...there is something quietly percolating about the integration of spirit into drawing. Not Spirit, with a capital S, not spirit infused with theological concerns of Western religion, but spirit, as in the animated and innate activating engine in all sentient things. I frequently feel like my drawings are sentient creatures, -- that i provide them circumstances in which to flourish, fail, fight or the like. But, in reading David Abram, who writes so poignantly (in Spell of the Sensuous) about just what spirit is, I feel the ideas about "inanimate" objects possessing some strain of non-human intelligence really resonate with me. I am looking always for venues to step back from anthropocentrism, for dynamics that let the human-driven constraints of perceived control or understanding to be overshadowed by something Else. Anything Else. And to defer to deep knowing of other creatures, other things, is so refreshing, so absolutely joyful, it makes me long for my own kind of permeable, sheerness. I would like so dearly to become thin and translucent, and to hang my husk of person-ness on the nonhuman architecture of my surroundings. What bliss to turn off my feeble humanity for a while, and let Other - spirit - take over - the pallet-yards , the fencelines, the thin cries of coyotes, the scraping resonance of a metal chair being pushed away from a table in a library - all of these things steeped in Knowing that is not Human Knowing. Rejoice, therefore.
