Samhain                                                 Waning Harvest Moon

Today was a glorious day with puffy clouds, clear blue sky and temps in the high 50’s.  Instead of wandering through the woods I spent it trying to get outside Ovid’s Latin.  This is fun, a lot of fun, but it takes such concentration, holding words in the mind while spinning alternative translations, alternative parts of speech, taking one and putting it on a stick, then another, on another stick, and another on the right foot, all spinning, twisting, trying to come together or crash to the floor.  That’s what it’s like for me right now. I presume at some point it becomes less arduous; it must.  A juggler of ancient words.  At least for today.

Tomorrow I’m back in a comfort zone with two Asia tours, one for 2nd and 3rd graders on a very specific mission, and a second with interior design students from the Arts Institute Internationale in Minneapolis.  I haven’t conducted tours for many kids of late; I think folks see me working with adults, with college students, that sort of thing, but I enjoy the kids, especially these ages, their energy, their enthusiasm, their fresh eyes.  With the interior design students I plan to visit all four period rooms in Japan and China, plus look at the tea wares, the Chinese furniture, in particular the folding chair and see the blown out roof technique in Japanese painting.

Art has so many facets.  It touches culture, spirituality, beauty, daring, courage, hope, despair, the full range of emotions and the most complicated of intellectual puzzles like perspective, color and form, all done in a range of materials that seems to have no point of exhaustion.  Then, add the human interaction with art, the relationship between object and viewer, and perspective becomes a prism spinning, never stopping, reflecting.