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Dear Readers: The
Fall/Winter '00 collection is titled hands of bridges. Bridges
are important structures, symbolically as well as physically. They
represent our right and ability of passage, characterize cities and time
periods, and have always measured civilizations’ ability to build, use
and defend them. Traveling,
we may see bridges as a demarcation in our journey because they not only
force us to leave the safety of the road we've come on, but require us
to trust them to carry us over whatever lies below.
Traveling far enough will always require bridges though, because
they allow us to reach places we couldn't have reached on our own.
Just as important, the act of crossing enables us to look at our
surroundings temporarily free of our ties with the ground. Throughout our history, we have learned to accept our struggles and conflicts as a necessary and ongoing part of our existence. They are, after all, necessary to achieve our dreams, to declare the principles we stand for, to protect those we love. Life, (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), can’t be a process of uninterrupted striving, however. There are times we must stop and observe the world around us, and, of necessity, observe ourselves as well. Often it's this process of stopping and reflecting that helps us determine our purpose and how best to continue. These times in our lives are our own bridges, those interruptions in our travel that eventually bring us to places we could not have reached otherwise. If bridges are works of human engineering that define the level of the societies that built them, then our own lives' bridges -- how we use those times of observation and reflection we've been given -- often defines our own level of growth and maturity. Writing hands of bridges has been an opportunity for me to stop what I was doing in earlier collections to write observations of things around me. I hope that you will enjoy reading the collection, but even more importantly, I hope to encourage you to reflect on your own surroundings from the vantage point of your own bridges.
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Best wishes,
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Seventh Street Bridge, Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh |
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