PETRIFIED FOREST

Look closely, and you will see there is a river in this desert,

a forest too..

“A lingering day was enveloped by water,
by fire, by smoke, by silence, by gold,
by silver, by ashes, by passing and there
it lay scattered, the longest of days:

the tree tumbled whole and calcified,
one century then another hid it away
until a broad slab of stone forever
replaced the rustling of its leaves”

— PABLO NERUDA

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JOURNAL NOTES

Sept 9th 2018

I’ve been thinking a lot about cycles of time + the seasons + the hand-in-hand lovers called life and death. These forces permeate our world, but their effects can be quite different depending on where I am.

Here in the desert there exists a scene of decay held in suspense…

the living leaves unmade themselves
skeletons engraven
in an endless autumn.

Yet the wheel still turns, slowly now, and life begins anew.

tree
to rock
to soil
to tree

This desert shall grow a forest again, after the long autumn of this cycle. Destruction is inevitably also a form of creation.

JULIE

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. SUN SEEKING .

with

JULIE

. . . in her backyard . . .

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She met me at the front door. We moved into the shade, I met her cats, and listened as she spoke her worries. She is not alone in these worries; I have heard many similar fears said aloud, when I go to meet with these women who want to be seen, but who have been told so many times what beauty is that they often exclude themselves from it. She had also let me know that we needed to stay close to her home, and I welcomed the challenge of taking photos in amongst the flowerbeds, bushes and shrubs.

Then we set off, seeking those spots where the sun would sparkle, glow, and eventually set.

she is a testament to strength

(like the sun goddesses of old)

she glows in a way that

only comes with time

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MICHAELA & ME

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. NESTING IN A SECRET ORCHARD .

with

MICHAELA

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This is a simple tale:

of little adventures

raw talks

laughing so hard we almost fell over while

tightrope walking

on an old log in a pond

pooling under a large chalk cliff.

Sour cherry-plum picking

drifting dragonflies

clambering hands and feet

over rocks

and through the river

to lay down in the long grass.

These are the best kinda days…

The curious ones, where everything seems so simple under the eyes of the sun and the wind, washing away all whispers of worry, or of the future, or even of dinner that night.

The wind also washed away all those whispers that we spoke behind the shelter of the bushes by the water’s edge. All you might have heard is a small cackle or two, a laughed-out-word caught in the breeze, and the glimpse of feet dipping in and out. The flash of white in the undergrowth, out of the corner of your eye. The sound of a singing bowl coming from the wooded hill up ahead…

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