Ancestral Strawberries, Lying Low in Bits of Field

Since Trump said the U.S. was no longer a party to the Paris Treaty on climate, the Sierra Club, among other environmental organizations have advised Americans on ways they can commit to remain in the treaty individually or as a community organization. Cities, universities and other U.S. entities have made their own pledges to remain signed on. Copied below is a Sierra Club-issued example.

           Pasque Flower, a spring American native plant evolved in the chilly climate regime of northern prairies

The American People Support the Paris Agreement

We, the undersigned people of the United States, will continue to support climate action to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

I commit to:

1. Reduce my own carbon emissions and do what I can through everyday actions such as taking public transportation or carpooling, making my home more energy efficient, switching my home electricity to renewable sources, and limiting food waste.
2. Support U.S. states, cities, businesses, investors, universities, and other entities taking strong climate action and showing the world that the United States is still working to fulfill the Paris Agreement - and call on others to join them.
3. Urge President Trump to keep the United States in the Paris Agreement and protect federal safeguards for our health and environment from regulatory rollbacks and budget cuts.
4. Call on Congress to hold polluters accountable and oppose any efforts to weaken the environmental protections and climate policies that protect our health and well-being.

So much assorted people activity is to blame for carbon and methane choking the atmosphere that it seems to me that a person not especially talented at hosting parties or political organizing could at best devote herself/himself to cutting emissions on a whole range of lifestyle-enhancing fronts, going on to advertise all the ways and means they figured out how to do it. Think in terms of gasoline ignitions and idling engines, as well as electric current coming from wall outlets. Remember that nearly all synthetic manufacturing is carbon-emitting at some stage of production in our times. Do you buy more brand-new stuff or, as much as possible, viable used/even antique stuff to furnish your home? And then ask, what's my vocation and on whose behalf do I do what I do? What do I value about myself enough to nurture and what else might be my legacy, toward everything that's a part of living Creation, big parts of which are now at risk.

     Now that I have a yard of 12,100 square feet, counting the house and gravel parking spot, and no power mower for the grass I'm remembering the summers fifteen years or more ago in a smaller yard that I'd planted with native prairie flowers all around the skirting of the house. That yard got mowed with a Sears Craftsman reel lawn mower that husband Jerry bought me. That mower's been in storage mostly for the past dozen years, but now I've gotten it back. Lately I had the blades sharpened by a qualified neighbor and this is my intended mower for as long as I am master of my fate. No carbon spews out of it (except for the little puffs I'm exhaling!)

     A reel lawn mower, in contrast with a gasoline or electric mower, cuts the grass selectively, rolling over but not cutting stems that stand above the thickness of turf below. Sparse herbage of whatever kind tends to be spared by the tumbling blades. The cut grass ends up not shaved like a conventional power-mowed lawn but noticeably shortened and textured with longer tussocks lying over against shorter in a beautiful effect reminiscent of hay maturing in a meadow, or prairie grass riffling to the breezes.

    Slow-mowing the way I do it won't work for a lot of people, especially with the bigger yards; it verges on being strenuous exercise along some stretches of ground, especially for the shoulders and upper arms. Of course for other folks that's a point to recommend it. However, combining your mowing practices with food and flower gardening, and/or cultivation of wild native plants is a best-yet approach to phasing carbon spew out of your yard care. City rules where I live say grass is to be kept no higher than 5 inches. The entire front and streetside regions of my yard can be kept like that for the grass growing season by slow-mowing. Around the corner on the north where the lawn blooms this time of year in orange hawkweed and patches of white pussytoes I've begun contouring it with mowed pathways around the thickest orange and white stands of those meadowy flowers. On the highway side are a couple more long patches in which pussytoes and a few blue forget-me-nots (like the hawkweed, not native but naturalized from old Europe) rear their blue and white heads. The yard so far looks groomed, with a contrast between naturally occurring moss where I have wet ground--a low carpet of lawn and high fluttering tufts, and it's colorful like a proper northern Minnesota forest clearing. I don't see how it could be considered unkempt or unsightly no matter who's looking at it.
    
