I go to Cornwall in England and sit on a rugged crag overlooking the wild sea, and I think I hear the mermaids calling me. I go to Cornwall to walk on Bodmin Moor, an even wilder place where ancient magic still lies thick, floating in the air like pixie dust. I stand in the shadow of the Cheese Wring and I touch the Men-an-Tol for good luck and long life. I poke in the gorse bushes and find the jawbone of a long-dead sheep, gleaming yellowy-white against the olive drab thorns of gorse. The sheep doesn't need it anymore so I take it with me when I go home to America. I go through customs with the sheep's jawbone wrapped securely in my middle-aged underwear, because perhaps it is illegal to transport animal bones and I don't want some officious customs agent taking it away from me. I go home to my studio where I clean and scrape and polish the jawbone until it is purely white, no yellow left, and then I paint it with deep blue spirals and make it into an object of holy mystery. I go to my altar and give the jawbone a place of honor between a rock shaped like a breast complete with nipple, and a hawk's feather I found in my herb garden. I go there to meditate when I feel that life is just too much to understand, and the now-holy jawbone comforts me with its message of art after death.