Eye to Eye: The print and back-story

August 1995. I had just come back from riding Mariah through some trappy logging roads scarred with clear-cut stretches you would only canter only a responsive horse over---zero tolerance for miscalculated footfalls or foolishness. When we came out of the woods onto the paved road leading home, I dismounted, and not for the reason you usually get off a horse about to face two lanes of traffic, or one overheated by strenuous effort. Mariah was neither squirrelly about vehicles, nor wet-coated. It was gratitude. I spoke to her. I told her she didn't owe me a thing; it didn't get any better than this. We pressed our foreheads together where her small star made a whorl of hairs like a miniature hurricane, like we were making a third eye between us I said. Then I carried the saddle two miles home with her nose at my elbow. That was one dam fine mare and I didn't have to write about her in my journal to name what was everlasting about us.

I mention this because although I had grown tight with Mariah over the thirteen previous years, on this ride our flame flared white-hot. We'd burned out any doubt about how conjoined it could be, where two creatures agreeably share one being and become something else---ancient man's idea of a centaur maybe, or merely our two energies soldered into one single circuit. Imagine my grief when I found her dead two days later. It was a blood clot the vet said. Sudden. No one could have seen it coming. She went out on a wing with a prayer.

So, when my friend Karen asked me a couple years later if I would like to create the cover art for her book about energy connections with horses, I remembered the courtesy of my mare, our dipped heads and our skins touching together trustingly where each other's optical blind spots existed on our foreheads. The idea of a third eye came back to me. Coincidentally, it's the place on one's brow representing our imaginative sense, the "inner eye" and seat of the intuitive faculty. In many Eastern religions it is known as, "the cavity of the spirit," and is one of the chakras or body's energetic centers lying in front of the pituitary gland and associated with the color blue-violet.

It's not Mariah's face in the drawing, nor mine, but the woman could pass for my mother when she was seventeen. While the technique is sharp-focus, the image is intentionally a bit ambiguous so that a viewer might hook into it, peer deeper. I hope it suggests the way non-verbal messages invoke their own grammars of meaning with suggestion, allusion, and metaphors; these shift like shapes reflected on flowing water that are altered not only by the water itself, but by you, the watcher inhabiting your own perspective to them. Now-you-see-it-now-you-don't. Besides, I like what John F. Carlson says: "Too much reality in a picture is always a disappointment to the imaginative soul."