Howdy howdy,

Thoughts for this moment:

Just like the solstice, we pivot from darkness to light. We sleep, perchance dream and then...

In Vermont, there is a rare plant called the Fen Grass of Parnassus that is around ten inches tall and makes small white flowers that bloom for about a month from mid-August until mid-September. A tiny bee the size of my pinky fingernail feeds on this flower exclusively. All bees are vegetarians and most, like this one, live in the ground. It's considered a "mining bee" and is so rare that it doesn't have a common name. Those in the know call it Andrena parnassiae. They emerge in August when the flowers bloom; mate; the males die. The mother bee deposits an egg and a packet of pollen in small chambers underground. She dies within a week or so. The egg and then grub grow and emerge as an adult bee ten months later. That's it. Life story. Long night and then daytime...

Do they dream? Warm, late summer dreams of nectar and sunshine... Ten months underground in Vermont's fierce winter. Time to muse...

"Methuselah" is the name given to a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine whose location in Eastern California is a secret for her protection. This small, gnarled tree is 4,852 years young, perched on the same rock outcrop for millennia, witness to the entire written history of humankind. Does she smile? Laugh at our foolishness, or curse our degradation of her air supply? In 66 years, we managed to invent a plane and then walk on the moon. She lived 1.3602% of her life during that span. When she dreams is it slower than a bee's? Or a longer dream? Seasons pass. Time as meditation...

The oldest star that we know about is labelled HD 140283 and the science community discusses it as the Methuselah Star. The namesake, according to Genesis, was a man who lived 969 years. Not a whole lot of science there, but the smarties who run the Hubble telescope will confirm this star to be a "metals poor, blue-shifted, high-velocity, Population II, sub-giant." It's only 200 light years away. Data analysis confirms that this star is 14.46 billion years old, plus or minus .8 billion years. (Now, that's a margin of error.) Since the universe is 13.799 billion years old, plus or minus .021 billion years, we have a very, very old and close neighbor. This ball of nuclear fire was around within a few million years of the Big Bang and over nine billion years old before our sun ignited. A year, five millennia, unfathomable eons...

Time. It's relative, and if you consider our friend Einstein's rules, tricky. Time in 2020, I can personally affirm, was whack. "Hey, it's Monday again. Boom. Friday. Hey, it's ..." From the Chinese year of the Rat - last year - to this year's Ox. OX. A hug and a kiss. The Ox symbolizes hard work, positivity and honesty. One year to the next...

But, we are in the midst. Just as the bee sleeps, the tree endures and the star seethes, we sleep, dream, persevere. Hyperbolics all. Us and them. How can we pack life into these days we are blessed? One by one. Reflect. Re-emerge. Persist. Time flies, but we are the pilots. Compared to the bee, we have limitless time. Compared to the pine, we are a blink.

And so we pirouette from history to the future each morning. Our personal time is unknowable. Get busy or wander. It's your time after all. This last year has been proof of the flexibility of its apprehension. So, consider the ancient fireball, but spend some time with the nectar and reverie, maybe go visit those pines, maybe stop looking at your watch...

All best,

B Mac

December 14, 2020

Dearest friends,

Hang on. Here we go.

Pandora, as told by the poet Hesiod in Greece around 700 B.C.E., was the first woman. Zeus had Hephaestus make her after Prometheus had stolen fire and given it to Man, who, interestingly, were all men, reverent and gods-fearing and, at the time, immortal. Her name is from "pan", Greek for "all" and "doron" meaning "gifted." So, our "all gifted" first woman became famous for opening the box, which was actually a jar (until some 16th century transcriber messed up that detail), unleashing "countless plagues" on humankind. Sounds strangely like the Eve and the apple story. Keeping in mind that all this was written down by men.  Apparently, Man needed punishment and women were the ones to bring it.

Pandamonium was the name scientists gave, jokingly, to the element #99 discovered in 1952 during Project Panda, the secret code name for the first hydrogen bomb detonation. In the coral from the decimated Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific and in the air above, this synthetic, highly radioactive element was detected. Today it lives on the Periodic Chart as Einsteinium, but it has no use, no value, just something to study in nuclear labs. It glows and decays rapidly.

We just had the warmest November in recorded history. Carbon dioxide is at its greatest atmospheric concentration in 800,000 years. Greenhouse gases trap heat today at a rate equivalent to four Hiroshima bomb explosions per second. An iceberg dubbed A68a, the size of Delaware, broke off the Larson C ice shelf of Antarctica in 2017 and is approaching South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic. It could run aground this month.

Pandemic comes from the Greek "pan", "all" and "demos" meaning "people". Us, basically. All people. ALL PEOPLE.

Pando is the name given to a forest in Utah of quaking aspen trees that are all genetically identical. These trees, all 47,000 of them, share a 13-million-pound root system. It's the heaviest living thing. It's cooperating, organically, naturally and researchers suggest it may be up to 80,000 years old. Maybe.

Pantheism is the belief that reality is divinity, that all things are a manifestation of God or that God is immanent. There is no separation from the divine and me and this snowflake or that iceberg or this bug or that meteor or.... The word was invented to discuss the 17th Century philosopher Baruch Spinoza's notions of a rational approach to the common glory of our existence. (Check him out. Great stuff there). But this concept of totality of mind/body/spirit/natural world can be traced through ancient pagan religions to modern East Asian theology. One can't read Thoreau or Wordsworth without feeling this resonance. Einstein himself stated in 1929, "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists."

So, it's the holidays. AND we are on the cusp of a remaking of the human adventure. We have a woman as a vice president and just a step from the top job of filling in for the oldest elected commander in chief. There are more women in Congress than ever. There are more top jobs in the new administration filled by women, and the culture of strong, brilliant women guiding us forward is a pivot for humanity. Look at New Zealand and the way its leader has managed the pandemic and having a baby.  It's time the millennia of misogyny ends. Moms should rule the planet. Men have done a fabulous job of mucking things up -- nuclear weapons, climate change, children in cages, global disease...

In the Pandora story, there was one thing left stuck on the rim of the jar -- "elpis", the Greek word for "hope." It remained in the jar and now it's time. Hope is the plan. Greta Thunberg can be our avatar moving forward. With women activists, with moms on the team, everything is possible. This holiday season hug everyone you love but, mostly, hug your mom. She sang to us. She read to us. She tied our shoes and made our food. It's time to recognize her divinity and our own and do what the aspens do. Work together. Save the planet y'all. We can do this. I know, I know, enough with the preaching. But, it's the time of year to reflect, to take stock and begin anew. Optimism is the only option. 2020 will recede in the history books as a bitter, brutal time. 2021 is what we make it.

Blessings my friends,

Oh yeah, buy art. It's the best present. Seriously.

Mostly though, hugs.

Love wins every time.

B Mac

P.S. Hug your mom again.

P.P.S. And support all those fighting the good fight to recognize the untapped power of the gender I'm not. They are stronger, and wiser. It is true.

P.P.S.S. Don't blame the pangolins.

Jason Giambi, one of baseball's best sluggers in the last 20 years, would wear a gold thong to try and bust out of a batting slump. Tim Lincecum always wore the same cap when he was pitching, for five years. Jockey Jake Noonan never let his helmet touch the ground before a horse race, ever. Another jockey, Emily Finnegan, swears by a certain perfume, Hugo Boss Deep Red, for race days. Chimney sweeps are thought to bring good luck; often in British weddings, a sweep is hired to come by in a top hat with his brush and give the bride a smooch. Shamrocks. Winged phalluses in ancient Rome. Wind chimes. Horseshoes.

