A Sudden Obituary (a bit Late) and the Legacy in Art and Mountain Panorama

A friend of mine going back thirty-three years died, I just learned over the past week-end by accident, a year to the date that we last saw each other. Before that week in early June 2012 it had been twenty-one years since we last visited, other than over the phone. She lived in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, and was a marvelous teacher, gardener and player of stringed instruments. A music teacher and ex-librarian, she was my mentor, without ever admitting to the decided value of the hugely varied lessons she imparted to me. I'm so far left wondering what could have happened, accident or illness, to have felled this staunch person at an age, 70, that seemed too soon.

Last summer, buoyant with my old youthful joy borne of spending time in the deep countryside with this friend (our acquaintance goes back to those years in Indiana, a state then significantly more rural than it is today) I drove from Duluth out to Rapid City, South Dakota in one long day full of lofty clouds and sun, touring in the car a ways around the Oahe Reservoir outside the city of Pierre as dusk settled. Next day it was on, via the Theodore Roosevelt National Grassland, to Wyoming in that area between Buffalo and Sheridan, where immediately the same day I began to get acquainted with new birds of the Rocky Mountain valleys: the red-naped sapsucker and the calliope hummingbird. The watercolor kit had ridden with me in the car and a profusion of hound's tongue or gypsy flower on sunlit ground (per my friend locally called the beggar's fleas) challenged me to a several-days' botanical painting effort.

The hound's tongue is a weed of pastures, not a native North American herb, yet in its peculiar fuzziness and olive drab overtone, its florets the meaty pink of a dog's dripping tongue, it seems as habituated into the nearby mountain slopes as my friend, a native of Germany, was absorbed into the high elevations of the American West. I found a patch of ground with both sun and shade where I could sit, where a specimen of hound's tongue or Cynoglossum officinale made itself available, and spent four to five days finishing the details in watercolor and gouache. The card front in its photo is shown here, with a link to where it's for sale:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/103227055/blank-note-card-botanical-watercolor?


When I think about that gypsy flower in blossom alongside a sparkling rill beneath a line of cottonwood trees, with magpies' prattle over in the sun's direction and from behind me the flattened little death-knell sound, like a screech owl without the tremolo, that later proved to be the western wood pewee, I think about our car excursions up to the passes in the Bighorns near the Montana state line, where snowbanks enclosed the two paved lanes on either side. My friend, putting in her gardens for the year's food crop, never-the-less took afternoons off to drive me with her to such places as Shell Falls and Crazy Woman Canyon; we saw miles and miles of the changing topography that makes up Wyoming including sub-alpine slopes with whitebark pines, and way below them the red rock chasms, sagebrush deserts and, partway up again in elevation, meadows dampened by snow-fed springs, a-flit with mountain bluebirds the greenish blue of a twilit sky.

I remember her explanations of the sights around us: her elderly Australian sheep dog with the bald and hanging teats and one crossed eye, formerly the property of some unnamed sheep herder who had obviously used her to commercially breed pups and almost as likely had kicked her face at some point near one eye socket. This dog had entered into a new life at the grand age of ten. Her career as a companion dog must have felt to her like a paradise, one old lady rescued and given to another to ease their joint tragedies past into vaguest after-impression. 

My friend explained runaway truck lanes I had glimpsed from the highway in another tragic story out of local news: a young transport driver fell asleep in his cab somewhere high above Sheridan or Buffalo, realized on waking that he'd lost his chance to use the emergency lane and knew he was fated to crash into the town below the heights in order to make his final stop. He dialed 911 and had the local sheriffs clear the whole route ahead of him and provided his speed and location. As predicted, with the main thoroughfare into town fully emptied of cars and trucks, he hurtled into view on schedule, missed a diagonal bend and crashed to his death into a building already vacant, the walls and roof collapsing around him. The local folk took up a collection for his widow and tiny children.

