A Slow Dissolving

After two months of fall and winter weather…

After bouts of heavy rain, long early mornings of mist and periodic bouts of wind; after freezing and thawing, back and forth, back and forth — this much remains. The chin is just about to fall off. The hands are gone entirely. And the stone pedestal is pooled in wet clay. And yet, a lingering Buddha remains.

For a couple of weeks I forgot about this Buddha completely, taken up with the holidays, out-of-town visitors and a studio sale. And it occurred to me that there are two kinds of disintegrations going on at the same time: the gradual dissembling of form and the mind’s many bouts of erosion.

Well beyond notions of success or failure, there is this: the beauty of fragile things, my own temporal being …. being.