Why Build a Ladder?

Photo Titled "construction"

I am building a ladder to reach my soul

It is not made of wood or steel

But something much stronger

It is made of all the emotions

I have the courage to claim as mine.

I have been building all my life. First with toys and then scraps of wood in the backyard with hammers, nails and lots of band-aids. I also build with words, sounds, pictures, pencils, paper, etc. I like combining materials sometimes with a vision and other times just to see what comes out of combining different materials or media. This I guess is the job of the artist.

I think this is what we all do.The cook puts different ingredients together with different temperatures and time to create a new recipe. Those who combine numbers, space and time to seek understanding or organization we call mathematicians. Teachers bring together resources, tools and a joy of learning to inspire their students. We are always building, changing and hopefully growing.

One day when contemplating purchase of a software to allow me to do even more combining of materials, and lacking the funds to make such a purchase, I came to the age old question of, why. Why am I doing all this combining? So I mused poetically into one of my journals the short phrase above. Yes I asked why and jumped right away to my soul. Do you have a visual of your soul? The place or non-place that supposedly houses your very being. I've heard said that Leonardo da Vinci and comrades did all their dissections and drawings of the human body to identify the location of the soul. Okay I'll add that to Wikipedia. I'm sure it's real.

I am trying to get an image of the soul here but I need this ladder to get up or down to get a handle on it. For me the road (or ladder) to this is in emotion. So I go forward combining what ever I can to evoke as many different feelings as I can to add to the rungs of my ladder.

Enough for the moment!

Jeff building one rung at a time.

On the origin of the soul - From the notebook of Leonardo da Vinci http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Richter-NotebooksOfLeonardo/section-14/item-837.html