Rooted in Place and Time

I'm interested in making connections in my work with the seasons and cycles of nature. I admire the earth's resilience in the face of human encroachment and destruction and am also drawn to the natural cycles of aging, decay and regeneration - ever beautiful and impermanent.

I decided to start a new group of works this Fall by paying attention to the colors around me and observe how they shift with each season. I started cutting out shapes to collage and moving them around, making a first "rocks and cliffs" sample to help me visualize possibilities. Even simple shapes, textures and colors can suggest to others what I see and feel.

Most of the reference photos of rocks and cliff formations I’ve taken are from vacations - stunning cliff formations like the Grand Canyon or the red rocks in Arizona. Now I'm seeking out the cliffs and rock formations where I live and considering ways to interpret them abstractly. This photo is near a waterfall about an hour's drive from my home. I appreciate the ragged outcroppings - they look like layers of shale, worn and broken over time. I can translate these visually in some way, have many options. Finding the methods that please me the most is part of the challenge of being a creative.

One of my favorite forays this summer was to the Salmon River Falls State Preserve, which is close to our summer camp in Bernhards Bay, NY. I saw both wonderful formations of rocks, and beautiful found lines in how they intersect as the waters have shaped them over time.

Since my work is abstract and not representational, it offers an additional challenge; how to create a surface that captures the feeling of rocks and stones and rock formations without making them realistic.

My first samples have been informative and spontaneous. I keep getting new ideas for what mediums to use and ways to embellish them - drawn or painted shapes and lines, or cut and collaged lines and shapes.

I tried cutting some lines today radiating out from a grouping of rocks to suggest striations. They're not even glued down, just a suggestion of one way I might proceed. There is a kind of gleefulness in creating a challenge like this and then inventing ways to try to make it work, tackling an idea from several different directions just for the stimulation of trying to find more than one way to solve the various problems that arise. I love the moments when a new idea pops in and I can start imagining ways to make it work visually.

Striations seem to be a hallmark of the rock formations I see in my region, and I will continue to make quick samples to try out the various ideas that keep popping into my mind.

Cycles, Circles and Transitions

September 17- 22, 2024: A full Harvest Supermoon and the Autumn Equinox created quite a celebratory week. I wanted to honor this transition of the seasons and the weekend responded with picture perfect weather - so I celebrated how much progress I had made over the summer in my pollinator garden plus the completion of my year-long appreciation art project (soon to be revealed!).

As the full-moon arrived, I was completing the last of 76 small works I had created throughout 2024 in celebration of my approaching milestone birthday in October. The full moon always increases my energy levels so I rode that wave and enjoyed the thrill of seeing the finish line. I love the feeling of completion. Then the weekend arrived and I began my Autumn Equinox celebration.

There's a farm market a few miles down the road from us that I had never visited, so I decided to head there on Saturday. My first suprise was discovering a massive field of sunflowers in full bloom on the way! It was an amazing feeling to step into such a vast array of the sunflowers spreading out over acres into the distance.

Then I reached the farm market. DuVall Farm Market is a family-run farmstand, just built a few years ago, but it has a charming country store feel to it that was just what I wanted to enjoy.

I found small, decorative pumpkins and also discovered they sell pie pumpkins, so I decided to make some low-sugar pumpkin spice bread, for the Equinox, which I did. It was tasty and didn't cause a leap in my blood sugar, a win-win.

Sunday morning I woke early, eager to make my garden mandala to celebrate the Equinox. I felt both joy and gratitude for all the work I'd done expanding my pollinator haven. Now the growing season was ending. Only the late-blooming false blue indigo had new blossoms.

I gathered leaves and flowers to arrange with the mini-pumpkins into a mandala at the edge of my native plant garden. From spring though late August, I planted between 40-50 new plants (lost count!), both sun and shade lovers.

I arranged the pumpkins and plant materials into circles radiating outwards. I loved the way it looked, simple andcolorful.

Once I completed it, I sat at the edge of the garden looking at all my old and new plants, filled with appreciation for the sheer joy of creating something positive and life affirming.

I had thought a lot about creating a ceremony to accompany this garden altar, but in the end I just brought out a stool and sat with all my plants and thanked them for growing, for flowering and bringing me joy. Then I thanked the earth, the wind, the trees and plants and birds and all the other-than-human beings who have brought me such purpose and pleasure working here.

