Little did I realize at the time that this would herald another radical change in my creative life. That years would be spent in a seeming wasteland of creative deprivation. That my possessions and my works would be stored in boxes year upon year. That I would have no studio, no students, few peers of like mind and, for most of the time, no home of my own.

In the absence of my beloved work I experienced first-hand that, as David Bohm had warned me, creativity denied is an open invitation to depression and destructivity. In the absence of joy, I learned how unbearable and meaningless it is to live without it.

A life-long question had brought me to the existential brink (also known as the creative edge):
If deprived of the work that brings one joy, what would happen?
Is there a joy without cause or condition?

Crippled by a leg injury and unable to run away, all I could do was sit. And sit. And stay seated. In the absence of company I learned to shut up. And stay silent.

Eventually – it took many moons – something happened. I fell headlong into the arms of what-is. I fell into the now and the this and the here of my life – warts and pain and poverty and disconnection and disappointment and all. And in an inexplicable way, I left the person I thought I was behind.

No intention of mine bought this about. Who in their right mind would opt for such psychological surgery? Life itself was the culprit, streaming along in response to its own question as it flowered within 'my' mind.

Life brought me to my knees. It was, perhaps, the only way this tear-about personality could be stopped long enough for that question to find its answer. For it was in the now, and this, and here – the ubiquitous moment of the Present - that I found that joy without cause.

It is the joy that rests in wordless awareness of one's Aliveness.

And I found that it is this joy that is the source of all wondering and wonderment - which in turn give birth to creativity. I understood that this causeless joy is truly the font of creativity – the womb of creation. The circle had been closed; the labyrinth's mystery was solved.

Back on my feet again physically, spiritually and metaphorically, I now understood that my questions are the bucket with which creativity is hauled up from that wellspring of pure joy.

New questions were now dipping into that well:
What if I created an online atelier? What would I need to learn, in order to do that?

Those questions catalyzed a new creative chapter. I taught myself how to operate the utterly amazing Photoshop software. Became literate in HTML. And learnt how to build websites - of which this is one. It wasn't always plain sailing for this baby boomer: we weren't raised on pc or mac-speak. Truly, I can say that putting my life together in this way has been the most challenging exhibition I've ever assembled.

But now new questions are finding their space in my makeshift studio: questions about the architecture of roses; about color and its reflections on water; about how little bits of wonder can go together in a box or a book; about the quiet rhythmic tide of the breath ...

These questions ex-press as they must - for me – in color and texture. It's as if color and texture are melodic notes with breath as the continuo. Yet beneath the tide of the breath, something - which isn't a 'thing' of any conceivable kind -  watches, eternally and ubiquitously: