nature – Page 4 – Elizabeth Bradford

Category: nature

November 24, 2013

Inheritance

I am writing this on an empty beach at 7:30 in the morning the week before Thanksgiving,while camping on a barrier island that’s a 45 minute ferry ride off the coast of Georgia. This is the most undisturbed spit of coastal land I’ve had the privilege to experience in the United States of America. I can’t remember ever being in a place where there were thousands of acres of 200-500 year old live oaks, miles of palms and long leaf pines, no pavement, hardly any infrastructure and so little humanity.

On foot this island seems vast. Even with the aid of a bicycle I wasn’t able to travel from the bottom to the top in a day. When I couldn’t make myself pedal any farther I turned around to go back to camp, still miles from my destination. Our tents are pitched on the back of a dune range a quarter mile or so from the Atlantic. At night the sounds alternate between wind in the leaves and needles, and surf pounding a short distance away. Swish/swirl/rattle, then crash/pound/rumble/hiss, over and over like a lullaby.

The sky has been aluminum gray for two days. Today the sun makes its shadow play, sharpening and warming the colors of everything. Last night there were moon and stars. I opened my tent and put my pillow outside the opening so I could look up. The illuminated sky showed clouds a little darker, skating by, and black live oaks bobbing in slow motion in the breeze. There was enough moonlight that I could see small birds flying back and forth from branch to branch just over my head. Stars sparkled in the spaces between the leaves. The silver coin moon was obscured, then not, by the movement of branches.

This island has a long history of occupation going back thousands of years. Vestiges of the lives of its occupants are still here. Its last incarnation was as a self-sufficient and lavish vacation enclave for the Carnegie family. I’m enjoying imagining the flavor their lives might have had. What was the color of the light that came in their bedroom windows? What did they do on a long afternoon? What did they eat and where did they get it? I can imagine the island populated with adults and children, craftsmen and servants, farmers and hunters. Like me, they were no doubt struck slow and easy by the sun and made hungry from the sandy distances they moved between one place and another. Like me, they watched the deer and armadillos, the gulls and the eagles, and were wary of the alligators and snakes.

They, and other island dwelling families, gave much of the island to the National Park Service, forgoing the huge profit they might have reaped from its sale in order to preserve it for their nation-family. It’s remarkable that there are people whose instincts are that generous, stewards who place guardianship above profit. I’m sure they were as aware of their good fortune as I am of mine. I am among their millions of beneficiaries. For that I am deeply grateful.

Below are paintings inspired by my backpacking trip to Cumberland Island

I particularly love this image of the bleached out cypress tree draped in spanish moss.

The palm fronts were huge. I loved their aggressive forms.

September 1, 2013

North Carolina Summer

This has been my North Carolina summer. Too busy to plan anything more complicated I have gone back and forth between the mountains and the coast soaking up my favorite part of the year.

I could live in perpetual summer, and look askance at all those people who tell me they can’t wait for fall. It’s the light, I think. I like the bald bright warmth of it that illuminates all corners, but also makes for overwhelming experiences of shadow. I like the light when I’m floating on my back in the pool and looking up at the untroubled sky. I like the light as the sun travels over the ocean, lemon or dove gray at morning, and lavender at dusk. And in the mountains I seek the southern exposures where it seems to me the light has a tangerine warmth once you emerge from under the darker dappled canopy.

This summer the ruin (https://elizabethbradford.com/blog/in-praise-of-june/) has been especially beautiful and there have been many suppers enjoyed there. I came up with a roasted red pepper soup that I’ve been serving as a starter…this summer’s signature dish. Last summer it was homemade sorbets and ice creams. It’s become clear that the ruin lends itself well to several courses, extending the length of time we have an excuse to stay outside talking into the descending night. My guests and I always pretend we’re far far away. A little bit of imagination transportation.

Just now, I’m perched on a deck overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and it’s one of those days when the water is navy and the sky is pale. Dense shadows are cast by the plants on the dune. The sea oats are very tall and lush this year.

I spent most of the day under my giant Japanese umbrella, reading on the beach. It feels almost athletic, like stretching out physically, to read all day like that. How many books have I devoured in this way? I take the occasional break from reading to watch the water rise up to build a wave. Over and over the light shines through it, exposing a whole school of fish suspended as if in a sheet of jade green glass.

