Going Home

If there's a place I would have to identify as the home of my heart, it is the Hill Country of central Texas. I spent this past week there visiting my family. My kids and I enjoyed the sun and cool temperatures, though I don't think they were as smitten with the land as I am. They have grown up in central New York, where the well-watered land is dense with a variety of trees and other vegetation.


There is beauty in this arid region, but you have to look closely to appreciate it. Central Texas is a place of subtle colors. Limestone--yellow-white and pockmarked with shells from a long-vanished sea and small depressions carved by eons of scarce raindrops--is the bedrock of the region.


Ancient rocks, such as the pink Valley Spring gneiss that is more than a billion years old, emerge in surprising places, a result of a fault line that lifted the oldest rocks above the younger limestone.


Drought-resistant evergreen trees such as live oak, juniper, and mountain laurel thrive in the thin soil. Foliose lichen cover their branches like crocheted sleeves.


Vernal pools carved out of boulders host a surprising diversity of moss and other delicate plant life.



Prickly pear cactus and other succulents add a surprising reminder that this land would be desert without the rivers that carve deep beds into the limestone and the Edwards Aquifer and its dwindling reservoir of ancient water.



The visit home fed my soul.

President's Day

I'm on vacation this week, but I hope to be back to blogging regularly very soon.

Crow Woman

From Royal B. Farnum et al, Practical Drawing,

Art Education Edition, Book Four,

Practical Drawing Company, Chicago and Dallas, 1925.

There is a large field that I pass on my daily commute with my son, and in it are several of what we call "crow trees." We have been fascinated watching the antics of the crows gathered in the trees this winter. They stand out against the white snow. My son noticed that the crows look like leaves on the bare trees, and it seems like such an apt image. Crows seem like hardy survivors, a sign of survival in the winter.

Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying, Macmillan, 1998.

Crows are smart birds and very social, and it's hardly surprising that there are so many legends and literary references to crows and ravens. The Lenni Lenape have a story about Rainbow Crow, who made the long journey to the Great Spirit in the heavens to bring fire to the other animals so that they wouldn't freeze in the winter. In the process, Rainbow Crow's feathers were blackened and beautiful voice roughened into a hoarse caw. Two characters from Canadian writer Charles de Lint's mythic universe, drawn from Native American tales, are the crow girls, Maida and Zia. In the opening scene from Someplace to Be Flying, the Crow Girls step in to help Hank, whose own rescue mission has just gone badly wrong:


"He knew a momentary sense of relief--someone else was playing Good Samaritan tonight--except there was only a girl standing there on the roof of the cab. A kid. Skinny and monochrome and not much to her: raggedy blue-black hair, dark complexion, black clothes, and combat boots. There seemed to be a cape fluttering up behind her like a sudden spread of black wings, there one moment, gone the next, and then she really was just a kid, standing there, her weight on one leg, a switchblade held casually in a dark hand."


Since the birds are such social creatures and look at everything with so much intelligence, it's easy to anthropomorphize them. [Edit: It strikes me rereading these stories that crows have a contradictory combination of characteristics: strong but with an air of menace about them; brave and social but also combative and independent.] Here's a poem I wrote playing around with this idea and what the crow means to me.

Winter Crow

Crow is strong.
She owns the winter.
Grasps the curved bare branches of the sumac tree
with her arthritic claws.
Pecks at the tight red clusters of seed cones
until they are bare.

Her beadlike obsidian eyes see everything.
She is calculating:
the geometry of the winter’s low, angled light,
the number of seeds remaining on the tree,
the pecking order of the other crows.

She preens her black feathers.
She sees that they shine with a purple and blue iridescence.
She feels lit from within her hollow bones, a cold fire that burns like the center of ice.

She is silent most of the time, brooding.
And then erupts in a series of throaty caws to warn her murderous tribe.
The others join the chorus, a cacophony of crow sounds.
Not a symphony like the chickadees chirping in the spring sun.
It is the harsh sound of winter.
It carries through the bare branches and over the snowy ground.

She launches herself gracefully, broad chest thrust forward,
Unlike her ungainly waddle across the ground.
Soars low over the road past the always-green bristles of the pine
and then to her nest, a sprawling clutter of sticks wedged up high between branches.
It is lined with shiny treasures, hair, and bits of string.
She picks up a tangled necklace and tastes the tarnished metal,
a sharp note of grief.

I'd be interested to hear if there are particular birds or other creatures that evoke powerful emotions like this for you.

Use Your Imagination

Lately I've been giving my brain a workout by participating in Cuban-born artist Elsita's imagination exercises. The conqueror-of-every-medium has been producing the most astonishing pencil drawings and asking her readers to give their interpretations of the delicate, complex works. It's been so much fun to carefully view and reflect on the symbolism of the images. It's also entertaining to read the comments to see how many divergent interpretations arise from one image.

I am quite taken by what Elsita herself said about the response to her own drawings:

"I look at the piece and try to read between lines. But as always, the most interesting explanations never come from myself but from other people. For example Natalie [Elsita's daughter]; when she saw the Flower Girl drawing she said: hey! that's sooo funny!!!! That girl was messing up with the flower and now the flower is eating her! run for your life little girl!!!!
And that's the best part of art, the freedom that it gives us to express ourselves in infinite ways as the creator of the piece or as the viewer."

I've had a very big creative block over the last few months, and Elsita's philosophy about art has unlocked it a bit. It's empowering to have an artist say that there is creativity involved in being a viewer of a piece of art. It also feels inspiring to have an artist say that her art isn't exclusive to its creator or to a few informed art critics. Instead, it's a participatory experience. Here's Elsita's formal invitation to join in her imagination exercises, which I encourage you to accept:

"I invite you to keep these interpretation games alive in this blog as a way to stimulate our imagination and as a way to connect with each other through one of the most rewarding things ever: art :)"

Elsita's is a model I hope that other artists adopt, especially given that blogland is such an effective medium for connecting with others and sharing ideas.

Let me leave you with yet another of Elsita's ideas about art and existence:

"Art isn't really alive, think about that, we are talking about objects, what is really alive is us and all the ideas coming out from our mind when we interact with that object."

I had a moment like this, a feeling of being intensely alive and connected to a piece of art (and to my son), when my son and I stood in front of Italian Futurist painter Gino Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912), at MOMA last month. We stood there for many minutes, exclaiming as different images leaped out at us from the painting. It was the first painting that my son had responded to that morning, and I think his excitement arose from looking at the painting like a code of images to decipher. I felt like all my synapses were firing at once!

I wonder if there are other daily imagination exercises, like Elsita's, that can be done to keep our brains awake and inspired?