Being a new transplant to Fort Collins, my sense of place is at the present transitory. My personal and professional life are also undergoing a metamorphosis, so this leads me to have a navigation compass that is more internal and body-centered. It is difficult to wrap my head around the idea of “wholeness” because of the physical place of my life. Looking up the meanings of this word according to the Webster English dictionary, I find references to integrity, in one place, intact, not broken. To me, these suggest a singular point of reference and also a sort of uniform idea of space and time. I wonder if these definitions could be expanded upon to include more complexity and to suggest the more developmental nature of lived experience. I do have moments of wholeness while singing in tandem with a favorite song, laughing with my daughter, listening to a friend, and sometimes while working in my studio. It has been my experience that when I think of place, I teeter between a psychological space and a physiological one. So also I sense a fleeting wholeness in a unifying feeling between these two parts.
– a Ekphrasis response
csuecopoetics 
Rachel, perhaps all we can ever have are provisional wholes–intuitions of connectivity or unity that arise spontaneously and then dissolve into larger structures of dissonance or dissolution. And perhaps it’s a question of place. I’ve alternated (in my many moves) between feeling radically receptive to a new place and then radically excluded from understanding it. Fresh eyes, and how to have them. It feels like two chrysalisis (chrysalae?) above. In your own drawing, what is the presence or necessity of “wholes?” In an age of fragments, I’m curious.
Fine post!