There’s very little wind up here on my deck perch. This is a favorite place for writing and for reading, with so few distractions beyond the view. It was here some years ago that I started writing again…a little book that seemed to arrive on gull wings. I spent that trip splitting my days between writing and painting. The painting was a still life– I think I titled it “Supper at Pine Knoll Shores”. It was a portrait of a watermelon and a blue crab, keeping company with an ear of corn, against a backdrop of sea and sky.

I’ve had fine times here with my family and friends. Lots of cooking and talking and watching the sea. Painted lots of pictures here. So it’s not only fun being here, but it’s also loaded with the echoes of older fun. I heard a comedienne tell a joke, from a homeless woman’s point of view, to an audience full of the affluent. She referred to the less privileged of them as “second homeless”. Getting geared up to leave this place, I’m embarrassed to admit I can relate to that description. I always suffer when I have to get in a car, turn my back on the beach and drive away. It’s always grievous. When my children were little they used to revolt like it was deeply tragic when it was time to get in the car and head west. They were child-wise enough to know what they were giving up… life as close to Eden as it gets in the summer in North Carolina.

In another day I will pack my things and head back to the farm. Maybe there will be another mountain journey before cold weather arrives. But there won’t be any place as hammock-and-book-ready, or where the summer food is better, or where more layers of years of good times are piled up on top of one another all echoing at once.

August 18, 2013

Unfiltered

This past week I went backpacking with two old friends who kindly agreed, some time ago, to teach me the skills I need to survive. It was my second real backpacking trip and it sounded a bit daunting… 30 miles of trails, 10 waterfalls, with predicted temperatures under 65 and a 50% chance of rain. Projecting into the future I imagined being winded and overloaded, cold and wet. I was telling a friend that it would be strenuous and tough and he asked me a great question: why do this if it’s not fun? I tried to explain that the goal was less about having fun than it was about expansion… expanding my idea of who I am and what I can do.

Now safely home, with a long hot bath, a high fat dinner and a 13 hour sleep under my belt, I can honestly say it WAS fun. It felt like watching a really gripping film unwind its plot, only it was brighter than technicolor and bigger than the big screen. One subplot was my own fear and inexperience. Even though I’d planned and shopped and packed with care, hoping to get it all right, I didn’t. On the fourth or fifth mile of hiking I realized my carefully chosen and broken-in boots were wretchedly uncomfortable. This was the second backpacking trip where I didn’t get it right with the shoes. Crossing a creek, one of the rocks I stepped on twisted and dumped me and those boots into the water. There followed a squishy hike back to our vehicle where I traded for some sneakers.

The thing I love about about getting out into nature is the element of surprise. I have an idea of its beauty, and of what to expect, and then something breathtaking will happen that startles me and renders it spiritual. In nature it’s direct and very personal. I have this unexpected sighting, and that’s followed by my recognition of a vast creative spirit spinning a momentary spell of which I am the only observer. There’s no filter between me and the universe, no scrim, no interpreter.

We pitched our tents beside a wide creek. At day’s end I leaned against a tree to watch the moving water. The sun slanted through the leaves, the water slipped by, and two wood ducks startled me with the loud rush of their wings, flying fast and low, down the channel cut through the woods by the creek.

We took water filters down to the edge to fill our bottles, near a huge fishing spider with an egg sac larger than its body and not far from a yellow fringed wild orchid. Nearby I even saw a hummingbird. When I poured some of our filtered creek water into my black cup, micah particles sparkled in the bottom.

On our second day we hiked to three waterfalls and returned to our camp late in the afternoon. Nearby we had discovered a sandbar where tons of snow white sand had been deposited in the bend of the creek to form a wide beach. We decided to come back to our beach that evening after supper to build a driftwood fire. The sand was made entirely of white granite and micah, and the little bonfire we lit reflected against the micah particles so the ground magically glittered around us.

Early morning we were back on the trail, wandering through enchanted forests of wild magnolia, maple, fir and rhododendron. We identified blue lobelia, trillium, lady’s tresses and nearly every time I looked down I saw Indian pipe. We hiked to two more waterfalls. At one I decided to ford the stream barefooted, so I removed a sneaker which slipped down the bank and into the rapidly moving water. In the time it took me to panic, Jim had both hiking boots off and waded far downstream to grab my sneaker which had become a boat headed for the Mississippi River. Images of hiking with one bare foot flashed through my mind, but Jim’s quick reflexes spared me the reality.