A few years back I was pooped on by a bird. Not so happy about bird doo in my hair, I was stunned to be shat upon again in the same week. In hashing over my sense of ignominy, I decided to spin it. It must be a good sign, a sign that I was outdoors a lot, a sign that I was living a life with hours and hours of fresh air. I later read that in parts of the world, like Russia and Turkey, getting pooped on by a bird is good luck. Well, there ya go. I'm super double lucky. Luckier by far than the story my friend Chris used to tell of being out in a fishing boat off Chatham on Cape Cod. He was working with an older captain and the business of fishing involved flocks of wheeling gulls and quite a stench of old bait for much of the time. His buddy, the captain, smoked cigars constantly to manage the stink. Just as he raised the cigar to his face a wheeling gull let fly right into his open mouth. In horror, Chris stammered, "Oh god, what's THAT taste like?!" The captain spit and smiled, "Hot."

But I digress. Lucky charms. Do they work? They must or why would their use continue over the millennia? In the 16th Century, a British Parliamentarian, Reginald Scot carried a rabbit's foot around in his pocket for good luck. Rabbit's feet are used in Europe, Africa, China, and North and South America as a talisman to bring good luck, which begs the question of why rabbits? Wouldn't it make sense for each culture to have its own paw? What's wrong with weasels or foxes? Or a chicken foot? The fact that this is a global belief system could be taken as a refutation to its inefficacy. It must work. EVERYBODY knows that. My brother had one on a keychain when I was a kid. Totally grossed me out; but you know, it's my older brother's so it must be cool. Did it work? Probably. He's still around and having fun. Might even still have it somewhere in a box. Old dead animal paw with a little ball chain through it. Yuck.

So what's all this about fortuosity anyway? (If anyone can glean the referential aspect of that word, let me know). Seems like a good time in our lives to lean into a little bon chance. The title of the above piece is "Amulet." Will it bring you good luck if you hang it in your home? Yes. I guarantee it. Abso-posi-lutely. Never fail. Starting immediately. Life will get better. For sure. There's a backstory to the name of this panel and if you buy it, I'll share it.

On the other hand, where is Tim Lincecum now? Didn't Jason Giambi get busted for steroids? That jockey with the helmet thing, crashed hard twice. Max Scherzer, one of the all-time most bad-ass pitchers to ever throw a baseball is very superstitious.  He believes that to talk about luck and superstitions is bad luck. So. Nothing. Nope. No talking about that. (By the way, look up his stats. Ridiculous. That is, if you believe in baseball).

But, I believe that if you believe, luck is real. Ruby slippers will take us home. Pooped on recently? Good. Better times are on the way.

Reread the above line, especially the last part.

We got this my friends. I think you could use a little fresh art to liven up the palace after all we have been going through. "Amulet", or "Disc", which is an amulet like the one I wore around my neck for a few years. How about "Looking Out"? "On With It" is still available. As is "Bridget". Can you feel the theme here?

Looking forward to our next missive. yes indeed. 

Meantime,

Peace.

Greetings Earthlings,

And anyone else paying attention,

This week's quiz: What has two claws, no teeth and can kill a lion? They have been around for 12 million years and can live to be sixty years old.

An "outlier" is, according to the almighty Wikipedia, a data point that significantly differs from other observations. Generally, Amazon recommendations have someone saying that this is the worst product ever while every other review is five stars. Outlier. Usain Bolt. Outlier. Picasso. Elon Musk. A tsunami is an outlier. So is a meteor.  The Wiki article is itself a fabulous outlier -- generally the exposition of a thing creates understanding, and a concept is simplified. The article for "Outlier", however, immediately digs into the arcane mathematics of probability and deviation, the three Sigma rule, the Mahalanobis distance, interquartile range, and the modified Thompson Tau test... "I'll explain Japan speaking only Japanese" seems like the program.

Back to the quiz: These critters have over a pound of sand and pebbles in their bellies to help grind up food. Usain Bolt can run 27 mph. These guys can run 43. For a while. Only cheetahs can catch them. Hint: They have lush eyelashes and the largest eyes of any land animal.

As I type this, a very, very dark brown squirrel just went up a huge maple behind the studio. There it is. Why isn't she grey like all the others? In college, there were black squirrels on campus and the story circulated that they were mutants or from The Black Forest in Germany. The former is accurate. They are genetic anomalies, although the dumpster behind the dining center might have been a contributing factor. Reasonable assumption...

What animal is nine feet tall? Has skin that makes durable boots? Is pretty tasty, (so they say)? Can weigh 300 pounds? Grows nine inches per month their first year? Has two toes on each foot but only one toe has a claw? Eats shrubbery?

The outliers are the ones who redefine reality; they spin civilization in a different direction.  Jackie Robinson changed all sports forever. George Lucas gave us "American Graffiti," meh. Decent flick. Then Yoda. James Cameron warmed up with "Titanic", so to speak, and then "Avatar" changed visual reality forever. Shakespeare remains a mystery, his genius from seemingly nowhere. Jimi Hendrix. Bach. Steve Jobs. Michelangelo. Wim Hof. Edwin Hubble. Gandhi. The Beatles. Malcolm Gladwell's book, "Outliers," covers this turf well, but...

Consider the ostrich. Weirdest creature ever. (Excepting the octopus, but we covered that here: Dark then Light, Rhythm in Hues. Wings. Can't fly. Lives on parched barrens. Rarely drinks water. You can ride on one, but they can disembowel a human with one kick. Three-pound eggs. Great vision. Wicked ugly -- total jumble of gnarled skin, giant feathers, balding head and protruding bones. Their namesake trait of "head in the sand" is unreal, just a trope. Perfect outliers. Even their name is bizarre. They persist as a freak of nature, strange as fiction.

And as always, value this day that you are gifted.

Be kind to each other. Love will find a way...

And

Vote, damnit.

Your humble servant,

Bruce Mac

P.S. Buy art today. I mean this. Otherwise, well, let's not go into the utter decline of all humanity, the pit of woe, the despairing wails of unfed progeny... yeah, all that...  

P.P.S. And have faith in our humanity to overcome inhumanity. We persist. We are strange as fiction too. Ostrich. Go figure. Super weird. Lots of that going around.

P.P.S.S. Vote Outliers. Vote Out Liars.

Howdy partners,

Yesterday, a guy was spotted in airspace at 3,000 feet over LA flying with a jetpack. Pilots in commercial airliners radioed the tower to report the flying man; one pilot said he was barely 300 yards away from his Airbus A321. Yikes. Now we can worry about this? LA traffic WTF!

As kids, we always knew that flying was normal stuff: Superman, duh. Ironman with his suit. Hawkman had wings. Mighty Mouse, way way back. Hovercrafts were going to be available by the time we got our driver's license. Pretty sure. The Air Force had the SR-71 Blackbird, which could fly over three times the speed of sound -- 2,193 mph -- so clearly getting places would get quicker all the time. And if James Bond had a jetpack, most secret agents had to have them.

I have dreamt of flying my entire life. Mostly it is just a function of thinking just the right thoughts and leaning into the wind just the right way and off I go. Arms out. Catching the wind. It isn't scary. It is exhilarating. And it feels right. It feels normal.

During the day though, I make light sculpture. My palette is reflected and refracted photons. These sculptures are internal spaces manifested. I'm not making political statements or riffing on common tropes. I'm not really interested in whether this will "go" with your sofa. (Ok, maybe I am a little bit). There is no agenda. There is only Beauty with a capital "B." These pieces are meant to resonate, to feel familiar and yet fresh. I'm trying to visualize magic, to capture snow in hard sunlight blowing off the roof. Diamond dust. Moon sparkles dancing across the lake at 2 AM feel a particular way -- liquid, platinum, ephemeral... Supercolliders humming organ-pedal bass chords or shrieking in absolute zero vacuums, quartz, schist, red sprites, morning glories, and the tendrils of supernovae remnants collected with a perfect mirror orbiting our tiny and complete sphere. Harmonics. The known and understood with the sublime and ineffable. The feeling of flying without stuff to make you fly...

My pal Wily has a Cessna built the year I was born, and he takes me up now and then for transcendence and breakfast across the lake. Who knew most little airfields have excellent diners? Last week a guy showed up at this little fly-in over in New Hampshire in a sport plane built in 1935  -- no roof, tiny windshield and a quilted red leather cockpit that feels lifted from an old Jag. Both my grandfathers had their own planes. Wish I had been old enough then to go up.

