Connection

Connection is the original human need. The one that precedes all others.

When John Lennon wrote Across the Universe in the early hours of a sleepless night in 1967, he described the experience as words flowing through him rather than from him. Images and phrases arriving unbidden, too insistent to ignore. “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe.” It is one of the most genuinely mystical things Lennon ever committed to record. A song not about reaching outward toward connection but about the overwhelming recognition that connection is already the nature of things. That we are not separate beings straining toward one another across a void. We are, at the deepest level, the same.

That recognition is the foundation of this painting.

Connection is what transforms survival into meaning. Before language, before culture, before art itself, there was the impulse to reach across the space between two beings and say: you are not alone, and neither am I. Lennon spent his life oscillating between that impulse, and the profound isolation that fame and the particular violence of being a Beatle imposed on him. He was simultaneously one of the most connected artists in human history, his words received by hundreds of millions of people, and a man who spent years in self-imposed retreat, hungry for the ordinary privacy of genuine human contact.

“Nothing’s gonna change my world” — the mantra that anchors the song, reads differently after December 8, 1980. Lennon was shot outside his home in New York City at 40, returning from a recording session, in a moment so ordinary and so savage that it became its own kind of symbol. The world he had spent two decades trying to heal was the world that ended him. And yet the song remains, and with it the conviction that underneath all the noise, all the violence, all the distance human beings manufacture between themselves, there is something unbroken, something that flows endlessly, across the universe, connecting everything to everything else.

The symbols etched into the rock-like formations of this work transcribe fragments of his lyrics as testament made permanent, words that arrived in the middle of the night and refused to slip away, now pressed into stone as proof that some messages are too important to be lost.

Art creates culture. Culture creates community. Community creates humanity. Connection is where that chain begins. The first courageous act of reaching toward another and trusting that the space between you is not as vast as it appears.

This piece asks: Where in your life are you most afraid to be fully known?