I am a retired architect compelled to offer service in the most dazzling of ways, yet somehow content that most of my time now is spent in celebration, in the quiet smiles of hope and grace, found both on my lips and in my heart, a celebration that brings flowers like you into my life, most importantly by those beautiful beings that fill my world--even human beings!  Especially little human beings. Just yesterday, traveling with family and friends along the historic path now called Broadway, paralleling the Hudson River in the lands of the Lenape people, the fall breeze together with the afternoon ‘golden hour’ sunlight shining through the trees alongside the road brought the laughter of the leaves, like we laughed together as we danced to the afternoon of our lives, both glistening with the pure joy of being truly alive! I’m quite fortunate to be graced with the time to turn that laughter, that dance, the love of those close to me into art of sorts, perhaps not that which we enjoy in a museum or even that which the term ‘fine art’ implies, but the art of an irrepressible need to reciprocate the love and gratitude that’s been so generously given to me by you, my loved ones and life. 

So a piercing question that has made its way through my being of ‘so what’s YOUR narrative!?’, a question so often asked in this hyper-individualised culture and society, I have found one answer lately, carried on the wind, in my co-created public art proposal termed The Peace Portal, an interactive, community-based bamboo, lycra and rope folly of an idea that I hope beckons those who get to become part of it, as it will perhaps engender future narratives, not mine; those spoken and sung and danced to that spring forth with their foundations in relationality, the common good, the expressions of love for each other and the Earth that the public art piece idea sits within. 

So the song on my heart as I write this propelled me into a delightfully irrepressible, non-stop journey to visualise, to make tangible, literally in EFI’s front yard, with Edinburgh’s celebratory backdrop and foreground for stories of struggle and sorrow alongside of stories of forgiveness and longing, in this urban furrow, at the edge of the student filled halls of the University together with Edinburgh community members busily traversing Lauriston Place, inviting both to pause, to ponder and perhaps traverse this portal, with a glistening invitation of colorful splendor and laughing leaves, to perhaps together begin to find soulful answers to questions of struggle and turmoil, of longing and belonging, of peace and serenity.

So, I bring a paradoxical curiosity to my non-narrative narrative to bear, providing an idea gift to those who imagine with me, about how we may breathe in the tempest of the day and breathe out an assurance of the hope for a more peaceful tomorrow as we traverse the travels of our days.

May my days be filled with inspiring exhibitions of socially conscious public art that pierces deep into our being and questions us and moves us and indeed inspires us to build into greater narratives to come.