Over the weekend I traveled to Seattle to attend the gallery opening of an art/writing exhibit on which I've been working with four artists for roughly a year and a half.  It had to do with the idea of Lost and Found.  It was a joy to work with the artists, to see their creative juices flowing in response to my essays, and to see the project come together.  Following is the introduction which I wrote to a book we published with some of the artwork and all of my essays.  I also enclose a link to the gallery website so that, for those so inclined, they may read the essays in full.

     "All that we are, all that we do:  this is lost and found.  Woven deeply, rippling steadily, flowing freely, remembering past, affirming present, and casting future, lost and found is the story of existence.  In it we find door and window, structure and form, and frame and foundation, all which shapes and comprises the realities we inhabit, the paths and realities we seek and pursue:  what we see and what we do not.  And life becomes.

     So do these essays endeavor to do:  to speak of lost, to ruminate on found.  To contemplate the point of losing, to meditate on the wonder of finding.  To take meaning apart.  And see it again.

     It is perhaps too simplistic to suppose, and to suppose nothing else, that in losing we gain or that in gaining we lose.  Although to an extent this is true, buried beneath this scaffolding is a bigger point:  life responds to us as much we respond to it.  Embedded in the countless patterns and rhythms of this cosmos we humans are, as dependent on it as much as it is dependent on us.  We lose and find as a reflection, and manifestation, of the possibilities of existence, as an expression of the near infinite compass of circles that comprise and impel this adventure we call life.

     To lose and find is to live as choice making beings in a freely roaming universe.

     It is also to move ever closer to resolving, though never fully, the tension that drives us all, the ever looming, and patently inescapable, juncture of mortal and eternity.  To tap into the transcendence that undergirds the immanent even as we wonder what either means, to step into our beyond even as we ponder how it can, in fact, be.

     To look even when we cannot see."

     Here's the link:

https://shiftgallery.org/2021/04/13/karey-kessler-anna-macrae-miha-sarani-and-david-traylor-with-william-marsh-lost-and-found/