     Manual, non-motorized yard care edges out the need for physical fitness routines, if you have any. Then, which errands can be run on foot or by pedal-power? You might find you really do have time for these self-energizing chores ever since you've been making your living--at least some of the time--from home. This is habit-building that can preserve bodies, the air, the climate, and the wild neighborhood of distant kin that have been succumbing to pavement, traffic, commercial/industrial chemicals and the changed weather regime with its symptomatic harsh flooding rains, angry heat and opposing runs of drought. 

                                          New-cut lawn with standing summer wildflowers left as found


       There are less-kempt lawns than my own in this town, other yards besides mine where ground is allowed to diversify from monotonous grass (monoculture) back into its old mixture, supporting broader-leaved standbys of the natural community that lies beyond; by keeping these growing you will have food plants for everything including maybe yourself. People have a long history of foraging plants from just beyond their doors. This thought opens out a long green-gold rug of memory, as I recall crops picked in open air in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and to a lesser extent later. Wild red raspberries,  black raspberries with seeds lodging in the teeth till poked loose and nibbled to fragments just between two teeth, wine-tart blackberries and dewberries, blueberries in Lake Superior country, mulberries along fence rows, apples in orchards long untended except by bees still free to flourish, a plum tree, a forgotten peach tree that let 32 immaculate peaches the size of softballs onto the lawn's edge, and the wild strawberries of late June. The strawberry blossoms (Fragaria virginiana) were a signature of well-drained ground abundantly warmed by sun at summer's onset. The fruit, big as thumbnails at a maximum, hid hanging just above earth, screened in grasses, with the beaconing aspect of new-found Easter eggs. Nursery-grown strawberries could never taste as sweet. A hilltop's picking of strawberries could add up to the 3-4 cups called for in a pie. 

     Shown below is my newest botanical in watercolor and ink, a miniature piece brought forth out of preserved memory and thanks to obsessive lawn care practices abandoned in the face of the foreclosure crisis and of all the things that have hounded midwestern U.S. citizens away from the towns lying along remnant strips of countryside. At least here, a dainty ancestor to one of the fruit crops most cultivated in this land still keeps to its life cycle.

Conservation, conservatism and, yes, liberalism are roots to the same commonplace plant...

       Wild Strawberry Marked your Path  - appearing soon at https://www.epiphaniesafield.com/

Does Someone Wanna Coax him Out?

It's the beginning of May and we birders still have a lot to look forward to. Yesterday I heard a northern waterthrush in soggy woods by the river within a mile of home.  It's a jolt of momentary melody and another debonair songbird whose entire class of creatures has always gripped my heart; even more than most animals birds are for some human beings the utmost subjects of art. That heard bird, a species of warbler even though it's been named 'waterthrush', foretokened the 2017 arrival of breeding warblers here to the northern forests, or to the North Woods, or to the bush, as known to Canadians.

A seasonally recurring bird in watercolor/pencil, seen in fall along the shores of Lake Superior: Calm and a Pipit



Since birders are people of all different kinds of drive and talent, it seems there are various attractions inherent in birds that may trigger any one person's fascination with them. I've known of birders to come from backgrounds as varied as industrial manufacturing, auto repair, law and politics, the military, music, teaching, graphic arts, the church, medicine, the biosciences and the hospitality industry. Some birders are assertive types who will challenge others and campaign against civic wrongs; others are retiring, comparably meek sorts who prefer the company of nature and animals over the rest of us, but who might after some agonizing turn out to a public meeting in order to confront the prospect of disaster. So, out of the cross-section of types described here, why couldn't an invitation be made to Donald Trump to come witness a spring bird migration? 

