Barry: Crater Lake. God as the ultimate landscape artist.

The experience of seeing it was that of a post card magnified to cover my entire visual field. The green trees contrasted with the white snow and grey rocks. The lake - blue, flat, an almost perfect mirror reflecting the clouds, the mountains and the snow. And the entire area was blanketed in silence.

There was poetry in that landscape. And spirituality. And artistry.

The story of Crater Lake began half a million years ago when magma started spewing out of the earth. The volcano reached 12,000 feet then 7000 years ago it erupted and imploded. The explosion was 42 times greater than the recent one of Mt. Saint Helens. The resultant Mount Mazama is now 8000 feet high i.e. the mountain blew off one third of its height with a resulting crater that is about 6 miles in diameter.

The crater gradually filled with water and is now a lake, the surface of which is 1000 feet below the rim. The area is blessed with an average snowfall of 44 feet a year. This year they had twice as much. As a result the drive around the rim is open only from July to October. Likewise the lodge - all four stories of it, is buried by the snowfall, and even now in June, some rooms are still covered.

Those are the statistics. For me, I don’t see the landscape of the universe as merely God’s handiwork. I see it as a manifestation of the Beloved. So I see some art - where the artist has transmitted his or her humanity, spark, creativity, whatever one calls it - as a manifestation of his/her Humanity. Something to be respected for the continuum of spirit and Creator that it is. Not to be worshiped - just as I wouldn’t worship a rock or lake.

My ideas are half baked but are being triggered by all the beauty I have seen, both natural and human made.

Goldie and I had a debate a few months ago. Walking through an exhibit of Picasso art that had been flown to this country, I turned to her and said: "Imagine the loss to humanity if the plane had crashed and all this art had been lost." Goldie’s response was predictable: "and I wouldn’t exchange all the art on the plane for the life of the pilot."

Naturally, I followed up with: "Well, what if it was all of Picasso’s art or all the Mozart works that went down?"

Goldie: "Would you give up your life if that could save his art?"

Barry: "I would. After all, I’m going to die sooner or later anyway."

Goldie: "To me that’s idolatry, making art into a God. In just a few thousand years of humanity there have been many outstanding artists".

Barry: "Art is an extension of the human spirit, a creation that lives beyond the grave."

The debate continues to simmer.

Barry: Our hosts in Portland are Sara and Fred Harwin, both artists. Sara shared a favorite book of paintings with me. It is of stunningly realistic paintings of the human body by Alex Grey, showing every artery, vein, lymphatic, internal organs, as well as electromagnetic fields and auras surrounding the body. The artist is attempting to create a spiritual experience in the viewer. Something more than a sensory or emotional experience.

Goldie: The pictures illustrate precisely what I experience when doing meditation. It has recently become possible (through the space program) to study the human body without the effect of the earth’s magnetic field. Magnetic fields on the body have become apparent through these studies....revealing the Kabbalists’ experience of a "River of Light" as our embodied reality.

Grey’s art takes the emerging awarenesses of capabilities and systems and receptors that humans have and renders them visible to us......artist as prophet, transducing the present and future through his soul onto the canvas.

Barry: We then looked at several books (Sara has a large library) of art by the painter Chuck Close. He paints huge portraits. As a youth he was learning-disabled and labeled stupid and lazy. Well into his career as a realist painter, he had a blockage of a spinal artery and became partially paralyzed. He now paints with a brush strapped to his arm and successfully changed his style to one of more abstract, but equally impressive art. Anything but lazy and stupid.

Goldie: Often humans paint together, on the canvass with the One.

Under your feet notice a change in texture. The stones have gone from smooth to round...the path curves left then right and again gradually to a temple-like gateway. Gateways prepare us for a shift of spirit.

Look, someone is weeding the moss within your range of sight. Yes, patiently with tweezers weeding the moss! Each movement of his arm is part of a meditation. Notice the bamboo gate is shaped like the arm of a kimono. Here white azaleas are set to suggest the cascade of a waterfall, over there roof tiles serve as edging evoking ripples on a lake.

