Description

Tebago “Joy”  Signed Poster by Woodrow Nash 1 of 100. Do not let his name mislead you. Tebago’s joy is not the joy of laughter. It is the joy of the man who has stopped fighting himself. It is the slow, hard-won peace that arrives only after the last argument inside the chest has finally gone quiet.

His head is bare and burnished, the deep clay of his skull catching the light like a riverstone worn smooth by decades of moving water. His face is unmarked, no paint, no ceremony, no announcement. He has nothing to prove anymore. His features are the features of a man who has finally arrived at himself.

His beard is the work’s great offering. A vast, intricate coil of fired clay ropes spilling from his chin, the color of old copper, the color of harvest, the color of every season he has lived through and kept. Each twist is a season. Each curl is a forgiveness he had to learn how to give, most of them to himself. A single flat disc earring hangs at his ear, heavy and ceremonial, the only adornment he wears. At his throat, layers of pale chalk-white beads ring his neck, grounding him in a tradition that no longer asks him to perform it.

Behind him, the ghosted face of an ancestor watches. Not in judgment. In recognition. The elder he has finally become.

Your soul is often a battlefield upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Walk the field as one who knows the ground is sacred.

Tebago belongs in the study of a man who has done his interior work. He belongs in the meditation room, the prayer corner, the quiet wall of the home of someone learning the difference between peace and silence.