There was the day I spent mostly alone, creeping along the Penrose hiking trail, further teaching myself the local flora like the clematis folk-named sugar bowls, and somewhere along the way finding my first Lazuli bunting singing to the sunny afternoon so much like the indigo bunting of the Midwest. Eventually my friend dialed my cell phone to check that I still answered and hadn't fallen prey to any cougars or armed strangers or dropped off a precipice. One night we splurged like hungry girls with the metabolism of youth, eating three platefuls apiece of Asian buffet meat and vegetables. In her dining nook I ate roast bear and heart of venison for my first time. I learned of treating old bronchial mucous with cups of mullein tea, and vowed I'd forage my own back in Minnesota, as I have now done.

So now, more than a year later, with the western expanses of America a beacon in my memory each day I make my living in the north-central U.S., I have the gypsy flower art image to help remind me of this legacy in the person of a great critic, teacher and humanitarian, who had once beguiled me into thinking she had been born a Romany gypsy, an adoptee saved from one of the orphanages the Hitler regime set up for selective breeding. The gypsy flower might, among other things, stand for the drifter and re-colonizer in people and species the world over. She told me on the last visit that the half-gypsy girl had really been her cousin by adoption.

When I envision the future with its dire impending constraints like unaffordable car ownership and withering summer droughts taking place between floods and consequent washouts along high-country roads like those in the Bighorns, I wonder what will happen to byroads between hubs of commerce and manufacturing. Will patches of old America and for that matter old Europe and other places still flourish, visitable by ordinary folk who yearn over collective memory of them? I tend to think that they will, if at great expense in money and personal safety, somehow--maybe by bus or bike, van, wagon train or foot...

Feeling like a Queen of the Prairie

I am celebrating the great, unexpected good fortune of being able to live in the country again, as I did through childhood, at the urging of good friends an hour from Duluth--and celebrating the concept of summer everlasting in our minds, summer with its weird discoveries or epiphanies from the natural world. Maybe half a mile down the road from my new shared home is this stand, just below the road bank, of a native American prairie plant classified within the giant rose family, called queen-of-the-prairie. It will be in a watercolor which I mean to develop at its own pace.

While we in our fifties or coming into our sixties feel or see our own aging process, a wild and lesser-known plant like this one, especially one this uncommon, coming into its prime just off our shoulder speaks to us of rejuvenation, whether it's individual or community. When I first saw this plant while passing in a fast walk, I knew it by name immediately, though I'd never seen it in the flesh, only in pictures in several wildflower manuals. Some plants and animals are like that, so showily distinctive that some photo in some book instills a lasting memory.

Queen-of-the-prairie is like a pink floss or a foam on top of its pale orangey green stalk. Originating, apparently, in the northern and central prairies of the United States where there's wet soil, the plant has found its way eastward into New England by way of plantings. Down in the grasses below the inflorescence are the leaves, colonial, sharply veined and toothed, deeply lobed and golden-green. What a privilege, to share habitat with things like this that nobody contrived or apparently sowed here, it just came into being by natural process through thousands of years and holds out, where nobody may for the longest time have grazed livestock or mown hay.

Watch for the 2013 watercolor, which continues my line of native North American plant note cards. I'd halfway like to have it done right now, right here to advertise the whole set of works. But every time I get down to business at one of these, trusting a folding chair will protect me from the bite of deer ticks, I have to consciously tell myself that the project can't be hurried or the whole thing suffers. Evolution takes eons; artwork meant for its glorification should take as long as the artist's whole life support system demands, as long as the inevitable mistakes take to be found and overcome, as long as the utmost patience will bear.

I am so full of gratitude, when I stop to think, of all that's been possible and may yet be possible in my time.

Away to California but Back to Mid-Continent - Refinding a Hardy Ephemeral

Better late than never--courtesy of generous friends I was recently able to visit the West Coast for my first time, spending a week in Sonoma County, California. For anyone who has never ridden Amtrak's Empire Builder westward or east along the Canadian border, skirting Glacier National Park in Montana, connecting at Portland, Oregon with the Coast Starlight which climbs up and over the Cascades to chug up or down Oregon and California, it's armchair travel worth the money and the time.

