After River acknowledges her Self in V6 No 2 – Kids of Lower Utopia: Softdoor’s Older Sister’s I-AM Knot (The Realization of River Scout Finnagain), and having accidentally sacrificed the last joint of the left smallest finger to re-membering her Self, River awakens under a Dream as The Witness of her inner world and naked as a newborn (pages 11). She gathers her clothes by need (pages 14-19), and is followed to The Water by her most beloved reflection of Self – her god: Beautiful (page 20). Together they drink the water as equals (page 22), and begin to wander through the woods listening (page 24). Listening, River begins to hear the call of the Very Mountain (page 26). River climbs the Mountain (page 28), and talks to the dead (page 30). She is directed by a Chance encounter (with herself – page 32 ), and stands before the warm dark cave of her Self Eternal. Standing before the Unknown, River sums-up her life in a single question (page 34), and is answered by an even more direct question (page 36), to which she gives the right answer (page 37) she gives her whole life, and dies as her reply (page 38 Hurray!). In this death she recognizes herself, who she is, and ever was, and will be (she is YES, page 39). Now River holds her death close (page 40), and opens her eyes inside Reality (page 41), realizing the echoes of Truth (page 42). Now River moves inside the pattern of Life (page 43) the instrument of her own Realization, and beyond the Three Changes (page 45). River kisses good-bye to the Horse-of-Power (page 47). And then returns to The Water to wash away her last words of inner necessity (page 49).
Now River begins to run, gather exuberance and momentum (page 51), until she jumps off a cliff that appears in her way (page 53) …and flies Home (page 55).
Her home is the warm dark and vast space of awareness in the heart of her Self Eternal where all things are River (page 57).
Epilogue : Finally home, River hangs with the Gods, being … One …her self (page 61).
In this, my 8th book, Kids of Lower Utopia: A Letter from the Front Lines, I am drawing, through the lens of my experience, an allegorical dream in which my heroine; River Scout Finnagain, travels through archetypal stages describing the greatest of the hero’s journeys – the one of self-realization
To me this story is best told in the medium of the pencil. Nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor, undisguised, then the pencil; simple, direct, and so very elemental. My drawings are spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing into “still-points” where life’s attention waits, gathering silence.
The pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge the space between pages – leaps through their own non-linear space of Truth.
Art is a metaphor about being fully conscious. It mimics self-realization by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously “now” that the viewer is suspended in “Aesthetic Arrest” and experiences observation free of thought, free of time. This …is our Work.
