#2 Experiencing “Nothing Is Sacred. Everything Is Sacred.”

When I see beauty it steals my breath and I gasp and I could just fall into it because it is so deep and beckoning and achingly more than my heart can bear and so dangerous I could get lost in it and lose my mind to it. Fall into light on water, fall into the sky, fall into the words that speak of worlds inside another person’s mind, fall into the letters pressed into paper, fall into the curve of the letters, fall into the music, fall into the moment captured on film, fall into his eyes, fall into his arms, feel his heart beating against mine. Is this a painting? Is this sculpture? Is this a painting of sculpture, is it from so long ago that we’d fall back through centuries to see the hand that made it, to know if these were limbs from dreams or ones he could touch or stroke, transposing the bone and muscle and flesh to canvas and then you, you with your fingers add the deepest place of beauty I could fall other than love, the starry night of galaxies and the supernovas spilling energy across an immensity my mind cannot hold. It is forever, it is a billion forevers, it is blood splattered across a body or a body made of stone, is it a warm pulsing heart within stone, is the stone broken, broken before you tore the paper, is it an image of that which clutches my heart before I fall fall fall into beauty, before I fall into love.

By Carolyn Wood—written while experiencing artwork by Able Parris
Piece # 2