file:///Users/lorna/Desktop/cape/Fowler.webarchive

http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/residency-programs-dune-shacks-of-the-peaked-hill-bars-historic-district.htm

and:

http://www.thecompact.org/index.html

28 April 2013    Leaving Amherst for Provincetown, MA.,  just as my Weeping Cherry Tree’s blossoms opened this very morning, (a deep dark intense red-pink), and the apple blossoms and crab apples. The magnolia had already been in full bloom, and rows of my first plantings have come up. Clouds grabbed the sunrise, like peonies floating in the sky: I could smell them!  By noon I was in P’Town, met by a seemingly gruff local dune taxi driver who drove me to my shack without a word, other than, “put your things in the truck while I let the air out of the tires.”   He drove through the dunes as though he was driving a snow mobile through a mountain pass. We slipped and slid. At the shack, he told me one or two things about the wood stove, and where the water pump on the lower hill of sand was,  how to get the water to come, (by pouring water into it while pumping),  and he was gone. I unpacked a little, immediately carrying jugs of water and wood as instructed, and then I went for a walk up on the cliff, (that had once been sloped dunes to the ocean before Hurricane Sandy),  sliding down on sand to the vast blue-green singing ocean.  (Getting back up is another story). The salt air, rhythm of the waves, color of the ocean and way of life were mine for one week.
When I returned to my shack, it was getting dark and cold. I lit a fire in the stove and as many lanterns as I could find, and flashlights. The dunes rose up through the windows like ocean waves.
29 April   A shock to my system:  no cell phone or computer. I am going into town on foot through the dunes to charge batteries. I hope I don’t get lost in the dunes.
29th  I set out retracing the tire marks in the sand from the inflated tires of the truck that drove me to the shack yesterday.  I got terribly lost. I remember thinking, ‘this is a longer walk than what I had imagined.’ What a big surprise that suddenly when another beach showed up, which I later found was ‘un-named. ‘ Would I go right or left? My only solution was to walk back in perpendicular to it.  I retraced my steps, each one sinking into sand 8″, walking up and down the dunes at high noon, (so I lost axis), and became exhausted, (especially after ‘chores’ this morning of lifting wood and water jugs).  I had water.  Moving a little more slowly as the hilly dunes became steeper,  I had to pace myself. I stem chrystied up and then slid down, undulating like that upon many, many dunes. I saw huge animal prints in the sand, which could have been deer or fox or the kind of inbred cayote/fox they have there. The dunes swallowed me up to the very point, 4 ½ hours later, that I began to panic. At that point the sun was more towards the west, which gave me reference.  What took over was instinct, headed south towards town, until I finally found my footprints!!! At the very point I was so lost, terribly frightened and frustrated, I ‘got found.’ (I had evidently made a huge circle). I followed them until I finally saw the water tower and then the monument, still far in the distance, but I saw them!!! both of which I lost seeing again as I walked down and then up and then down even more steeply and then up another mountain of sand,  (towards them, I hoped).  At long last, the monument was closer than before. This pattern I kept following until I heard cars and saw the highway. I got cell reception again so the artist Bob Henry who was to pick me up at noon knew not to wait for me; he visited his wife Selena, in rehab from a broken hip. He picked me up on the highway, but not before I struggled to walk through thick bush and avoid a small river. I did not know how long the river traversed, but I climbed back up another dune, to find the point the river did not flow between me and the highway. Another artist told me ‘the dunes embraced you.’  Bob was waiting for me on rte. 6 with a sandwich and water, that dear sweet man. (I last saw them was when Jim Gahagan sent me to their loft in NYC in the 70’s, but they remembered me. Selena looks so small now. Her painting was hanging next to her bed in rehab; she had broken a hip but there she was was drawing. Nothing stops an artist. The portraits are so strong. She paints with gold leaf. The poses are from memory, so specific of people in her life. I loved the drawings.
It was a long steep walk ‘home,’ me with a new respect for the dunes, and again, very complicated to even get back ‘home.’ I could get myself all over Paris, Rome, Tegucigalpa, Medellin, etc., but right here in my own country, in my own home state, I got lost.
30 April   No way to keep the fire going through the night, so the 30 degree temperature awakened me, as I  carried wood as fast as I could.   The fingers of both hands were so stiff.I could not open them. Thinking about taking a hot shower was useless.  The shack was freezing cold which took an hour or more to warm up. Shortly after I set my easel up on the windy cliff, and threw the ocean onto a piece of paper, working so fast! (as my fingers were so cold they were dropping crayons in the sand). Sand was hitting the side of my face and scratching it. It did not get above 45 degrees that day.   I attached paper to  2 drawing boards which became like a kite, with me attached, until I gave up.  The dunes are grey=beige, but the ocean and sky always have color. I saw water vertically spouting, then the  whales!! (large like elephants), leaping ever so gracefully right up out of the water, arcing back down into it, the tail the last to disappear. Seals were curious, “who is this person with that contraption?”  (my easel)?
I want to go to town to buy a bottle of red wine and a tomato, and to charge my cell phone, if only to renegotiate a new agreement with the dunes again.

