My personal interest in graphic expression leans heavily toward spontaneous art that lets various aspects of the unconscious have their say in the daylight. Mandalas are particularly suited to this because they are an ancient form understood at a pre-literate level. They are soul maps. In my mandalas, the spiral frequently shows up , and I identify it as my joie d’ vivre, my creative life essence.

• Here I see myself as the spiral energy barrelling along under the central garden.
• The garden is full of my students standing like fireweeds in full bloom with their seedheads blowing away in the wind of change.
• On the right, in the West, is an apple tree, and that is my writing about childhood, an actual manuscript called “West of Wenatchee.”
• The most interesting emergent energy to me is the long path swooping across the bottom under the spiral. I take that to be my novel on the move as I try to wrap things up at the end of the quarter and get ready to go to St. Louis to take a workshop dedicated just to that project.
• The red streak that comes down to join with it is my physicality, but every mandala contains unspoken mysteries, as well.