Of course he could prove to be exceedingly bored, lacking the powers of eyesight or the curiosity to bother sorting even a single moving bird out of its background. But what if he's never been properly tempted with the opportunity to make birding his own kind of sport? And what do I really know about Donald Trump beyond what I've read, including suggestions that he's got dementia coming on? But if all it would take is a certain kind of appeal to a certain notion of sport within Donald Trump then would someone who knows him, or knows someone who knows him, try taking him on a field trip? If he could see splendor in a $$$ designer cheesecake, or even in a double Big Mac meal, what mightn't he see in a bird that's flirting its magnificent tail, or speeding after prey, especially if he could spot the bird before his companion(s) did. It would give him a personal triumph, which he demands at all costs, from what the articles about him say. Going after new and different birds could stoke his need to pursue a flying quarry worth more to brag about, maybe even in his own sense of aesthetics, than a tiresome golf ball on turf, though he might or might not have to let go of old biases toward the end result of getting laid. Of course too he could walk along, or roll in his cart if he must, at his own pace, and once coming in from the trail he'd find his day changed and even some explosive kinks in his mood loosened up--for no reason he can name. At any rate I'm just saying what if... because, in a desperate ploy to stall his issuance of executive tweets, simple measures like this deserve a little considering even if they come from my own most worthless daydreams.

Wolf in an Enriched Setting

Flat countryside full of watery pockets that freeze and melt back into cool swampland triggered this painting. My home region along the Canadian border remains wolf habitat, and for a person a wolf sighting tends to be remarkable and quickly over, since the wolf wants to get away. I wanted to portray one wolf that paused, sadly if I'm not mistaken, alongside me in a manner that so much carnivorous-animal art does not pick up on. When I reflect on North American paintings of the wolf I think of wolves in glorious poses with heads high, or wolf packs engaged in chases. My Tuesday morning wolf from the spring of 2016 paused in a bulldozer's ruts, ducking her head and exuding suspicion at being viewed by someone out a car window. I had a moment's vision of German shepherd dogs made afraid by a family member's loud scolding, in a cowering pose. This wolf cringed with lowering head and ears for a moment, but then regained her dignity and exited tall and trotting, taking no visible path across a poplar grove. 

This art piece aims to extol our continent's lingering timber wolves in all their well-warranted shyness, which helps them save their own lives concurrently with all our industrial expansion, murderous trigger-joy and ingrained superstition about how cruel wolves are and how hungry to eat us, not to mention our fears for our pets and our livestock. The composition seems overpowered by the flatness of the foreground. Depth occurs in layers, with rain clouds behind a distant line of forest suggesting a layer of hills within, and then the grove of 'doghair aspens' like one continuous, many-stemmed tree erupting from the flat meadow behind the wolf. The wolf is assuredly the star of the painting, exposed like a potential victim in front of a human ogler, armed to shoot or merely passive. This land's marshy flatness, from the perspective of the painting, combined with cold climate and soil infertility recommends itself to onlookers who would rather see places still this rustic kept vacant from takeover by our enterprise. But no matter, this little wolf landscape looked too flat and too inconclusive, to my judgment. The open-ended issue for me is how my wolf as shown would or wouldn't convey fear of whatever had put it ill at ease. An art piece about a fleeing, frightened wolf might better be dominated by grass and landforms, the traditional retreat of wild wolves which cover so much countryside ( up to125 miles in a day, according to Barry Lopez in his Of Wolves and Men) in all their questing, long-legged might--the wolf in that picture nearly lost to sight.

So my first wolf scene as it was lacked context. I still needed to show that the wolf knew how to exit from the hazard that comes with a human encounter. That more accurate context invites use of the poetry of little trees whose whole purpose from their tender beginnings is to reclaim open land, making cover for littler and larger lives both plant and animal. The north country's poplars, or aspens, sparkle in the breezes, quivering, delighting us as we cross their expanses. Is it possible that this wolf in art, whose form never underwent any revision except a little more contouring of its fur coat in the meantime, has gained in dignity because a grove of sapling aspens grew up around its route of escape? A bit of added downslope, as well, takes away from the earlier sense that the wolf is heaving and about to get sick, or is in disgrace.