Look at my work with eyes out of time. There is as much Aboriginal dream time as forest walks, Ukiyo-E, pictures of the floating world, as Hubble imagery and Middle Earth and Thor and quantum fields and waves in the sand where the waves break. I have dreamt of flying an F-16 (don't tell Wily). That's in the work too. Maybe you need something on the wall out of time, above this plane, airbourne, quotidian dispelled...

"The crow wished everything was black, the owl, wished everything was white." -- William Blake

Owls have magnificent adaptations to facilitate doing their jobs of quietly eradicating the world of tasty morsels running about at night. They have, as we all know, the ability to fly silently thanks to specialized feathers that dampen vibrations. These feathers are, however, such particular structures that the preen oils most birds possess would nullify their effects. Consequently, most owls are not waterproof. They can't hunt in the rain and have been known to drown when landing in relatively shallow water to drink or bathe. They also need extra down for warmth to combat freezing when feathers get sodden. Their ears are asymmetrical on their heads to help with the sound location of tiny feet moving around. Their facial feathers help with light collection to their eyes; eyes that are far superior to their prey. Owls have eyes that are more tubular than round. In fact, owls’ eyes are fixed in their heads, which can swivel up to 270 degrees. Less body movement is more stealth. They have to move their heads to change their view.

That last sentence is the one that really jumps out. William Blake also wrote, "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind." How do you change your mind? How does one change someone else's view? There is, as one can imagine in today's world, a great deal of research on how to convince someone to believe something different than what they currently believe. The consensus is that facts -- logic and evidence -- don't change minds. We have 4% of the world's population in the U.S and consume two-thirds of the world's production of antidepressants. There's a fact to throw into any conversation regarding wellness, gun control, socialized medicine, education, screen time, lack of contact with the natural world, income disparity... and on and on. But documentation shows that empathy can change someone's mind. If you play to win, to confront, bash down the other position, you will not win. You can't play to win. You have to play to learn, to connect. People are tribal. They want to connect and fit in, to bond with others and be respected. We are herd animals. (Some exceptions, naturally). And insulting another herd's lack of ________ will only serve to thicken the wall between.

Owls swallow prey whole after kneading it with powerful talons and then regurgitate the indigestible stuff -- fur, bones, teeth. Kind of like the way people tend to process the news they choose. If we want to change the views of others, we can lead by example. The increase in solar energy in the U.S. is 51 times greater from 2009 to 2018. The installation of panels on homes ripples in radiating waves -- when your neighbors get panels, you get panels. Changing minds requires being open to hearing the issues from the side that is not your side. It requires being open to things that fall outside your group's belief system. Just listening engenders openness, which in turn leads to communication and the potential for your position to be heard. Listening is hard when you know you are right to start with... Right!?  But, it's a process. Dogma is what people hang on to in order to define themselves. Carl Jung said, "People don't have ideas. Ideas have people."

Fighting doesn't work. You may knock them out and win the match, but they will hate you even more after. Like the owl, you have to move your head to change your view. Moving heads is tough, but we have, as a collective, been through worse. We can work toward common ground. We can share the air with the owls. And the crows. And all the others flying through the yard. Last week, a great-crested flycatcher perched on the garden stake ten feet from the deck. It careened off in a flapping explosion a split second before our local broad-winged hawk streaked by. Talons out. Whoa. That was really, really close.

And so, "Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything," said George Bernard Shaw. Time for some radical head swiveling, my friends. Get busy. We have work to do. There are wicked creatures to confront but they may not be waterproof. We can do this. The ultimate power in William Blake's world view was the human imagination.

la la la. :)

A neutrino is one of my favorite things. It's one of those bits of nature that seems invented by poets. Atomic scientists discussed the possible existence of this little particle in the 1930s, but actual detection didn't occur until 1956 in a lab. A naturally occurring one was found in a complex detector at the bottom of a gold mine in Africa in 1965. Believed to have no mass at all and having no electrical charge, "neutrino" is Italian for "little neutral one." Birthed in the nuclear guts of all stars, this particle streams in every direction unimpeded -- they go directly through the Earth without slowing. Our bodies are being bombarded by 65,000,000,000 per square centimeter every second. Zoom. I feel fine. Do you? Fundamental particle, yes indeed.

But fundamental with nuances, as all good characters are. They apparently have "flavors" and can oscillate between these states in flight. Experiments have shown that there are anti-neutrinos, but a respected Italian physicist suggests they might just be neutrinos behaving weirdly, not other particles at all. Studies prove they, in fact, do have just the tiniest mass, nearly zero, therefore the laws of the universe say they can't go faster than light. Other research postulates that they have no mass, like light itself, and may actually travel faster than the speed of light and therefore are going backwards in time. You know, like Merlin. Wizards do that sometimes...  Ok, but how big are they? Well, "size" is not a thing for these guys. There is no minimum distance between them -- they have no width or volume. Science or ghosts, poetry or physics... Neutrinos are an invisible constant in our lives, the force of the sun pouring through us every moment. Billions of dollars are being spent globally on neutrino astronomy. Are they part of dark matter?  Can we detect some blown from a far off supernova? Or from the Big Bang? Space doesn't slow them down or gas or dust or rocks or age or viruses...

Since the pandemic started, phoebes returned to the yard, built a nest, laid eggs. Fledglings flew away. A spider as big as my eyeball appeared every night for a few days and wove a web eight feet in the air. Hunting. Next day, gone. Next night, web and fog. Etc. Bumblebees in the backyard cram their bodies down the gullets of snapdragons just to the right of my chair on the deck. My pals post Instagrams of outrageous sunsets. Paul and LIzzyliz just had a baby girl. Jameson learned to bike.

Comet Neowise is visible tonight and for the next couple weeks to the naked eye below the Big Dipper. Discovered on March 27th, it's a three-mile ball of ice and rock with a blue and golden tail. It will return in 6,800 years. It's the far and the slow tempo. You really should have a look. For the near and the speedy: Levi, the good dog, threw up for two days; he's fine now. My son Schuy and I have been working to keep the black Spyder running and playing plenty of frisbee on the sand these hot evenings. Neutrinos blaze through me. Through us. Cucumbers are ready. There is nectar still.

Saturday a moth was determined to hang out on my left knee. Using an app called "Seek," I discovered it's a skipper, the Silver Spotted Skipper, and a butterfly, not a moth. It's the most common skipper in North America and I had never noticed one before. Introductions ensued.

NEOWISE is an acronym of science stuff (it's an orbital observatory looking for planet killers heading our way -- the comet that ended the dinosaurs was only slightly larger than this comet we can see sailing by), but I'm breaking it down to "new wisdom."  "Skipper" is the perfect name to guide us forward. Civilization is evolving through the suffering. Pain is all around us. But, vegetables grow as always; skippers visit; fathers and sons hang out; the invisible winds of the cosmos are blowing through our beings every second. I can't fix the world, but I'll catch light and push it your way. I'll try to find grace and share it. The theme here is On With It. Now is a great time to find a little slice of joy and share it. Lots of little bits can be lots...

Summertime and the living is queasy.

But, here we are. Same as it ever was -- quantum mechanics, birds, spiders, cukes and kids... As reality flings apart, hold on to the perennials. Find the rhythm and try to join in just a little bit. Look for the familiar that is cycling the way it always does. We can do this.

On With It. 

P.S. Buy art now. It's good for the soul and the very, very local economy. Time for some big pieces. More light means more light. And, by the way, love. Make that visible. Love in a time of chaos is redemptive.

P.P.S. Come to think of it, in The Two Towers, Gandalf was talking to a moth too. That led to a fabulous outcome.

