Thursday, April 4, 2013

Good Friday...Any Friday and An Expedition

Good Friday is traditionally a Christian day of mourning the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, though as a person like me raised amid Christian teachings loses sight of the rites celebrated in churches, a holy day is liable to take on personal meanings of the hour or day, connected loosely if at all with the sacred meaning.

On Good Friday 2013 I had decided to take advantage of thawing weather and head north into public land beyond Ely, Minnesota, the habitat of spruce grouse and source of the setting I'd been painting around a spruce grouse drawn from a photo I shot in Lake County two and a half years ago. Passing up through national forest along Highway 2 I sighted my subject bird, the spruce cock, in the roadway doing as his kind will, eating grit to help him grind up food; he has a crop, full of sand and pebbles, instead of a mouth full of teeth.

The encounter, it pleased me to think, boded well for the artwork that would continue from the top of that cliff I traveled toward, 112 miles north of Duluth, where snow would be likely trickled away to expose some of the surface I intended to paint. But by my arrival, no trails had been broken other than by deer in the campground I needed to cross, and my snowshoes sank laboriously at each stride. Sometimes a section of snow as big as a bathroom floor would cave beneath my weight and whoosh downward, releasing air with an industrial-sounding blast from hollow spots way down under. A few times the snow crust barely crushed underneath me. A beast of burden, I continued, seeking a sitting place on top of the rock dome where at last I found my necessary conditions, with roots of pines exposed on pinkish cliff.

Sorrow, mostly a private matter, accompanies me lots of places these days. There are various helps for it but one of the best, and of course not in my estimation alone, is huge country too inhospitable for alien plants or much industrialization/urbanization to expand their reach. Here is the home of the wild beasts and specialized birds still left on earth, and sorrow might well arise merely from thoughts of the earth so glutted with humankind that these very places like the rest become infested with ourselves, our roads and our mandate to develop every resource in or on the ground. 


It is natural to hate sorrow and fear everything that might give rise to it, experienced in different ways by different people. Yet sorrow persists and recurs, accompanies folks everywhere in low-grade, residual or full-blown intensity, offset with our work and contemplation. Sorrow gives rise to corrective courses, new chapters but also illness, which makes way for branching off and innovation by those personally or indirectly affected. Sorrow challenges our lives the way competition, seismic upheaval and disease challenge the trees at root level. We go into the wild and see what the trees have done by way of response.


We go back out into the streets, or, if we have the option to do so, we linger at those places deep in vegetation dead and alive, where we build something hidden, as we see it, from other people. We know ourselves sufficiently torn down by our choices and those of other people that we will make our creation manifest when the good hopes brought back in us somehow, through days and nights characterized by that forest, the heavenly bodies belonging to everyone and the drama of all events determine that the time is ripe.

Artwork can be viewed or ordered here: www.etsy.com/shop/EpiphaniesAfield

1 comment:

  1. an insightful description in how it feels and from time to,time

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