"I want my work to act as a catalyst to help a visitor reclaim their belief in their own power . . . to [help them] want to believe in something outside of themselves."  So says artist Heather Hart, who is at the moment building a "roof" in the Olympic Sculpture Garden on the waterfront of Seattle.  Set on a hill overlooking the beginnings of Puget Sound, Ms. Hart's "roof," asphalt shingles on a frame that sits atop what appears to be half a house, captures the dilemma of human meaning:  although we have power to think and imagine nearly anything, we frequently realize that we do so in a universe whose power is beyond our capacity to grasp.  On the one hand, we have total power; on the other hand, we have none at all.
     In climbing the "roofs" of our lives, we also climb to the limits of what we think and, if we're fortunate, we break those limits apart.  We find things we never expected to see.  And that's Ms.Hart's point:  when we climb to our oracle, as she puts it, we find the truth--whatever it may be--that comes to, because it constitutes and reflects a compelling depth of power and insight we didn't see before, sustain, at least we hope, us.
     And we also find, I think, that this power becomes our weakness:  we see that although we come into this power through our individual questing, our own journey to the roof, we do so in the grip of a roof of contingencies beyond our human capacity and ken.  In the end, we're but little waifs in a vastly personal (for why else would we pursue purpose?) but often epistemologically confounding universe.
     Isn't life a marvel?