Goodbye, Vermont

Goodbye waterfalls and tea house and farm stand. I love you and always will. Sometimes I can't believe how lucky I am to have landed in this, like I fell into a painting. I can't stay, it doesn't feel right to stay, but it doesn't feel right to leave either. Not happy, not sad, but definitely alive.

I wrote that just before leaving Vermont to head out West for the final stage of my journey. On my last walk around the Triangle I found the first fall leaves, and the sun set on summer as I said goodbye. Vermont was the hardest place to write about because it goes so deep and spreads so wide. I didn't take as many pictures there because that happens with places you know well, yet the images in my mind are abundant. So many stories to tell, what to put in, what to leave out? The Vermont part is vast because it's my original place.

Your first landscape is no different to your being than your very own limbs. It's how you see things as how things are, what you'll grow up to compare each new experience to. From that oneness you set forth and an inevitable separation occurs. Then a longing, a returning, but the returning isn't a returning exactly, it's a moving through.

Robert Johnson writes about the stages of moving from a childhood paradise into a necessary separation, developing one's independence and sense of personal self, before moving through to a deeper union, reuniting with the oneness of God.

There is a constant pull back to the sense of unity from which we came...a regressive pull in all of us to quit this business of winning independence, to escape the painful human process of becoming a distinct, separate personality...you cannot put back together again that which has not been adequately differentiated. Consciousness must separate before it can reunite...when people come to my consulting room with a drug problem I tell them they are addressing the right problem but in the wrong way. They are trying to go back to a paradise when they need to go forward to a paradise.

My blog was born from a remembrance. A remembrance of the feeling making art gave me as a child. A floaty, timeless, alive feeling that deep in the well of me I did not think should have to be over simply because I grew up. From a natural oneness a separation occurs, then a remembrance, not a turning back but a moving through to deeper union. To where the mountains are mountains again, the rivers, rivers, the sky simply sky.