this fleeting world 2022

For many years I have dreamed of stumbling upon St. Mark's Basilica (Venice) in the desert.

An unrelated chain of personal events led me to attempt an exploration of this longing.

Simply for its own sake, resisting the temptation to overthink the why, to simply observe what is.

The title is taken from the short book by Big Historian David Christian in which he briefly sets out our deep time origin story as it has emerged in recent decades.

Christian in turn borrows the title from verse in the Diamond Sutra:

Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightening in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

And so we all are in the vast scale of deep time, of what we may count but cannot know.

This work marks a prelude to Settlement.