Joshua Tree

 Joshua Tree National Park

Memorial Day Weekend 2018

I want to wander in the wild.
I want the magic of it all.
 
 

A Long Walk

Mendocino, May 2017

A thousand feelings, a thousand thoughts, a thousand miles

and I am still searching.

The River Smith

Memory, Study JS3

mixed media on paper, 2017

Jedediah Smith Redwoods, May 2017

I was running without knowing 

I had even begun moving

to a place I reckoned to be home

Welled from the deepest recesses

of stymied words and thoughts unpenned, I heard my younger self cry out with anguish 
My legs gaining a momentum all their own
nearly tripping over river rocks
as you called for me, and called for me by my name

As I closed in on the distance to the edge of your emerald blue

my pace slowed to long strides, letting the rain

and fog and cold come down hard
on a person I no longer knew
a person I no longer recognized.

Jedediah

Memory, Study JS1

mixed media on paper, 2017

8" x 10"

I told myself I could do it.
And I did.

Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, May 2017.

---

I've spent most of my life acknowledging a truth I discovered at a young age: people, and being around them, cannot quell the aloneness one feels living in the world.  It seems, however, nature can.  And it has.  

I've traveled alone before.  Committed to one-person road trips in the past.  When I decided to embark on my first solo camping experience--driving six and a half hours north of San Francisco, three hundred and sixty-some odd miles away--I wasn't so much weighed down by the fear of being a female alone in the forest.  Instead, I was exhilarated to fulfill a year-long desire to walk among some of earth's oldest coastal redwoods.  

About thirteen months ago, I read Richard Preston's The Wild Trees, a non-fiction narrative about key individuals who have dedicated their lives to climbing and exploring redwoods in order to better understand and preserve the species.  It quickly became one of my favorite reads of 2016, perhaps even of all time.  It was in this very book that I was introduced to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, as well as some of the oldest redwood groves along the California-Oregon coast.  Unbeknownst to me then, thirteen months later, I would begin reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild, a memoir of the author's long-distance hike on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), a journey brought on by a heartbreaking period in her life in which she was left feeling devastatingly lost. 

Which is how I've been feeling these days.  People and failed relationships of every kind aren't the reason(s) I've lost my way; they're merely a decoy to the slow-but-sure collapse of the person I once was, the things of which I once was certain.

I was introduced to both books by way of fate.  And both books left me with an overwhelming desire to seek . . . more.  Of what exactly, I'm not sure.  In a way, my decision to camp alone and somewhere far enough away was more than conquering a self-imposed challenge.  It was an attempt to re-engage myself with the girl who lived before this person--this aged, jaded, and self-deprecating person.

When I arrived at the campground and staked my site, the sun, which appeared now and again from behind encroaching clouds, was only beginning to set.  Slants of golden rays found their way through the towering redwoods and onto the nape of my neck as I pitched my tent.  I turned around and tilted my head toward the sky; a stillness blanketed my being, warming me from the outside in.  I had made it here.  To Jedediah Smith.  To a place I had read and dreamt about for over a year.  And I was by myself.  And I was fine.  Because strangely enough, in that moment, I did not feel lost.  I did not feel alone.  I was exactly where I needed to be.

For I was among my wild trees.

 ---

Methuselah

(May 2017, Woodside, CA)

Excerpt from an email I wrote to a friend:

. . . This week has been a reflective one, experiential really.  After a year, I finally made my way back to Methuselah--an enormous, old-growth redwood off Skyline Blvd in Woodside [ . . . ]  I had put off revisiting it for personal reasons.  However, as I made my way along CA 35 several days ago, surrounded by endless towering redwoods on both sides, I experienced a feeling I haven't felt in a long time: home. 

I ended up spending two days in the pullout right next to Methuselah, setting up studio and painting in my car.  And during that time, I reflected.  About the present, the past, as well as the unknown future.  I thought about my relationships, about people and places, about ideas and the opportunities that come and the opportunities that fall away (either by circumstances beyond our control or by our own undoing).  More importantly though, I just allowed myself to be [ . . . ]  In a way, you can say this overdue visit to Methuselah was a deep cleansing for my soul and spirit.   

---

To let be

release

lose

Find.

The Fragrance of Forgiveness

(Redwood Regional Park, 04.02.17)

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the 

heel that has crushed it."

-Mark Twain

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I am at home here
among your wild trees
My safe place
this sanctuary.

Through the Oakland Redwoods

I was in a fairy tale.