B Mac

If you read the words below, and you should, they are a lovely affirmation of life amidst the turmoil of modern "life, or "flaming chaos," as we now call it. Spock from the tv show Star Trek recorded this on an album in 1968; and I first encountered it on posters during the hippie days of the early 70s. (I know, I know, super old). "Go placidly..." seemed wise during the Vietnam debacle and being a "child of the universe" helped overcome the alienation youngsters always feel. Peace and love was groovy. Still is. The notion that this was a benediction found in a church over 300 years ago lent it gravity and foresight. Yeah, the world has always felt like a dumpster fire, or Wednesday, as we now call it, even in the 1600s. These lines of prose are profoundly applicable today. Read them slowly, even if you used to have the poster:

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Found in Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore, 1692 A.D.

But, the truth is, this is a prose poem written in the 1920s by Max Ehrmann from Terre Haute, Indiana. It was widely shared with little notoriety in Europe during the war and ultimately published after his death by his widow in a book of collected poems. In 1956, a pastor distributed it to his congregation, without attribution, in a mimeographed booklet printed on a letterhead reading "Old St. Paul's Church, Baltimore, A.D. 1692", the year the church was founded. To this day, there is confusion in the public mind as it is so familiar and yet feels like a historical text. Wisdom, whether from the seventeenth century or from the Midwest, has no bounds. A moral code in one paragraph, yes indeed. "Keep peace in your soul."

The extraordinary concept of the proper unfolding of the universe, especially RIGHT NOW, is a comfort.

Thanks Max.

As always, please share. Comfort is needed. And buy art now since Beauty is always a comfort and a delight, and artists right now are working on the placid part with noise and haste. Imagine growing fruit and the fruit stand is closed. Or playing music and everyone is wearing earmuffs... Or...

You get the picture. So, get the picture. Peace and love, Bruce Mac

P.S. Doyle Bramhall Jr. sings, "Love is the answer. The answer is waiting."

The most popular vehicle in the world is the Flying Pigeon. It's made in China and the company has sold 500 million of them. The design was established 135 years ago and even though all sorts of little parts have been improved, it is basically the same machine. You can walk outside almost anywhere and there is one rolling by. Today there are over a billion bicycles in the world. A very fast woman rode 184 mph behind a very fast car. A wickedly determined man rode across the U.S. in seven days and fifteen hours. My brother Kevin rode 272 miles with 20,000 feet of climbing in 26 hours. For his sixtieth birthday.  Athletes. One woman rode the equivalent of nearly four times around the Earth in one year. Endurance athletes.

From my bike saddle, I've seen lightning, way way too close (KA  BOOM!), snakes, (yeah, too many of those), hawks, eagles, falcons, pigeons, wooly bears, slugs (one rainy day was slug-a-palooza, super gross), redwoods, a microburst thrashed forest, a dead owl (might have been napping, but I think not), a very alive mountain lion (Go Aero, Eyes Up), fog, sunsets, deep green forests, the rain they used for Noah's flood, poppy fields, blue ridges, blood and broken bikes. (Sorry Kev). I've eaten bugs, dust and mud, been injured in my driveway by my bike, and I have been helicoptered out from the high Sierra after a stupid crash. (Sorry Kev). I have ridden with close pals, friends, lovers, a wife, brothers, strangers, lots of strangers, sweet strangers, and mean people. I met a couple at the top of Middlebury Gap just south of here who, when asked where they started, they smiled and said, "Portugal." I rode 167 miles one day around Vermont with Kev and Steve, a day I will savor forever. One day with these two, while they were fixing a flat on Whipple Hollow Road on the ride Steve calls "Castle Flow," I fell asleep on my bike. Story for another time.

But why ride? It's not like I accomplished anything while zooming across the countryside. Sisyphus pushes his rock. I ride out and back. What's the allure? Mark Twain said, "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." (See above, Life Flight, woo hoo). Well, there's dopamine -- brain synthesis chemistry in high gear. Endorphins, yes please and thank you, I'll-have-a-bit-more-please. There's ADHD management in real time when stuff is sailing by at forty miles an hour. I'm a better animal in motion than sitting in a chair. Clarity prevails on a bike.

But mostly, the answers are all above. It's private time to understand the landscape. It's social time to understand people and my place in the fabric. It's internal time to go all-out crushing the climb in full sufferfest mode, or coast along the coast. It's being out in all weather and saying howdy to all the critters who live here. It's oxygen in and problems out. It's the visual food for the creative soul -- the time to wrestle with the art piece smoldering in the back of my brain and placidly laughing at me from the studio. It's being one with the universe with an elevated heart rate. Don't ride? Should you get a bike? In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the bike salesman says, "Sure, it'll change your whole life for the better, but that's all."

AND, finally, what's this have to do with art? Read every tenth word above (you know what I mean). Velocity of reality. Light. Clarity. The universe and my place in it. Blood. Brothers. Mist. Out and back. Endurance.

And suddenly, these paragraphs written a couple weeks ago seem so flip. Who cares? The world is on fire! Disease. Murder. Politics. HAVOC.

On the radio was a story this week of a man in India who got injured and couldn't do his job. His wife, home and kids were 700 miles away. The pandemic came and his daughter who had moved in to nurse him to health was down to their last $20. She bought a bicycle, put her father on the seat, their meagre belongings on the back and rode a single speed bicycle all the way home. In a week. Standing up the whole way. 100 miles a day. She is fifteen years old. They had no money and no food. People along the way fed them and they slept in the fields on the side of the road.

I have neighbors who put together fifty bags of groceries a week to give away because they didn't want anyone suddenly out of a job to be hungry. I have a friend who is an ER doc and stayed away from his family, sleeping in the basement or in an empty condo after treating Covid patients all night. An artist buddy is selling art online everyday and sending the money to a food bank fifteen hundred miles away. Each of us can play a role. If you have some to give, give.

Now more than ever we need love, humanity, and patience. We need a sense of dignity and restraint, respect for each other and their challenges. Get up from the crash and say, 'I'm sorry, we can work this out." Picture that angry person at their limit and imagine them as a child on a tricycle. Just trying to make it go. Will a bike save the world? Nope, but the person making it go can. We need the fresh morning air and effort to get over this big hill. It's raining hard and the road is slippery? Go carefully. Head home. Out and back. We can do this. AND, consider that this is not about going 184 mph. It's endurance. In the Tour de France, almost any of those badass skinny athletes can win one day. It's the ones who survive every heatwave, snowfall, stomach bug, elbow, deluge, flat, shunt, cramp, crosswind, breakaway, sprint pile-up, nasty climb, fan freakout, and screaming mountain descent, that prevail. The world is inside-out right now, but, quoting my brother Kev, "The point of pain is the place of growth".

Anything I sell before July 4th, I will send 20% of the money to The National Black Child Development Institute. Do your part just a little bit extra right now when it's really needed. Somebody somewhere is sleeping alongside the road. Just trying to get home.

H.G. Wells, England's brilliant futurist, said, "Everytime I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." I wonder if he had a Raleigh. They were British, biggest bike makers on the planet at the time, based in Nottingham and started by a chap from Sherwood Forest...  Sound familiar?

In 1971, there was an ad on tv showing a Native American, an "Indian" at the time, with a tear in his eye after surveying the litter on the water from his canoe and the trash alongside a road. All these years later, the tear in the eye of an old man whose country we inhabit continues to resonate. I was just a kid. But I grew up canoeing, spending time in the woods, "leaving a campsite cleaner than I found it." That was nearly fifty years ago. We, white people, as a group, ruined his home.

The year before, my brothers and I went to the movies and saw "Little Big Man" with Dustin Hoffman as a 122-year-old man recounting his life's story --- he was a white pioneer boy whose parents were murdered by the natives, he was then raised by these same "Indians." Captured by the military, he renounces his tribe to save his life. Put into foster care he becomes a good Christian boy who is then seduced by his foster mother. He runs away, becomes a mule skinner, a gunslinger, marries; his wife is abducted. He then returns to Cheyenne life, becomes a father with four wives, who are then massacred by the cavalry. Thus, there follows a general unravelling of his mind... He claims to be the only surviving white man from the Battle of Little Big Horn. He was the reason, he claims, Custer and all his men were slaughtered. As the hired scout, he sent them all to their death.

