I love those unexpected experiences that can come from smaller exhibits. My son and I were traveling in Colorado once and came across a Chihuly exhibit… I like Chihuly’s work, but finding his exhibit in a small museum– a large gallery, really– was pure serendipity. And then we came across this one installation, a simple one: a totally dark room, all draped in black, with shards and fragments of glass all over the floor, with these planet-like glass spheres nestled amongst them. So simple, so small– but it left me in tears, contemplating, well, *everything*. Our place in this huge universe, existence, how art can be at once so small and at once let us touch that which is most vast. No way I’ve ever been able to put words to it, even as a poem.

Like the exhibit you describe, that installation is gone. It could be recreated in some fashion, but that instance existed for just an instant. Its own impermanence part of what has made it permanent in my mind.

For all the talk about being haunted by our digital history, the reality is that there’s very little *practical* permanence to it… it’s all theoretical.

A hunger to engage with something of permanence is part of why I write poetry… art has, potentially anyway, a longer life than *anything* in technology and education except, perhaps, the art that might be made by a student.