In the afternoon we decided to rest on our beach. Dick had brought an 8 oz fly fishing rod that collapsed into a small cylinder. He went out into the creek and started casting, pulling in brook trout of every size. We photographed many of them, and admired their lovely markings before he released them . After yakking for years about wanting to try fly fishing I finally got the opportunity. Holding the rod for a half hour, getting my first strike and overreacting insanely, I came to understand how keenly a fisherman has to observe the habits of fish in order to catch one.

The beach afternoon was delicious. I found a banded water snake near the edge of the beach, who slipped into a little hole under a rock. We sprawled out on the warm sand and slept. I painted a small watercolor of the deep pool we were fishing. As evening arrived we walked back to camp to fix supper. A bit later I went back to the beach to see if it was still uninhabited. A lone camper and his dog had claimed it in our absence and had created the perfect vignette: dusk’s lavender light, warm yellow bonfire against white sand, big black and white spotted dog, curled up nearby. It was as lovely to observe them in that place as it was to be there ourselves. We settled in for the evening alongside our bank, and watched the coming night, hoping for a cloudless sky and some stars. Dick’s phone is equipped with a mountain identifier app, and a constellation app, so when one big fat star appeared we were able to research its name as well as the names of each of the mountains in our view.

The guys have a tradition. After the exertion of backpacking, they reward themselves with beer and burgers. So, when you’re on your 7th uphill mile for the day, and your shoes hurt, and your lunch is dehydrated, you obsess over that burger and beer. It may be three days into the future, but it’s the beacon toward which you hike. So it all ended at a great little joint called Daggy’s in Brevard, with delicious food and the question “what did I learn?”

I learned so many things I can’t list them, about simplifying and traveling light. I went into the woods carrying sad thoughts. The inhumanity of current North Carolina politics has tainted the summer. A dear friend’s beautiful mother had just died as I prepared to leave town. Another friend spent the week at the bedside of his mother , who died while we were gone. I went hoping to expand myself but I think, instead, I shrank myself so I fit neatly as a small brown water snake into a tiny hole in the universe, spangled by glittering micah and far away stars, shaded by old trees and tall ferns, into unfiltered communion.

Paintings inspired by this experience…

A second painting of a very different waterfall

August 5, 2013

The Creative Life

When I was growing up, in Huntersville, North Carolina, the kids in the neighborhood all claimed one treehouse. It was actually maybe three boards, nailed across a forked Sycamore branch hanging parallel to the ground. The host tree was immense and beautiful with its outsized leaves and white skin. We would collect there, suspended over the creek that threaded through our neighborhood, known as “the Pasture” because that was what it had been.

Back then I was transfixed by the movie Swiss Family Robinson — mostly because of the house they fashioned in a tree. I loved the family’s ingenuity and creativity in the face of adversity. Not only did they construct a home out of scrap, but it was better than a normal house! There was a life lesson in that movie that I embraced right then and there, and never let go.

In 1988 on a sunny Sunday afternoon, David built a treehouse for our little boys to play in. He used scrap lumber of every description– some painted, some not. Some treated, some not. He conceived, in a flash, an eccentric structure to support the little platform up in a hundred year old pecan tree. It was strong enough to hold an adult, so we all went up there occasionally. I took to making lunch and pulling it up in an egg basket on a pulley after preschool many days.

When the boys grew up and started driving and dating, and bemoaned their lack of funds I suggested they invite girls for dinner in the treehouse. Each boy, in his turn, learned to cook and serve dinner on high, complete with candlelight. I occasionally took friends up there for dessert after dinner on ground level. Grown people always got a kick out of being invited to climb a ladder for their dessert. Once up there, they usually wanted to stay. I like, too, to have very young friends up for tea parties. It’s fun to wonder what I might have thought when I was 5, had an old lady had invited me to tea in her tree…

Lately the much-loved treehouse has been showing its age. Due to its creation at the hands of a construction pro, it lasted way longer than its parts would have predicted, but, after 25 years it had reached an existential juncture. As the universe around me seems to operate, I discovered just the composite flooring I wanted for the treehouse, damaged and reduced to almost nothing at the lumber yard, so I bought it and set about planning the resurrection. Stewart, my youngest son, had some time off, so I asked him if he’d be on board for the treehouse project. He was completely enthusiastic, because he too has the gene for wanting to make things.

