Watching the Patterns of the Land

I have been reading The Snowy Tower by Martin Shaw and am enthralled with his insights into how stories and images come to us from watching the patterns of the land:

"A slow emergence from the tree line - a mist of story. Not in the clipped tempo of the written sentence, but in a galloping, roaming, rampant language that tears into the soul like the vivid colors of a jungle bird...We no longer rove, ablaze and alive in the greenness of things...we're getting big on statistics, big on knowledge, but if ever we needed wisdom, now is the time."

Breaking Through / 30" x 40" 

"Mythic disinformation is a very sophisticated way of understanding the human psyche. It understands that we don't always respond to strict orders, and that the results of our choices are rarely black-and-white...To the literal mind, myth itself is a profound form of disinformation. There can be no truth in its images--a hedgehog standing on a rooster playing the bagpipes! Try to be serious! But the image distrusts the societal rush to the concrete picture and uses the brilliance of metaphor to disable (at least briefly) the triumph of logic. Logic is not the enemy but the dance partner."

Land Patterns / 30" x 40"

"Moving into a mythic perspective saves us from continually trying to address the situation from linear, statistical, clock time. Attention to the eternal as well as the historical would provide insights into stories and images that have a genius that statistics do not."

Land Patterns 2 / 30" x 40"

"May we all be wild horses under a blood moon, riding mad into its tangles."