“Tell them to go away,” says the unconscious, “I’m painting right now.” On the wall a sacred animal rises, a beast grazing at the edge of the Milky Way. The people outside the cave invent sling shots and whips. It takes thirty thousand years to turn the unconscious vicious. Goya waved the checkered flag. But the animals are still there, fully acquainted with the sky.
**
How I love this poem by Richard Crashaw (1612-1649):
The Flaming Heart
Upon the Book and Picture of
the Seraphical Saint Teresa
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large drafts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His,
By all the Heavens thou hast in Him
(Fair sister of the seraphim!);
By all of Him we have in thee;
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die!
**
A game I play: I picture my guide dogs in heaven. Some say time runs backwards after death and I like that idea. But only a little, so I choose to imagine them in their prime. Corky, my first guide, is carrying one of St. Teresa’s shoes. How she loved to bring me my shoes first thing in the morning! And how lucky Teresa is, because both she and her new guide dog rise early in equal happy expectation. She puts on her shoe. They head together into waves of light.
Planet of the Blind 
Oh Steve this is wonderfuf in so many ways. Remember, my mother was “Theresa Marie” and now, where she is, she has seven guide dogs!
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