Liminal Living, 24x36 inches, collage and colored pencil on canvas, $1250
and cheating death
I'm excited to present to you a series I've been working on for five years! Kinda, I've worked on it for a week or two at a time, then put it away for months, then brought it back out. You know, that kind of thing.
I had been calling it Sparrow's Descent for a long time, because it follows the story of a golden crowned sparrow in her quest to incarnate on earth for the first time, but I've decided that Falling Together is a better title.
I realized I get the most joy out of an art series when I can combine certain elements together, namely spirituality, music, and history. This is what made working on Last Quartets such an amazing experience.
In order to fit all of that into Falling Together I needed to think of it in a different way. The tale of a sparrow's quest to incarnate is now not quite enough.
What is Love? 11x14 inches, collage and colored pencil on canvas, $308
These pieces span the entire rainbow of color, 13 in all (the largest one contains several colors on the spectrum) and it got me thinking about how many things we associate with the rainbow.
I was thinking about the idea of the rainbow chakra system, pondering that perhaps the act of obtaining a physical body might mean learning to create one out of our light body.
The rainbow chakra system is a western concept that has no true parallel in any yogic text from which the idea was thought to have originated, but you can read more about that here.
What is interesting about the rainbow chakra system is that it corresponds to so much more than just colors. Musical notes got involved, planets, psychological containers.
It would seem that for centuries people have been trying to tie concepts together that really have nothing to do with one another, especially in groups of twelve and seven.
The seven colors of the rainbow were contrived to correspond to the seven intervals of the western diatonic scale, and the 12 signs of the zodiac too have been placed upon the circle of fifths.
The seven planets (because forever we only knew of seven - and some of those aren't even planets) were each assigned a day of the week, just as the zodiac signs were each assigned an hour or two.
The hours also fit onto the circle of fifths, and I absolutely bought the clock. It was very helpful in music school.
The Great Trust, 11x14 inches, collage and colored pencil on canvas, $308
I bore all this in mind for a while, trying to make heads or tails of it all, and one really can't wrap their mind around so much, but last week I found the missing piece of the puzzle.
I was reading a book called Ka by Roberto Calasso. It is a very poetic retelling of key stories from the Vedic religions of India.
A word was used in the tale of Prajapati, the creator god from the Rg Veda, and his duel with Death: sampad.
Sampad is a rather esoteric Sanskrit word that means "falling together" or "equivalency." Basically, it refers to things like assigning colors and emotions to musical keys, planets to chakras, zodiac signs to body parts, birds to omens.
This odd activity is how one cheats death. Creating invisible mental relationships between things is supposed to give them a certain immortality due to all this interconnectedness. It is also the basis of any kind of magical or religious ritual.
For example: the wine of communion is the same as the blood of Christ. That is a sampad. When I talk about the macrocosm in the microcosm this kind of thing is what I mean.
These are things we do with our minds all the time, quite arbitrarily, quite subjectively, eventually thinking that because we came up with a relationship between two unrelated concepts this must apply across the board. These relationships must be absolutely, objectively true!
Of course they are not, but that doesn't mean such equivalencies don't have value.
Love Under Will, 11x14, collage and colored pencil on canvas, $308
The original idea behind Falling Together was about discovering possible reasons why one might choose to incarnate on earth in spite of all warnings not to.
The beautiful thing about our brain's tendency to constantly create relationships between seemingly unrelated concepts is that this is what creates meaning for our lives - it is how we weave together our earthly purpose like a custom tailored garment.
This is how things "fall together," how we begin to experience synchronicity in all things.
One might even call it confirmation bias, but it encompasses more than that. We are what we pay attention to, for good or ill, but we can also choose to use our attention to enrich our earthly experience.
Spirit's Shortcut, 11x14 inches, collage and colored pencil on canvas, $308
So, for the next couple of months I will be knitting stories together out of some seemingly unrelated ideas that have somehow become attached to one another.
I got really good at this as a kid when I would record mixed tapes off the radio and act out musicals from them with my dolls, playing with the randomness of the music to create stories.
For Falling Together each story will have something to do with a chakra, a color, a musical key, an emotion assigned to that key, a zodiac sign, and a consideration about what might make life on earth different and special from life in spirit.
These are just some of the things that we weave together to give our lives meaning, and in this case the life of a golden crowned sparrow.
Song of Thanksgiving, 11x14 inches, collage and colored pencil on canvas, $308
This is all to spread the word that Falling Together will be part of a big art exhibition called Voices, Visions, and Reflections in the month of October, 2026 along with three other fanciful and vibrant artists: Jennifer Carroll, Jeanne Detlor, and Torrey Liston.
We will be showing in the Vandenbrink Community Center inside the Tashiro Kaplan Building in Pioneer Square.
Join us for first Thursday art walk October 1, and come back October 17 for some wild and wonderful performances in the space.
I will be premiering a solo shadow puppet show that goes along with Falling Together, the second in what I call the Shadow Bachs series where the goal is to create a puppet show for all nine of Bach's solo soprano cantatas. This one will be "Non sa che sia dolore," one of only two cantatas Bach ever wrote in Italian.
Also joining the party will be The Pashas (Greek fusion party music) and The Crayons Who Met Jimmy Carter.
I too look forward to seeing what that's all about!