A Lonesome Retreat vs. a Frenzy of Adaptation

In winter when soils and bog waters are frozen there is a creek I walk just about due north of home, out of hearing range of most anything human except the odd gunshot, or a plane high up. I'm on the ice or on erratic marginal land petering into islets sometimes just big enough to support one of my feet, with little bog plants bearing leathery reddish leaves all between my strides, which are slow and ponderous in case I start to hear any ice cracking. Also I'm listening, since I want to see winter's most secretive warm-blooded fellow-creatures that venture through our spruce bogs. On each side stand the tree citizens of cold wet terrain, old black spruces and tamaracks maybe as tall as a store building on the edge of town. They take a long time to grow in the acid-rich watery soil, which in certain spots is a living upholstery that bobs on top of groundwater if stepped on.

A boreal chickadee, more predictably found near a cluster of suet feeders in prior winters, would be welcome if I could hear any chickadees at all, but this time hardly a one calls out throughout the afternoon, and no wheezy boreal chickadee voice this whole winter long. The boreal is shyer than the every-day black-capped chickadees, much more selective of its habitat which is typically bogs, and--could it be--prefers to stay away from ourselves, the bipeds that talk and lift binoculars at them. Yesterday I noted only the chet-chet of white-winged crossbills calling from one to another sky-high somewhere where there may have been a view of cones on firs or spruces.

It's become significant to me how much oftener, if it happens at all, I see my wild four-legged kin from the road where I'm driving than I do anywhere I happen to be walking. Or if I meet a big mammal from a trail I'm walking or skiing it goes by in a flash, like the cougar silhouetted off to my right in post-sunset forest by a river, or some low brown animal or other deep in grass beside me on a fishing afternoon. Cars quietly coursing a county road or driveway seem to be more trusted since the other creatures know they don't, by nature, swivel around suddenly or leave the road but to keep their bearings, though risk may intensify if a car stops at any point. What wild animals make of ATVs probably fits parameters of its own.

In any case rare creature-sightings come as surprises in places to any degree wild or worked over by human industry, like bird rarities dropping in on suburban lakes or farmers' mud flats. In the Anthropocene Era, the geological time period that mass human activity is said to have launched beginning with the atomic bomb in the mid 20th century, every shy outnumbered animal a person sees can be thought of as having some human influence brought upon what it breathes or circulates through its tissues or what perils it dodges. But if it lives, rejuvenates itself, bears offspring and risks showing itself off to respectful gawkers like ourselves, it's made some adaptation to our ever-growing takeover of earth. For those of us excited by novelty and resilience in the animal kingdom, hope for these creatures endures.

                            Mixed-media pencil-watercolor: Pecking Order in the Collapse of Seasons

Right about now, their struggle seems inexorable, since too many business-immersed people making up corporations consider little as important as the mandate of growth in profits, theirs and their allies; in the age of water drawdown, climate collapse, pandemic and famine there can only be a crescendo and a collapse on the large time scale. Nothing grows forever on a finite earth; the faster the would-be subduing of nature, the sooner and more abundant the repercussions. All kinds of living things, meantime, are moving to where fear or new atmospheric conditions sweep them. We have exotic plants and animals, and we have extinctions where wild beings were stranded in the only homes they knew.

The mixed-media art piece shown above, Pecking Order in the Collapse of Seasons, was drawn from an initial scene in grittiest downtown Duluth, Minnesota where imported, naturalized bird species like the English sparrows and the Eurasian tree sparrow shown on the wall commingle in the breezes, in the wake of confused, abbreviated seasonal phenomena, with stray plants that will grow in the poor soil at the footings of a parking lot, or out of cracks, plants whose seeds were borne from nearby beaches or  farms or gardens way inland. Sorrow yet wonderment at all kinds of transitions out across the natural world amid the chill of this past winter attended this work in a corner of my latest home in Floodwood, MN. Dried clippings of last year's weedy fruit and flowers served as my models. The piece is 12 x 9 inches or 30.2 x 22.7 cm. unmatted, and is painted in watercolor and pencil on cold-press 140 lb. watercolor paper. 

