What folly it is to try to capture something that feels like a slippery fish: you’ve got it—and then it flies off the line or out of your hand, flipping and gyrating back into the water: splash!  You can describe its keen muscled energy: slithery, pulsating, wet, for that split second before it leaves your grasp; the rainbow sparkle of sunlight reflected in its silver blue scales as it leaps its way towards home in a flip-flopped downward spiral; the concentric circles formed in the water as it plunges in and swims off and away. But the fish itself? Gone. What remains are wet, smelly hands and droplets of water. The fish is  history, a spin of memory; a tale told to one’s self and others; an approximation; a backward glance through a rear view mirror. Are the droplets of remaining water enough to reflect a nugget of truth about the fish itself?

Writing about my life, art and teaching art is like catching a fish: a fluid, slippery thing just out of reach–beyond catching or containment.  It begins as one thing then becomes another, flipping this way and that in its contorted effort to escape. The best I can offer are fragments or droplets, the whole experience reflected through its memorable parts, woven together with a golden thread or through-line of seeking and championing voice and creative self expression. Whether viewed through a lens of adventure, tragedy, comedy, didactic instruction &  inspiration (you pick!), the story I share has both dark and bright beginnings, middles, and dead ends—and illuminating magic. There are paper, pens, pianos, poetry, tears, psychology and child’s day-dreamed imaginations;  sullen, heavy slogs through  small town mountain days; peripatetic wanderings and wonderings through larger urban spaces, including the hallowed halls of academia. There are soul-crushing breakdowns, far-flung adventures, lucky breaks and miraculous synchronicities that punctuate a life lived in the quest of meaning and deep creative engagement, all centered around the  BIG dream of calligraphy and art. The dream that stretched beyond the borders of my early lived or imagined experience: out of reach, impossible, no compass to chart its direction, my face pressed up against glass looking out towards its horizon.