In Japanese gardens something is termed a rock until it is deliberately placed and then it is becomes a stone. I could stay for a thousand years in such a garden....wandering amongst the feathery low trees, steams with with koi fish, the only striking points of color which guide us in their currents through each of the gates of the garden. Five and half acres, five dedicated gardeners carry on the work of the master from Japan who fashioned this canvass of harmony.

The tea house beckons, transported from Japan and so carefully placed....gates within gates of subtle garden lead to its entrance. Gone to the next world, friend, contemporary and scholar, Rabbi Seth Brody, his very memory is a blessing. We would often walk beside falling waters, his way of being - warmly silent...should I ask for his thoughts, almost always he would share a garden scene from the Jewish mystical traditions of such magnificence, levels within levels, waterfalls for which one must watch, and gates leading to gates, leading to The One. He would have loved this garden, almost as much as the Gan Eden which he has doubtless attained.

Pour yourself into a new space now where red, peach, orange, white, even violet and black rejoice in traditional forms and then play with creative possibility all around you. Where to look first? At a single petal, the plant, the profusion? Portland’s civic rose gardens extend from formal Elizabethan gardens all the way to tennis courts with climbing rose bushes on their enclosures. Forms and formats I’d never dreamed of appear in this show.....colors so buttery and intense or variegated that the infinitude exploded on me and petals float through my consciousness even now.

"As above, so below." said our sages. So many palates of possibility...who creates at least one new rose and goes on to Gan Eden, restores a bit of Gan Eden right here among the living. Sara has brought her digital camera along. The possibilities of the technology captivate us - new tool and new palate.

We who are part of the palate of the one, created perhaps to help magnify and multiply the creativity. Such a glorious gift it often is to be alive and becoming discerning apprentices in the studio of The One.

Barry: So, we drove with Fred and Sara on the old scenic highway to the Columbia River Gorge. The road was built in 1913 and follows the Oregon trail. We stopped at several waterfalls ending up at the 600 foot Multnomah falls.

Goldie: Becoming the water I enter free fall, imaginary arms spread wide over the mountain’s side, sprung outward by the outcropping of rock, tickled by the change in terrain and not at all disturbed to break into rivulets heading to divergent goals....at one in the One. Feel so rested and well-misted, like a beloved plant.

Goldie: Do you sense that we are gorging on nature? This fall we’re moving to NYC and these memories will be nutrients for the experience. (P.S. We’ll need an apartment, please pass the word.)

Barry: Lunch was at the lodge next to the falls. Before even ordering, I suggested we share our worst restaurant service stories. The Cosmos responded by us waiting two hours to have our meal arrive. The kitchen manager was appropriately apologetic and waived our bill. Fred gave the waitress a big tip, and all was well.

Goldie: My worst was when as a teen.....wearing pink lace mini-skirted dress, hair teased high, hoped for boyfriend seated across from me at some bar mitzvah or other.....the waitress comes by and begins to lower her tray.....a juicy steak decides to make a break for it, deflects off my lacquered bee-hive hairdo, slides down my face, a dash on the bodice and lands in my lap. Her comment: "Don’t worry honey, you ordered fish. Can I get you another napkin?" Now that was poise.

Barry: What do roses, bungee jumping, war ships, junk food have in common? Damned if I know, but that is how the annual Rose Festival is celebrated here in Portland. This bungee works in reverse. The lunatics are catapulted up a few hundred feet, then spin up and down and around. I stand back hoping not to have junk food rain down on me. Never saw it happen - a tribute to the effectiveness of the gastroesophageal sphincter. Which brings to mind dinner.

Goldie: Dinner restores palate to its rightful use. "oBA," selected by Sara and Fred is madly alive Mediterranean cuisine with Sephardi flair. We shared halibut crusted with garlic and toasted pumpkin seeds and sweet salmon marinated in cilantro and lime, beside peppery corn meal and coconut rice, trussed in a banana leaf beside a lake of just not enough black beans. Margueritas?

