where water holds the sky

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Where Water Holds the Sky has been selected as part of the San Antonio Art League & Museum juried exhibit and will not be available for purchase until June.

Some places gather the stories of a family so quietly that you do not realize their weight until years have passed. This low-water crossing on Beaver Creek is one of those places for me.

According to my grandmother, when my grandfather returned home from World War II, they lived for a short time in the small cabin on Beaver Creek that my wife and I now call our own. She once told me that she washed my mother’s diapers at this very crossing, the creek water moving steadily across the granite beneath the bridge.

Long before I ever thought of painting it, this place had already become part of our family’s rhythm. As a boy I swam here in the summer heat, scrambling across the rocks while the water spilled gently over the crossing. Years later, my wife and I brought our own children to swim in these same pools, and now our grandchildren splash in the same water.

After a rain, when Beaver Creek runs high enough to spill over the bridge, something remarkable happens. The shallow water becomes a mirror, holding the reflection of the sky for just a moment before it moves on downstream. In that brief stillness, the ordinary crossing becomes something more.

The Sacred Ground series explores places where memory, land, and faith quietly intersect. These are not famous landscapes or dramatic vistas. They are the places where life actually unfolds — where families gather, where stories are handed down, and where time shapes both land and people.

This crossing is that kind of place for me.

Here, water passes, generations pass, and yet something remains — a quiet reminder that even the most ordinary ground can hold heaven for a moment.