1 May I went for a sunset walk in a nightgown and an old, ugly american down parker I grabbed at the last minute, (not very ‘parisianne appearing,’ knowing I would not run into anyone, while my shack was warming up.  Almost to town, I found a couple who was lost and I was able to help them!!! (I could now get a job as a dune tour guide). I noticed that the man had a Hampshire College bag. Deep in the dunes like that I met  the person who ran the Globe Bookstore which had been one of my favorite bookstores back then.
It was pure joy to set my easel up on the cliff again. My entire color pallet changed from lush Western MA. I had to mix the colors together to very specifically find what color this place is. The ocean constantly moves and changes.
2 May     By now I have lost track of days… Yesterday I got lost in the dunes again. What should have taken me 1 ½ hrs. to return to my shack turned out to be many more hours. I again got disoriented and lost my sight lines, (as in Bruce Chatwin’s “Songlines),”  as I descended deep into the crevices of the dunes; when I climbed back up in sand, my references were gone, so, I walked the wrong way. Alan, a friend from way far back who knows me so well, said, “Good. You are doing just what you are supposed to be doing: getting lost in the Dunes.”  Jesse said , ‘Me and my wife never get lost. “He added, ‘you should have map quested the dunes.” (Impossible, in this case: I even had a National Park Service map which was of no help when disoriented).  A P’Town artist told me that people get lost all the time, many having to sleep outside in the night, in the cold,  because they can’t find their way out. It was my instinct that got me ‘found’ each time.
2 May Today was my happiest day, (not getting lost)! Last night before I went to sleep I lay flat under the mysterious sky full of brilliant stars, listening to ocean waves. The combination has put me in a good mood for a lifetime. I did another ocean drawing, paying attention only to the waves coming up onto the dunes.
Returning to my shack, there visiting me was a strawberry-blonde with dark markings ‘red’ fox/cayote; we stopped and looked at each other for a long time, until one of us moved forward, and it was I, and he disappeared. I had never seen a fox so close up; the only thing in me was how gorgeous he was.
3 May  At home I am always accomplishing ‘things,’ (ah, those myriads of practical ‘things’ that have to get done), but here, it’s ‘carry water,’ ‘carry wood,’ and ‘draw.’ At night it is, “Read, write, chores.”
I climbed the cliff to set up my easel again, but the fierce cold, (40’s again today), and wind blew sand in my eyes, and I knew if I set the easel up, it would again throw me and my easel off the cliff, entertainment for the seals. Later I again I carried my easel up to the cliff overlooking the ocean, which had a more beautiful light than any time I had seen it, (because there were thick clouds casting shadows).
The wind was just too strong; I again gave up, went to town to charge my cell battery and then spend time with a local Kathy Shorr, who works with whales and who knew my mentor as well as Bob and Selena, then walked me back to my shack, a two-hour walk. She offered that it was complicated, as the dunes shift every time there is a storm, the cranberry bogs filled with water so we had to walk around them, losing our route. It is impossible to walk a straight line to town. Even Kathy, who lives here and knows the dunes well, admitted it is easy to get lost in the dunes, that many people have. She gave me reference points to follow so I think it will be easier for me next time I walk to town. Kathy loved my shack; she told me, when she looked out at the dunes from my shack, that the landscape made her fear not even