I don’t know if it’s the chicken or the egg. People have always asked me through the years whether the words come first or the painting. I guess my only answer is that the story arrives, and it can take the shape of letters or landscape or limb, but it’s always in the shape of love. 

I suppose it’s all a practice. The more I see, the more I see. The same with memory. The most with love. What’s taught is what’s known. 

The fields are especially golden now in the south of France. But they aren’t the destination. No, people travel miles, continents even to gather at the feet of lavender. And it can’t be denied, it is lovely.  But wasn’t it my grandfather’s hand that gave me the gold? That first waved my hand over wheat, and in that swoop, painted me in? And it can’t be unseen. Unfelt. All that beauty. All that love. And in that same brush of the hand, my fields, my story, arrives on canvas. 

And maybe you see it. Maybe it tickles your palm, and you remember your grandpa, your neighbor, your teacher, or youth, and you wave it on, and on, and again, all the while humanity becomes a little more golden.