I reaffirmed my pledge to create habitats for them to find food and shelter and places to reproduce and support the healing and regeneration of the earth for all living beings. I closed my time in the garden with a small prayer of blessing and thanks, because I feel a true love and connection with nature I didn't feel until I committed to doing this.

My vision is simple - I want to create a wide path of reclaimed turf through our seven acres that is dedicated to pollinators and native plants and bushes, and keep learning how to design, improve and expand that.

If the idea of helping pollinators calls to you, you will find a lot of support and information at Wild Ones for how to begin rewilding any size yard.

Writing as a Sacred Practice

September 10 - 17, 2024

I started this post on Monday morning, September 16th, the day before the Harvest Moon. I attended an online freewriting and sharing group led by Nancy Kilgore though Burlington Writers Workshop, which I just discovered and joined. Synchronistically, the class turns out to be a perfect fit.

I have returned to writing, not in the ways I wrote earlier in my life, not the teenage diary entries suffering over prettiness or boys, not the long, soul-searching essays questioning life’s purpose and meaning, not the magazine articles I wrote profiling artists, not the corporate marketing and non-profit development newsletters and fund-raising appeals I wrote, or even blog posts about process, art theory or practice.

My return to writing is driven, in part, by both hope and despair. I hold hope high in esteem, because I believe we create our lives by choosing the lenses through which we view the world. Division and destruction can challenge my hopeful beliefs about humanity and our future. But even at those times I can also see the beauty of human compassion and loving-kindness through all the turmoil.

As despair began creeping in with the 2016 elections, then multiplied and magnified with mass shootings, extremism and a global pandemic, I made the choice to withdraw from the world. The whole culture felt toxic and frantic and apocalyptic.

I did find some peace through nature and creating in my isolation, but I am a person who has a lot of curiosity and a deep need to explore the world and challenge myself. That brought me back to the idea of writing. I wanted to write again but I needed a new perspective on it to create a foundation I could invest in with whole-heartedness and genuine enthusiasm.

In the Monday morning writing group I just attended, we sat in silent meditation and the words “a sacred writing practice” popped into my mind. I pay attention when words pop into my head. I’ve learned, as a creative, they are often messages from my inner wisdom and merit careful attention.

Of course, my mind immediately leapt in and began asking, what actually is sacred writing?  Is it only about conventional religions and their tenets?

I contemplated the concept of “sacred” and how much I respond to the word on a feeling level. I was tempted to look up the definition in a dictionary, but then I realized the answer to that question is not what a dictionary or any "authority" says but rather, what do I say? What is sacred to me? If I choose those things and write about them, then is that not a sacred practice?

So what in my current life is sacred? I keep an altar in my studio that I change with the seasons, where I light candles and set intentions and reflect with gratitude on the many blessings that fill my life. I can write about that.

I have a growing passion for native plants and am creating a large pollinator garden on our property; by doing this, I join the growing movement of humans who want to be stewards to rather than destroyers of the natural world. I picture my garden forming a chain with others across this whole region and creating a large pollinator pathway where native plants, trees and bushes provide healthy habitats for these vital small beings. I can write about that.

I love learning and reading books; they provide insights and new perspectives and teachings. I don’t often read books cover to cover. When I have ideas or questions, I go to my book shelves and frequently find the perfect chapter or page that offers options and resources. I often build small piles of these books around me. When the piles grow large or unwieldy or I don’t need them anymore, I put them back on the bookshelves, and let the process begin again.

Happily I am also surrounded by objects that I call sacred. They are often simple, like the faded woven reed bowl I fill with found feathers. I purchased the now-faded bowl in New Mexico decades ago when my family was all alive and living there, from a large imported Mexican goods store that I loved to visit, filled with bright textiles and baskets.

Seeing the sacred in the ordinary and every-day is the direction my life seems to be taking.

As I move around our home and my studio space, I see items, some arranged intentionally and some by chance. They all take on a new importance when I pause and really take time to see and consider them. In this creative life I choose to live, they are touchstones, rich with memory and my own appreciation for their meaning. When I acknowledge them, my sense of rootedness in place, in time, in my own changing body feels supported and uplifted by their presence.

Perhaps it is not just writing that is sacred, perhaps my whole life, when I allow it, is as well. My whole experience and history as a human are unique and sacred and I can carry that with me, draw on it for strength and sustenance when needed and share it with others as a gentle reminder of our connectedness.