Sunday, November 26, 2017

Wild sisters


Into the dark wood she climbed up streams of amber oak leaves.




When she reached the top of the little hill, she was still thinking her hill-climbing thoughts, drawing in the smells of earth and leaf and a velvety, caressing wind rarely felt in November.

Thus occupied, the woman did not see the oak russet doe standing in the trees until she bounded away, white tail flashing in alarm.

"Oh, beauty," said woman remorsefully, in the softest voice, a wild-calming voice.

As if heeding human words, doe stopped after four bounds and looked at the woman over her shoulder. She wants to stay away from humans, but is pragmatic. It is no use running further if she is not being pursued.

Eyes turned inside see one reality; eyes turned outward see the deer standing before you.

The deer who is is paying attention and not daydreaming.

For a moment, woman and doe regard one another.

Then the woman withdraws slowly, humbly, so as not to cause more disturbance.

When she later returns along the same path, the doe is nowhere to be seen. But her image is now part of the woman's inner dreaming, the woods she walks in her mind.





Saturday, November 18, 2017

There are so many things I haven't told you



It's a long time since I've written, with good reason: we've moved house, and I've been bewildered by the entire experience for months.

I have missed writing here, and the trail of photographs I leave to mark the way: an oak tree stirring the clouds, the whispering of light-dappled paths, an ocean of air dissolving the edges of myself.

How rusty I am. Now that I sit down to it, I feel self-conscious. What is my persona supposed to be? I'm "me," but a certain version of me. I may not remember exactly who that is.

I do know this is not a journal, detailing all my innermost thoughts (ie, complaints).

It's not a diary of what I did every day, or most days, or, recently, any days—and certainly not a list of my goals, which remain a mystery even to me.

It's a life out of context, mostly. And that, I rather regret, though I don't see a way to mend it.

This isn't art, but it's not reality, either. It's more like an unreliable performance from an unreliable narrator communicating partially digested thoughts for no clear purpose, other than to remember that I have a voice and to use it.

The photographs are less fraught, because I don't have to explain or present them. There is no explicit "I" in them. In some ways they are artifacts, markers, signifiers, maps. But really I mostly skip all that and think of them as the actual places they portray, not mine but mine. 

I took the photo on the Dingle Peninsula. My husband and I traveled to Ireland and London last year, which seems long ago in both world and life events.

One more of the countless things I haven't told you, and you haven't told me.