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Coat of Many Colors

20 X 25 watercolor, 1982

spiritual trailblazers

the story of this painting


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The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you, not knowing

how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.

They're in each other all along.

Rumi(1)

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The Story of this Painting

Man in rainbow black shawl, firekeeper. You hypnotized me with your exotic, brown eyed power. Burning fire, boundaryless, stay in your circle, don't consume me. Yet I reach out to handle coals as you do. Two pronged deer antlers, a sacred tool of firekeepers came to my hands as I walked in the hills. Now I too could stir the fires glowing ashes and recite important words. The water drum sounded its love affirmation for the earth, the fire played its air harp, women transformed into ancient muses reciting poetry, but my words were hiding. Men put on the masks of bards and sang great tales of grandeur. My body ached. Do I have permission to go to the john? Who's writing the rules here anyway? I smell vomit, one drops in exhaustion, another shakes away her ghosts, slowly the night wears on. The firekeeper sits, a rainbow mountain of strength, his eyes viewing distant places looking through me. How I wish to know what he sees. Darkness caresses my eyes. Moments, aeons pass and I look up to see an ultramarine blue sky. The fire roars at the dawn and a white eagle soars from its center, up through its spiraling life. My song comes as I witness the new day's birth. "Thank you for the spiral dance, one with the spirit."

Lifetimes later: Dreaming of brown bears I wake up. A shabby motel room on my trip through the southwest doesn't feed my need for entertainment, so I flick on my mind channel and remember someone I shouldn't. Deciding to meditate and watch my breath instead I feel myself rising. From my body floats a woman with outstretched arms, woven colors softly flowing from her back. Before me descending is the dark rainbowed black shawled man, so beautiful I am transfixed in awe before him. We embrace and he melds into me, both dissolving into tingly warm colors and light.

Even then it took me years to understand that this man of power lives inside of me. This butterfly cloak, my vision, my life spread out behind me, a rainbow cloak only I could weave through action in the world.

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Lovers think they're looking for each other,

but there's only one search: wandering

this world is wandering that, both inside

one transparent sky. In here there is no

dogma and no heresy.

Rumi(2)

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1. Rumi, Open Secret, Quatrain #1246

2. Ibid., p.27

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