I move through the sanctuary very slowly, aware of the way my weight shifts to the balls of my feet.  I’m meant to be moving like this.  My friend Meghan has been leading us in a dance exercise, helping us to become aware of the kinesphere, that circle of energy that surrounds our bodies, the energy that makes us aware of someone coming into a room even when we don’t turn our heads to look at them.  We each have a kinesphere, she says, and we meditate, standing, breathing in and out and feeling internal energy grow within us, from a small flame behind our navels up and out through our limbs into the spaces that surround us.  And then we walk, slowly at first, increasing our awareness of the space that we’re in, the sanctuary, with its crowded chairs and altar on a dais, and doors that open to older and less beautiful spaces, alleyways and much-used kitchens.  I become aware of the windows on the door that leads into the lobby, and I walk towards them, watching the light shift on the textured glass, the contrasts change from pools of darkness to contours of light that allow the colors to rise, as if they’re bubbling up from a hidden depth.

As I walk towards the doors, I know that I’m seeing them in this specific way because of Michael Ambron’s paintings.  Michael is an Adjunct Professor at OSU, and on Friday night he opened a show at the EASE gallery, which I manage.  Here’s his artist’s statement:

My work is concerned with the expansion and extension of our senses into rarified zones of perception that exist between imagination and hallucination.  My paintings are doused in dirt, clay, dried powders, plaster and acrylics.  They are encrusted in the studio floor and pried from the walls.  The studio (as much as the materials) becomes a medium through which I can access strange forms of vision and magnify otherwise liminal experiences.  I use lights, patterns, and colors to test the limits of my knowable perceptions in order to develop sensitivity to that which I have yet to understand.

The body of work I have submitted represents a new vision of living paintings that shift both spatially and temporally.  The surface is raised, pulled forward, and balanced at the threshold of flatness and dimensionality.  As you move in any direction, the paintings move with you.  By expanding this interval (or zone of interactivity) between viewer and painting, the notion of a prescribed vantage dissolves.  The paintings exist as you exist, changing as your eyes and body adjust and change, and fading as we all fade.

These paintings have been working on me, making me aware of the shifting nature of the physical world.  I have always understood two-dimensionality better than three-dimensionality.  My mind translates the world I see into flat surfaces – photographs, drawings, watercolor paintings.  Now I wonder if this is a strategy of avoidance, a way of denying a connection to the physicality of my environment.  If we all have kinespheres, then our presence in any room subtly alters that room.  And maybe not just in terms of energy or spirit.  What if the world, like Michael’s paintings, changes as we change – changes because we change.  The territories that Michael’s paintings invite us into are places where the landscape shifts because of our presence in it.  But this is true of all landscapes.  Why is this so easy to ignore, until that moment when a painting makes it palpable?

At the opening, Michael kept taking one of his paintings off the wall and turning it in the light.  The colors shifted as it turned, as light from the tracks above illuminated different ridges of paint and shifted across the painting’s contours.  Those contours seemed to move with the light.

I’m most drawn to the largest painting in the show, a painting whose colors are brass and blue.  If I start to the left of the painting I see a field of gold and reddish hues in the center of the canvas.  As I move to the right, the center loses its distinction, the reds drip downward, and thin waves of blue begin to rise along the ridges of paint.  Finally I come to the far right, and the brass is almost wholly subdued.  A few sparks of red remain, but the blue has imposed a kind of silence.  To sit before this painting is to commune with something beyond yourself.  I know that it’s only paint, and mud, and clay, and plaster.  But it seems alive.  More than that, it announces the life of its materials, and points beyond them to all physical objects.  It suggests that the whole world is alive – the buckled glass on the chapel door, the pattern of shadow on the weathered maple tree outside the window, the perpendicular grooves on the column of the lamp post beside it.  And if these things are alive, they have their own kinespheres, their own zones of energy and being, that subtly change and alter, grow and dwindle, depending on our interactions with them.

This suggests an ethic, a way of being in the world.  We can grow or narrow our kinespheres.  We can choose to make ourselves less present, in deference to the presence of others.  Meghan tells us to come back towards the center of the room.  At her direction, we begin to move quickly, to weave between each other.  She tells us not to avoid each other, but to fill the gaps between the moving dancers.  Those gaps become smaller and smaller.  We have been expanding, but now we are shrinking, and our kinespheres blend with each other, like overlapping waves of tinted light.

We are doing this exercise as a way of responding to the beatitudes.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.  Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”  We accept the smallness of our kinespheres, the diminishment of our energies.  We accept it meekly, because such acceptance is a path to awareness.  An awareness of other people and other things.  A desire to honor their energies, to blend with those energies, to avoid overwhelming them.  It’s an attempt at a kind of purity, an attempt at cultivating pure generosity, a response to the pure grace of other things.  It’s a form of blessing.  We bless the physical world with our awareness, and the physical world blesses us.  In the end, this blessing becomes a kind of territory that we, person and painting, dancer and glass, have created between us.

