Images from “Winter Seed’s Promise”
I have just returned from a week in Taos, New Mexico, where I taught “Winter Seed’s Promise.” The students collected seeds over the winter, and also on walks on the grounds where we all stay in Taos. The seeds became images of promise, possibility, fragility, curiosity, secrets, and time. Seeds were the inspiration for writing, drawing and painting from beginning students to professionals. There was an international atmosphere in our classroom with French, Italian, American and German students.
Below are lots of images inspired by seeds, and further down is the work with alphabet variations:
A Tattered Yearning
On this side of the world February is a quiet, introspective time, often accompanied by the yearning for spring. It can be a dark and dreary time, but this is fertile ground for making and creating. Creativity is fed by allowing darkness, boredom, loneliness and uncertainty — allowing these unwelcome things to rise and make something of themselves. I am thinking about how the seeds we plant now, in the earth or in our hearts, are the ones that blossom in spring. The spring needs our seeds.
What gorgeous thing
I reached for the bacon and found a poem.
It’s Sunday morning; I am making our weekly brunch in the kitchen: southwestern grits with cheese and salsa. Yellow grits that need the final garnish. I open the freezer, and when I reach for the bacon out falls an envelope addressed to no one. Inside the envelope is a sheet of paper with a typewritten poem beginning I don’t know what gorgeous thing the bluebird keeps saying. The poem is accompanied by a tiny songbird feather, smaller than my little finger, that floats down to my feet. The delicate feather of a bluebird fallen from an unaddressed envelope with a poem found next to the frozen green beans.
Wherever the poem with its bluebird song, and a feather, wherever it came from (no one has yet confessed to putting it in the freezer), the day was permanently altered by mystery and gratitude. I consider it another blessing, regardless of how it came to be beneath the bacon. And why not? There is the continuing story of our bluebird house — it sits in full view of our kitchen, and I am thrilled each spring when the pair returns. But last spring the bluebirds were chased off by the house wrens. This was after they had laid four beautiful blue eggs. When the house wrens took over we grieved the bluebird eggs until the day we found a fledgling struggling alone on the ground. This baby bluebird, whose vanquished parents would not return, died in my son’s open palm. We buried his feathered body with its tiny feet, and its lovely beak that will never sing, with my father’s ashes. Three generations in love with winged things.
What sustains you in collective loss and anxiety?
If you are not exhausted by months of Covid, the upcoming US election, and the uncertainty and tumult that has visited our world, then you are among the few. What sustains you and replenishes you in this time of collective loss and uncertainty?
The answer, of course, is mostly known. But how often do we pause long enough to hear the voice inside, and the answer that is waiting? I make an effort to begin the day by reminding myself to wake up slowly, to extend the time between waking and sleeping. I just don’t let myself get out of bed with my mind racing ahead like it wants to … and there is plenty of time for screens later. There is an implosion of “newspaper truth,” which by its nature needs to be dramatic or dismal to get our attention. My only hope is to begin by extending the morning quiet. Just this morning, in the wee hours, the full blue moon got me out of bed, and outside in it. What a comfort she is in her constancy and change, unceasingly waning and waxing, departing and returning, from total darkness to lambent light. Millions and countless millions of years of gliding across the night, witnessing every kind of disaster and miracle. I feel certain we all have a moon inside — a witness, something that returns and brightens after every darkest night.
Hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his journal on the necessity of slowing down, gazing … looking long enough at something until that something itself becomes alive. Any of you who have beheld the object you are drawing long enough know what I am talking about. Stones, apples, lamp posts and books — all things have their presences.