Prepare to Meet Thy God
I was on my way to the Archie Bray foundation, driving quite intuitively in the right direction, when I took one wrong turn and then another. About two seconds after I turned onto Green Meadow, I realized that I was heading north into the hills� and then realized that I didn�t feel like turning back. The XXX range loomed in front of me, my foot to the floor, I sped out into the valley. Ranches, car specialists, farm houses, the land between properties grew more spacious as the hills rose behind.

I am in love with this country. Every nerve and fiber of my body has told me that since I first came here in the summer of 1998�even only for a day�that I belong here. It�s taken me this long to convince my mind of two things: that I can be happy here with or without the memory of a man, and that Montana, in fact, isn�t the �middle of nowhere��and if it is, it doesn�t bother me in the least.

I passed a church on the left, spewing gospel on a roadside sign,�PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD.� For a moment, I pondered the menace as if I were about to see my destiny in the face of an oncoming truck. I chuckled at the threat and looked up into the mountains beyond. Suddenly, the message took on an entirely different meaning, one that I doubt the church could ever have intended. HERE was my God, alive in the hills and all around me. I had met the divine, was meeting the divine, in the perfection of the open sky, the dusty meadows, and the staggering beauty of the Rocky Mountain front. Flying down the back roads at 70mph, I passed from the ordinary into the Holy and God-- not the angry face of the Baptist church but the omnipresent, eternal God of love and nature�embraced me. I drove until the road came to a T and the moment was lost. Then I turned around headed back to my destination.

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BE SURE YOUR SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT.

The same sign leered at me on the way back. It was much easier to guess how this message was supposed to be interpreted. I thought, I have sinned, surely. I have lived moments in my life without honor, I have met challenges without grace, I have cowered in fear and indecision when I should have embraced what stood before me. Yet if I search my actions, by the book, for what others might label blasphemy, I find that I am quite proud to stand a pagan, a heathen, a heretic. I�ve drank, smoked and reveled; broken hearts and broken the law; opposed the subjugation of land and lady; cheated the system and given the finger to The Man; opened my legs, opened my heart, and learned to love my body and my sexuality. If a life with a wide perspective and thirst for understanding is a life in sin, then I live it gladly. If my search for Self and God takes me down many roads rather than one, I see acceptance of that diversity as blessedness and repression of it as the true short falling of man. The one true sin I�ve allowed myself is to forget the paths open to me, forget to embrace the Now and forget that every moment is Holy. The times that I�ve lost "God" have been when I am caught up in my past and set on looking for happiness in the elusive �future.�

I don't want to go there anymore. I want to be here, now. I want every moment to be a Holy Moment.

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I arrived at the Bray half-past four o�clock. The light was perfect, and then I realized that I hadn�t brought my camera. Shit. But instead of turning around, driving home and coming back in time to miss the good afternoon sun slant, I stayed and walked alone. My brain takes better captures than my Canon anyway.

Some things never change and others change very slowly. I�ve only been to the Bray once before, six odd years ago, but except for the ongoing construction of new resident artist studios, little was different this time. The shoes were missing from the �shoes� installation and a few other new exhibits had been added. One of the condemned Beehive kilns has been opened, to the best of my knowledge to public access, and the giant, dripping, hollow interior was somehow much different than I expected�oh, and the echo! Fabulous.

There was somehow both more and less to see than I remembered. But, I think, it�s a place best seen with another person. So after an hour or so of walking and poking around, I left, driving opposite the sunset, south and east, back to the little house in the hills, where two cats and a friend waited.