There is a wall, and beyond it, the sea.  The heat is heavier, here.  It strikes the houses’ red roofs and the tops of the green trees.  There is quiet – a deep quiet that stills even the sound of the water, lapping against the shore at the city’s edge.  Everyone is sleeping through the heat of the day.

They have been taken to a room on the second story of a small house.  There’s a temple to the household god on the floor below, and a bath in the room next to it.  But the god is neglected and the bath is empty.  The house’s owner is dead, and Abimelech, the King of Gerar, uses it now as a waiting place for his guests, for the wandering peoples who have been coming into the city because drought is on the land.

Their herds, their men, their wealth is beyond the city gates.  Isaac has left Rebecca there, and the other women.  He has come only with his sons, quietly, and the king will greet them, and look at them with boredom, because he has seen their kind before.

They’re allowed pasturage outside the city walls.  They provide the city with meat from the goats, and trade from their wanderings.  But there are men who walk among them, Philistines, soldiers who come into the camps to barter and haggle, and look at the women.

In the morning, Jacob wakes early and goes and stands by an old, dried up well with a few knotted trees providing him a small piece of shade.  He is looking at the city, at the walls and the road that leads into it.  He is wondering if there are more people outside the city walls than there are people inside them.  He has the sense of being part of a large and living thing, of breathing in and out with the goats, and the men who tend them, and the women who are still sleeping with their children.  He has never thought of himself as belonging to a people before, but now he understands that his people don’t live under red roofs, or bring water into houses for baths, that they don’t go to sleep at night to the sound of the sea, or expect their gods to stay in a house.  He turns and looks back at the tents of his father’s people, and frowns, because a Philistine man has come out of one of the tents and looks like he spent the night there.

The man comes up the incline to the trees and the abandoned well.  He stops and rests there, squinting his eyes at the morning sun.  He doesn’t seem to see Jacob, although they could reach out and touch each other.  He is wearing the short skirt and breast plate of a member of King Abimelech’s guard.  He turns and looks down the incline towards the tents, where the women are emerging to light the cook fires.  Jacob sees his mother come out of her tent.  She is wearing red cloth, and it hangs against her dark hair.  The man is looking at her as well.  Jacob shifts his gaze and watches him.  The man has swollen lips, and gray stubble along his lip and chin.  He raises a hand and scratches his cheek, then draws his fingers across his mouth and down, playing with his bottom lip.  His eyes are narrow and wet as he watches Rebecca.

“You have a very beautiful wife, I hear,” King Abimelech says to Isaac.  They are seated in his reception room, and Jacob is chewing a sweet date.  The men of King Abimelech’s guard are all around them, and the light slants in from the open windows, and wreathes their hair with gold, so that each of them looks as if he’s been crowned.  They seem very big to Jacob, and he glances at his father and sees the same thought in his father’s eyes.

“She is my sister,” Isaac says, and reaches for a piece of bread.

Jacob has heard this story before, told about his grandfather.  That when Abraham and Sarah were in Egypt, Abraham told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister.  When Pharaoh realized the truth, he gave Abraham gifts because he was afraid of the Lord, that the Lord might strike him down for coveting another man’s wife.  But these men of the Philistines are different.  Jacob doesn’t think that they care much about other men’s wives.

Rebecca hides inside her tent.  Still, the men of the Philistines come to the dried well under the trees and stand there, to catch a glimpse of her.  Jacob has never thought that his mother was beautiful, but now he sees that she is, that there is a lightness to her face and a mischief in her eyes, and a slow languor in the way she moves her arms.  His brother is often with the Philistines, gambling with them, drinking their spirits.  His brother has gone down to the sea with them, and gotten on a boat.  But Jacob is staying close to the camp, somehow hidden by the shade from the trees beside the well.  He is watching the Philistines, and thinking how he could take one of their swords and kill them.

It is night, and his brother is snoring, but Jacob is awake.  There is a breath against the wall of the tent.  He reaches his hand up and holds it against the fabric, and feels the breath resist his fingers.  He lifts his head and presses his lips to the fabric and tries to breathe the breath into himself.  Then he gets up and goes outside, where the stars are tall in the sky and the sea sounds deep beyond the city.  There are men by the dried well.  They’d don’t see him as he slips up the incline and into the shadows of the trees.  They smell of wine, and seared meat, and they’re in the skirts and breastplates of the guard.  A large figure sits on the rim of the dried-up well, and Jacob waits until the wind blows through the trees and moves the shadows off of him.  It is Abimelech himself.  They are watching the camp.  And as they watch, Isaac comes walking past the damped down cooking fires, stepping over the men who sleep beside them, and slips inside Rebecca’s tent.  The men by the well go very still.  Jacob feels their anger.  They are all wearing their swords.