I had never been in California or any of the Pacific Northwest, and never seen a palm tree growing naturally out-of-doors. Occidental, California where we stayed, is in the thick of redwood country and nestles among the hills of the Coast Range. Taking it for granted that in our time the landscape of most inhabited places would still be recognizable to our ancestors a few centuries back, the look of north central California today, take away the grape and olive plantations, the estates and the towns with their ornamental groves of imported trees and flowers, would have been the color, texture and tree outline carried home by the European horseback travelers who first scoped it out as a paradise where they'd make their new homes. Most landscapes must remind a newcomer of places where they'd lived or traveled, but as I made my acquaintance with the definitive trees of this forest, redwood and tan oak, California laurel, interior live oak and Pacific madrone, I knew beyond a daydream that I was on the other side of mountain ramparts distinctly separating me from the Midwest, Ontario and New England, the places I've walked the most. Redwood structures and outlines do not resemble those of any other conifer in my experience.

At Powell's City of Books, the giant used-book store in Portland, Oregon I bought introductory manuals for the trees and wildflowers of California. Especially informative was the older book, Trees of California by Willis Linn Jepson, published by the University of California in 1923. The circular pattern of redwood shoots' maturation into a ring of full-size trees, the centrality of redwood lumber in the history of California's statehood, and the huge diversity of pines and firs to be found if a person traveled inland and northward from Sonoma County are all impressions I gained from that little book with its exquisite pen-and-ink illustrations of cones and foliage drawn to scale in an age before photography could adequately show the hallmarks of trees, herbs, plumage, etc. 

We passed time along the fog-drenched and wind-whipped Pacific Coast, as cold as Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota--counter to my biased expectations. My most vivid plant encounter along those state-owned pull-outs and beaches near Bodega Bay was with outcrops of pink and lavender blossoms, their anatomy so much like the fleabane from Midwestern brushlands but growing squat on the ground, the flowers the width of a little girl's hand. The leaves were three-cornered and fleshy like exotic desert foliage, but I wanted to think of these plants, creeping on the ground in typical adaptation to ever-recurring gales, as members of the composite family which includes the daisies, asters and sunflowers. With the other purchase from Powell's, The Wildflowers of California, Their Names, Haunts, and Habits by Mary Elizabeth Parsons (Dover Publications, Inc. of New York, 1966), but most of all with a tip from my host Barbara who called it ice-plant, and then the internet, I learned that these flowers were of a totally other family called fig-marigold, or Mesembryanthemum, most members of which strayed to America from southern Africa. Ms. Parsons, the handbook's author, speculated that the three species known along the California coast may have taken root without the direct help of human hands.

We car-traveled around the county between the towns of Occidental, Guerneville, Sebastopol, Jenner and Santa Rosa, allowing me the chance to walk and see twelve new species of birds, most of which I wouldn't reliably meet east of the Pacific seaboard. From the bus windows between Santa Rosa and Martinez, the train stop, I saw agricultural flatland, always backed by the hazy storm-cloud blue of the dry mountain chain that lends the Coastal Range its special character, the land as a whole provoking impressions not new but familiar, gathered from book- and article-reading down the years, sealed by awareness of being nearly as far west as possible in the continental U.S.

Sun, as in sunny California of course gives this land its reputation for days and days at a time, baking and cracking mud into tiles, irregular hexagons and octagons, in a wildfowl refuge nearly devoid of ducks, that we passed alongside. Fields adjoined streamside groves between dwellings fenced and tree-sheltered, the evening angle of the sun mellowing the daylight across all this semi-arid backdrop of anonymous settlers' westward dreams of space and moderate climate, lives either chosen or settled for, since the settler had run out of choices on meeting the coast. Though I didn't feel at home,  I was glad to have visited here firsthand, as a validation of so much amassed magazine-reading and almost-envisioned vista through the eyes of novelists like John Steinbeck.

