The Glorious Middle
The idea of the middle has shadowed me my whole life. At first it was just how I made sense of myself—my strange, in-between place in the world. Over time I’ve come to see it reaches much farther, touching something we all share.
Born in one country, raised in another, I belong to both and to neither. My blood draws from three continents; my culture weaves Cuba, Maryland, and Hawaii into something that never quite settles. For years I felt adrift, never fitting cleanly anywhere. Then the quiet turn: this rootlessness was my root. From the middle I could look out clearly, unclouded by loyalty to any single flag, team, or story. No allegiance meant I could spot the blind spots others carried.
That same vantage slipped into my art—sometimes on purpose, often without my noticing. Without a fixed cultural or racial anchor, “Who am I?” stayed unanswered. So I let go and made spontaneously: shapes rising without plan, a language surfacing from somewhere deep. Figures hover in blank voids, weightless; hands curl like smoke or tide around them; feathers drift in from nowhere; rays slice through from distant, unseen sources. They felt like messages. The middle was calling again. Those floating figures wore my outline, even if their meaning stayed half-hidden.
Here in Hawaii we live on the edge: land meeting sea, isolated in the Pacific’s wide heart. The energy hums constant. A surfboard catches it—a slender bridge riding the seam between ocean below and sky above, rider and wave in momentary balance. It carved its way into my work: a human mark of the middle, another riddle I couldn’t yet read.
Then we moved to a small beach house at the road’s end. I’d lived near the ocean for years, but never right on its lip. Here the whispers sharpened into a clear, steady voice. The glorious middle finally spoke plainly.
I thought the place would flood my art with the expected: blazing sunsets, turquoise water flashing, stars pricking the dark. None of it took root. What struck deepest was the horizon—that endless silver thread where sky presses down and sea rises up, two vast forces meeting in perfect, unyielding truce.
The sight entered me like breath I hadn’t known I was holding. It opened my eyes wider. The middle wasn’t only mine; it was ours. We are the ocean’s surface—thin, living skin shaped by powers above and below. Winds rake across it; rain stipples it silver; moon and sun tug tides like invisible strings; stars scatter cold light on the night mirror. Beneath, currents coil like buried rivers, great creatures shoulder waves toward shore in tireless rhythm.
We are the horizon: a fragile shimmer born only from that tension. Heaven and underworld press together to form this neutral, luminous middle—the place we call home.
That realization brought my earlier pieces into sharp focus. The floating figures are us—suspended, adrift yet held. The swirling hands and luminous forms are those immense forces, molding and contending. The surfboard is how we live here: not by fighting the pull, but by joining it—riding in balance, letting the wave carry us with open trust.
My work from here forward will keep exploring this magical middle place: the unseen but undeniable forces that shape our lives, and the way they let us reflect something divine in what we create and who we become.
