Artplex Gallery

• Artplex Gallery was my art-focused activity for Tuesday the 5th of May. it's a sort of commercial space because you can purchase any of the art works, and it nicely meets their "Discover Contemporary Art Beyond the Ordinary" tagline.

• Flower study 1 • Sally West

• Perched on the Tree of Life • Jennyfer Stratman

• A Design for Life • Jonjo Elliott

• Soft Daylight • Frederic Paul

• Flowers on Tuesday • Sally West

• One Day • Sally West

• Enchantment • Alessandro Casetti

• In the Above • Jeff Faust

• After the Storm • Jeff Faust

• Settling Into Dusk • Steven Nederveen

• Sooey • Kyle Paliotto

• Pale Green Dream • Taking Root II • Peter Kuttner

• The Frequency Of A Loving Heart • Amadou Opa Bathily

• Breaking News • Amadou Opa Bathily

• Sunny Beach Days • Elizabeth Lagreiters

• Mid-Hudson Inscape • Bruce Rubenstein

• Ultramarine • Kate Tova

• Tuesday was Cinco de Mayo but I opted for Tuna Tuesday at Subway. I'd planned to get a frappe afterwards, but Boba Time was closed again. Short staffed? Maybe, because they'd been advertising help wanted.

Five Minute Friday :: Beginning

• Five Minute Friday :: Beginning Linkup

Have you heard the phrase, "every ending also is a beginning?" It would take eons to scroll through the years of your life and show how sometimes that was true, other times it was a loud false because a particular ending marked the conclusion of…? A pain-filled situation you couldn't wait to be rid of, or a glorious phase filled with achievement, support, and wonder. Some endings make space for new beginnings that otherwise couldn't be; other endings mean emptiness and heartbreak.

Like too many in this economy, I tell people I'm "between lives," meaning I consider myself in a transitional time between an established routine of employment, housing, and connections and (ideally) some of the same in the future. Most of us "between lives" people are working at other than our ideal job or the career we thought we were preparing for. Most of us probably are in temporary style housing and not in a place with a mortgage or a long-term lease, unless someone else holds the mortgage or the lease and we're renting from them.

I wrote that introduction because all of us between lives people can't stay there forever, although I'll admit it has a degree of comfort. Unsettled yet comfortable? Mostly because of meeting and commiserating with many many many others who truly get it.

How. Some. Ever. We need to figure out what it will take and how we will get to a serious new beginning. That new start probably will entail ending aspects of between-ness, so in that case, a particular ending is essential for a beginning.

The end of between lives may be a little bit bitter with a touch of sweetness. Have I ever mentioned how much I love the thrill of the chase? That I do, but this one has gotten very old. I'm ready to settle, not for less than I need or deserve—I'm ready to settle down again. The end of "between lives" had better make room for an excellent new beginning.

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Celebrating Live on Easter 5!

Live at The Amen Jubilee!

1 we gather at the font
2 death has no more dominion
3 glory praise
4 listening, hearing, being
5 we give thee of thine own
6 broken and shed
7 we gather at the welcome table
8 thankful praise
9 jubilee, amen!

"The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine;
you are but aliens and sojourners with me.
You shall grant redemption of the land of your possession."
Leviticus 25:23-24

April 2026

• On Tuesday the 7th, I visited the Vincent Price Museum and especially enjoyed art by Ofelia Esparza.

• The Los Angeles River on Tuesday the 14th

• Earth Day 2026 • Our Power :: Our Planet :: two versions of the same design

• Street Art Tuesday on the 21st

• On the last Tuesday of the month, another Santa Monica Lunch and the Armand Hammer Museum again. There were two new exhibits since my last visit.

• Space is the Place: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection

• From the website instead of linking to it because Space Is the Place ends early September:

Space is the Place takes its title from the 1973 studio album and 1974 film by Sun Ra (1914-1993). The selected works in the exhibition consider "space" as a conceptual framework, through the themes of afro-futurism, belonging, placemaking, and the act of taking up space [The display] comprises installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and multi-media works by nearly thirty artists.

• Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials
• Act 1: Breathing, Bleeding, Crumbling Form
• Act II: Cosmic Abstraction and Communal Form
• Act II: Clay

• From the museum website:

Twenty-two artists from North, Central, and South America who embrace the unpredictable nature of living materials. These artists use materials such as avocado, cacao, achiote, cochineal, stone, clay, and natural dyes to create large-scale installations, paintings, works on paper, and mixed-media sculpture. They are rooted in the spirit, memory, and knowledge of Brown and Indigenous worlds … as records of the living and repositories of cosmic memory, organic decay and transformation.

Have I ever mentioned the commentaries from the Hammer Museum are beyond pretentious? Well, they are.

Five Minute Friday :: Decision

The breeze at dawn has something to tell you.
Your boundaries are too small. Rumi
• Five Minute Friday :: Decision Linkup

Our days are packed with decisions already made that may include what to have for breakfast, what route to take to work in which conveyance, what time for your lunch break, etc., but Kate's kids especially are deciding about a road that stretches far ahead that's yet a trek they can start any time. To limit today's decision topic, those of us with more chronology already have decided about higher education, a possible profession, career training, a good company to work for. Sometimes when to quit and when to keep on keepin' on.

These are decisions regarding where you'll travel to your future, and the road you'll take to get there. It's about whether or not you'll carefully follow a map, or trust a more random intuitive approach. You already know "It's about the journey, and not the destination."

Although a young recent high school, community college, university, or professional school graduate has what looks like an endless road ahead, at any life stage we have the opportunity to decide the next step, a possible change of profession, workplace location, or type of employment setting. I love the quote from Rumi in my header! Although our dreams often start out boundless, they sometimes don't stay that way.

This has been about the road ahead. What about the miles, the highways, the decisions and their outcomes that lie behind us? William Faulkner reminds us the past never is past; it keeps overtaking us minute by minute. How are you, how am I, going to make the journey that's now in the rear view mirror happily affect your decisions today?

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Five Minute Friday :: Timing

My header poppies are from 22 June 2020 – two days after the solstice –
because the timing of the seasons always is just right.
The peaches square comes from 12 June 2022.

• Five Minute Friday :: Timing Linkup

Theology blog here, right? Greek distinguishes between chronos (ordinary everyday time we usually measure on a clock or calendar, as in "chronology"), and kairos (extraordinary one of a kind time that marks a specific event we may have been awaiting or that happens unexpectedly).

It's super ironic and surprising that the Apostle Paul writes his only birth narrative about chronos and not kairos time. Given that it's one of the most poignant verses in the New Testament, who'd of thunk it?

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law. Galatians 4:4

Which of these timing renderings in English from that verse feels best?

proper time – time came to completion – fulfillment of the time – appointed time – time was right – right time – time had fully come – appropriate time – chosen time – set time had fully come – fulfilling of the time
I'm often grateful I didn't send an email or make a phone call when I'd planned it, and my lack of preparation or another circumstance delayed it. When I finally made the call or sent the email, the timing often felt providential, close to "kairos" even for something relatively small. Then there have been a few times I ended up not contacting the person or organization at all. Has that happened to you?

When I place larger events in the chronology of my life and my relationships with other people, the ways right timing makes seemingly disparate events and people come together often astonishes me. Every time it happens!

There have been times I've instinctively known other people's suggested timings were wrong. Then there were a handful of instances i refused to follow another person's suggested timing and regretted it.

This has been a somewhat abstract five minutes. Is timing an abstract concept? Not usually. Timing most often is about the important stuff and when events that move life forward just happen to happen. And timing is about joys in life that become disappointments when we don't consider the whole timeline—like Kate's hydrangeas.

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Morning Has Broken

City Resist

Morning

Beach Speak