A Passions Project

In the middle of a turbulent sea, a small island floats in the white capped waves and the wine-dark water. Grey cliffs, stoney and creviced, outcroppings of green-grey weeds, cold nests of sea birds, rise up twenty, thirty, forty feet from the water level. During storms, and the storms are almost non-stop in this part of the ocean, the waves can sometimes breach that height of the cliff and wash over the small flat surface at the top of the island. Is it flat? Or does it rather tilt and angle - up and down, rocky and scrubby, only the toughest of weeds can grow here.

And then in the center lies a perimeter of silvery chainlink fence topped by the most outrageous barbed wire ever imagined. The barbs are sharp and long. The fence is over 14ft - double the size of no man. Every twenty feet along the perimeter a tower rises up and in those towers sit men in heavy woolen grey coats. Hats pulled down over their heads and scarves pulled up over their mouths to keep the seeping cold at bay. Faceless, they pace around the tower, always looking down, guns at the ready. By day, by the dim grey light of sun shrouded in misty gloom and by night with bright klieg lights, they watch. 

Who are they guarding? Who are the criminals so dangerous that they require this force of martial showmanship?

At the very center of the enclosure, there is a bunk house. On the top story of the windowless wooden structure, the guards have their rooms. Each guard is given a small cell - monk-like in its simplicity. There is a common room - a red stove in the center warms the whole structure. 

Below, on the ground floor, the inmates lie in a common room, bunk beds pushed against the bare wood walls.

Who are the inmates?

What crime did they commit?

Who are the guards - why did they agree to this inhumane job - a hardship deployment for them and cruel punishment for the inmates?

This is the fortress that keeps my words from the paper- my vision from the camera. This the fortress that keeps myself from me. It’s not the mind, it’s the heart. It’s the exiled emotions. It’s the guardhouse of the soul - it’s the survival system that was created to maintain that surface appearance of normalcy. These innocent criminals were exiled out to the turbulent ocean because they were considered dangerous - undermining the safety of the rest of the system. The defenses exist to keep the exiles, those dangerous emotions contained and constrained.

If I built this can I now deconstruct it? Can I allow the emotions to escape? Can I set them free at long last?

The prison island may be an illusion of my mind. Drop the belief and the chains dissolve and the turbulent sea becomes a calm and tranquil oasis. Is it truly that easy? If the belief is everything that you have lived through and made it though and it was the belief that allowed life to continue, is it possible to create a life without it?

Let’s begin. You say build and I say make. What are we really saying? Let’s build up the image of God within us. In creating, we are re-created.