Dealing with Winter-melt

Snow melt along Lake Superior's northwestern shore must have been thickening today's low clouds that never gave way to any sunshine. But heavy overcast is okay with me--it instills, I think, a special intimacy with everything drowsing under the cloud cover. Temps. were 37 degrees F outside of Two Harbors and 39 in town along the backdrop of Lighthouse Point. No ducks or other fowl than gulls appeared on the lake. Conditions made for the most marginal weather for outdoor watercolor, but I had come scouting to find a dark ledge of local basalt cliff I could observe to finish up  a watercolor commissioned by my friend and co-worker Scott W. Crouching rather than sitting on the snow lest I get soggy jeans, I daubed in the colors of the cliff and watched the paint not dry. My parka was open, but the chilled outer edges of my hands knew the day was not much warmer than freezing; by that means I could say: it IS winter, and Decembers decades ago DID include some days of thaw, and so I can better accept this kind of winter day. I took the painting to the car to dry while the daylight dimmed and the 101st St. Olaf Christmas Festival came in on FM radio. The car is an old, first-generation Toyota Prius which, once run a short distance and warmed up, works compactly as an art studio, holding sun's warmth or engine heat inside without needing to idle by internal combustion, only the electric ignition; that experience consoles me. At least some of us are fortunate enough to have the advantages of a hybrid car.

The St. Olaf Choir buoyed me further with the sounds of the old and the new, bringing me back vistas of my central Indiana beginnings and bonding them with visions of the Upper Midwest and the boreal region, which are home now and the home of my art. The Christmas compositions said it is possible to bring old masterpieces into a new time, and the darkening day, with cosy heat in the car despite the raw air outside, said it is possible to accept some taming of winter, and adapt with a plant and animal community that is adapting as best it can to a more generic temperature regime that may, who knows, ultimately become common to all of central North America.

Just the Right Extent of Loneliness

Necessarily, I welcome time alone and have arrived at a phase in which I've got all that I could want of it. Day by day it seems I have to ask myself how much is too much. Connections from home are by phone, internet or a walk to a few businesses or kindly neighbors.

Last summer I was putting the lawn mower away when a neighbor I'd yet to talk to stepped into the doorway and invited me to stop over, two doors down, no matter when, saying "I know how it is." I must have known she was talking about social isolation; I think to be exact she may have meant marital strain at the same time since she stays home or visits nearby while her husband works in construction 180 miles away in the Twin Cities, being gone for at least a week at a time.

I eased my problem of isolation by finding a guy my own age to love but it's a situation similar to hers as he, a carpenter, has to locate near a customer base and a clinic, at least for now. So as I work from home weekdays I confront weekends right along with my own aging process, recoiling from new episodes of being all alone. It's this fear, or distaste, that I have to try and take apart. For a week at a time in northern Ontario I have coped and enjoyed my days alone, free to my own choices, with loneliness surfacing, then ebbing away, often in reaction to a sudden wild animal that made me suddenly feel I had company. This state of being is possible. I embraced it before, during and after. But didn't I know I'd be coming back where I could pick up the phone and visit, if not actually see family and friends?

Remembering that book, Women Who Love Too Much, by Robin Norwood and its advocacy for women who endure an emotional bond, marriage or whatever, with a man who isolates and wears them down invariably body and soul, I recognize the behavior pattern in myself. Seeking to improve upon my own troubled history in the child-rearing years, too often, in bouts, I fret because of the distance in miles between the man and me and our differences in temperament. I'm given to this sort of  convoluted mental suffering, time and again. Causes for it have to be taken on, dismantled all that I can dismantle them, even if the requirement imposes itself for years and years as a daily internal therapy. That whole situation recommends a person's comfort in aloneness.

I see myself suddenly as a clear stream in rocky-hilly country, high in oxygen and rippling free, inviting, involving and frank, sensitive to disturbance. My origins make me how I am. Loneliness will make me ache with cold and I'll seek solace and a functional re-integration of all my inner currents. The sun may sparkle pleasingly, which I can reflect for all to see. But does embroilment in aloneness come easier the more it's practiced?--so many conditions lessen by dint of disciplined exposure to them. Over months and years, conditioning. I would learn a new serenity and long-term contentment, maintain myself against heart soreness and shriveling and even, who knows, cancer?, this way if able to master  inevitable, especially longer and longer stints of aloneness. The lonely feelings all by themselves might just fade the way youth fades.

 So many survivors learn this or already know it.

Books, lately a masterpiece by Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves. The bog, its roads with the tamaracks and spruces shouldering close alongside, its moss hummocks helping to hide animals which may, some of them, endure heart-ache that would shock an imagined human inquirer who won a chance to resonate somehow with exactly how that creature feels, for want of its own kind or anyone. Experiments--for me, with fishing bait and technique, with bread recipes or new foods. Music. Conversations that collapse time. Chores, plants cultivated or wild, errands to town, conversations. Then another foray with the paints and pencils and pens, rag and paper and brushes, to where the eye sees and the mind's eye harmonizes, the hours pool into my own best efforts to make a realm of beings on the paper, a community in balance for the sake of wonder, magnificence and surprises. The loneliness by then would appear to be a medium for everything that matters. Day by day this will have been lived out.

