"This life of ours is like a street that passes many doors", Ball said, "nor think you all the doors I mean are wood. Every day's a door and every night. When a man throws wide his arms to you in friendship, it's a door he opens same as when a woman opens hers in wantonness. The street forks out, and there's two doors to choose between. The meadow that tempts you to rest your bones and dream a while. The rack-ribbed child that begs for scraps the dogs have left. The sea that calls a man to travel far. They are all doors, some God's and some the Fiend's. So choose with care which ones you take, my son, and one day - who can say - you'll reach the holy door itself."

-Frederick Buechner, Godric

Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.

-Thomas Merton

This piece is part of the 2018 Exquisite Corpse Games http://exquisitecorpsegames.com, a blind artistic collaboration, in which each artist was randomly assigned the creation of a head, torso, or legs. The assembled pieces were unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete, FL on Nov 1, 2018. 

This encaustic piece, Choices, was inspired by a quote from C.S. Lewis:

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.

​

I sit in darkness. I sit in human silence.
I begin to hear the eloquent night.
The world of this night resounds from heaven to hell with animal eloquence.
With the savage innocence of a million unknown creatures.
The enormous vitality of their music pounds and rings and throbs and echoes
until it gets into everything, and swamps
the whole world in its neutral madness.

​-Thomas Merton

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer & supplication with gratitude, make your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will protect your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

​-Philippians 4:6

This piece is part of the 2017 Exquisite Corpse Games http://exquisitecorpsegames.com, a blind artistic collaboration, in which each artist was randomly assigned the creation of a head, torso, or legs. The assembled pieces were unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete, FL on Nov 2, 2018. 

My piece, True Self, is the torso portion of the completed work. It was inspired by a quote by C.S. Lewis:

What I call my ‘self’ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires and fears, etc., some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

O be still while 
You are still alive,
And all things live around you speaking
(I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

​-Thomas Merton