In which the Wind-borne Find themselves Impelled

This winter, for two full days on separate week-ends I've been one of the birders heading over northwest to try and see a rare bird visitor, the curve-billed thrasher who should normally be found in warm arid places mainly in the far southwestern U.S. Work-related priorities during the last three occurrences of rare birds have cost me those sightings; I'd miss them by at least a day while I ran errands or took care of some first thing first. Each time I got there the bird would have left the scene, gone for good or just temporarily, where it gathered less attention. Gales of wind, rain or snow have a lot to do with odd bird arrivals everywhere, I have read. Yet why a thrasher from hot lands of chaparral, sage and cacti would opt to roost in spruces along city streets in Itasca County, Minnesota all beset by frozen peat bogs in January's deep freeze no one has explained so far as I know, but it's interesting to think about animals no matter what kind they are, and what some sports among them may do partly by choice. For corresponding reasons birders feel compelled to zoom along miles of highway, familiar and not, to see a strange and different bird for its unique evolutionary splendor, even though it might be an immature dressed in drab plumage.

If this thrasher continues showing up in the same neighborhood I figure on making time again to try finding it with the help of others who will be trying, most having come a lot more miles than the 36 I've been traveling to get there.

Meanwhile I'm most of the way through the homespun travel memoir From Blueberries to Blue Seas by my friend and neighbor Curt Bush, published just last year by the Savage Press of Superior, Wisconsin. In 2013 Curt followed where his heart and fascinations were calling him, taking a 28-foot sailboat he had bought and outfitted for a long solo journey out of Duluth and down the other Great Lakes, out the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Coast of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, ominous with winds and seasick rollers, crags and sunken rocks and three-day fogs. Having trained himself on earlier, less suitable boats on the perilous near-shore waters of Lake Superior he had gained the skills it took for him to survive storms, mysterious tidewaters, shoals and other deceptions of nature besetting the long route from midcontinent to the sea. The story, in lighthearted tones that reflect the teller's everyday style among friends, nevertheless recounts his stresses and moments of rage interspersed with his delight in places, landmarks and companions met, cherished and left behind. In the part where I am today he is nudging his way along the coast of Nova Scotia in a fog and a headwind, with reefs and boulders to either side, making only 30 miles in a day, using charts, an instrument called a chart plotter and his anxiously squinting eyes in order to keep from wrecking against obstacles and ledges barely to be seen alongside. Once he puts up for the night in a bay on an island wrapped in fog, the only sheltered bit of water the maps reveal, demonstrating how, even in the technological age, a person can still painstakingly venture with something of the attitude of fear, daring and triumph known in the Age of the Explorers over lands they crossed, at a pace truer to that period before mechanized transit. No human may have been on that scrap of land before him, he'd have supposed for at least a moment. This reader would love to have had the know-how to make the same trip herself, or a different trip on a route even farther from popular consciousness.

The thought came to my mind as I was reading, and not for the first time: what if an ancient overland traveler, a North American of 200-300 years ago, could be reincarnated and sent walking over familiar terrain, with at least a vague idea of how much time had elapsed. What would the person see that still evoked the place in those bygone centuries; what rediscoveries, besides the stark changes, would the person proclaim to some modern-day fellow-traveler, like me? Could it be that as long as there is humankind there will still be be a few trekkers on foot or by sail or by hand-powered boat, seeing what is out there up close and intimate, growing spellbound at the hand of nature?

