What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been

We are called to see beyond the mirror of our own shadow. Within our projections of evil lies a truth we must embrace. Harm cannot touch the roots of integrity or the wellspring of love, for both flow from a source deeper than fear —a stillness that holds us tenderly, even amid the whirl of the world. Through suffering, we surrender; and in surrender, we are reshaped, like water carving a stone. We emerge softer, wiser, and whole; our hearts extended to the echoes of others’ pain as our own. In this openness, transformation becomes a river without end, integrating the union of opposites. From this marriage blooms the quiet joy and the vibrant aliveness, of being awake, fully present, and deeply connected.

“Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” 

-bell hooks, All About Love

Love is the force that animates the seen and unseen. It is the sacred architecture of existence, revealing the luminous interconnectedness of all things as the underlying structure of reality. Love is infinite and transcends linear time. It is the pulse of consciousness —the ocean in which all life flows together. We discover love through polarity. We teach one another how to love better by holding complexity. Love is the current that softens and dissolves fear. It awakens perception to the unity of self and other and restores the radiance of individuality within the collective. Love is recognition, practice, and devotion; it opens the heart to ecstatic connection. Love nurtures, protects, and empowers action. It is the tangible design in which every being participates —a healing salve, known through the corporeal and shared through relation.

In its most expansive form, love is metta: the boundless goodwill that radiates to all beings; karuna: the active compassion that responds to suffering; mudita: the joy in the flourishing of others; upekkha: the calm recognition of impermanence. This form of love dissolves self-centeredness and reveals the interdependence of all life. Love is a discipline, cultivating presence, attentiveness, and care as one would tend a sacred garden. Love is not only felt but enacted —in every choice, gesture, and bond. It is a living ethic of connection.

We are serenaded by love through ballads of longing and desire. Love is the rain of purple light that washes the heart, restoring union with the divine. It calls us to stay, to hold, to be seen, and to open fully to another. We find love in the lyrics that echo through our lives: I Will Always Love You, All You Need is Love, You Are the Sunshine of My Life, I Wanna Be Down, Baby I Love Your Way, Can You Feel the Love Tonight, How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You. Each song is a prayer, a chord of intimacy and commitment that tethers joy and pain into the fabric of existence. These melodies remind us how love is expressed and celebrated, binding human experience to a cosmic order.

Wells Chandler’s site responsive, hand-crocheted installations emerge from the entanglement of ecology, gender, and queer iconography. The etymology of queer is twerka, meaning “to twist.” Crochet is a process of twisting lines; it is repetitive and contemplative. Meditation underlies Chandler’s labor-intensive, slow practice, embedding time, ritual, and devotion directly into the work. Informed by Jungian frameworks and comparative religion, Chandler weaves art history, esoterica, pop culture, and autobiography to stage heterotopias oriented toward collective healing.

The Secret of the Golden Flower, an early Taoist meditation text later translated by Richard Wilhelm and commented on by Carl Jung, teaches that enlightenment arises through the circulation of inner light, a turning inward that transmutes shadow into radiance. This pattern of transformation is echoed in Goethe’s Faust, where the homunculus, longing to dissolve his glass vessel and merge with the generative waters of the Great Mother, achieves union with the source of all becoming by descending into the sacred feminine. Structural to both of these texts is the coincidentia oppositorum —the mystical union of opposites. This dialectic principle is central to Jung’s process of individuation, where self-realization emerges through the integration of the unconscious and the marriage of the contrasexual forces of anima and animus. Wholeness dawns when the ego acknowledges it is not the sole center of the psyche. Across spiritual traditions, this alchemical act of re-membering represents the highest stage of psycho-spiritual transformation. Flowering becomes a metaphor for this inner shift; the divine hermaphrodite as both forge and crucible, embodies nondual reunion.

Invoking vitality and presence, Chandler’s exuberant garden symbolizes the cultivated mind and the interdependence of all existence. Within this psycho-spiritual ecosystem, loss, grief, and love compost into new life. Bugs—each named after the artist’s family members—animate a terrain of repair and generational healing. As yidams, they serve as sacred mirrors, emissaries of reconciliation, restoring wholeness through the purification of aversion. Flowers titled after popular love songs and lyrics compose a chorus of tenderness and elation. As splayed queer icons, each bloom gestures toward bodhicitta—the opening of heart and mind through love and surrender.

Suffering is an inevitable part of life, yet it is through the metabolization of pain that being deepens and meaning arises. Despite our differences and irreconcilable grievances, an invisible force connects us—felt more than known—binding all living beings in shared existence. Liberation is not an escape from earth but a deep flowering within it.

Aiding this endeavor, joy and humor emerge as potent strategies. In the artist’s words, “Choosing joy is radical because joy is idiosyncratic pleasure—and that destabilizes power as it currently exists.” Humor softens rigidity, challenges fixed relationships, and cultivates compassion. These tools allow Chandler to create environments charged with the profound openness of childlike wonder—a state in which perception is fluid and everything is alive with possibility. Chandler’s talismanic lexicon punctuates a myth-making that embraces the fantastical and positions queerness as central—rather than peripheral—to culture itself, revealing transgender identity to be a generative, world-building force. Installed as an interdependent field, the works hold symbols and viewers in reciprocal relation, modeling attunement that resists separation.