By the time he arrived I had done some of the obvious demolition in normal power-through mode, but Stewart stepped in, and as naturally as drawing breath,took over most of the strategy and the three dimensional thinking. I did the cutting, he did the structural repairs, holding me to very strict standards. Climbing up one of the 40 times I ascended yesterday, I flashed back to earlier days, and having sandwiches in the treehouse when he was little. I rejoiced to be re-experiencing just such a summer afternoon but with grown Stewart. Increasingly he was excited about the job he was able to do, and about the fun of problem-solving, as was I. He told me his older brother may have redone the barn but that the treehouse remodel was going to be his.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about our little farm is and always has been its collection of derelict buildings. They call out to our creativity and invite us to reimagine what they might be, how they might look, and how they might serve us. They school us. We have all learned amazing lessons in creative thinking, self sufficiency, the use of tools and follow-through from tackling our various projects. Had we lived in a modern house I doubt we would have explored some of the things that now bring us so much pleasure.

I used to be terrified of circular saws. My beau at the time, was helping me by repairing my rotten kitchen floor. Saturday came to a close, and we had a disagreement. I found he’d left his saw behind. My ferocious self-sufficiency kicked in to keep my anger company. I became determined in that moment to prove to myself (and him) that I didn’t need a man to run that saw for me–that girls can handle their own problems. Not long after I became the proud owner of my own circular saw, purchased at a garage sale for $5 from a lawyer who had sawed through its electrical cord. I repaired the cord, and we — my saw and I–have become very good friends, spending many hours locked in common cause. If I’d had a normal kitchen floor I’d have one more fear to haul through life!

Marked as a child, the first time I saw Swiss Family Robinson, I can’t imagine any home more apt for me and my offspring than the “island” of our little farm where we landed and had to figure things out.

July 22, 2013

River Mud

It’s been a quiet summer. My only thoughts have been of work and essential chores. I made no plans to travel, and confined myself to home. The most vivid moments I remember were sitting outside looking across the pasture at dusk. My work has seemed halting and has fought me every day. In my isolation I made abstractions out of my relationships and pushed those abstractions away both in my mind, and by my actions. I knew I was temporarily lost but would find myself again. I even knew how to find myself, and yet chose not to. Perhaps sometimes one needs to be lost and stay lost.

It was clear all along that if I’d only pack up some gear and head into the woods everything would right itself. I set a date to do that at last, and counted the days.

It wasn’t an elaborate challenging backpacking expedition in rough terrain. It was the simplest, pleasantest, most ordinary kind of journey. But like the wake behind my kayak, the wide wedge of cause and effect is easy to look back and see.

There is a state park where, for three decades, I have gone with my friends, my young children, and their friends to camp in a valley beside the New River. By now it is as familiar to me as my own living room. I know exactly what to take, what to do once there to make myself happy. This time I took one of my dearest friends, and with our gear and kayaks and we settled in for a weekend of Returning to Self.

Good summer food was cooked and eaten. Sleep was deep in the din of rushing water sounds, insect hum, bird calls. Best of all there was no cell phone signal and we shoved off from the shore of the culture,into a remote and unpopulated river of peace.

In the absence of commerce, traffic, internet, telephone and television we resorted to face to face conversation. Hours of it. There was reading out loud. There was the work of very simple daily life.

I realized in the middle of the night last week, in my bed, that I probably own, among many other things, 150 cloth napkins. I am these days devoting myself to the maintenance, storage and keeping of thousands of objects, most of which are superfluous. On this uncomplicated weekend there was, instead, one towel. One knife. One light. It didn’t take much of my time to maintain this household. Instead I watched the world. I floated fast down the swollen river in my kayak and felt the wonderful rhythmic swing of the oars in my arms and all the way back to my heart. I observed the way raindrops look against a misty far away background. I listened to the voice of my friend.

The river seemed to wash me clean, though there was abundant river mud between my toes. I get weepy thinking about the preciousness of that time, the embrace I felt in the bent arm of that river, the perfect invitation to life.

Mama, a character every minute of her life, used to use an old southern phrase to describe a person of material wealth. She would say “he’s rich as rivah mud”. I know in my bones a deeper meaning for that phrase. Today I am rich as river mud myself.

