Rivers and Roads
March 8, 2015 by
I can be guilty of waiting around for Robert to be the impetus behind my life adventures. I can be so burdened with creative focus (which really can be a blinding burden at times, and by that I mean, all consuming so that everything and everyone else in life gets dropped completely and existence is the suffering and glory of getting out of bed, creating until I’m exhausted, and falling back into bed…for days and days on end) that I simply cannot pull my mind and body away from the work. So Robert pulls my mind and body away, and we go launch our raft on a river, walk out with backpacks into a mountain range, hunt antelope in the high desert or chase chukar for days. He’s a planner and it makes us both doers.
When he isn’t home for these long stretches, the planning and the doing fall to me. It’s when my body breaks down after too many consecutive days of work that I snap out of creative obsession and realize I need to step away, for the sake of my mind, but also for the sake of my neck, right shoulder and back. So I do. If I can. I load the truck, load the dogs, pack the Yeti, and head for the highway. Half the time I don’t have a clue where I am going; the vapors of wanderlust have shrouded my head like lenticular puffs sliding over a mountain peak in curving wisps. I pull the truck around, take the one way streets out of the valley bottom, turn on my ticker, enter the stream of traffic on the highway and like a salmon headed upriver I drive, drive, drive until the land and sky open up and I feel myself come home.
It doesn’t have to be the mountains. Sometimes there’s too much emphasis put on the mountains as being THE PLACE to connect with the thing we’re all trying to get a firmer grip on. For me it’s all about space and a general absence of humanity. I just want to go somewhere that no one else is, grab my scrap of earth, twine my fingers down into it, watch the clouds canter in and out of space, glass for elk, deer and antelope, watch the hawks hunt, listen to the river run, hear the sound of the human world fade away. I want to slide into a hot spring and simply let my mind drift into the world of daydreams while the wind ruffles the junipers.
I want to be alone, or alone with people who know my heart of hearts and are alright with me being silent. I want to be with my dogs and run free like they do. I want to fall into rhythm with the sun and moon; live my living while it’s light out, sleep when the stars rule the night, wake up with a cold nose and start a stove with numb fingers. I want all the sharpness to return to my senses, I want steel blades for eyes, ears that hear the grass clanging in the breeze and the sometimes terrifying sense of being watched by wild and hungry eyes (I’ve always said the times I have felt most alive is when I have been hunted by something unseen).
—————————————
I bought a day planner this year. I’ve never had one before which is part of the reason I’ve been such a doggone flake part of my life (I think the other reason is simply that I like to feel free and sometimes forgetting seems like it takes me there). I used to write myself little notes on scraps of paper that would flitter around the house and studio like giant pieces of confetti. It was chaos. Now, I’ve never been so organized! I told a friend recently that when I look down at the pages of my day planner, swimming with fresh ink and penciled in messages (like a black bears claw marks on an aspen) I sometimes feel like every booking I make, like a civilized little human being, is bleeding my wildness out of me.
But then again, every day I shift towards a state of complete un-domestication, I mean I move entropically towards the state of being feral — tangled hair, wild eyebrows, flickering eyes, and the quaking desire to lope across foothills and drink from rivers. I grow gradually unkept until I wake up one morning and the scale has tipped fully to one side and I need to break out, I have to satiate my need for space and freedom. I love the things that keep me on the edge of tame, but I also like to buck it all off and gallop like cuss to a wide open place where nothing can own me.
————————————–
Idaho has been top notch lately; sunny and warm between snow squalls and rain. The hot springs have been boiling and tranquil, the antelope herds have been massive, the hawks have been claiming fenceposts and telephone poles when they’re not swirling around in thin air. The mountain peaks have been nothing short of mystical — chanting life into the clouds up where they build and break open. The foothills are already chirping with song birds, the magpies are building nests, I hear the song of the yellow-winged blackbird rising up from the river behind the house here and elsewhere, the steelhead are coming in — shining like bright polished sterling. It’s always a good day to be Idahoan, but it’s especially good lately. I’m not sure any other rivers and roads will bring me home, time and time again, quite like these do.