In our time when the urban hordes and the corporations supposed to serve us all threaten to scrape  away soils, acidify waters and ruin the climate for anything out in the open, it seems to me a kind of learned adaptation to detach in happy-go-lucky style and move within the moment, eternalizing it inside the self. Whatever the weather we'll weather the weather (if the means persist) as some old song said. It's easiest if the present weather is a kind you savor--bright if you adore the sun, dim if that fits your temperament..

Remembering back to last fall when week after week of August-balmy sun prevailed and unusual people like me, not particularly a sun lover, fretted that we might have crossed into a new winterless era marked by long dark nights with the interspersion of a little frost, forget the snow, I've been drawing and painting a different, recent bird visitor. Day after day back then we had had southwesterly winds. Those must have been the impetus for the sudden, startling Eurasian tree sparrow seen on a weekday morning from within my car where I slouched in the driver's seat looking over a call list I was planning to use that day. This was in a sloping gravel parking lot above an alley in downtown Duluth where English sparrows whirl and forage, pigeons peck and gulls swoop after morsels flicked from cars. I had seen my first Eurasian tree sparrow in the January not quite two years previous, a visitor to feeders in Hastings in southern Minnesota. But now as I looked at the specimen just an arm's length above my windshield on top of a retaining wall, I was stirred with a memory of rushing from the car in weeks recently past and glimpsing what may have been an earlier Eurasian tree sparrow but dismissing it through inattention. Some days later a local authority on birds saw another Eurasian tree sparrow in the town of Two Harbors just up the Superior shore. I connect these strays with the southwesterly winds that must have swept them from Missouri or neighboring Illinois where their species, by some whim introduced from Germany in the 1870s, is more reliably sighted among the grubbier, more raucous and ubiquitous English sparrows.

Work-in-progress with English sparrows and sole Eurasian tree (or German) sparrow on top of a cracking, very American retaining wall

As the days lengthen and thaws allow me the chance, I will keep at this little 12 x 9" piece of work that shows both species (not true sparrows) side by side but mostly minding their own affairs, with a background that suggests crumbling, dispersion, residues and traceries of what once made up the area environment. The mood suggests the whimsical and fleeting, the weather-borne, restless and unstable, given over to wandering for maximal stimulation if no other gain.

Brought Beyond Fear - Winter Introspections on a Christmas Eve

Air travel makes me feel that I contain shades of people from eons back in ancestral times and places, who make themselves felt in a kind of glee that we, here and now, aren't confined to ground travel at any speed, and that we're privileged to swoop away over the curvature of earth with all our great bulk and bags of belongings. I feel it in a swell of tears behind my eyes. Holidays are my yearly excuse for air travel, so I'd have to admit that sheer wistful excitement at the prospect of rejoining daughter, sister or cousins, precious members of a small far-flung family, heightens all my emotion. I think too that even for frequent long distance travelers a reluctance is regular at the prospect of leaving home; after all for reasons unwarned of we might never make it back. But the exhilaration of the hundred-miles-an-hour take-off  implies a rebellion over the heritage of ancestors, for whom soil bacteria, mosses and algae and ancient long-running geological processes made up all the ground supporting each person. We're dismissing the ground at this moment, even though we risk exploding in a rupture of the controlled massive combustion, right on board with us, that's propelling this plunge into flight. The sentiments percolate in the heart, yet in the formidable might of what we're riding we feel invited to close down our consciousness at least for a little while, succumb to whatever's next. This is how I experience take-off in a jet plane.

I've left the bog lands of the Lake Superior watershed for New York City through a cloud mass that gives the plane a shaky course while the last blue light of day dims to blackish. The floor of clouds is characteristically a snowfield with mounds welling up that fade into night. There is a wilderness aspect to the view out the window away from the travelers around me. They are watching wi-fi movies or are napping; most of are hidden from my sight. It's two hours to New York. Before I begin to notice any degree of tilt into our descent I observe white lights and red way below, a small plane at an altitude that means that pilot is just skimming the cloud floor. The lights wink, and there's a blue one too. A plane? Or a snow plow... Are the clouds right at the level of the Adirondack summits, and down there is a plow cleaning off a high piece of road engulfed in clouds? I feel as if I'm the only one in the world to be seeing this sight and trying to figure out who or what that is down below.

