When making I am drawn to three qualities: simplicity, elegance, and grace. I judge these through a combination of intuition and reason.

There is a point when something becomes so simple, its elegance evaporates. Elegance offers more than meets the eye. Something elegant is coherent, lucid, inventive, surprising, pleasing.

Simplicity and elegance may be static. Grace relates to movement, an expression of something alive.

My response to danger from another is to head it off, meet it, or withdraw. If I feel strong, sense I have no choice, or as a prelude to fight, I could use threats to face peril. The use of threats stems from my primal response to uneasiness. It is the roar and intension of striking fear into an adversary.

Disputes, personal, social, or between groups and nations, are not resolved with threats, but through a willingness to communicate differences, and an appreciation of the desires and fears of others.

I am fortunate to live in a home with a garden. The garden has grass that flows to a border of flowers, shrubs, trees and a hornbeam hedge. This morning, as I filled up the seed and water feeders under a magnolia tree, a small woodland bird flew onto a nearby branch, unafraid. We looked at one another, inquisitively, calmly.

Trust is a gift, a treasure, no matter who or what living thing bestows it.