AQUILA

Aquila began in the hush of a week-long silent meditation retreat, held over the winter holidays in a remote part of Northern California — the region blanketed in fresh snow, the world muffled into a rare and magical quiet.

Each evening, walking back beneath extraordinarily clear winter skies, the constellation Aquila — the Eagle — stood low in the southwest, setting.

During one round of meditation, something met me. I won’t try to name exactly what it was. What I can tell you is how it appeared: not visually solid, but wrapped in a garment of light — as though made of color, glowing softly within a deep, luminous darkness.

That presence is held in the wings that fill the lower two-thirds of the panel — wings covered in eyes, old imagery echoing seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, and their all-seeing spiritual vision.

As I stayed with it, my own awareness began to refine, drawn toward a higher, more concentrated state — a threshold, marked in the painting by a single point of light and the bands of color that rise above it, expanding through layers of clarity toward stillness.

On the other side, what I’d been meeting changed again — or stopped needing a shape at all. It became less a presence and more a felt quality: intricate geometry, immense speed, deep clarity, a sweeping and total vision. The eagle’s head at the top of the painting, and the eyes throughout, are a nod to exactly that — a “seeingness” that sometimes arrives as sight, and just as often as simple knowing.

The upper third of the panel is etched rather than brushed — fine, geometric, precise — holding three luminous forms that suggest archetypal realms: knowing far more densely packed than an ordinary thought, more felt than seen.

It is the quietest part of the painting, and the one where the most is happening. You have to come close to find it.

Aquila is a painting about ascent — about consciousness condensing and refining as it moves through th

You can read more about this painting and it’s journey here.