Matt: Rothko Chapel Garden

It’s been hard for me to write about Friday because it was so overwhelming, to see so many friends and loved ones and teachers and mentors there, including friends of my late Father’s I hadn’t seen in years, and to be with all of the people who have been driving the mission of the Rothko Chapel over decades, and gosh. There were literally monarchs and dragonflies (my Mom’s favorite) flitting about as each person spoke. Although the Houston heat beat down upon us on an unseasonably warm November day, you couldn’t have imagined a more perfect scene.

Speaking before me were Troy Porter (Board Chair), Abdullah Antepli (the new director), Christopher Rothko, Abbie Kamin (City Council member), Adam Yarinsky (architect), Lanie McKinnon (landscape architect), and my sister, Charleen. Here is what I offered to the proceeding:

I can’t believe we’re all here; it’s been so long coming to this point.

So I should start by saying that part of the reason I started blogging and WordPress is I have a terrible memory, I forget everything.

But as I remember it, my conscious relationship to the chapel begins in my teenage years, when exploring the city with some friends from the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, some of whom are here today. We were always bumming around the area. HSPVA at the time was in Montrose, and we bummed around the Saint Thomas campus and the related parks and stumbled across the Rothko Chapel.

I was totally taken aback, and couldn’t wait to call up my parents about what I had discovered. “Mom! Look what I found!“

She just started laughing.

Of course, I hadn’t discovered it; it turns out that almost a decade before, she had brought me there as a small child. Apparently, we had been playing in Bell Park, and rain clouds started to form, so she was looking for someplace we could go inside, and the Rothko Chapel was, of course, open.

I’ve been to the Chapel countless times now. I’ve been when I’m grieving, I’ve been when I’m celebrating, I’ve been when I needed a reset, I’ve brought friends that loved it, that hated it, that cried, I’ve brought friends that laughed.

Some of my favorites when I was training for a half-marathon and would run here, take a quick meditation break, and then run back home

There’s a milion stories about how people come to the chapel, and many more about how they leave it, it’s a nexus or Schelling point. Whatever your experience, you’ll always remember it and leave changed.

I’m so glad to be able to celebrate this opening with all of you. Here are of course my family that raised me, but also friends and teachers that shaped me as a man and without which I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything I have in my life. I see some teachers here, I see Doc Morgan, David Caceres. Thank you so much for being here.

My father, Chuck Mullenweg, passed in 2016, but Mom, I know he would have loved this. Christopher, thank you for the opportunity to contribute in a small way to our shared mission of honoring our fathers’ legacy.

My mother, Kathleen Mullenweg, is right here, I hope you get a chance to meet her. A garden seemed very fitting as her lifelong green thumb and love of gardening has always been grounding and inspiring to me. Mom, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you again for being the best mother a boy could hope for, and giving me such a broad extracurricular education, especially in the arts.

I work in technology, which has already transformed society and is poised to do even more with the age of AI beginning, and I believe it is incredibly important for technologists building the future to be connected and informed by the arts, because we need our software to have soul.

What I hope for most, though, is that the peace and reflection garden and birch grove bring some mother and child someday, who perhaps wander into the chapel looking to escape rain, and that kid later goes back to his mother a decade later and says, Look what I found!