Fast forward to 1993. I saw a movie and afterwards sat in the parking lot and wept. I was horrified to be a person. Being a human was too painful to bear. I had just sat through "Schindler's List" and couldn't stand being a person when people are capable of such inhumanity. The horrors depicted I could not understand. How could anyone behave in this way? How could millions of people behave in this way?

Fast forward to now. It's not a movie. It's the same horror in real life. Torture and then death. On a street corner. Why? Because some people have forgotten the truth of life. All life. Every single person in the world is a child who got bigger. Every single human being is someone's baby. Who then became three. And then four. And then grows... Into an adult and then older and finally, elderly. And fragile, like a small child.

Would you kneel on the neck of a three-year-old? What's the difference? Two hundred pounds, give or take. Would anyone defend this behavior? I repeat: Every human was once a child, and deserves the kindness shown to a child. Just because you are taller doesn't mean you lose your right to kindness. It's really very simple at its core. Treat all humans with the care and respect you would afford a small child; the heart of this is kindness to each other. Pure.

I am white. I have led a privileged life. Yet from childhood I have had a sense of guilt. This is not my country. It belongs to the native people who we Europeans have treated with atrocities. We brought Africans here to exploit by the tens of millions. I can't get on an elevator with a non-white person without wanting to say, "I'm sorry." That sounds absurd to write down on paper, but it's true. As a little kid, my grandmother in Virginia had a "yard boy," a black man in his seventies. My entire life I have seen that for its implicit disrespect. I can't blame my grandmother for her lack of vision. She was a product of a system of beliefs, another world view. But CIVILIZATION is overdue to evolve. NOW is the time to stare into the bias deep within and recognize we are either part of the solution or we are the cancer itself.

The simple crux move is kindness. NOW. Regard a person as a person, and as a child, and you will elevate them to their status as a precious member of our big family. We are different skin colors. We have different faiths, countries of origin, languages, preferences for partners...  You will see these things, but you will first see a little human on a journey through life that we all make. The Dalai Lama says, "Be kind, whenever possible. It is always possible."

Will this solve today's crises? Will racism be eradicated so simply? No. It won't. For that we need strong, determined, brilliant people of every color and gender and background working together to reshape the collective mentality of all citizens of all countries. I can't do this. I'm just one small person and far from the smartest guy in the room. I am just one voice; this will take a choir and probably a drum section and lots of horns, some marching and conductors and very loud arrangements. However, I can stand for kindness. Moment to moment, remember, every person needs it, deserves it, and I will give it to the best of my ability. Please walk with me in this direction.

Thanks, my friends. Just a small step...

It's love put in action.

Bruce

P.S. You are thinking, "huh, ok. Sounds good." But, get busy. NOW means NOW. Get political. Write to your law makers. Donate. March. Volunteer. Register new voters and, most importantly, vote for leaders who will make the changes we demand. Now is an excellent time to change the world. Inequality. Pandemic. Climate change. Ready GO.

Recently, in the middle of a conversation, a friend said to me, "Freckles don't mean anything about anything." O.K. Roger that. Move on from a completely inane observation about reality.

But, as with so many moments in life, that little statement resonated. Yep, sometimes it's the stupid things that are actually clever. Clever, stupid, it’s a fine line. Some of you will get the Spinal Tap reference right there...

"Sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right..." was scrawled on the back of a highway sign by an on-ramp heading east on I-70 back in 1979. I was hitchhiking from San Francisco to Memphis, and seeing a lyric from Scarlet Begonias in such a random spot made sense at the time. Still does...

Steph Curry once made 77 three pointers in a row in practice. Witnesses say he missed a couple but ended up sinking 94 out of a 100. Michael Jordan once scored 59 points shooting 21-27 from the field and dropping 17 out of 19 free throws. Grace and power. Transcending the game...

Snowboarding rapidly through trees is about my favorite thing in the world. NOTHING makes me more present than this dangerous velocity. My mind can't wander; I can't be thinking of anything else. In fact, I have come to realize that I can't be thinking of anything. The purity is the emptiness.

Making art is what I do. It is the thing in my life that pulls me forward, makes me want to practice, makes the exploration exciting, makes all the crazy stuff I see and do and hear and read smash into my head to lodge as raw material. For years I have spent countless hours scratching the surface of metal to make light dance. And when the process of doing this becomes automatic, it's perfect. When I'm lucky, I find a "flow state" that is nothing short of magical -- I'm no longer making the piece. It's making itself and I'm just in the room moving my hands around. Making patterns with loud tools and tight lines and matte and gleaming and mysterious stuff that sometimes later I wonder where it came from or how that stuff manages to look so... well, you know...

Sonny Rollins, one of the titans of saxophone recently wrote in the New York Times:

"The spirit of art shines through in a performance when I stop thinking — when I let the music play itself, not just the one song that I’ve memorized, but all of the songs and experiences I have in my mind. And as things come to me, unplanned, I surprise even myself."

When Pat Metheny or John Meyer is soloing, you can see the look of complete detachment on their faces. They are not thinking of notes -- the suspended 7th in the arpeggio... They are thinking music and sound comes out. The analytic brain is gone. They are dancing through trees, dropping through space in deep fluff, playing with gravity, surfing, glissando, sparkling, lost in the moment, in flow... This is where the art lives. This is knowing your instrument to the point that it disappears. Notes, tools are instinctually chosen. I don't know what this is going to be when it's done. Not even sure I'll know when it's done.  

At the very end of the Pirate show that I was watching, Captain Jack Rackham says,

"It's the art that leaves the mark, But to leave it, it must transcend. It must speak for itself. It must be true." 

Freckles are the remnants of experience. Sun, bright, doing damage, signs of time passing, leaving a little mark.

Bruce Mac 

P.S. Thanks for the brief stint of attention. Now buy art. It's more important than you know. It's the mark I leave in the universe. These are the freckles. Give them a good home.

I know all of you are pretty freaked out, to be blunt, about the invasion of our country, first documented in the Pacific Northwest. Sometimes fatal, but generally not, the neurotoxin from the 1/4"-long stinger of the Asian Giant Hornet feels like "a hot nail in the leg," to quote one experienced researcher. Murder Hornets?! Really? Now this?! With bodies that are nearly two inches long with a three-inch wingspan, stripey black and orange, like a miniature flying tiger with fangs and a spear, these nasty invaders can chop the heads off of honeybees at a rate of forty a minute. They have been found to cover sixty miles a day and can fly twenty-five miles an hour.

On July 5th in 2015, I took a photo of my brother Kevin taking a photo of a hornets' nest.

The back of his head looked just like the thing he was shooting -- grey and twirly. Just like mine, I would imagine. (Mine may be more twirly, at least on the inside. Or not, jury is still out). I have always been amazed that bugs can build things out of spit and leaves, big things that they live in, things bigger than my head. Or small grey hexagonal cell structures like the one between the skylight and the screen over my bed. (Actually, I got rid of that a couple weeks ago. Tired of finding wasps stumbling around the floor of the bedroom like they were hungover from the party after the stinging good times. Also, Monique won't let me smoosh them. Have to go open a window and throw them out).

These, as with EVERYTHING, always show up in my work.

In October of 2017, I walked out of the house to find a hornets' nest quite a bit larger than my head lying in the middle of the driveway. Likely a gust blew it there, a paper ellipsoid sculpture, magically gifted to me. You can see it in this piece just right of center that I sold in Chicago in November of that year with the title, "October, Crow and Hornet". The back of Kevin's noggin is depicted with a swarm of scary critters where his nape would be. There are crows, a murder of them, like the ones who hang in the woods outside the studio every October by the thousands. In the center of the panel is a mare's tail cloud from a hike up Camel's Hump with Miss M. and her sister that same month. I often am asked where my art comes from, how it gets out of the grey matter and onto the grey material...

