Ritual Relish

08/16/2026

Missed the 3rd week pic, but here he is 4 weeks later, 2 weeks and 1 week. Growing up fast!

08/15/2026

It's a little late in the week for a fun fact, but we're gonna roll with it because it involves umbrellas. ☂️

There's a temple in India, Mahābodhi (Great Awakening), where the Buddha gained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. It's the most sacred site in Buddhism.

The top of the central tower is crowned with a stupa (mound). The stupa sits on a square base. The stupa represents the Buddha, the square base represents his throne. It is adorned with an undulating garland (mālā) which represents the full blooming of his enlightenment.

At the top of the stupa are 7 tapering umbrellas representing each stage on the path to the Buddha's enlightenment.

Another example of umbrellas as architecture is the pagoda. Stacked umbrellas in odd numbers (3,5,7,9), they evolved from stupas.

The hieroglyph for the sun (and sun god, Ra) is a circle with a dot (or circle) in the center.

The shaft of the umbrella has long represented the center of the universe and the trunk of the Tree that pops up in pretty much every creation story of every civilization and culture, whether a fig, palm, banyan, olive, apple...

When you view an opened umbrella from above, it looks like a circle with a dot in the center. The center is the holiest of all the cosmos (where the enlightened Buddha resides), and everything between it and the edge of the circle is sacred space.

So the umbrella is also a symbol of the entire structure of the cosmos. 🌴🌳🕉️☯️🤓☂️ Don't forget it or leave it behind, unless of course it's time to let it go. 😂

08/15/2026

Still in training, getting ahead of himself with the beads a little bit. Doing exceptionally well.

08/13/2026

Save the Date! This is going to be such a lovely evening in the gallery. 🤗🦄🌈✨

08/13/2026

08/12/2026

Omission poems are so much fun. It took me awhile to find the right background for this one. Everything I tried over the last month or so was too distracting or competing or too plain. Yesterday it finally came together. 🙌🏼

A reminder that sometimes setting something aside and surrendering is what is needed for things to come together.

08/10/2026

Training to ship out packages!

08/09/2026

Most of the umbrella corpses were captured in New York, but this is one of a handful from Montreal.

Recently I did a little research about the art installation in the background. There's hardly any info about it, but it was designed by Olga Zeldakova (1932 - 2019).

She was a Montreal-based artist, architect, and designer. Little is known about her, but the thirty-foot-tall, seven-foot-wide clock sculpture known as the sculpture-horloge, was created in 1983 by her in collaboration with Denis Matte. The piece was the winning entry of a $63,000 contest organized by the Ministères des Affaires culturelles and Travaux publics et Approvisionnement.

This 5x5" Umbrella Co**se is titled Feed The Soul, Not The Ego.

08/07/2026

Going into the weekend like a super villain. 🍊🐾