The Manna Redemption is a visual testament to the striving for holiness as well as an invitation to being and becoming receptive. It is an envisioning/envisaging of the divine cloud that covers the Tabernacle and Mt. Sinai like a canopy. With ceremonial/ritual intention, materials from the everyday world – parachutes, fabric, structural armatures, crinolines, conic forms, hoops, disks, cylinders, semi-spheres, suspension systems, hoists, pulleys, trampolines, gravity, force, weight, concavity, convexity – and manna (food from heaven) – are used to build a circumstance and occasion for the direct experience of awe and sublimity. This is a vessel of reception and transmission reverberating as spaceship, transformer, jellyfish, chariot, caravan, tent, canopy, nuptial chamber.
Indwelling Presence is invited to descend into the world and the everyday world is invited to ascend at the same time. Above and below meet. We are a mountain that reaches into the cosmos, our efforts every day as individuals and as the body of human being. We participate in our own ascension; we make a kind of manna which accrues as the edifice of knowledge, desire, will, wisdom, and understanding. Knowledge is at once something and nothing, one byte at a time, made and used, given and taken, celebrated and surrendered. The mountain of manna is built by and as a labor of love, rooted to the earth by gravity, palpable. By breath, air, wind and water, the mountain is transmuted, as if by alchemy, meeting the fire – the ineffable light – of the heavens. All is borne through, compassion, loving-kindness, rigor, justice, restraint, beauty, brilliance, confidence, faith, labor, endurance, and fortitude. The foundation is thus made fecund and ripe; the membrane that facilitates ascension is so taut to support the power of the rebound.