Tom Gottsleben likes to point out that the stone and crystal he works with are actually the same material: silica. Yet stone is hard, dense, and opaque; crystal is clear, light, and transparent. Combining them, he says, expresses the metaphor of oneness often appearing as the duality of opposites. This exploration of unity, of wholeness, informs all of Gottsleben's art. It grows out of his search for the sacred, and his desire to make art that evokes essential truths of the spiritual path.

Life Seed (see right) reveals its wholeness through different perspectives. The photograph shows the twisting shape seen from one vantage point, and also captures the shadow of a perfect six-petaled flower that the viewer discovers in the sculpture itself from another vantage point. Even when unseen, the flower is immanent in the sculpture, just as it is immanent in the seed. Composed of polished stones threaded on a flexible steel armature, the piece defines a perfect sphere, but a sphere that exists only as a void. "You have to work a little to see all this," Gottsleben admits. But part of the enchantment of his sculpture is the personal experience of discovering its subtleties.

The spiral, the quintessential form that unites opposites, figures in much of Gottsleben's work. From our galaxy to our DNA, the spiral is the form of growth and the metaphor for the spiritual path. As Gottsleben puts it, "All of your experience brings you back to a greater awareness of who you are. That's the spiral. You start at the center and come back to it through this wonderful circumambulation of experience."

Over the years, Gottsleben has created a number of spiral towers made of stacked bluestone. Inspire (see gallery for these and other pieces mentioned below) incorporates many of the apparent contradictions in such a structure: it's a circular piece made of squares, a heavy material made to seem soaring and flexible, a substance we consider masculine made to feel feminine. Topped with a quartz crystal, Inspire represents, in the artist's mind, the transformation of consciousness, from what seems to be dense, dark, and heavy, to the reflective, transparent light of the divine. Precisely planned and executed so that each piece diminishes by a very specific ratio, the form has a lovely and readily apparent harmony that transcends the intellectual ideas on which it is based.

It's easy to see unity in a spiral, more difficult to find it in a knot. But a series of colorful crystal and bluestone knots (see gallery) is another exploration of order and chaos. "The knot is really a convolution that comes back in on itself and returns to unity," Gottsleben observes. It's a unity that's not graspable all at once, from any single perspective.

Even Gottsleben's most whimsical pieces are informed by his observing the natural world. A series of anthropomorphic creatures called Shadow Dancers was inspired by how wisps of smoke might coalesce. And when invited to create a piece for an exhibit of birdhouses, Gottsleben wondered: what kind of a house would a bird make, how could it reflect the fancy that we feel seeing birds in flight? The result: a birdhouse made of tiny pieces of stone (just the scale a bird might choose) with a hole drilled through the center to slip over a piece of 7/8-inch steel pipe. The unseen steel takes all the weight, allowing the structure to actually sway in the wind while remaining perfectly stable.

From the look of Gottsleben's sculpture, it seems fitting that he lives in an abandoned bluestone quarry. But when he first moved to the site, set between the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River, he was a painter. The more attention he paid to the stone, the more he discovered its potential to express deep and timeless ideas, ideas he'd began exploring as a teenager reading Ramana Maharshi. Today, the grounds of the quarry are a garden for his sculpture, and the house he built with his wife, Patty Livingston, is a spiral bluestone gem designed as their personal expression of sacred architecture. They have taken what is essentially a raped landscape, with stones chaotically piled about, and returned it to unity with the mountain that was its origin.

One afternoon last spring, we were sitting in the meditation room at the top of his spiral house when the sun cast a shadow of Shiva, the resident deity, on the wall. Gottsleben diverted the conversation to the moment, as he had so many times during the day: the deity had come alive and he wanted to pay attention.

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