December 10, 2012

A Chistmas card from a quiet place

Christmas Morning

Merry Christmas. From a different place. The sky is soft gray and the color repressed by a light fog. The landscape rolls away from me, calm, and unaware that things have shifted. That pasture doesn’t know that it’s techno-world, and it’s filled with troubles and posturing, selfishness and grief. To that pasture it’s the same as when the news took two weeks to arrive on horseback. That sky, stuffed with clouds like a quilt, softens sounds and wraps me up.

In the quiet house I have been preparing, as we are supposed to do, for Advent. I have unwrapped the nativity. I have put hay on the mantle for the baby. The tree has come in from the woods and everywhere small lights are glowing. I anticipate the arrival of all I love– every person who still walks the earth who is my family, and the spiritual celebration and remembrance of adoring a small, clean-souled child.

Last night I went to a huge church the volume of which was filled completely with music– floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The music arched and twined around the retelling, over and over, of the experience of our encounter with that child. There was brass and string and pipe, all there to amplify our human voice and make that song more an ecstatic cry. I felt the terrifying full expression of that cry.

Embedded in this story is the seed of all our stories. When we see a newborn child we are captivated by perfection. If we are parents we experience just such awkwardness and inadequacy as the Holy Family. I suppose I must bring you home to this room with peeling paint . I suppose the television must blare in the background as you sleep on. Don’t mind this bed of hay. So the shift slowly begins–away from perfection and into full humanness.

But perfect or not, quiet or soaring, singing or weeping, at the core of everything is love. So, for a few hours at least, I wish you the fullness of that love, leaving your own heart and traveling on a camel across a desert, bearing the full weight of all your riches, to the destination marked by a star.

November 19, 2012

An Evening with Catherine Murphy

Polka Dotted Dress, Catherine Murphy

Last night I attended a lecture given by visiting artist Catherine Murphy at the Weatherspoon Museum. It was one of those evenings that lingers in consciousness and comes back over and over the next day, comforting as a blanket.

It’s not a common thing to hear a talk by a representational painter in an academic setting these days. Artists of all kinds doing every kind of work intrigue me, but Catherine Murphy’s description of her journey was especially gripping for the way it reminded me of my own. We were both art students in a time when it seemed like nearly all art professors were Abstract Expressionists. They had come of age in post-war America and were, to generalize, fiercely devoted to one way of making art. To be an observer and recorder was to be uncomfortable in their classes– in my case often derided in their critiques.

Catherine Murphy described a similar experience. She received a BFA in painting from Pratt, taught by Minimalists and Abstract Expressionists, and once graduated, had to create her own vocabulary for representation. I identified with her youthful coming to know that she wanted to tell a story, as she said, about “the electricity of the world”.

I remember at that young age recognizing with a certain irony that I was a kind of rebel who refused to paint as these professors insisted I must, seeking instead to tell my story with a more traditional vocabulary. I think I’m still a rebel, painting in this way in the digitized 21st century when the pronouncement has been made a million times that painting is dead, a time when we are deluged with art about being deluged with information. Murphy said that all painting is a narrative. The question is how are you going to tell the story. Will it be poetry or prose?

One statement of hers struck me like thunder. She said “you can do things that are better than you are, that are smarter than you are.” I have done this. And those paintings sometimes take me years to understand and accept. I am intellectually not yet at the level of this thing that I have delivered into materiality.

Catherine Murphy went on to describe her growth as an artist, as she moved from painting what was around her into setting up scenarios that described a moment, an incident, or an idea. They became carefully crafted metaphors instead of accidental sightings. When workers dug a hole in her yard for the purpose of planting a tree she knew she had to paint it. It was the perfect metaphor she was seeking. The tree got planted and she had another hole dug just like first one to serve as a model for her laborious process. She described her sense of painting that hole as “when I can make something that is nothing into everything”. For me that is a core value: to take the unnoticed, the “unimportant”, and render it in such a way that something of the scope of life on earth is expressed as poetry in that visual scrap.