In the weeks just before this two-week trek, back in northern Minnesota I had watched one of the most reluctant onsets of spring ever in my memory, snows arriving like sweepings from some overhead storage loft into the month of May. One significant Saturday hour by hour gave way to a parade of overlapping winter and spring weather drama, yielding everything but a summer thunderstorm. That day I was driving backroads north by east from the town of Aitkin--which the previous day had hosted a rare painted bunting that had blown this way from the Gulf Coast region but likely blown homeward before the night's frigid reblast from the north--to the township of Meadowlands. All this countryside is nearly as flat as river delta; much of it was prehistoric lake bed that contains peat bogs. Stopping at the home and work space of good friends I went wandering toward the St. Louis River where the prior week-end I had been startled by blue-violet petals on the woods floor like a revolt, a freakish kind of blossoming in defiance of persistent freezing. This was the native perennial hepatica or, as foretold by its Latin name hepatica americana, a woodland harbinger of spring in the American heartland, modest like so many cold-tolerant plants, the leaves lobed and purple-splotched, a little bit suggestive of a liver.

As I stood over the isolated flowers they looked mostly the blue of the ever-amassing and scattering storm clouds marking that early afternoon rather than lavender. Any effort to start a watercolor out there would take on the speckles of melting snow pellets so I just took photos and hurried back to the house, the whole mood of the day become one of hurry-hurry, gales from the north overhead roaring in the woods canopy, driving clouds, admitting sun, strewing snow that switched to rain and back to white pellets. Sometimes a deluge whitened out my view from the car between meadows but before I got back among the trees the sun would boom into clarity and raise the outside temperature on the car's readout by seven or eight degrees in scant minutes.

Austere border country of a kind shared between the U.S. and Canada, unlike the fields, gardens or redwood sanctuaries of California, has its parallels in a nation of less diverse human culture with fewer naturalized Eurasian trees and shrubs, a more raggedy, homogeneous bushland that resonates as the Canadian provinces, Minnesota and the Dakotas must with lands in Russia or Scandinavia. Inhospitable fens, cliffs and badlands beckon to some people with a fascination that might compare with the allure of moldy basements, industrial ghettos or warehouses good for the game of dungeons and dragons or photography of failing architecture in all its glory of ideals.

Accompanied on that long midday drive by a CD on the car stereo, Nordic Roots, "An ideal introduction to the vibrant traditional music scene developing across the Nordic lands: incredible playing, catchy tunes, brilliant arrangements and strange instruments playing pre-medieval as well as modern compositions", produced by the label NorthSide in Minneapolis,  I was full of themes that deserved commingling, the hepatica or liverleaf at the center because it showed itself in the vanguard of the coming season of flowers. Infinite yearly cycles, condensed into one day's crippled start at spring  felt represented in that music and in that scene of a struggling herb on the ground, carried home in that vision that became this card image.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/154636427/north-country-note-card-blank-card-with?

Spring, not to be Denied

Sun-lovers move where the sun, in an opinion like my own, overwhelms a typical daytime sky, and in temperate zones they're apt to bemoan every cloudy delay to the green season, often including the rainy spells that signal the buds to open. A few of us, who define ourselves as odd, scruffy, wolvish in our orientation to the wild and natural most of the time, but clad in a stack of shirts, knits and jackets, secretly delight in the shivering of the bare bushes even if we curse the sea-borne winds that bite our hands and make us grab gloves even in May, because a heat-baked outdoor scene to us feels loud as if light from the sun could be heard shrieking or roaring; we have to get away to where the sounds are fainter and movement slower and tentative in response to other movement, sensed or suspected. Still, we cold-weather types freeze and peer, crouched low or standing tall, awed by any number of springtime discoveries. 

Yesterday, these wild cherry buds were breaking open, tight and yellow-green.

Nearby a noise overhead stopped me in my stride--a mechanical stutter like some bygone hand-held tool with a couple of moving parts, something small and steely and something heavier with a grinding clatter. One merlin, small and extra-nimble like something shot out then retracted by an elastic cord, was besieging a crow where the road led between trees and river's mouth. The crow made the low clatter, the falcon jingled. Apart and together, apart and back together, swinging more and more to one side, the siege continued, antics and face-offs a hallmark of  the motives of spring's general awakening.

