Eleven years ago I had just begun to explore, through study and art, a theme that has preoccupied me since childhood — the convergence of science and spirituality. Here’s where I think it started:
When I was eight years old, and suffering a family trauma, I withdrew deep into myself. Hiding in a secret compartment under the attic stairs, I would pray. My prayers were answered by someone I called “the Doctor”. When I told my sister about him, she said these dangerous stories were going to land me in a home for crazy children, where they would “lock me up and throw away the key!” … so it became my biggest lifelong secret. But during those troubled times, I visited the Doctor often, and was always calmed. He would explain what was going on with my family in terms of science and math. He never, ever mentioned the Bible … so in my eight-year-old brain he couldn’t possibly be God … and quite reasonably, I called him the Doctor, like Doctor Albert Einstein.
The Unseen Architecture phase was my attempt to access the underlying fabric of the universe … to articulate something I had always felt, but could never grasp in a material way. Since I was driving everybody nuts with these unfathomable paintings, I wrote a little booklet tying the art to ideas … calling on great writers and scientists and poets and artists to help me tell the story.
When I woke up this morning to the news of cities on fire, this current atmosphere of hate and division made me wonder where my country has gone …. how it has come to be so lost to me. I tried to imagine a way back from this ‘Country Once Forested’. One page of the Unseen Architecture booklet reminded me how timeless and universal this struggle is in humanity — the struggle to remember who we are, and not go back to sleep.
The image on the page below is a bit hard to read, so here’s the poem by Wendell Berry:
In a Country Once Forested
The young woodland remembers
The old, a dreamer dreaming
of an old holy book,
an old set of instructions,
and the soil under the grass
is dreaming of a young forest,
and under the pavement
the soil is dreaming of grass.
