The Black Hole

     The black hole, the concept of the black hole, the mystery of some barrier of time space, some boundary of reality as we can know it...something almost dark and, dare I say it, evil?


This actual scan of a sand dollar shell, in the sea urchin and starfish family with it's pentagonal tentacles all emanating from a central opening between the hard and the soft, the exoskeleton and the layer of 'skin' and the protected viscera inside.


This scan shows nearly infinite 'tentacles' or 'branching' etchings in a calcified 'shell', and when one looks at this 'non-living' specimen we can see how the entrance, the gateway, so to speak between our internal organs and our external needs of food and energy create a 'skeleton' of how living things interact with the planet...


Could the black hole of the universe be merely a sand dollar skeleton, could the calcified remains of a universe without an undulating black hole even have the potential for infinite existence?


So run my thoughts as I ponder this imprint of the tao, of the morphic resonance of life.

Digitally Visualizing Reality 

Standing at least 500 feet away, with a 30 powered optical zoom camera, I was able to capture the basic lines of this formation on the Icicle River this afternoon.  In my mind, it looked more like this, but because of the later afternoon flatter light, it was more of a monotone, like this:

The Little Time Bombs of Memories

Open a cigar box with old lead pencils, and a mysterious odor from another age wafts below my nose.

My engineer father before CAD Machines actually drew blue prints with pen and pencil, and even in post-war Amsterdam, where everything was sparse after the war, my father would bring me some of these pencils to play with, and I'd color while he drew hexagons and pentagons with his compass and ruler, or he would draw perspective in such things as ships.  We bonded around these pencils, we were at our best together...he the engineer, I the artist but both of us loved to play with the pencil, and I, a lad of 6 was permitted to be free to draw and color as I wanted.  

This stamp brings all that up, because it was one of the first stamps I ever paid money for.  I loved stamp collecting, because it gave me an understanding of the world, history, propaganda, time periods, colonialization, a word once the ring of a century, now no longer in the spelling checker.  So then books and knowledge creative play, Montesorri values, and an appreciation of beauty all began to sink in.  

The memories that moment of opening the box, the ambience of 1950 in the room, the ambience of my father, the mood of the moment, for a deep sniff into the box that all came alive...now I know how the dog experiences the moment...and then, from a drawer slip an old stamp album, and the many letters from my grandfather to remind me of them, and The Low Countries of my birth and early upbringing.