After awhile Jacob’s father comes out of his mother’s tent.  He turns his head towards the well, as if he senses that someone is there, but he doesn’t seem to see the men.  He crosses the camp to his own tent.  Jacob’s mother emerges.  She goes to the cistern where the rain water is kept and fills a water jug.  Jacob can see the sheen of her hair in the moonlight.  “She is as you said,” Abimelech says to one of his men.  “Very beautiful.”  And the men laugh, and relax, and loosen their swords.

“Do you want her?” a playful voice asks the king.

“The man is her husband.”

“That can be ended.  Say the word, and we will procure her for you, my king.”

The king is about to answer, when Jacob releases the breath he’s been holding inside of him, the deep breath that played on the tent walls and that he’s hidden beneath his regular breathing.  He can feel its power and the trees seem to feel it.  They shake with it.  The shadows move rapidly across the king’s face, and he looks up, surprised, his face open to the wide sky.  All the men seem to feel it, too, because they go still again, and wait.  And Jacob can sense it, what he felt when his father sacrificed the goat.  A tremor in the air, a beating in the earth.  The heavy smell of blood rises up around him.  Abimelech draws back into the shadows, afraid.  He doesn’t say anything to his men.  He is very still, and then he stands up from the well and turns, and walks quickly as they follow him, back to the walls of the city.

The quality of the wind changes.  It doesn’t breathe against the tent sides, but is sharp and thin.  It lifts dirt from the ground and scours their faces.  It seems to shrink the rivers, and there’s no rain.  The sun is heavy in the sky.  Jacob and Esau follow their father as he walks through the herd, his palm skimming over the backs of the goats.  Jacob reaches out his own hand, feels the rasp of wool against his fingers.  A rope dangles from his father’s other hand, with a loop tied at the end of it.

They lead a white goat out of the flock and along a steep path to an old well.  There’s an altar there, built of stones.  The goat goes to chew some sparse grass that’s still growing in the shade of the altar.  Isaac watches it, and there’s a kind of kindness on his face.  Then he throws his body down over it.  The goat splays against the dry earth.  It scrambles and bleats, but Isaac draws its legs together and lashes them, his hands fast and competent.  When he stands the goat is trussed in the dirt.  Isaac wipes sweat from his forehead and holds out a hand so that Esau can give him the water jug.  He drinks, and both boys watch the precious water.  It courses down his beard, and Esau, laughing, goes and stands in front of him, and cups his hands, and catches the rivulets.  But Jacob is watching the goat.  It’s side expands and contracts and the sharp sunlight seems to move with it.

After Isaac kills it on the altar he stands with his eyes closed for a long time, and Jacob closes his own eyes.  In his mind he sees the sides of the tent moving, and listens for the voice that spoke to his grandfather Abraham.  The day has gone very still.  The wind has dropped away, and he can feel the thin layer of grit that it’s left against his skin.  His father stands, and he wonders how long he can stand there, his hands raised, the smell of new blood sharp in the air.  He hears his brother scuffing the dirt with the toe of his sandal, and then stealthy footsteps as Esau slips away.  But Jacob keeps his eyes closed, waiting.

Night, and his father is talking, addressing the men around the campfire.  Jacob and Esau are sharing a tent now.  Esau’s scent fills the air.  He smells like dirt and wood smoke and blood.  He is asleep, snoring softly, but Jacob is sitting by the tent flap, listening.

“The Lord says to go to Gerar,” Isaac says.  “Not to Egypt, as my father Abraham did.”

“To the Philistines?” one of the men asks.

Isaac is quiet for a moment.  Then he says, “The Lord told me to reside in their land, as an alien.  We have nothing to fear.  The Lord will be with us, and he’ll give the lands to me, and to my descendants, just as He told my father.  He will…”  Isaac pauses, and when he speaks again, there’s a fullness to his voice, “He will make my descendants as numerous as the stars, and they’ll inherit the lands of the Philistines, and all of Canaan, and they’ll be a blessing to all the nations.  Because my father obeyed the Lord’s commands, and kept His statues, and His commands, and His laws.”

Jacob slips out of the tent and creeps along through the shadows.  The wind is large and sharp again, and the night is hot.  He can feel it desiccating the land.  He slips closer to the fire, to a place where he can see across it, to the women’s tents.  His mother Rebecca is there, sitting cross legged in the opening of her tent.  She is looking at the sky but she is listening, and she seems to sense him watching her.  She lowers her face and looks at him, then looks back up at the sky.  He follows her gaze and sees the stars, numerous and quiet above the dry, heavy earth.