Japanese honeybees have evolved a defense mechanism to deal with these viscous predators. When the bees detect the pheromones of a hornet, the workers gather just inside the open entryway to the hive. When the hornet enters, hundreds of bees engulf it in a dense ball and begin vibrating their flight muscles the way they do to warm the hive in winter. They literally cook the invader. Dead hornet scout. No more hornets follow. It's obviously a defense based on the collective might of the group; the individual doesn't stand a chance. Decapitation. As a collective, the bees are able to defend their homes, their queen, their thousands of brothers.

As usual, my friends, we are so much stronger together. Wasps scare the crap out of me. But I have brothers and friends and I have you. You are part of my clan, and I'm counting on the big family. We got this. By the way, buy art now. It's a good time for that. And tell stories. Always a good time for that.

 love love and more all the time,

Bruce Mac 

Greetings from the modern swamp,

Amedeo Modigliani once said, "It is your duty in life to save your dream."

Johnny Allen Hendrix was born in 1942 in Seattle and started playing guitar when he was 15. He moved to Tennessee and played rhythm guitar in different bands on the Chitlin' Circuit, was "discovered," and moved to England and proceeded to burn down the notion of an electric guitar in a pop group and emerged as the greatest guitarist in history. Turned the planet on its ear at Woodstock, literally set the instrument on fire at Monterey Pop. Wore the clothes of a revolutionary and spoke the language of the astral traveller. Voted World Top Musician in 1969, Performer of the Year, Rock Guitarist of the Year... And dead at 27.

John Berryman, an American poet, said of a particular man, "For a while here we possessed/an unusual man," referring to a friend we all recognize by his language. That man went to Dartmouth for a few months. Dropped out. Later Harvard for three semesters. Quit. Farmed. Wrote. Tried to teach. Farmed again. In 1916, he described himself with his "most notable trait, patience in the pursuit of glory." and so far, "Don't seem to die." That was in 1916. In 1961 Robert Frost was an American institution; he recited a poem from memory at JFK's inauguration as the sun was too bright for him to read his notes. He died at 88.

In Japanese is a phrase, "mono no aware." It's the understanding of the transiency of the world and its beauty. The phrase is meant to convey a sense of beauty as ephemeral, that the passing of beauty is a sadness, but the experience of it is redemptive.

I was planning to write a completely different missive than what you are reading right now, but a couple conversations I had yesterday with two friends altered that scheme. In one, he had had a medical crisis at an age way too young and is now reformulated as a man on "borrowed" time. Every day is a chance to be not who he was, but who he wants to be. Smartest dude in the room, Hell Yeah, or... enlightened, with the emphasis on light, lightened, unburdened, source of light... The other, dealing with a crumbling business model, the kids home nonstop, is spending time in the woods. Skinned up to the top of Mt. Mansfield last Saturday, alone, and fell asleep in the sunshine glorious for an hour, realigning in real time the priorities of life and joy and being right here, right now. 

My mother was in a theater production with dancers, a chorale, and an orchestra in a huge summer-stock pageant sort of thing in Virginia society in the 40s called "Common Glory". That pairing of words has stuck with me my whole life (so far). There is so much esoteric wordiness shouted in the service of political analysis, art criticism, journalistic hooha that this notion of the sublime in the simple is, well..., sublime. What may come? Who knows?! But, Frost said a poem is "a momentary stay against confusion." An excellent song is a place. You can go there anytime. It's a refuge from the noise. Real ART sings. Changes your posture. Will Brittany Howard go the way of Jimi or Robert? Who knows, but you should listen to her voice, and his flying, searing sound. You should look around carefully at time passing. It's full of passing beauty and dreams coming true.

That Modigliani guy is right.

Love love and more all the time.

Bruce Mac

P. S. So, here we are. And I haven't instructed you to buy something from me, so Sarah, my gallery director and right-hand-mastermind will yell at me, not too loudly though. Buy art y'all. Before you can't. Today is better than tomorrow, cuz tomorrow never comes...

P.P.S. Case in point: I was lamenting to myself (you guys do that too, right?) how long it's been since I've heard thunder. Minutes later my son sent me a text video of it hailing in Montana in his backyard. Thunder. From my cell phone. Can't make it up.

Hi Friends,

Last summer, I headed out for a SUP having checked the radar and knowing storm cells were coming out of the Adirondacks around 5:30. It was just after 3:00. Eighty degrees. Stiff south wind. I left my beach at the north end of Shelburne Bay working hard into the headwind with the idea of three miles into it and then a fast, fun surf back. Wind picked up. I paddled harder.  Fought to the southern lee down where the rushes hide the heron by the fishing access, had a Gu and water and headed home. Wind fell out. Bay went flat. Low black clouds were building west. Lightning out on the broad lake. I started a hard race tempo and paddled over near the eastern shore of the bay just in case. About a half mile from home the cell jumped over Shelburne Point and blew due west at around 30-40 knots. No way I was going anywhere but downwind and into the shore. There's an abandoned estate right there and I just managed to get the board out of the water and up the bank fighting hard with the gusts. Tucked it behind a crumbling stone wall and crouched beside it as the rain cut loose. Curled into a fetal position while the rain pounded down and the temperature dropped into the sixties. Barefoot in board shorts, I pressed into the wall as the wind carried the rain over my head. Nothing but shivering and waiting. I felt alive and miserable and strong and alone. Waiting. Cold. If it's blowing this hard, it's got to go by soon. Waves of emotion. Lightning and thunder. Then, as quickly as it came, the wind died. Rain continued pelting but I grabbed the board and fought my way home on my knees. Stumbled up the lane with my board on my head. Just as I reached the yard, the rain stopped. Grabbed a towel and then a hot shower, still shaking slightly. Came back downstairs. The sun was peeking out.

"Lie low to the wall" 

Affirmative. We got this. Time to feel alive every day.

Hug your people. love love B Mac

P.S. This happened last summer and I had stopped thinking about it until my good buddy Matt sent me a poem a few days ago, just some strong words to hang onto in this turmoil. This is the paragraph I wrote back to him. Thanks buddy. Got your back too. Look for the sun peeking.

P.P.S. Please share this missive with friends. The online gallery needs eyeballs more than ever! Now is a perfect time for new art in your home.

In sixth grade, my friend Marisa created a world called Chaos. She said I was in it and my name was Kaokee. I don't remember any of the plot, and I haven't spoken to her in over forty years, (or 280 if you like to think in dog years, seeing as how time is pretty much an arbitrary human construct to order the chaos of everything. Which, apparently, we really need). The fact that I had a name in grade school cosmology has stuck with me.

The word "chaos" comes from the Greek for emptiness, chasm, the abyss or void. A bunch of those old Greek smart guys wrote a lot about it. Heraclitus posited that it was the true foundation of reality. In the news today, chaos is a constant theme. It has morphed from "Chaos in the Middle East" into "Chaos in the __________ (fill in the blank). ER’s (which magically are now ED's, emergency departments, just ask any doctors). China, tornado wreckage, grocery stores, the Dow, cruise lines, Yemen, nursing homes, medical supply chains, the Amazon, Amazon, elections, payrolls, coral reefs, closures, poaching, oil storage, farm subsidies, school, etc. etc. etc...

Jens Voigt is a retired pro bike racer from Germany who was famous as one of the true "hard men" in cycling. He was a breakaway specialist who would take off from the pack, the peloton, and routinely hammer an attack alone. He once fractured his wrist in a nasty crash and rode the entire day before the doctors x-rayed it and ordered him out of the race. After a crash utterly destroyed his bike in the Tour de France, he borrowed a child's bike because the car with the team bikes had left him behind. He rode it nine miles before the team realized he was still in the race and left him a proper spare. He famously printed "Shut Up Legs" on his handlebars. He set the hour record by riding 31.76 miles in a velodrome after he "retired" from racing at 43 years old, generating an average of 412 watts, an incredible ouput. The peloton of a stage bike race is chaos --180 humans, with five-foot-four climbers weighing 125 pounds, big power-house sprinters with massive track-racing-built thighs, twenty different languages, food on the fly, sixty mile-an-hour descents, flat tires, screaming mobs lining the roadways, broken bikes, broken bones, 180 different brains riding elbow to elbow for three weeks. Jens said, "Having things organized is for small-minded people. Genius controls chaos."

