Yo!: How To Have a Cosmic Christmas

Several weeks before the Christmas of 1986, less than nine months after the accident, Anne and Marcus' sister Amanda presented Marcus with a set of Crayola watercolors and unknowingly awakened a talent in Marcus that would turn out to be a gift to so many others.

Marcus took up the paintbrush, in the spirit of fun, and his first work was a Christmas card (pictured). The message it carried was more than just a holiday wish. His triumphant “Yo!” signaled to everyone his definitive take on the situation.  Rather than gloom or depression, the drawing attests to Marcus’ simple joy in being alive and his pleasure in this new-found form of expression. Twenty-five years since the accident that paralyzed him, Marcus still paints in the spirit of love and fun, touching lives with tenderness and wonder.

There's an ancient Hindu story about a man who spent his lifetime begging by the city gates, always at the brink of starvation, clothed in rags. After awhile, he died, and after another several years the city decided to enlarge the gateway. During the excavation, the municipal workers turned up the earth on which the beggar had stood, sat and slept for those many years. Underneath the very spot, they discovered a priceless treasure, enough to feed and clothe any number of men for any number of lifetimes. All along, the story goes, within touching distance of the hapless beggar's feet great riches lay buried, worth many times more than what he needed to survive and live abundantly. What a cosmic event that might have been! If only the beggar had ever paused to consider what lay underneath the layers both of himself and the world.

We need more messages like the message of Marcus' first Christmas card: signs, poems,  paintings, gestures that point the way to the treasure hidden shallowly beneath the surface of our everyday struggle, hungers and chills. It is in the same spirit of love and wonder that we wish all our friends and family,
Merry Cosmic Christmas! 

PS: Happy solstice all! There's nothing like the shortest day and longest night to heighten your sense of time. ;')

Thanksgiving: Time Is a Gift

Watch time soar.

Marcus began work on the painting How Time Flies after the first couple of sessions of interviews with Leslee for his 25-year retrospective coffee-table-book.This image was taken during the creation of the painting. The raven is gaining his third dimension and appears to be tearing out of the canvas, over and beyond Marcus' pallet and implements. The pocket watch trails in flight, haplessly careening.


How Time Flies is a direct expression of Marcus' relationship with time – the revelry and ravages, the love and loss, the joy and the heartbreak, as he is (all of us really are) simultaneously blessed and held hostage by time.  In his honesty with himself, Marcus transcends his particular experience of time and touches on something universal. We see through Marcus’ own eyes something we can all recognize in our own relationship with the time of our lives.

Time around the table with friends.

We often catch ourselves lamenting the speed of time. Days, minutes, hours go by so fast, especially when we are with people we enjoy, doing work we love, creating something we believe in. We can't help but wish for more time. It's probably high time we recognized the commodity time is - we can spend it, waste it, lose it on crazy nights perhaps worth forgetting, we want to steal it, and oh if we could just stretch it out to last a little longer. . .

But time fools and foils us completely. We trick ourselves into thinking time is exhaustible when the truth about time is that we make it. Just like we make art, memories, love. "I cherish every moment," says Marcus, when he reflects on the time of his life, nailing the true spirit of Thanksgiving in his depiction of this holy theft."The raven seems like it could surpass time, and I’m hitching a ride – the fountain of life."

"An infinite perspective is the fountain of youth," Marcus says and this is what he shows us in How Time Flies. And this is what defines human thanksgiving - simultaneously blessed and held hostage.

So, here from this corner of the world to yours, wherever you may be: let us give thanks for the folks that make life and time meaningful, for good work, the people who inspire us, the moments we spend with one another . . thanks for art, and cadmium yellow, alzarin crimson, Payne's gray and cobalt blue, trickster ravens, lovers, friends, deep sky over the mystery ahead, and for time and life itself which gives us all these possibilities in which to dwell.

What are you thankful for in this moment? Add to the infinite list (into cyberspace, for which we are also thankful) below.