Of everything said that night, the work spoke loudest. I saw the way this artist was captivated by “the electricity of the world” and I know in my bones that same feeling, though my obsession is more and more with the natural world. I inherited that obsession from my father who grew up walking the fields and woods. He said he was hunting, but even as a child I knew he used that as an excuse to inhabit the woods. A day or so before he died, at the age of 48, I watched him from an upstairs window as he pulled into the driveway. He parked the car, and sat there, studying the tall whispering pine trees for a long time– as if to memorize them or say goodbye to them. I had a jolt of recognition in that moment of our matching souls. I have referred to my own work as “elegiac” because there is a certain sadness there, watching the culture I live in have total disdain for my lover, the naked and vulnerable earth.

I write this with a bluegrass concert playing in the background and I would be remiss were I to fail to mention the poetry of the bent note, the minor key, weaving its way into this narrative. How like a blanket these art forms are, wrapping us up. They comfort us with their assertions that making things is important, and stories, told in whatever voice, link us soul to soul.

August 19, 2012

Stepping Out

I have this mental image of who I want to be in my 70’s and 80’s. It’s a snapshot of a granny, loading her kayak on top of her car, or standing beside her tent in her hiking boots. There’s a relaxed smile on her face and clearly, still some hunger in her soul to find ways to more deeply drink in the fine earth. For several years I’ve been accumulating gear so I could begin backpacking. Always a camper, I had never yet hiked into the wilderness with my kitchen and bedroom on my back. I talked over my ambition with an old dear friend, an inveterate camper, who immediately offered to let me join him and another of our good friends on a trek. I was elated because I knew they would school me, but also keep me laughing while doing it.

This past weekend we set out for Mt Rogers National Park for my maiden voyage as a backpacker. Our first day out we climbed three separate stone peaks, each higher than the one before it. I struggled at first, to establish a pace, which was much slower and more measured than theirs. At the high altitude I had to grow accustomed to breathing, and to climbing on rocky, uneven trails. Each of the stone peaks was followed by a walk through an upland meadow. Formerly cows grazed this land, and rendered it open space. Now, wild ponies are allowed to graze there to keep the meadow character. The primary plant life is meadow grass, and scores of blackberry brambles and blueberry bushes, with the occasional fir tree. The view from the peaks and meadows receded in layers of mountains so numerous as to appear infinite, each growing a bit fainter. At the farthest layers they were so vapourously blue they seemed apparitions.

I had my camera and some drawing materials. One of the weekend goals was to find subjects for my next group of paintings. In the past year I have found myself less and less interested in the cultivated world and drawn instead to the wild. When I bring that imagery onto a surface to begin a painting, the synergy of what already exists in me and what is still wild and unspoiled about the world, totally engages me as an artist. From those two elements come abstractions– a thousand tiny ones, cobbled together into a mosaic that people recognize as how the world is/could be/used to be. It’s my meditation on the fragile, unnoticed earth, rambling on in its own way, thirty yards behind the shopping center or a mile off the interstate.

That evening, under a giant fir tree we enjoyed cocktail hour and cooked our dinners. I had tried to be imaginative with my choices of dehydrated foods, but the Trail Masters put me to shame. I have a lot to learn. In such a stripped down, simplified existence good food and drink take on an exaggerated importance. The hunger is intense and nutrition important. My first efforts were gruesome– oversalted, and insensitive. With almost no experience of prepared foods I was a lamb up for slaughter at the grocery store. Next time, I decided, I would try concocting my own recipes and drying my own fresh vegetables.

We found enough wood to build a campfire and enjoyed telling stories as darkness arrived. Finally, in the tent, lights out, I realized that one of the things I love most about sleeping outside is the sounds. When there is no sight, only sound, you become keenly aware of your surroundings. Even at home I will sometimes get up in the middle of the night and open the window to climb out of my hermetic chamber and sense what is out there. The rush of night air and night sounds always soothes. Oddly enough, at that high altitude, there was NO sound. There were no crickets, no frogs, no birds. When the wind blew the fir trees would make the sound of ocean waves. But if there was no wind, there was no sound. I cannot remember ever having experienced that level of silence. At home, when I turn out the light, my tired ears will roar with exhaustion from too much sound. But lying in my sleeping bag, they did not roar. I heard something tiny and faint and realized it was the sound of my eyelashes against my pillow as I blinked. In the middle of the night there was the distinct sound, very needlelike, of small raindrops on the tent roof, and close to morning, the wild ponies whinnied

On Saturday we hiked a segment of the Appalachian Trail, over a ridge, and around a valley to another ridge, making a giant loop that took all day. The ecosystem at nearly 6000 feet was so different from the lower elevations. There were fewer species there than I would have expected. I noted fewer than 10 varieties of wild flowers, but many mosses, ferns, and mushrooms. We calculated that we hiked 8 miles, climbing much of it. The first mile was such difficult going it took us hour and half. I struggled to keep my consciousness open to the beauty and peace and closed to the whining. It was a long day, and at the end we all groaned…a lot, but took pleasure in what we’d seen. I hope the paintings that come from this adventure are strong enough to carry the spirit of that place, and that hunger in my soul.

