I’ve spent the last two days curating through the oh, so many photographs I took in India. (Death by digital photography is a legitimate peril, especially for excessive types like me.) For those of you who can rapid fire through images and would be interested in seeing more, I’ve created a site on Shutterfly. Viewer […]
Personal
Back from India
Dak Thok Monastery Festival On the long flight back home from India, I kept searching for a pivot point—that spot that could bring coherence and comprehension to so many disparate experiences. I’ve never had an adventure quite like this one, one where so many extremes were in play. We came upon oppressive heat as well […]
Journey to India
I leave today for India. We’ll be in the southern region for a week before heading up to Ladakh. After a trek through the Himalayas, we will visit the Ajanta Buddhist temple caves in Maharashtra. I have been trekking with this group of friends for over 15 years, but this is the first time I […]
Moving in the Landscape as One of Its Details
This was a weekend with a disruptive sense of time. It made me think of an essay by the poet Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods” in which he describes making a trip to a forest in Kentucky. He leaves work, drives hard over the interstate highways for over an hour, then finally arrives […]
Interior Space Deep in the Human Heart
Early on in my art education, a professor told me a parable I have never forgotten. Long ago, an emperor in China loved ducks. Inordinately. His passion was so overwhelming that he called forth the greatest artist and calligrapher in his kingdom and made his request: I want you to create the ultimate image of […]
Tribeswoman
May Swenson (1913-1989) was born in Logan Utah to a Swedish immigrant Mormon family, the eldest of ten children. After finishing college at Utah State University, she moved East, teaching at Bryn Mawr and several other universities. Well respected as a poet during her lifetime, she is known for her proclivity to closely align nature […]
Surfacing into a New Season
This weekend was like the joyride down the mountain you spent a grueling morning pedaling up. For the first time in three months I had three halcyon days with no hint of that ambient grief that arrived uninvited, filled my front room with baggage and has blocked my view ever since. Maybe it was the […]
Ups, and Downs
In my studio yesterday, I felt some of the old familiar feelings of “flow”, a sense of things that invariably calls up an unforgettable line from Mary Oliver: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a quiet place, that soft animal of my body right now. […]
Court and Spark
I had my three children in three years. (It didn’t take much back then, just washing our clothes in the same batch could have done the trick…) During those years when they were small, I took some time off from painting. Once I was out of the acute care phase and could consider getting back […]
Into the Grain of the Cloud
For two months now I’ve been digging in the field of grief and loss with nothing but a spoon. So when my husband David and two other friends commented this weekend on how “intense” (code word for a variety of dark and heavy descriptors) my recent postings here have been, I got the message. Time […]