The Depth (16"x20")

“The Depth”

There was a point in my life I had submerged to the bottom of a pools deep end during the night. As the sounds vibrated to a deep murmuring. I stared into the vast abyss, my peripheral vision of the floor and walls faded into a mass of darkness ahead of me. I hovered there open and vulnerable staring into a nothingness infinite, and in this vast space I couldn’t help but brace myself for impact. Yet I know nothing was physically there. It was a moment that shaped my life, and many years later I realized there was something there. It was my imagination reflecting back that had moved my body into protection.

When I created this piece, I thought of that moment. The overwhelming feeling that ingulfed my being. To be mesmerized and lost within its depths, feeling vulnerable and instinctively trying to protect oneself. Love is much like this, the vast infinite pool, no walls for protection, no comforts of air, or grounding of gravity just the infinite capacity of love in the scariest of places. A place where there is nothing but the vulnerable reflections of self. And yet I have found in life, we keep traveling to such a place, searching, and feeling our way through. Looking and looking and at one moment we realize that what we were looking for, this light, this cord of connection, is self. The love in which we seek is the love in which we reflect.

That of which we seek to protect is self-love. And in many moments, we find ourselves trying to protect this love from our own selves, by constructing walls, comforts, and fears. Manifesting what closes the connection instead of opening it. Yet the connection is never out of reach no matter how lost we may feel as love seems to be just as infinite as the abyss in which we stare into. Are we not the infinite searching for love within.