......................................................................................................................................................... Last night, I dreamed: I was in an apartment, a collage of many in which I've lived. The doorbell rang. I opened the door. There stood a broad-faced, brown-skinned man with a menacing look, wearing a parka, its hood up, trimmed with an animal's fur. He tried to pass me; I pushed him back and yelled, "Get out of here!" In the hills above the city today, exhaust fumes from below mix with sweet scents of pollinating plants. Dark clouds float past hang gliders spread out, their guide lines meticulously untangled before the veneer of Christianity and its attempt to change the meaning of ‘crossing’ to ‘a place where a cross stands,’ trees have long marked crossings and were regarded as flourishing intersections between the temporal and the eternal. Powerful trees have powerful presences and their function in bringing people together for blossoming like large silky flowers tossed up and riding erratic thermals back down to earth. I sit in a molded plastic chair, down toward the sea, wondering if at some genetic junction our ancestors opted for arms instead of wings. So that now our nesting instinct is woven from nerve cells ascending in fledgling primate brains. "Transposed into symbols, however, something quite different arises—a space in the earth with features of the sacred and a medium of man's expression of himself." [G. Gabauer, "The Place of Beginning and End." In, D. Kamper & C. Wulf, Editors, Looking Back on the End of the World. New York, 1989.] To the artist, home is not domestic, but a site for wildly creative ideas. Not locking doors and loading guns, but balancing "the mythic need for home and security with the capacity to accept and appraise the reality of the other"— Out there and in here, we arrive home. ............................................................................................................................................................. the veneer of: N. Hall, “White Riding: Milking a Legend.” In, S. Marlan, Editor, Archetypal Psychologies: Reflections in Honor of James Hillman. New Orleans, 2008. the mythic need: J. Hill, At Home in the World. New Orleans, 2010.