i confess i am not unfond of isolation. no; the lifeblood of my art is owed to a lonely practice. predawn/ weekends/ thinking-walks alone. this solitude is where i pilgrimage into the self, that great wilderness. i visit trees of pause; i peer into pools of reflection;

i burn the incense of the blossoms; i work. it fruits. and this practice of withdrawal is the sun that ripens.

these are not new concepts to the artist. writers have mused over the topic from era to era. we can read Keats, Gibran, Baldwin. in this, i am my predecessor’s

disciple- made modern:

i ghost from my phone in the evenings. i employ airplane mode as often as night or no work, and i wouldn’t think twice to throw this device, which fetters me, into a lake, were i given proximity to one, and relieve me from the burdens of alarms, emails,

conference calls, schedules, deadlines, boring business people; all the maladies of modernity’s worldly concerns.

i prefer quarantine.

but all that said, this position i held as an idiosyncrasy, as counterculture, as phenomenon, was reactive. a negative response to a life of

demand and social overload.

today, with all of us forced within walls, playing at passing life in the windows like so many house cats watching the birds, i cannot help but crave nothing more than a journey, travel, wander, escape.

to be Basho after the Shirakawa Barrier

in spring, or Suhrawardi wandering the Anatolian hills seeking dervishes, to be Tolstoy on walking from Moscow to Yasnaya Pollyanna, or Odysseus at quest for Ithaca, eating the lotus of uncare, to be Shahryar and Shah Zaman, who renounced their kingships to go into the desert

as wayfarers.

how i long to wander.

don’t we all? we still have our bookshelves. and so we can travel vicariously through the characters and the artists we can summon, in their word-form, to take us out into their worlds. join me! use this tag:
#wanderinginthetimeofcorona

it’s simple. I will post from the stories and people presently living on my bookshelf. reply here, use the tag, or share with me yours and i’ll post them. and we can compile a thread of epic adventure.

#wanderinginthetimeofcorona

Matsuo #Basho was a 17th century Japanese Zen poet and #Haiku artist. He is considered the great master of haiku and was wildly popular while he was alive. His travelogue prose intermixed with haiku, known as #Haibun is legendary.
#wanderinginthetimeofcorona

Basho would wander for months, surviving from luck along the way. he would gift poems to patrons. his haiku which went the 17th century form of viral:

an ancient pond
a frog jumps in
the splash of water

see a map of his travels from his book, Narrow Road to the Interior.

Frederick Edwin Church was one of the most successful American landscape painter of the #HudsonRiverSchool. In the 1840s, he journeyed by steamship to Alexandria, Egypt and on to Beirut.
#wanderinginthetimeofcorona

He sketched and painted Baalbek, Jaffa and Jerusalem, Damascus, Petra. Church was forever impressed by his trip to the Orient. He went on to paint many masterpieces in which he "imagined" landscapes, combining various places into a single composition.
#wanderinginthetimeofcorona

His work was high priced and internationally renowned and commented on in all the prominent art journals. He had the unintended (i think) function of his work becoming a beautiful recording of the history of these lands in a simpler, more peaceful time
#wanderinginthetimeofcorona

the book, Frederic Church: A Painter’s Pilgrimage, chronicles his life and his long painting journeys through South America and the Near East. It has many very beautiful and vivid copies of his paintings.
#wanderinginthetimeofcorona

Sohrab Sepehri: 20th c. Persian poet from Kashan, trained as a painter, and world traveler. In 1964-1965, on an extended bout of wanderlust he studied woodworking and painting in China and Japan. Steeped in the spiritual, he was affected by zen philosophy and buddhist practice.

so much so that before return to Iran he detoured to India and stayed on for several months. once home, he wrote Water’s Footfall. the height and veracity of his pen at this moment can only be described as untrammeled. this a wildly ludic masterwork.
#wanderinginthetimeofcorona

utilizing ideas of the syncretic in tempi, he is at once Sufist and Buddhist, Taoist and heretic in the same poem. clear. bright. potent. fluid.

only someone fresh from a pilgrimage or long journey, with the words, the ink, the poetry so amassed and welled up in him could produce such a flood of emotion and pulse and energy.

bravo maestro.
#wanderinginthetimeofcorona