There

Inner worlds, outer worlds. People racing, bodhisattva waiting. Here. There.

In the second photo, a woman walks past, or through, Nataraja. Nataraja is Shiva in the form of the cosmic dancer, who symbolizes the cycles of creation and destruction. In this dance, Shiva transforms illusion into power and enlightenment.

Here

Inner peace, city streets. What have these photos captured? That we are never alone. This brought to mind the vows of the bodhisattva. Albert Low explains the vows beautifully here,

The vow of the bodhisattva is that she will not go into Nirvana until every single suffering being has entered Nirvana. One has to understand what this means. Our awakening is not a personal triumph. We do not have to win a spiritual sprint. We are one mind. Awakening is to penetrate more and more deeply into this truth. The world is alive. And as long as there is suffering then this living whole is shattered. Whether it is my suffering or the suffering of another, when seen from the perspective of the bodhisattva makes no difference, because, seen from this perspective there is no ‘me’ or ‘another.’

Horatio Street

I found my New York home in the West Village, on Horatio Street, again through airbnb.com. It was a studio filled with vintage paintings of flowers and wood furniture, and owned by a writer for the New York Times. Fortuitously, it was two blocks away from the Magnolia Bakery, where I found myself a year before.

I was brushing my teeth one night when it dawned on me that the studio on Horatio Street was the first place I stayed on my trip that didn't have blue glass. "It must have been a coincidence with the other places," I thought to myself.

With toothbrush still in hand, I took a look around, just to double check, only to discover in the darkest corner of a small shelf... blue glass. And next to it a tiny frame holding an image of a saint, shaped like the Virgin of Juquila, encrusted in shells.

New York, New York

A friend who grew up in Southern Colorado told me he was surprised by my stories of growing up in Vermont. He said he thought the whole East Coast was one long never ending city. It doesn't feel that way when you live there, but when you come from the Southwest it does, and I couldn't resist taking advantage of it. This brought me to Philly's neighbor, my favorite of all, the fabulous New York City.

I moved to Manhattan just after college, it's sort of what you did after art school, and I had a boyfriend there. I also remember the fear of leaving it a few years later, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a world to see.

After college, I found work dyeing, painting and screen-printing fabric for Broadway shows, movies, rock stars, and fashion designers. It didn't pay much, and I often couldn't afford to take the subway home, but those long walks were my favorite part of all. On this journey I wanted to return, not to the city of my old every day reality, but to the one I had seen through windows and fantasized about on that long walk home from work.

This part of the trip was a gift to the 22 year old me, the one who had longed to stroll through Central Park in the middle of a work day, to be the one on the other side of the window writing in a cafe, to experience the city like it looked on the cover of the New Yorker.

A lifetime in a week, small but real.

Farewell, Philadelphia

I caught these characters in the window of a tavern, past the Franklin Fountain, toward the trolley stop, and on my way back to the Pink House. Suspended in time but alive. Inner worlds and outer worlds, old worlds and new. Toasting the end of my Philadelphia stay, stopping, going, moving on.

Here, the last from my Studio Incamminati handouts, spoken by Henry Hensche in an interview with Charles Movalli, in American Artist Magazine, 1977.

I'm reminded of a story Robert Frost told me. He and a friend had both set out with grand artistic plans. Frost persevered and, of course, became a poet. His friend didn't. They met late in life and the friend, somewhat shamefaced, told Frost that he'd like to have stuck to their ideals, "But I had to live." Frost waited a second. "Well," he replied, "have you?"

If you hold to your ideals, you'll never really fail -no one fails when he spends his life in pursuit of the good and beautiful.

I hope so, Henry Hensche. I hope so...

Franklin Fountain

I celebrated the end of my Philadelphia story with homemade ice cream at the fabulous Franklin Fountain. It meant so much to me to be to be able to study at Studio Incamminati, to make art all day for two weeks. I was a painter.....all day long. I was and I felt it! It was a small gem of a larger dream. Tiny, but real.

Windows and a Cheesesteak

One last wander, windows and a cheesesteak. I love that time in the early evening when neon first begins to glow. No longer day, not yet night, that in between time.

At first I lived ahead of my blog, then I started writing the posts and was living behind them. Now we have caught up to each other and I'm writing them at the same time they are posting, but having already lived them. But the story isn't then, it's the combination of now and then, with a sprinkle of way before then and a dash of what may be.

Time.

I think we all know time isn't linear by now, but we can't come up with any other ideas of how to organize it. So we continue to trudge along, our souls expansive, our bodies needing to stay on the road.