When I paint I am influenced by the texture of the paper, the viscosity of the paint, the condition of the brush. I reach down to make a thin line and it comes out plump. Then the picture takes a new direction—I influencing it, it influencing me.

      We start to do one thing and something happens to divert us. We resent the influence and try to go back to our original intention. But we are always influenced because we do not live in a vacuum together with our intentions. We are in a relationship with everything that occurs. We walk down a road and feel a sudden burst of warmth from the sun and stop to bask our eyes. We receive a letter from a loved one, a nibble from our puppy, a knowing look from a clerk in a store and are no longer the same. What we just were doesn't quite apply. What we just intended is in the past. This is not a lack of resolve; it is the way life flows. Always a new painting, always a new self.

      Are we more mind than body, more body than feeling, more feeling than memory, more memory than future? Sometimes I am all anger and sometimes all peace. There are minutes I live for tomorrow and minutes I live for her. In last night's hot bed I was flesh and afterward soul. But most moments I am not just a body or a mind, and when I am at peace with this reality, and my intellect does not override my flesh, and here does not deny tomorrow. When emotions, memories, needs and all the et cetera of my being each have their own voice, I see that I am how everyone else is . . . and possibly even how everything is.

      Cause and effect have no stopping point. Everything we do touches everything else. Since I have become more willing to acknowledge my displeasure, I notice that I have started crossing my Ts. And somehow this is related to the comment I recently made about Beulahs: “She liked me until I crossed her.” And all of this appears to accompany my new posture: I no longer hold my head down as much. I suspect there are a thousand other connections.