Later that day, indoors in the call center where I work, I was remembering hepaticas from last week-end, in woods an hour by car to the northwest, isolated whitish blue-violet outbursts from brown leaf litter, barely offset by any first sprigs of green anywhere on the ground or above. The leaves stood apart from from the flowering stalks, old-green with red tinges, lobe-shaped like a liver.

All these seem precursors to the leafburst and the months of summer. Late as this spring has been,  when it arrives we have a menu of items to call to mind, observe, harvest and protect. Here is a set of spring floral note cards for sending your thoughts or for using wherever you can use them.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/96314046/spring-flowers-card-set-of-6-peonies? 

Ruptures or Shutdowns are, Eventually, our Fate

What do I know now? I have lost what I feared all along I was losing, seeing plenty of warning signs, but I waited to see it through. Now I know...this much, and it feels...this bad, and it can only be true that a new period of adjustment will follow, in the knowledge that all over the whole wide world tragedies do hit so many of the most wretched souls in multiples. The earth seethes with the shock and bereavement of all manner of beings, human and non-human, even less noticed than tainted seepage oozing from hidden underground flows.

We almost never read about the evolution of the pain suffered after news stories have covered kidnappings and murders or cases of ravaging disease--how the survivors briefly escape from it and then return, the reconciliations within the mind, the stages and their triggers for fresh starts made for better or for worse. What if there were a separate news bureau devoted to victims' and families' outcomes in the years following after high-profile crises? More usually this is the stuff of private diaries, autobiographies and therapists' notes or even fiction, where it's ever recorded at all.

But in my case I'm talking about heartbreak, much more routine than murder and mayhem. 

O the love relationships that each of us may have sanctified based on rosy conclusions reached and savored like the most exquisite marbles, all in our own private minds! And the writers who have written that they knew a fellow person's thought, could just see it, knew absolutely what would come next, when the fulfillment of that knowledge owed itself instead to well-imagined guesswork. There is no science of what people will do, or how things will turn out in the end, after so many lesser, day-to-day conclusions.

If we felt sure that we read someone's heart, saw the delight in it that corresponded to our own, then noticed it recede or learned that we misread the face and the words, how are we ever to ascertain the degree to which our intuitions about the loved person or the potential for fulfillment as a couple were wrong, or how much the obstacles to a shared future lay more in ourselves or in the other person? And are we safe in trusting our intuitions about new love again?

In  July 1990, another agonizing time, I wrote this poem about the lasting power of infatuation, called  
A Panorama of Loves:

   Stars! Near, immense stars, far, far sown--
   each one, unknown jewelwork of hovering starlets--
   each a beloved, replete in its majesty.
   Forces do breach and strew them, bursting them
   from within, sometimes, off through the gape of stars.
   One star may dazzle another, but does it escape and flare,
   star of its own fate, or smother itself in strange starfire?
   Shooting-stars flee across ages of waiting space--
   breathtaking traces unfurl through their wakes, decades long.

   ©2012

Some time near that same date came this other poem, Grief: The Exile:

   The old boat rises,
   and settles, its timbers controlled by
   the waves that divide them and nails that uphold their oneness.
 
   Why hast thou left me to rupture away from thy pillar?
   Thou couldst have hefted me loose long ago, with thy hand
   unsnagging my anchor.

   The old boat straggles,
   and wallows, the stub of a rope floating
   hopeless to anchor me ever again.

   ©2012

Blessed are a long memory, and better yet a time out sharing between intimate friends, for dicing up and scattering the thoughts that humiliate us or freeze us in a place we'd best be moving beyond. Blessed every bit as much are the tricklings of well-being when we least expected them and can't account for them: thoughts of space and opportunity, or realizations that we pre-grieved for a while so this latest, really, came mostly as plain old heart-ache rather than shock.

