I drew this piece with colored pencils when I was 21, and I have a different perspective on life and this drawing, and what it means than what I would say how I felt about it when I first drew it.

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This drawing I believe represented a time in my life when there was an extraordinary sense of wonder and beauty everywhere. I remember that was a word I used frequently and with people who resonated or not - "beauty".

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I saw this "beauty" everywhere. I had lived 18 years in a hard working Italian American family with a father that was the son of Polish and French Canadian ancestry. My parents had discovered spirituality, and they brought that into my life.

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Whereas my parents had carved out through their own discovery, what it meant to connect to oneness, and higher planes through established Indian mystic teachers, I was born into their lives, after they had been well established in their spiritual practices.

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I feel like I had to harness abilities of being grounded and stable AFTER I had connected to concepts of "shakti", "oneness", "meditation" and spirituality. I was coming from a place of wonder, and I entered a place of mundane and ordinary, and that was an assymetrical path compared to, what I've gathered, most Americans. It seems that most Americans fall in love with cars and houses, and riches, and getting ahead in life, and when all of that garbage fades away because they realize that none of it lasts, and if it does, other hungry Americans want to take it from you, and no one cares about what you have, but if they care at all about that dimension, they care about what you have so they can take it from you.

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So, instead of divining into an imbalanced relationship with the material life, it feel normal and understandable to find a connection with what may last longer than this life. What can equate to the value of "eternal value". What value lasts forever? A checkbook or generational wealth can only go so far, and although they are absolutely necessary and helpful in this lifetime, for the time being, they won't help soothe ones' racing thoughts late at night, or when someone else is taking the starlight, or someone else is the center of attention. 

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We need something deeper - and this drawing is an effort to balance the love of this world, and all the spirit-infused into objects it brings, along with the unknown, and all the mysteries are out there that we don't know, and we will never know with the thinking, rational mind. 

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The drawing is not quite solid, not quite liquid, and not quite atmospheric. It contains an entirely different element, that seems to have shadows, and somewhat of a variation of depth and texture, smooth, and rigid in parts, but it is not quite clear what it is, and if it belongs to this world.

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The composition of this image is most certainly pointing to one spot - the center, and that is what keeps it all together.

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I believe the reason I survived this time in my life is because I had a sort of internal compass that was guiding me, a north start that was directing me. My north star was the surrender to something greater than myself, some sort of mystery, unbeknownst to myself, that I kept on and continue to pray for. 

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I have come across other spiritual teachers, and they suggest it is things such as "shakti" or the "supermind" or it is a total immersion into this world, into the here and now, and either way, I continue to get up, and move, questioning what it could be, defining meaning, and defining success for myself, which like this drawing, seems to be a mixture of what is in this world, and worlds beyond us.

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