Years ago, I was in my front yard drinking a coffee and a bumblebee buzzed just by my ear. I turned to discover, instead, a baby hummingbird, the tiniest bird I have ever seen, zipping off into the sunlight. So naturally, I made a piece of art to honor the little guy. Called it, "The Rookie." Art helps me order reality. Doing some homework, I discovered the smallest birds in the world live in Cuba. The Bee Hummingbird weighs two grams, the same as two dollar bills, or a couple of raisins, or a half a teaspoon of sugar. They eat half their body weight a day and make nests smaller than a golf ball out of spider webs, which they shingle with lichen to make waterproof. Their eggs are the size of a pea. Our hummingbirds in Vermont arrive later this month, something I really look forward to as a way to order the chaos of time. You know, seasons. In the Greek comedy, "Birds", Aristophanes explains that chaos transitioned into the creation of birds.

In my art, I have a whole genre I call "Chaos" pieces, which range from the inexplicable like "Lush" or "Ruckus," to randomness with elements of structure like "Imperium". I have done a series of pieces that slide from structure into total chaos -- "Crystalline" then "Warren" then "Haystack" -- from the ordered, angular grid of a meteorite's guts, to the organic randomness of a pile of cut hay, Mondrian to Monet, M. C. Escher to Pollack.

In Germanic tradition, the hero had to battle with chaos, generally depicted as a monster like a dragon, Beowulf versus Grendel. Chaos is the base nature of all reality and man must make it orderly to be comprehensible, if even just a bit. Slay it or just give a beat and a nice vocal, maybe a guitar break with some horns for punch. Jens, our hero, once said, "You have to make your own luck. If you try to win, you might lose, but if you don't try to win, you lose for sure." I am constantly in the studio wrestling with the chaos. The formlessness of an empty canvas is the void. There is nothing. Our nature is to make rhythm out of all that, to find patterns for comfort. My favorite artists are the ones who take the familiar and twist it into the unfamiliar or vice versa. Take the twirls and stripes and explosions of our daily realm and build a latticework to see it and understand it. Look to my Instagram #havocgallery for the bizarreness of our natural world, how the simplest moments can hold visual magic. My job is to transmute that into art you can hang in the dining room.

We are bombarded today, more than ever in my lifetime, with CHAOS. Shouldn't the mission be orderliness and consistency, applied science and medicine, structured policy, to save our citizens and our cultural fabric? This fabric is what we have evolved over millennia because it works to keep the chaos at bay, the monsters, the abyss. Keep your rituals as best you can my friends. They are the separation of us from the mess. Take it from Kaokee. I know what I'm talking about. (Fact checked it myself, yep, spiderwebs). Note the name of my gallery that I hung on the door ten years ago -- HAVOC. I am intimately familiar with this stuff. "Random Order" is a nice oxymoron and the title of a piece from 2009.

Finally, one last nugget from Jens: "At the Tour, you always have some fantastic days and some days where you hit the asphalt. Today was an asphalt day for me." This is our collective asphalt day. Get up. Get it moving. "On With It". The hummingbirds will come back soon.

Stay home. Buy art. Hug those you are living with.

Find order that comforts.

love love

as always,

Bruce Mac

Yo fellow homebodies,

WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE.

Ok, got that out of the way. Yep, it's true. Every last one of us. Sooner or later. In the Tom Hank's movie "Bridge of Spies," Tom as a lawyer continues to ask Mark Rylance, the accused spy, "Aren't you worried?!" His answer: "Would it help?" That's where we are right now. This anxiety of "Do I have it?" "Did I have it already?!" "Does she have it?!" "What if the kids get it?!!!" can only be offset by the assiduous practice of what the medical professionals advise us to do. That is pretty much it. Be smart. Be careful. Be kind, as everyone you see in the grocery store is in the same swamp. AND, just to be clear, worrying definitely does not help. It creates its own cascade of symptoms from "I think my chest feels tight" to "Lying awake at night is it, right?"  Worrying is using your life's energy to focus on the thing you don't want to happen. Want to chat about viruses? Nope. Naturally, distractions can be really helpful.

Like art, for instance. The title of this piece is "Night Light". As a kid, there was nothing more comforting than having a light in the darkness. Down the hall, in the bathroom, was a night light. Take away that pale yellow glow and the darkness was almost painful. Who knows what could be going on when you can't see ANYTHING? Sleeping at another house as a kid was always a challenge--Gramma's giant house full of really ancient weird things was challenging because of the utter darkness when we were put to bed. I guess old people didn't need night lights, but... fortunately, I usually had brothers around to talk through the possibilities of monsters or attic zombies or crazed drifters sneaking up from the cellar. Smart guys tell us 60% of the brain is visual-processing oriented. Well, for a kid with no night light, it's 100%. No doubt. Forget about sleeping, we just were trying not to die. Funny, we always slept. Never died.

As a grown-up (sort of), I have come to enjoy darkness. When I was on the staff at Camp, we took the kids on night walks--short hikes in the woods without flashlights. The whole exercise was to teach them a sense of security in nature AND to make them realize how well one can navigate in the woods with just the ambient light. Obviously, bright moon on a clear night... you can read a book. But, I remember a night with no moon and rainclouds overhead. Seeing your hands was a challenge, but off we went. The kids were typically skittery, but one seemed completely relaxed. I found out later that he was born blind and surgery gave him sight a few years prior to coming to Camp. The goal of my art is to teach unsuspecting adults (and savvy kiddos) how to see in the day. And at night. And when it feels like nighttime with no night light...

"Night Light" is part of a series I started as an attempt to capture the way light shimmers on water--the late afternoon sparkling on the bay of dancing sunshine, the wriggling white or pale yellow lines of the moon on the black surface. Years ago, from Eagle's Aerie, the highest lookout on the mountain, I stared through binoculars at the sun sparkles on Lake Dunmore, a couple thousand feet below. That little moment forty years ago I still consider. Capture that. LIfe's work maybe...

I'm hopeful this piece will find a home where one of you would enjoy the comfort of a "Night Light". Beauty is a comfort. Sunlight is a comfort. I have a good friend who has a "pondering room," where she can sit surrounded by a number of my pieces. Seems to work for her--she's a bright light herself. In a "normal" world, I have shows that put my work in front of a hundred thousand eyes. Here and now, I have these missives.

Stay safe friends,

Support the artists trapped in their studios. Better investments than the Dow, methinks.

Be strong. Notice the shimmering. Stay calm. 

Bruce Mac

Hey distant but close friends,

The gravity of our days is fierce and has been somewhat paralyzing considering what may come, but I still would like to share, and have you share as well. Stories help.

Last summer was a challenging time for me, which in retrospect, falls into that perspective that is always impossible when one is standing knee deep in rising waters. My life was going either in one direction or another. That's it. Two roads diverged and both were fraught with unknowns that at the time were somewhat terrifying. Being as sensitive as I am... sleepless nights were common. As is often the case for me, all this manifests in my artwork. I made a panel called "The Brink." It's large, nearly four feet by eight feet and tremendously complex, as you can tell by the detail images that follow.

There stands, just right of center, a lookout tower under a shower of iridescent rain. It is anthropomorphized architecture--a person--with the windows for observation at the top, exactly the way our eyes are placed on our bodies. Left of center is the Orb, the ball of energy, with which, on so many days, we find ourselves having a mandatory staring match. Is it finances? Is it your relationship? An addiction, a worry over the kids, aging parents, the small but insistent fretting, house paint, car repair, knee pain, gaining weight, losing weight, tuition, is my job secure, should I finally call, am I the person I know that I can truly be before the lights go out... ??