.      Hearken Midwinter     9 x 11 1/4" watercolor mixed media painted in and near the Sax Zim Bog   Visit or inquire at www.epiphaniesafield.com

The Travesty That Is Today's America

Imagine that you are a big girl in a society where everyone is struggling just for food and enough water, and you have no prospects to set you apart from anybody else in the struggle. Any skills you learned have no value because no one can pay you to use them and there are no raw materials. You can't afford to think beyond the struggle. Maybe you have a sick parent or brothers and sisters who depend on you. The only thing anybody will pay you for is sex, so you can only capitulate, get a dollar or two that way and make yourself available to other possible clients for their free-ranging ideas of sex. You get pregnant that way, for sure, and maybe you pick up a disease which you will have to live with till you die. There are no clinics and no one to go to for birth control. You or girls much like you commonly deal with ten or eleven pregnancies, if not surviving sons and daughters, before your reproductive system or your body wears out. Then those offspring, almost certainly, face a future of despair comparable to yours, whichever kids live to grow up.

This is the way recent U.S. policy has willed that life should remain for the world's poorest poor women in equatorial or sub-equatorial Africa and Asia. Every Republican president since Reagan has ruled that the vile A-word should be the crux guiding foreign policy as regards family planning assistance. If a clinic in a foreign country offers abortion, makes referrals for it or recommends it in any of their practice then no U.S. funds are allowed to go there. No more evil medical procedure, these officials rule, has been condoned through official channels than the A-word, which means the snuffing of the innocent life of an unborn child by the whim of the heartless mother. It's clear-cut and it's wrong and it speaks loudest of the innate evil in the souls of men and women in their procreative years, but particularly women. So we will not condone it by any sort of U.S. funding. That's the way the official Republican thinking goes, whatever many thinking Republican sympathizers may arrive at in their own judgment.

If we are religious or spiritually-inclined and believe that a soul is given to every mortal body at conception but admit that not all who are conceived are born (for any number of reasons) and that mortal life can under some conditions be little more than wretchedness, WHY ARE WE NOT WILLING FOR PREGNANT WOMEN TO GO FOR HELP IN TERMINATING--OR EVEN PREVENTING--PREGNANCIES THEY DID NOT WANT AND CANNOT HOPE TO RESULT IN A CHILD ABLE TO SURVIVE, FLOURISH AND BE WELCOMED INTO A PREDATORY, DESTITUTE SOCIETY?

If souls are eternal, better that they populate somebody in some time or place who can expect the community to value the person, where there is hope of some earthly reward. Let pregnant mothers be free to assess that and let's get on with OUR OWN BUSINESS, let's not mind theirs as if we knew anything about what they have to cope with. In this world approaching a population of eight billion people, why do we make policy that says more, endlessly more children are God's will? Do we believe that God's will is a squalor of wasted lives, wars, unmet need and destruction of water, air, soils and other living creatures we've been sharing the earth with because we should observe no limits on ourselves? We have our own sacred cows in the U.S. value system, apparently, and these are human embryos and fetuses.

Under the Trump administration, the Global Gag Rule, revoked by President Obama, came back in fuller force than ever under previous Republican eras, taking away funding for any form of health assistance including treatment for malaria, HIV, malnutrition and any and all family planning if the recipient organization wouldn't sign a statement that they never provide abortions or refer women elsewhere for them. So, how draconian, mean and ruinous to the whole human and earthly community have we wished to become in this disunited nation?

We are intelligent enough to know that any organism including the human that grows without limits hits limits, on its air supply, its water and its bodily territory. Only a cancer tries to grow forever and so it destroys the body it afflicts. How is American Christianity, the originating belief system in support of the U.S. Global Gag Rule, upholding God and the Lord Jesus Christ by imposing early death and misery on thinking, spiritual human beings in countries that have the least remaining resources to cultivate? 

It's not our role to judge that people--women especially--in other lands, of other religious backgrounds, are less holy than we are. Moreover why do the most sanctimonious U.S. Christians feel that God approves the using-up of what may be the most beautiful, diverse planet in the universe by ourselves collectively and our industry? Do we really choose depletion, extinctions and squalor in favor of money in wealthy people's bank accounts and the stock market? Yes?

The situation in which we find ourselves, and the U.S. system of values as it appears, makes me absolutely disgusted to be an American citizen. I would sooner, if I could, retreat into history and have some other identity from before there was a United States. I would rather that the United States had never existed, with some, truly democratically-governed nation in its place.

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.