Rule #4 of my Trigger Point Theory is that metaphors are idea models.

All societies have stories, myths, and sayings that distill their wisdom, and values as teaching tools. Metaphors influence society by projecting aspirational values. Metaphors can project such vivid pictures of comparison that a powerful vison takes shape, whether or not they are grounded in or supported by truth.

It is the first day of Spring and I am ready for something new. My new work will be “Tidal Flushing.” The lead image for today’s essay is a death mask of my father. It illustrated a previous essay in this series and was painted shortly after his passing . It is based on a photograph I took immediately after his death. It represented what I was just beginning to understand about death, life, tidal flushing, the power of the sea and the vulnerability of the land. Now, I am facing the last years of my life and my life’s inventory must negotiate reality.

The sitting President of the United States recently stated about the current war in Iran, “...some people will die.” Indeed. When you reach an extreme of inability to communicate between systems, war inevitably means some people will die. It may be worth considering why we reach those extremes.

In the natural world, change is determined by laws of physics. Energy in, energy out. In a rhythmic flow of energy for example, ocean tides carry water in, and energy out, as nurturing soil, maintaining a constantly changing wetlands system.

Chaos is terrifying but it’s also a source of fertility. I took a week off last week to think about the uncertainty that chaos creates and what it takes to live with that uncertainty. Two useful qualities I decided were essential, are humility and patience. Faith and trust help but are more sophisticated skills.

This will be brief.

When people disagree, whether in the bedroom or in rooms of power, it is always easier to get angry than to listen and learn something. When power is asymmetrical, too often a disagreement is resolved with bullying and gaslighting instead of some simple reality-fact checking…

Today’s picture asserts the truth that there can always be a new beginning, even a few minutes after the world has a lapse. My lapse yesterday, was to miss my daily photograph of the dawn as the sun firsst rises. My redemption was that the universe still provided light and beauty.

Some people are arguing over whether or not we are in a civil war in the United States today. In a conversation with someone yesterday, we discussed whether we are already into WWIII: whether the environmental wars begun as backlash to the Green movement, has morphed into an all-out assault from fossil fuel hegemonies, from Russia to Texas to Silicon Valley, extracting life at blood price. I think we are both in a Civil War and fighting WWIII. It just doesn’t look like previous wars.

In 2007, Dr, Jim White, founder of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, where I am an Affiliate and I studied the relationships between geopolitical conflict zones and climate change. Our work was part of the “Weather Report”show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) in Boulder, Colorado, curated by Lucy Lippard. Our collaboration was written about in a feature story in the New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure section, in which Jim and I mentioned that we had bonded over agreeing that we (the industrial West) were raping the world.

Doors can open up to a new world but they can also sometimes be a one-way trip. Sometimes that works. Other times it doesn’t.

In 1985, I embarked on an ill-fated but important project, developing an interior mural with residents of a shelter for abused children. It was ill-fated for several reasons. One was that I organized our imagery around my presumptuous understanding of Native American Medicine Wheels, an unfortunate claim to wisdom that was not mine to claim, but was ubiquitous at the time amongst maturing middle class ex-hippies.