Artist and poet, Bruce Baillie has turned many eyes with his creative takes on life and its landscapes.  One of his most famous works is "To Parsifal."  In it, he moves rapidly from one image to another of the American West, turning sensibilities over and over again until we are not sure on which image we ought most to ponder.   But this is his point.  Life is anything but static, and existence is anything but predictable.  We live in a sort of illumined darkness, suffused with joy yet caught in mortality.


     As we do, as we balance these contradicting points, we find ourselves blending, Baillie observes, our interior thoughts and the external space in which we have them.  We mix our inner with our outer, weaving them together, day after day, year after year, in a continuous attempt to come to grips with the facts of our finite existence.
     If I may, I will expand on Baillie's point to say that, yes, all of us need to be aware of the relationship between what is within and outside us, that we all must attend to our form while not overlooking our content.  I will add, however, that unless we ground our quest in something other than ourselves and our world, we are really not going anywhere.
     We go around and around only to return to where we began.  Materially, maybe this is enough.  Existentially, it will never be sufficient:  how can we explain that which we have no inkling of why it is here?