There's a garden, full of spiked geometry and blossoms. There's a wandering cloud, an EKG, ripples on the water, a sunrise, the wind, rain, the moon, the house in the distance, a pyramid small - that upon inspection becomes enormous, encasing the three-dimensional schematic for the time machine that might be the best answer. There's the void. There's the far distant teeny, tiny tower reminding you that you are not alone in the staring match. Layers and layers... the void. Our planet from space... The horizontal broad beam of light holding up the tower...

Yep. That is all in there and a single paragraph doesn't begin to explain what is what, but...

My path emerged. I made some choices and life is better. No one bought "The Brink." Then came the political explosion of the impeachment inquiry. Is this the collapse of our democracy? A tyrant or just a careless man in power? Immigration. Election interference. Greed. Lies. The Brink! And the country survived. (For now).

And now. The Brink! The entire world upended and so many of our assumptions of normal destroyed. The abyss of tomorrow or next week or next month. The Orb of energy looks suspiciously like the sphere of a virus, dark and menacing. The energy ball of focus and its streaming wind of airborne broken glass cannot be willed away. It's huge. And close.

Is this art piece some talisman of prescience? Well, yes. It is. My unconscious made this metaphor last summer that on this very day rings bright and loud. It's a scary world we find ourselves facing but, and this is the moment of salvation, there is always the energy ball. That short list of worries above never goes away. It's an endless list and terrifying to stare at. Some of us will make it through this alive. For a while. With hope, a long while. Some won't. That's how this works. What seemed the brink before was and then wasn't. And then was again and then wasn't. And now...

On the panel protecting the tower/me/us is a force field. Almost nothing gets through and what little does, there is a wall of massive organic complexity perfectly engineered to handle it. The concept of a force field of protection will be the subject of my next missive. Please stay tuned. I have been fascinated since childhood by the notion of a field of visible or invisible power that protects us, can shield us from ray guns, catapults, destructor beams, meanies, orcs... Sometimes it's blue and sparkly, depending on which movie you are watching or the book in your hands. I am hard at work in the studio making force fields for all of you people. You can buy one to protect your family. But these are my metaphors. The real Force Field is us. Today I am surrounded by people, (ok, they are standing over there, close, but not too close) who are the reason we will get through all this. The strength of us all together is it. Yes, this is the BRINK. We will look different after and there will be another brink, but the force of us together is how we will prevail. My energy field is yours to use. We got this. There are too many brilliant, dedicated, caring-beyond-reason humans who truly are the Jedi among us. Nobility is in our DNA. Do your best. Stay safe. Send love every day. Support those who need it. We all need it...

And btw, somebody please buy "The Brink" as my two Spring shows in NYC didn't happen. Make me an offer with what might work for you and we'll see if it works for me. My summer show in Seattle probably won't fly either. Support the arts. Now. Making metaphors helps. Crazy huh? Who knew. Can't make this up...

More love every day,

Bruce Mac

P.S. My personal brink of last summer means I now have a partner in my life. She's awesome. I'm lucky.

What could be the furthest thing from your mind right now? Here's a guessing game:

What can regenerate a detached limb? What has three hearts? What grows from the size of a grain of rice to the weight of a man in three years? What can taste with its skin, has copper-based blue blood, and is happy at 47 degrees Fahrenheit? What has excellent vision, with horizontal, dumbbell-shaped  pupils, and can also "see" with its skin? Some are bioluminescent. What first left the family tree of humans a half a billion years ago? One can walk carrying coconuts. Some, when pissed off, turn bright red and raise horns above their eyes. Got it yet? What has two-thirds of its neurons outside of its brain? What can change the texture and the color of its exterior at will to be indistinguishable from its surroundings, or mimic a mass of predators or a rock, or simply pulse rhythmic color?

21/Borisov is an interstellar visitor flying in a hyperbolic trajectory around our sun right now, only the second object from outside our solar system we have seen. It looks like a comet but it came from outside our small(ish) neighborhood. I imagine that at the controls of that spacecraft, it it were one, there might be something like the above being. You could hardly devise a stranger creature if you tried. No bones. Can fit a 100-pound body through a hole the size of an orange. All of them have a toxin that is delivered through saliva; one is poisonous enough to kill a person. They can bore a hole the size of a large needle through calcium carbonate with a tiny abrasive tongue and then inject this venom to kill its dinner.  Most have a complete lifespan of six months but the largest live up to five years or so. Hawaiian folklore believes these to be the lone survivors of another age of the universe. They breathe water but can absorb up to 40% of their required oxygen through their skin. They don't have ears but they can hear. They make ink but don't have pens.

The solstice is in two days, making today's day here in Vermont only eight hours and fifty minutes. Eight. Like the arms on an octopus. Am I alone in making this connection? Yep. Pretty much. But it's ok; I'm used to having things connect in my tiny brain that no one else connects. In fact, it's part of my job. Do something no one has ever done before. My art is exactly this. Make people use their eyes like they never have before. Ask people to consider how truly bizarre our world can be. Is it coincidental that a Hawaiian observatory crew found the first interstellar object, dubbed Oumuamua, which I wrote about back in December 2017 (Current Thinking link) AND the octopus is revered in Hawaiian folklore as the symbol of Kanaloa, the spiritual leader of the underworld. Kanaloa is associated with intelligence, flexibility, and, he is the navigator. There it is. The aliens that live on earth left over from a previous universe are probably the navigators of these interstellar objects (spaceships).  Makes total sense...

Or not. If you are still with me... 

Happy solstice, dear friends. Happy holidays. Light the candles. Trim the tree. Hug your assembled family. Have a feast. Invite the neighbors. Dream your wildest dreams through the longest night this year. Call me and buy art heirlooms as gifts. (My gallery director requires that sentence). Mostly, greet each day as the miracle that we get once again. They are numbered. All are precious. And share your blessings just a little bit extra around this pivot toward brighter days. Two arms we have to hug everyone we love. Giant Pacific octopuses have suckers that can lift 30 pounds and they have 1,600 of them on their eight arms. Don't hug them.

Peace and good will. Repeat...

but mostly love and more love...

A hex is a spell usually meant to curse someone or something. This piece, "Hex", is based on the panels placed on barns, starting in the early 19th Century in the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside, to ward off evil and invite prosperity on the farm. The word itself is from German referring to casting a spell, but I like the notion of both meanings. A word that means both itself and the opposite of itself has been a fascination of mine for years. "Sanction" means to say it's ok to do something. AND it means that nobody can do the thing. "Dust" means to remove dust or it means to cover something, like "dusting" the cookies with sugar. "Cleave" means to cut AND it means to hold fast to something. Divide and not divide. "Overlook" means to have missed something AND it means to look over something to be sure nothing is missed. Language is so slippery. Makes me crazy. "Hex" is both the spell and the thing to ward off evil in your space. (The patterns on the metal are based on the precise mapping with 3D laser scanning technology of the energy fields surrounding pyramids recently discovered buried in South American jungles. Pretty sure. Maybe...). Around 2005, I did a piece called "Angor Wat" that referenced this same energy mapping of the massive temple in Cambodia. For millennia, this religious monument, the largest on earth, was the spiritual center for countless believers. Seemed to me that a satellite view would be helpful as none of those people ever saw it from above. Uluru, the sacred sandstone mountain of the Pitjantjatjara aboriginals in Australia, was just closed this last week to tourists wanting to trek to its summit. I made an art piece in 2003 named "Uluru" to celebrate its stark magnificence and spiritual potency. The strand between these art pieces is the energy within objects. Painted, constructed, or naturally occurring, we humans endow things with power. Or maybe they have power that we perceive. Either way, "Hex" is part of this continuum--the overview of the invisible energy. And, by the way, "strand" is one of those contronyms, as a verb and then a noun.

P.S. Send me your favorite contronyms if you have any. If not, let's all agree that language is whack. AND, look around for objects with energy... those are my specialty.