Descending the stairs early this morning, I entered The Gallery at Redlands, turned on the lights and settled down behind the desk. Before returning to the work of last night's painting, I decided first to build an altar for thinking and just sit quietly at the desk over a cup of coffee for awhile, to wait and see if any fire would fall. As usual, I wasn't disappointed.

The older I get the more I find myself returning to one all-encompassing idea, which is dual--the idea of change vs. stasis. From the beginning of my higher education, I was introduced to this through the ideas of two conflicting Pre-Socratic thinkers: Heraclitus and Parmenides. Heraclitus argued that the seat of reality is flux, an ever-changing reality, whereas Parmenides argued that change was an illusion, reality always Is.

Throughout more than 2500 years of writing, it seems that the major ideas always boil down to this debate. In my own personal life, I have embraced both truths. Life as an odyssey has always been filled with change and surprise for me. Over against that, I have held on to this core sentiment that reality is solid and essentially unchanged.

I am happy that my career landed in the field of education, because I found myself getting paid to do what came naturally to my inherent curiosity about life and exploration. Throughout the years I acquired many new and intriguing perspectives. Yet they always seemed to fall into some kind of immutable structure.

Direct your eye sight inward, and you'll find

A thousand regions in your mind

Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be

Expert in home-cosmography.

Henry David Thoreau, quoting William Habbington (1605-1654)

. . . be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Now that I am re-entering the university environment after a four-semester hiatus, I'm reading some material to insert into the orientation section of my online Humanities course. Realizing that the study of Humanities is on the endangered list of educational curricula, I decided to take out a Frank Bruni article I read a few years ago:

I worry that there's a false promise being made. The world now changes at warp speed. Colleges move glacially. By the time they've assembled a new cluster of practical concentrations, an even newer cluster may be called for, and a set of job-specific skills picked up today may be obsolete less than a decade down the road. The idea of college as instantaneously responsive to employers' evolving needs is a bit of a fantasy.

Frank Bruni, "Aristotle's Wrongful Death" New York Times, May 26, 2018

Colleges are not alone in their frenzy to keep up with the ever-evolving business climate of our world. In the final years of my high school employment I listened to the same tired rhetoric of school administrators touting our schools' latest endeavors to introduce new curricula to train students for jobs and careers. It was then that I realized I had become a fossil to many; I still believed that jobs trained employees whereas schools trained minds to be adaptable to whatever shifts came to the job reqirements. Schools are for education; jobs are for training. Neither my son or myself landed the careers we had targeted while earning our degrees. But we did indeed gain a valuable, broad education that enabled us to adapt to changing circumstances. So I will make no apology for requiring students to read and engage with the ideas introduced by Homer, Aristotle and others from antiquity. My job is to sharpen students' minds to think critically and creatively, hoping they will apply their learning to wisdom.

To think is to confine yourself

to a single thought

that one day stands

still like a star in

the world's sky.

Martin Heidegger, "The Thinker as Poet"

This morning has already been valuable to me, as thinking seems more and more a luxury of the retired life. I relish this moment to re-visit that dynamic of change vs. permanence. I close with this remarkable thought from Thornton Wilder's "Our Town":

There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk . . . or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strains so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

Well now, there's a change! I look up just as I'm about to launch this blog and see a pair of men rising outside my window to make some changes in the signage outside the gallery.

Wayne & Stacy
Wayne White, "Reflections" Framed Photograph $90
Stacy Campbell, "I Like Your Willie" Acrylic on Canvas $395

As I was about to close the blog, I noticed on the top photo that Wayne White and Stacy Campbell have art hanging on the wall to the left of me at the desk. Oh yeah! Next week, Friday night August 20 at 7:00 we feature Wayne & Stacy for our gallery Art Talk. We haven't held this event for a few months, so we are excited to put it on the calendar again. You won't want to miss this duo!

I'm ready to get back to painting. Thanks for reading.

I make art in order to discover.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.

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