February 24, 2015 by
If my hands are candles, they are burning at both ends these days.
I am proceeding with my shop update tomorrow at 12 noon, mountain time! I hope you’ll swing by.
I will be listing my little wolf pack as well as one Saint Wapiti Necklace — a straggler from the batch I was working on before Christmas (that seems so long ago now). I have plenty of other bits and pieces finished but am hanging onto everything outside of the wolf work until I can increase the volume of a couple series and further explore a few design ideas. I don’t want to rush through anything or pass over any rabbit trails. Getting back into the swing of things here has been a savage old fight — self against self.
I will testify to the fact that creative bottlenecking is a very real thing! After being away from the studio for the better part of two months, I shot off in over a dozen different directions in my first week back at work and the finished pieces I have laid out on the studio tables are evidence — it’s all over the place, more than usual. It’s like I opened up my mind and heart and instead of a slow trickle of ideas, there was a cacophonous explosion that left me reeling…too many different things all at once, a lot of frustration, a bit of chaos, a handful of sleepless nights…
Work has simmered down now and I’m feeling slightly more routinized which is quite lovely. I’m going out to the studio like a steady old mule now instead of a velociraptor with seventeen arms and firecrackers in its ears. I exhaust myself.
{I made a pizza for dinner. Sometimes I just have to have a pizza.}
Until Tomorrow!
X
February 11, 2015 by
Do not dwell on the shots you missed, do not fret about the shots to come. Work hard, have faith in your dog and cross the creeks as they come to you.
———————————–
I’m already missing those foggy, muddy days out on the land, chasing tailfeathers with my favorite men. I keep putting my nose into the wind when we go out hiking and running here, but it’s not the same. Everything feels edged with tameness, gently corralled by barbed wire and fenceposts. Even though I turn my back to it, I am aware of town, stretched out thin and humming in the valley below. I need a bigger horizon. I need more space. I need longer sunsets. I need the stars for a blanket. I need to feel the cold again, eating at the sparking and electric ends of my spirit, causing me to quicken my pace in a quest for heat.
Sometimes I think I know exactly how the mustangs feel, or the wolf that has been made a pet, or the falcon that is only set free to hunt.
I fret I won’t ever find a way to balance who I really am with basic, human civilities. But I think we all struggle with this, to a certain degree. Even the cities are wild jungles, in their own way, demanding a certain set of survival skills.
January 27, 2015 by
I’ve been driven to the light lately. You can find me winding my way up the East bench in the evenings; to get closer to the sky, to catch some of that gold for myself, to see the West bench rise foot by foot to unabashedly meet my gaze. I see the way the sun stumbles towards the distant sea, magnanimously, giving up the sky to the silence of the moon and stars. I see the way the last ribbons of day stream down through the softness of the Portneuf Valley peaks — tributaries of a greater whole. I see these things and I wonder why can’t we all move through life as directly and flawlessly as light.
Golden hour is romantic. I am in danger of forgetting the nature of light which is as two sided as any human. It is gentle now, here under the nearing of night, beneath the weak sky of winter, but I have felt it burn. I have seen it crack stone in two. Is there anything, here on Earth, that is pure, unerring strength? Is there anything free of the blessing and curse of power and weakness? Must we all be such a wild blend?
In the evening light, there is the precious moment when the sagebrush and bunch grasses are set afire, gently at first, more raucous by the moment, until all things are stained by day, light bearing, gleaming, luminous with the sacraments of dust and crumbling starlight.
If this ancient light is this bright, how much brighter is new light? How could anyone stand to look into the childish face of a star?
I open my vest, unbutton the top of my cardigan and denim shirt; I expose the pale place in the center of my chest that ripples with sinew and bone when I make my arms into wings. I stand like that, with my face skyward, and I feel the light move in chattering runnels into the center of me, the most awake part of me. I stand like that, with the wind in my face, with the final warmth of day pooling like a trustworthy foundation at my feet, purring like a cat. I stand like that until my fingers turn cold, the sun flares, the light twitches, fades, crumples and the day plunges away.
