Sketchbook Journaling: September 19, Scout Mountain

Note:  This is a collection of my writings from my personal journal.  A lot of it is thinking out loud, sorting through thoughts, processing the world around me with paper and pen.  I share it with you because I think you’ll understand and relate to some of my ponderings.  I’ve shared carefully here and know you will be careful in return.  Thank you!
Love, JSL
It’s morning now.  It’s cold.  I can hear a cacophony of bird music breezing through the Douglas firs and the wind is singing careful arias in the aspen groves.  Crescendo.  Diminuendo.  My hands are freezing.  Each fingertip is an ice cap drifting on friction melted waters across the white of this page.  And now the staccato of a woodpecker.  How lucky am I to hear this symphony?  How well it matches the score of my heart.

I’m brewing a second pot of Earl Grey, just to stay warm.  Thank God the sun is just within reach of where I sit. As soon as it crested the top of Scout Mountain I could feel the air temperature swirling with warmth; like adding hot water to a cold bath.  Ah.  There now.  A fresh cup of tea for my hands.
Penelope and I have been for a long walk and back.  She looks like a small red pony galloping about in a tall Northern jungle.  At one point, she located a handful of ruffed grouse that burst into flight and drummed deeper into the forest to escape her ferocity.  At a bend in the trail, we stumbled into a few free range heifers.  When they saw me they turned and trotted deeper into an aspen grove.  With all the crashing and crackling of grasses and bush, Penelope was terrified and galloped down the trail, shrieking at the top of her lungs, until she was around the next bend and out of sight.  Some watch dog.  She’s all bark and no bite.  I wonder what she feels when she is fearful.  Is there the same thrumming of the heart that I experience?  Is she grateful when I pick her up and speak those fears away — quietly and carefully?
The light here, as all morning light is, has been so soft and blue.  It’s been easy to fill the memory card on my camera while sifting through the bits of detritus on the forest floor.
  Each berry, each leaf is so delicate and unique.  I want to honor each one with every individual image I capture.  Each thing I see, each magical dapple of sunlight drifting down from a yellowing aspen crown, deserves to be remembered for the sacredness of its immaculate and unique design.
In the same way, I want everything I create to be uniquely concocted, special in its own right, worth claiming, collecting, cherishing, loving.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask of myself as a creative person if indeed I do believe that my desire to create is a reflection of God’s ability to create.  I look around and all is so good.  There’s a crumbling humbling going on inside my chest.  Who am I. What am I.  This grace.  This grace.  I’m a child on my knees.  There’s a bloom of faith.
I try to see the world around me fully; the detail, texture and holiness of each leaf, bug, branch, bird, fish and beast.  I can’t help but want to catch everything in my hands in an attempt to cure this zealous curiosity that boils beneath the veneer of my senses.  Is that wrong?  In light of recent blog commenter harassment over catching and releasing fish, is it healthy to quench my curiosity?  Is it healthy to allow my curiosity to go unquenched?  Is it wrong for me, for my species, to interact so fully with nature, even if I’m graceful and careful in my quest?
Now the aspens are lit gold in the pour of sunshine through conifer.  Penelope has climbed inside my down jacket and is keeping my core warm.  The wind is moving through the wild rose bushes, swinging the rose hips like lady dancers on a light hearted stage.  I’ve collected a bag of rose hips, the largest rose hips I’ve seen in all my life, to go in herbal teas this winter.  I’d also love to encase a few in resin.  Their color and shape is so sublime, organic, fresh and sensual.  In point of fact, I’d like to encase this moment in this space beneath resin.  I’ll wear it over my heart to help lighten the load on heavy days.
I can hear a shotgun pounding in the distance, every now and then.  It’s Robert and Farley collecting dinner for our table tonight.  How magnificent is that?  To interact with nature this morning, to take what we need to feed our bodies and souls, and then to return to town, to the business at hand, to the grapes and plums staining the counter tops and splashing about until they find themselves locked tight in canning jars and sitting quietly on a pantry shelf until some cold day in winter we draw them out and sustain ourselves on their sun spun wholesomeness.
Oh.  The wind. The wind.  I find it remarkable that there are people in the world who have never heard the wind sigh like this, who have never been without the incessant white noise of the city.  Urban living is beautiful and ripe with convenience and the steady flow of humanity!  I sometimes fear I am out of touch with humanity.  Has it hardened me, this hermit life, has it made me less compassionate towards humans?  I’m removed from the scenes that present themselves to city dwellers.  The homeless, the addicted, the impoverished.  The living, begging and stealing of the streets; people selling all that they have, even their bodies, to feed themselves, clothe themselves, secure their next fixes.  I don’t see them.  Does it mean I don’t love them?  Does it mean it isn’t my problem or I don’t care?  Since I live in a wild space which is, ecologically speaking, just as vulnerable as a human being, is caring for this space my compassionate duty?  Is this my responsibility instead?  Do I tend to this space the way I would a broken person in a back alley?  Is it right to see nature this way?  If I need to do more as a human, for other humans, how else can I go about it besides sending money to organizations?  I love elk.  I love wolves.  I love jackrabbits.  But I need to love people too.  We all need to love people.  That’s where unity is.  It’s not enough to just tolerate the existence of others, everybody needs love.  I’m working on this concept constantly.
Last night, after the sun set, I looked up at the sky, imagined myself plucking a star as one would an apple.  There are so many up there, burning and twinkling, which would I choose and would it be selfish to keep it under glass in the living room?  Could I find a bell jar big enough for my pet celestial?  The moon offered a bright silver pulse of light into the small morning hours.  The window at my back, in the van, was open and thrust cool sheets of breeze down the small openings of my sleeping bag.
I didn’t sleep enough last night but I feel so refreshed this morning.
I haven’t showered but I feel so damn clean.
Robert is back now.  Farley too.  Happy.  Manly.  With birds in hand; probably the prettiest grouse in existence.  RW and Farley have taken four of these beauties for our dinner table for the week and it was hard work and a fair fight. They look exhausted after hiking up to the top ridge of the mountain where a Douglas fir crown grows on nearly vertical slope to find this bird and bring it home.