Blessed are old, timeless things--how many can this industrializing world maintain, unwittingly or determinedly?--since they reliably gave comfort when sought. The sore thoughts may be at bay now but raw pain, its special loneliness, won't leave till sometime--I trust--we notice that it has departed the way a body ache has healed and gone; we suddenly observe that we haven't been suffering that thing lately.


 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/103302109/encouragement-cards-landscape-photo-card?
 

 
https://www.etsy.com/listing/94873894/botanical-watercolor-set-of-7-large-gift?





































.+

On the Wing...Compensating as Best we Can

It is true, just as written in a 19th-century medical encyclopedia I remember browsing many years ago in the Irwin Library's Rare Book Room at Butler University down in Indianapolis, that the best antidote for sorrow is a change of scene. Sorrow, of course, is a broad outcome of our common inability to see so many situations fully for how we got into them and can get, gradually, out again. Sadness also comes from the expectation of loss, and all the echoing loss we know will follow afterward. Eventually the person has to acknowledge being self-entrapped in circumstances not right for the long term, and must own being powerless to do anything about it other than break away with a full complement of still more painful regrets. So the answer, fully endorsed by the antique medical reference with its long-winded title and subtitle, for me was to head off to Minneapolis. An invitation to attend a concert down that way had been timely.

It felt a bit thrilling to hit the freeway and car-power my way through jurisdictions southward, after driving only streets, state roads and a few bits of semi-urban freeway all the weeks since January...to visit another friend at her art gallery in the farming outskirts of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area...then land at the rooming house called the Alamo among other sturdily decrepit houses edging up to Dinkytown, all the while beguiled away from the thoughts that had been leading me between eddying ponds of doubtfulness. Older history would catch me up once I exposed myself to it; here was this concert over at Sundin Music Hall in my former St. Paul environs (see bachsocietymn.org) with six men and six women pronouncing old Latin and Hebrew texts embedded into the musical scores of J.S. Bach, Heinrich Schutz and an Italian composer, Salamone Rossi; what an embroidery, a labor, of lives and learning, discovery and re-discovery. These ancient languages, intoned in harmony by people still sleek-faced with youth, in an age when we communicate more and more in acronym and other computer-driven code. What work, what agelessness, an exhibit of things worth keeping when so much background from their time has crumbled away and shed both its poisoning and its nourishing properties.

On the way back my Minneapolis-based friend and I came through another forecast snow squall as we traveled up two-lane Wisconsin 35. Temperatures were a degree or two above freezing; nearing the town of Siren, I felt the little car skidding even at reduced speeds and joined the few other drivers crossing up through town at a creep. Slush lay over the pavement and could be expected all the way along the seventy-some miles remaining till we reached the Twin Ports and my apartment. But highway treatment must have been applied past the town of Webster, where we abruptly left behind the slickness to continue along shining wet blacktop like a beacon the whole rest of the way, no other traffic in sight amid the white-out that swirled on all sides. Once to the right I saw the orange breast of a woodcock wheeling up-over startled, wings triangular, mission his own version of safety. In enough regards the scene out our windows could have been November or December except for the long white light of a spring evening, blizzard-beset, lingering towards its own strange dusk. Far to the sides of the roadway there were likely the season's first red-winged blackbirds and maybe a meadowlark or two nestling in the sogginess, knowing how to wait it out. This is a winter that through a sequence of big snows seems to beg to be remembered. And we've been needing that moisture.

Here at home a winter's piece of work is done, an image as much about weirdness as it is about repletion, or maybe about what happens when we take on more than our bodies or unique nerve networks can bear. But the overweight hummingbird is in his element of blossoms, baggy nectar-pouches as shown, and hasn't collapsed yet. Everything is still beautiful. Right now I strive to believe that half of all anticipated troubles are never met with, because although they lurk, we refuse to go face to face with them, and instead act so as to ease the preconditions, and so something else which might be the best of all outcomes eventually takes place. The pain of coping must relax, intensify, relax and transform into other states of mind.

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