What Comes After?

It has been a good weekend for me, for which I am thankful. I spent some quality time with good friends and got to know and appreciate them even more. I made a new friend, got to hold a newborn baby on his second day home from the hospital, and made my first visit to the Akron Art Museum. It is so exciting to be living just a few miles from such an excellent museum.

A good deal of the weekend was spent in pretty heavy conversations about life and death, love and betrayal, selfishness and selflessness, the present moment and eternity. I found myself reading "The Hound of Heaven" by Francis Thompson aloud to my friends. It is a favorite poem for within its words I somehow find reason to believe in an eternal dimension of life that defies my preference for objective rationality. It is a poem that moves me to believe in the eternity of Love as the power of Life. The poem is made all the more powerful when one also reads about Thompson's tragic life. 

There are no words, however, for the powerful experience of holding a small bundle of new life in ones arms, especially one's own son or daughter; knowing you would sacrifice your own life to protect this little one from any harm and recognizing the presence of an emotional bond that I want to believe transcends life and death. It is a bond with the timeless dimension of life that I also find evidence of in humanity's awesome capacity for art. 

I went to the Akron Art Museum today to see an exhibit of the photography of Edward Weston. Weston is known for his very sensual photographs of vegetables, especially peppers. I have included a picture of one that I found amusing in that it reminded me of the wrinkled face of a baby or elderly man with a pacifier. Weston saw patterns in nature that affirmed his belief that all of life is one.

While I went to the museum to see the works of Weston, I fell in love with the works of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson. Her extremely moving and innovative works document the life of a community from earlier days in Columbus, Ohio.  Ms. Robinson will be speaking at the Akron Art Muesum on Sunday, March 22, 2009. I regret that I will be out of town, but I hope it is a standing room only opportunity. 

I was especially struck by the large hands of the people in Ms. Robinson's works. Large, strong hands, seemingly for the necessary work to hold one another up in love and community in the present moment and also patiently waiting for what tomorrow brings. The use of buttons, shells, and thread are also very powerful in her work and speak to me of holding things together, one for the other, today, tomorrow, and for what comes after.

Thanks for reading.