I’ve just finished inspecting this large male up close. I turned him over and over in my hands, taking in his mustard yellow eyelids, his underwing feathers, his tail feathers….everything about him I took in slowly and carefully. Such a beautiful bird… I’m humbled by this harvest and totally blessed to be taking the energy of this animal into my body.  There’s something so holy about hunting to eat, the effort of the work involved, the skill and courage it takes to so carefully end the life of a living thing.   I feel so sad.  I feel so thankful.  Does everything always have to be so complicated?


In a few moments we’ll load up Talulah and coast down the mountain and into town.  To ensure I return soon, I’m going to leave a small wedge of my heart behind.  I’ll tether it to a tree and come back to tend it from time to time.  It will be safe in these woods.  Surely.  It will be safe.

Northern Exposure

A friend of mine in Alaska sent me a few strips of birch bark recently.  As soon as I pulled them from the box she shipped them in, I knew they were destined to be pieces of jewelry.  Last week, I used a dash of birch bark in a necklace design!  Pure, natural, organic, soulful magic.

This pendant features a hollow form sterling structure with birch bark set under resin on the surface.  Dropping down from it is one of my sterling twirlygigs with an enameled feather in chartreuse.  A bit of pearl appears on a silk cord as well as a wee hunk of coral.

It’s Northern Exposure.
Don’t it feel good?
There’s a chill in the air.
The nights grow longer in leaps and bounds and 
up in the sky the northern lights comb neon fingers through the stars.


What does it mean to me, working with birch bark?
It brings me closer to the home I miss so much, my home in Canada, and more specifically, Northern Saskatchewan and the chain lakes and river systems that bury Precambrian shield in icy waters.  There, along the shore, grow the jack pine and the birch.  In such a silent place of deeply carpeted, dark forest, the birch tree brings lightness; lightness of being, lightness where there is so much dark.  And in that light, that delicate filtering of sunlight down to forest floor, is hope, growth and green.


Can you see it?
I can.


xx
Plume  

The Quest

I’ve been obsessed with the feathers of great blue herons for nearly a decade.  I’ve always been attracted to feathers, in general, but the magic of heron feathers has overtaken all other plumeage interest and I’ll do anything to get my hands on the darn things.

It all began about 8 years ago when I was on a climbing trip with my boyfriend at the time, we’ll call him Igor.  We were in Whiterock, BC for a few days and decided to canoe a small river that spit itself out into the ocean just off the coastline of the mainland.  As we were paddling along, I noticed a great blue heron standing on the edge of the riverbank, Igor mentioned the fact that their feathers were supposedly gorgeous.  It was like music to my ears, I commanded Igor to paddle harder and we made our way to the edge of the bank only to find that it was made of cattails and other, general riparian vegetation that made it impossible for me to make my way to where feathers might have been found.  I’ve been nearly driven mad by the elusive heron feathers of my life ever since.  This is all to say that besides all the OTHER reasons Igor and I didn’t work out (namely the fact that I was still madly in love with the dashing mountain man I’m now married to) we broke up because Igor failed to help me secure the plumes of the great blue heron.

HARUMPH.
Some fellows just aren’t up for the task at hand.

When RW and I lived in Arizona, at the nearby Southern tip of Lake Havasu, there was a great blue heron nesting sanctuary.  It was amazing!  Most unfortunately, humans were not allowed to trespass on the terra firma of the little island that tended to be aflutter with heron wings and squawking babeletts.  I occasionally dream about how many feathers I could have collected from that little sanctuary…I wake up in hot panics.