January 2, 2012

A Word Painting for Winter

Out on the very edge of North Carolina, where it touches the sea, I greeted the new year.

Some wind must have blown there from the islands, it was so gentle and warm.

The colors out at the edge of North Carolina in deep winter tend toward white. There is a huge expanse of sky constantly color shifting, and brilliant oblique sunlight. The ocean, so stirred, sends out foamy fringes, white and lacy, like the shells on the oysters at supper.

October 17, 2011

Being

This afternoon I was torn– should I take a nap, or maybe work in the studio, or grab a last perfect warm day to go out in my kayak. I’m so grateful my sense of adventure called out to me and I loaded up the kayak. It’s Indian Summer here. Seventy degree days, and forty-ish nights. A few lovely colored leaves, but mostly green. Winter is slipping up on us, behind our backs.

I wore layers, and took only a camera, a sketchbook and an apple. Once there– at Mountain Island Lake, the boat slipped easily into the water, and I set off at a leisurely pace, shucking some layers to bask. The light lured me–its extremes of bright and dark. The shadows were bluer and the sunlight yellower than normal. I took a few easy strokes and let the currents drive me into my favorite cove.

Nobody except two other kayakers seemed to be on the whole immense lake, and we were all bent on the same thing– the zen paddle. One paddler had her dog trained to stand on the back deck of her kayak, and they toured the opposite bank. Another appeared to be napping in the middle of the lake. Like them, I didn’t go for an upper body workout, or for some competitive need to reach Australia. I went to drift. I like to feel the water move through the thin skin of the kayak. I go for the silence–and I practice making my strokes soundless and invisible. I like to think of myself as some latter day native American, sneaking up on the woods. This behavior has its rewards. As soon as I hit the edge of that cove the world opened up and the act of being alive on that day in that place became the whole point.

First I scared up a small duck who flew deeper into the cove to evade me. Then I found myself, the water clear as clean glass, looking down on some huge fishes. The were the size of a man’s forearm, and just as muscular, arching in S formations, and when they’d gotten enough of me, they muddied the shallow water to throw me off. A kayak will continue moving forward in only a few inches of water, so I can go all the way to the back of that cove, and always do. Sometimes, back there,I can look down and see the tracks left by a wading heron printed into the undisturbed mud.

A little turtle the size of a silver dollar jumped off the limb he was sitting on and hid in the water as soon as he realized I was there. The water’s surface was patterned with the first fallen autumn leaves. Some were long and narrow shapes that curled up at one end. And when the wind blew they moved across the surface of the water like little gondolas headed for shore.

I took perhaps 75 photographs, and never drew. I didn’t want to stop long enough to concentrate on a drawing. But I did stop, in the middle of the quiet cove, to put my feet up on the deck and just BE. Floating into the sunlight of a clearing the air would wrap around my bare arms like a warm sweater, then a few seconds later it would gently cool. The little duck, wary of my presence at the back of the cove, flew in the other direction.

Over and over I thought to myself about what a blessing this afternoon was. I thought of my friend Beth, who once went kayaking with me, much to her delight, and has now left this earth. I thanked God for allowing me this day. I reminded myself to do this again and again. I told myself it probably didn’t take 100 calories to make this afternoon happen and that tiny expenditure took me to the head table at the Feast. When the sun dropped almost behind the high banks I paddled back to shore, and headed for home. And when I got there I left the kayak in the back of the truck to tip the scale in favor of waking up in the morning and going right back.

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Inheritance

North Carolina Summer

Unfiltered

The Creative Life

River Mud

A Chistmas card from a quiet place

An Evening with Catherine Murphy

Stepping Out

A Word Painting for Winter

Being

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