When you fly in a jet plane there begins, at some stage into your descent, a relaxation of sound, a newly steady antiphon to the roar that must have been your ascent, ever since your ears themselves have dimmed with changes in air pressure. The plane has settled into a glide. In the grey floor out the window rents (gaps) are opening and lit structures pass glowingly near your feet. We sink into a course that takes in gem-work of night lighting, housing and businesses, all in elegant curves and geometrical arrays. It stretches on and on forward in a patterning that enhances the memory that this is Christmas, but that in the cynical part of my mind suggests infestation of planet Earth by our designs. Lights in this case are about triumphs in all kinds of our commerce; motley colored lights are the emphatic Christmas reminders seen from the air. Down there is wild America taken over; our kind, like all weeds and pests who have mastered their environment admit little or nothing about their own limits. Through more and more of these exurbs we pretend we can go on encrusting more of the ground and slurping more of the water for our civic pride and prosperity. And now that superstructure we've built is off-gassing into intense weather phenomena that ever oftener come back for us in escalating degrees of danger, but we go on making jet fuel and expanding the airports and hyping the economic growth that boosts ever more of the take-over. We have seen our own heyday by and large and we need to adjust to what comes after, which somehow needn't be our utter extinction, most of us trust.

                        Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY on Christmas Day 2016 - winter imitates spring

Like the skiers of the world and other snow-lovers I'm saying good-bye to winter landscapes, which are not going away entirely yet but are changing to be muckier and greyer and browner. But tradition remains strong in many of us, tradition that celebrates the unchanging look of places, faces and seasons we cherish. On a night like this one, full of a sense of the festive, of a knowledge of precedent and of ways that have worked so long and well, isn't there no end of possibility? That the majority know what will need to stay in place to make way for a livable future? that the same majority will matter, will succeed in the midst of all their places worthy of saving, and that all these thinkers and devotees and protectorates will, united, be enough to enable future generations to figure out how to guard against the deadly temptation into perpetual, impossible growth...?

Looking at my own wall art where I live (including framed photos) I'm inclined to admit that winter for a long time has been the peak of the year to me, whether or not I'd dare to say it's my favorite season. Winter spins off spring, after all, and is the culmination of autumn. It's in my nature to discourage people from dismissing snowy, cold winter as a dread time and instead to see it for its glories--get out there, look long and look close even if you have to do it from a car. Two original artworks are these:


                         March: Red-winged Blackbird over Lake Pepin (Mississippi River) Blufflands 
                            original watercolor framed at 14 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches framed 

      Repercussions  
           original watercolor and gouache 16 x 20" matted

Also on Etsy.com -   Surreal Snow Landscape Boreal Forest Cliff with Gull Collision into Rock Facade....

Hollow Hearts in the Anthropocene Era

It must be every waking hour now that I get back to thinking of the resisters/protectors out to the west at Standing Rock in North Dakota, doing what a group of  local citizens can do to stave off deadly industrial development of their home land. Would I ever go out and join that effort or one closer to me? The thought of being captive, jailed or beaten up, is too much for my cowardice. And I'm alone, no partner to take up my projects and responsibilities if that happened.

Those tribal people are our most immediate best hope for slowing, at last stopping the suicidal zig-zagging of pipelines across the United States. I heard a filmmaker named Josh Fox yesterday, being interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now saying there are plans to build 300 new power plants to process fracked gas in this country, requiring thousands of miles of new pipeline which will be ill-received to say the least by most of the landowners whose acreage gets picked as a corridor. As weather and climate repercussions advance and convince more and more decision makers that we've got to 'leave it in the ground' then rounds of civil disobedience, not to mention a variety of other unpredictable and unsavory reactions, will be visible in more and more places. From climate researchers comes the report that in 2015 the atmospheric carbon load was averaging 400 ppm, as it continues to surpass the much publicized goal of no more than 350. And meanwhile our mid-continent highways still zoom with super-sized gas or diesel pickup trucks driven by individual owners at 70 to 80 miles an hour, because little cars don't have enough power to inspire those mighty drivers.