But.  Let me tell you, where Igor failed me (specifically in the heron feather realm in this situation I speak of), RW has conquered once again!  Over the weekend, whilst fishing a wee reservoir on the upper Portneuf River, we looked West from my little yellow canoe towards shore and spotted a great blue heron.  I whispered to RW, “Take me to shore.  Right there.  I must see if there are heron feathers to claim…”
He obliged.
And I found heron feathers;
the first of my sad little heron feather hunting life.
They truly are spectacular.  I tried to capture the color and sheen for you but I failed miserably.  MISERABLY.  They are of the palest greys and silvery blues — somewhat like the walls in my living room and bedroom.  Subtle coloring.  
As if by magic.
I’ve been turning them over in my hands all day long, thinking about what I’ll do with them, thinking about how precious they are to me.
In the grand and worldly scheme of things, they are nothing, they are without value.
To me, they’re soft and perfect beacons of hope,
RW helped me find them,
they make my heart light,
capturing them in this world has been a quest
they are, to me, the holy grail of feather collecting.  I love them so.
RW will read this and he’ll be annoyed that I even mentioned Igor in the first place — there’s a bit of bad blood there…though I can’t imagine why since the better man got the girl!  HA!  Sorry husband.  Don’t be angry.  Do a touchdown dance instead…

This is all to say, while fishing on the weekend, I didn’t catch a single fish
but I did find something I’ve been dreaming 
of for quite some time.

Do you have a quest?
Besides finding the perfect pair of jeans or comfortable, black ballet flats?
What is there, out there in the world, out there in the nest of nature, that speaks to you more than anything else?  Are you actively seeking it or are you able to find it every day?

*A patch of lady slippers.
*A perfect pussy willow branch.
*A hummingbird or kingfisher sighting.
*A whopper walleye caught at the base of a glorious set of rapids in the Canadian North.
*The perfectly braided lightning strike.
*A sunset.
*A finger crack that follows a beautiful line up the face of a granite wall — it burns your fingertips so bad but there’s so much pleasure found in clinging to it and climbing it — there’s so much joy to be felt in that moment when you defeat gravity.

What’s your quest?
Just wondering….

xx
P.

Suspended

Yesterday I went walking

in the ice and snow
alongside my creek.
As it trailed down the mountainside, I trailed up,
lured by the music of water,
the juniper on the breeze,
the gentle sweep of sage against boots.



The wind smelled like a whisper

up there in the bird song.
My heart swam out of my chest,
a robust ribbon,
and suspended itself in the sunlight
that faded into narrow shafts of gleam
as it traveled down through a bony aspen canopy.





The world and I dangled there;
hanging like prepositions at the end of a string of words.

Hanging like
the aftertaste of harmony
on still lips.

Tunnel Vision (and a giveaway!!!)

Since I’m waiting on a shipment of bezel to arrive at The Gables I’ve been fooling around with an idea I had months ago.
Antlers.

I just finished making six single antlers.

These delicate little sterling objects are fabricated from scratch though they kind of look like they were cast from a single mold. Each antler is built from five individual pieces of sterling that are cut, filed, forged and then soldered together. But, I have to be honest, the little detail on these antlers that has me most excited, besides the texture, is the fact that each one has a pedicle (which is the lumpy little portion of the base of an antler that connects to the head of a deer). When I take a close look at these little trinkets, I find myself thinking, “Well jeepers! These look like the real thing!”

I turned the prototype into a necklace on a long chain with some hallmark charms jangling about on it. It’s quite the bauble for a nature girl, a girl with the name Fawn, or anyone who likes nature inspired jewelry. I plan to incorporate these antlers into a few other design projects I have at the moment. Hush hush….
I have antler tunnel vision, they’re all I can see at the moment….

The five antlers you see here today will be available in the Etsy shop on Friday! I hope you’re all having a scrumptious Wednesday. We’ve got grey skies but I’m not feeling under the weather at all. I JUST registered for spring semester classes at ISU, I’m wearing yellow and a long ponytail and I’m off to make another pot of mint tea. Be well my birdlings!
Love,
PLUME
PS
In a moment of:
Feeling utterly overwhelmed by your generosity, kindness and constant encouragement.
Feeling wild (which isn’t unusual at all).
Feeling shocked while witnessing just how many of you have passed through this blog
since I posted this blurb about these antlers…
::::::::::::
I have decided that I should give one away.
One antler.
The antler will come equipped to flaunt on a long, sexy chain that will dangle said piece of nature most sensually between your personal topographies (hee hee);
hallmarked with my maker’s mark as well as my trademark bird button.
A gift to one lucky person. If you’d like to enter please
LEAVE A COMMENT SO I WILL KNOW YOU WERE HERE.
Entry for the drawing ends on Friday at noon.
May the luckiest bird win!