But of course.

Goldie: Now the ultimate independent bookstore. Powell’s - world’s largest new and used bookstore. They give you a map upon entering (another one of those couple dichotomies - Barry does maps, I do narrative directions)...he found everything he was looking for. I introduced hovering singles to each other in the huge, well-categorized Judaica section.

Barry: Our host Fred Harwin is a medical illustrator, he also creates prosthetic eyes. His images of the eye include every capillary on the conjunctiva. I stare into his renderings of the iris and am reminded of Crater Lake.

Goldie: And you are a physician, Barry!

Barry: We weren’t taught to appreciate the human body - its magnificent artistry and design. Perhaps they were afraid we would see it as artists do and not just as a complex machine to be worked on.

Goldie: Fred showed us his office..

We reviewed photos of adults and children born with sightless, overly small eyes...or eyes destroyed by injury or illness. We saw the "after" photos. It was impossible to distinguish the prosthetic eye from the natural.

We observed how he makes the eyes - from impressions, two castings, fittings, hand painting the iris and pupil, glazing...and more we didn’t even retain. In the palm of my hand the finished project is the size of a small shell, concave on the inside, a thing of great beauty looking up at me. This too is another new type of canvass, yielding the aesthetics of prosthetics.

Fred spoke of his ways of working...A person receiving a new eye has to learn to move his/her head consciously to help the eye appear to follow the direction of their interest or speech since the range of motion of the eye is limited.

Fred is not only an exquisite craftsman. He is a healer. Many who see him are devastated by their loss. Fred spends hours with each recipient helping them to re-orient how they use their body and "see" themselves. For many a huge shift occurs in self-esteem.

Barry: Alas human nature being what it is, some patients are disappointed because they expect the prosthetic eye to see. HMO’s are on his back to take short cuts and discount his fees. Seeing what he does, I find myself becoming angry when I hear this.

Fred’s primary field for many years was as a medical illustrator of great renown. His sabbatical included a cross-country year-long trip with stops at fourteen medical centers to learn about how to make such prosthetics.

Goldie: Back at the Harwin household, Sara is busily preparing for the Aleph Kallah, a festival of Jewish renewal. Her tall kippot are legendary at the renewal retreat center, Elat Chayyim. Sara’s work is that of the fine artist, her designs are filled with joy, dance, continuity, fluidity and an elegant specificity of line and medium. She also makes silk and fabric and custom tallitot (prayer shawls).

Often I am asked why I wear a kippah or a hat all of the time. For me it indicates that I am in a conscious relationship with God as a Jew, open also to public scrutiny as a Jew.

When my son Adam was small a reporter came to his day school. She asked the orthodox head master why only the boys were wearing head coverings. He replied that it is to remind them of the mitzvot, offering the traditionalist spin that girls are inherently holier and don’t need such reminders. My son was quoted in the newspaper as saying: "Girls aren’t holier than boys, they’re people, just like us!" He then continued, "I thought the purpose of a kippah is to replace with a reminder of holiness what got cut off !" Makes more sense than most explanations, if you ask me.

Sara has another take. On Shabbat morning we pray "Yismach Moshe", the prayer speaks of the "crown of glory You placed upon his head when he stood before you on Mount Sinai."

This spiritual radiance she experiences as the source of the Jewish impulse to crown the head with a kippah, as a symbol of that transcendent moment. Works for me. Today I’m wearing a kippah made with my sons. It has tiny rocks forming a path and feathers we gathered upon it....a crown in honor of the Artist of this glorious day.

Barry: So, Oregon has been a sensual experience. The creativity of nature and humankind: the collaboration between the two as in the hybridization of roses carefully designed Japanese gardens, and rose gardens, expertly prepared food. And finally the beautifully designed human body - captured by artists Chuck Close, Alex Grey, Sara and Fred Harwin.

More on Portland, tomorrow.

Addendum: Goldie’s web site is temporarily down for maintenance. It will likely be back up by next week.