Never Lost

I’ve found that many people in the United States don’t know much about their ancestry or culture, and that cities born during and developing after the Industrial Revolution, cities like Houston, share that disconnect. When we don’t keep visible traces of the monuments to the time and people that preceded us, including- if not most importantly- the natural world, there’s very little to ground us, to help us feel that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, that many came before us and many will come after. The pressures of defining ourself through work and individual achievement is partially because we don’t see how we’re just part of a chain of events, and that has created a kind of sickness.

There’s a sort of spiritual hole that we try to fill with stuff and things- newer, bigger, faster, sleeker than the old things- and in the process sacrifice buildings, nature, and communities that were integral to the shaping of the city’s soul. I suspect some of the extremes we’re facing with climate and culture wars has to do with that loss of connection to the ancient and eternal, what our ancestors might have called the otherworld, something I hear repeated in the teachings of Michael Meade (who I write about often) links our need to have that connection with the archetypal wheel of time which has twelve spokes: six which turn us toward the light of deeper truth, meaning, and knowledge, and an opposite side which turns us away. In those times that we’re plunging deeper into the dark, when we reach the point that we can’t go back, we’re asked to cross over to the far shore, the mystic reach, where we can reconnect with our place of origin. “In the condition of feeling or being lost we can find the path again,” he says.

In these drawings I allow the past and present of both my own life and that of my city to be mangled in the ways that dreams stitch together places of spiritual impact into an altered geography.