Texas

I love Texas. I have a meditation retreat center overlooking the Pedernales River west of Austin, one of the hippest, most musical and livable cities in the country; but recently I was surprised to find that Houston is one of our country’s best kept secrets. It too is green, friendly, highly cultured, and has world class museums in abundance as well as the historic NASA Space Center. My favorite place is the Rothko Chapel near Rice University, where abstract expressionist master Mark Rothko installed in the late sixties, eight immense minimalist paintings rich with existential resonance, all done in a dark palette which may have prefigured his suicide in 1970. I returned to sit and meditate there every morning.

SABBATH AT ROTHKO CHAPEL

More splendid than
the stained glass windows I expected

here, eight sided negative space
embraces this empty zen garden like

the music heard between notes,

lustrous mirrors facing each other
as no one comes and goes

beyond words, weightless, timeless
in radiant reflection.