When will I give up driving a gasoline car--or any car?

At the start of October I circled Lake Superior again in my quirky little old hybrid car, tent-camping on a stack of air mattresses and a folded comforter two nights along the way, heading from west to east. Beaches and roadways and dooryards were a-twitch with southbound migrant sparrows (white-crowned, song sparrow and fox sparrow) and the short scooting flights of American pipits, bound as normal from stony open northern Canada to wintering places deep down in the United States. I was so glad to watch them and imagine the stages of their traditional year-to-year travel. I had the piece, below, of mixed-media watercolor to finish, with its flying pipit, and so I put in a lot of indoor time, window-lit, and shore and clifftop time, ultimately consolidating the piece down from a greater width because of damage I had done to the paper by a use of masking fluid. To my chagrin two dried coats of masking fluid,  when I scraped them away, took the surface and sizing of the paper right off with it. It's a mistake I'd like to remember never to make again. But I'm not sure that the earlier 12-inch wide version of this work would have conveyed any more exact aura of Lake Superior calm and a pipit than this miniature at 6 x 9.25 inches, ready to mat and frame. Small is beautiful in so many arenas.

                                      Calm and a Pipit : Lake Superior 

                                           
Meanwhile I continue sifting among the layers and particles of my own climate-related depression.  It's not a paralyzing state of mind, but more of a pall over all my emotional resonance with the lands I look out upon. They appear much as always but are emptier, because fewer birds and other vertebrates hang on or cross those places, their reproduction down and mortality up.  In recent days spent crossing a stretch of northern Ontario I find again that it forms a kind of landscape like a mirror image in me. There was a time when open vistas made my heart sing like a meadow of nesting songbirds no matter the time of year. Now the song is musical theory for the most part, or little mutterings I make, driving along, to quiet anxieties, the radio in the background. It's like owning the fact that you're old and facing death, though many around you are significantly older; your best memories are largely if not all made in other times, and the whole topic is best avoided in order for you to maintain an ideal level of functioning. Joyfully however, there are still visions of splendor out in nature, which I still can best express in visual art.

Those of us who suffer from the melancholy of watching natural systems wither under pressure from all our collective uses of the earth have to console ourselves however we can. Reading on these topics can help, as experts' research findings bring insight. Walter Youngquist is one of the hosted writers with Negative Population Growth or NPG, working to reduce U.S. population growth especially from the standpoint of curbing immigration and births to immigrants, though also by lowering domestic birth rates. His essay 'The Singular Century' deals with energy sustainability given the world's inevitably shrinking output of and reliance upon oil. He reminds us that these 300 or so years of increasing automation and affluence (the Industrial Revolution) look to be a moment in time, now as we move toward renewable energies, because no energy source of the past or the future is so dense, or packed with power, as oil and its derivatives like gasoline. Our growth and takeover of nature will be curbed by built-in limits (which techno-optimists still believe we will indefinitely overcome.) My take is that nothing in nature--including ourselves--can extend its dominion forever; we would have to be gods, not mortals in physical bodies with physical needs. We need to take into account that an expanding population and raw resources on this finite earth are at odds with each other.

Older and sadder, I have to learn to be a lamp lit from within, if I can, by grace of what passes my windows. It's therapeutic to conjure up moments in a desert day--the Badlands?- though I have scarcely gotten acquainted with any of Earth's deserts. I trust that Creation on its own habitually tends toward beauty which the questing soul involuntarily drinks, even if evolved in a distinctly different kind of region than where we're living now.