death, that she was at home here and loved the shack life, especially my shack. I offered to take her up to the cliff to see the ocean, but no, she wanted to stay right inside by the wood stove and drink tea. (Kathy attended a panel discussion at the Provincetown Art Museum George Pearlman and I and a few others gave about Jim’s paintings, (www.jamesgahagan.com),  when he had a show after he died. So we met there, but Kathy and Bob were often mentioned by Jim and Pat, and so we knew of each other). Kathy and I spoke of the Gahagans with so much love and warmth. We are all a family, all of us so moved by them having been in our lives with the impact that they had on so many of us who gravitated to be with them first in NYC and then in Vermont.
4 May After chores, (heat first, at 6am….’brrrrr!’ I brought my easel up to the cliff. The winds were strong but a little less than yesterday.  I was only up there for 1 ½ hrs., working very fast, as the crayons were dropping from my frozen fingers, but I ‘grabbed’ ocean waves. When I could take the welded fingers no longer, I tried to close up my easel but the fingers could not turn the bolts. I hope I don’t get ‘finger’-arthrirtis like Renior suffered, (and, Selena).
First my sister and my niece arrived, in a first class ‘dune taxi,’ which had to leave them off below my shack, as one of the Dune Taxis almost rolled over onto the side of a soft shoulder. I was so happy to have them here! They loved my shack, and the ocean, the wood stove, the way of life here, so completely remote, deep in the dunes. The ocean is so powerful. I talk right out loud to ‘Yemaya.’ Shell asked me what it made me feel like, and I said, ‘humble, so that I can become brilliant.” I will draw it one more time in the morning, and then I pack up and leave. It is emotional to say good-by to the ocean. I tell it to wait for me.
Jeff and Marilyn from Amherst have a house in Wellfleet, and brought me red wine, French bread and Dutch cheese. I brought them to the cliff to see the ocean and we watched for whales that did not show up for them. Then we went back to the shack and sat by the fire to enjoy life. Finally I learned the most direct route to town, to meet them, so off we walked to my shack. Would’nt you know that the very day before I leave I learned the best route?! (though the winds would come and change it again).
5th May   My last morning here, so times moves back into ‘practical time,’ getting the things done for the next tenant; carrying gallons of water up to the house and lining them up, sweeping the floor, bringing wood in, and packing. I will have time to get one more drawing done. I get to look out at this gorgeous view again.
May the next person here carry on the sweetness of the many souls who have resided here,  salient from the first moment of my arrival. I have been so happy.  Aside from dune-shack living, the power of this place is the complexity of the dunes coupled with the vast, infinite ocean.
6 May    Driving back inland was like entering another country. I went from one paradise into another. Everything was in blossom. The air was and remains so sweet, and much warmer. The blue sky came through the red blossomed cherry tree with a yellow green tree behind it,  already a painting. What gorgeous color, my familiar pallet came back to haunt me for my next drawing or painting yet to come.
I stopped to see my Mother on my way back; seeing her worsening condition,  I told her, “I want you not to struggle. Do what you have to do to keep peaceful.’  She’s in real rough shape, hardly able to speak, but when I told her that I was moving my indoor studio out to the barn,  she smiled and then said, ‘good!’  I had to call to her and touch her gently, “I am here,” until she turned her head, but her eyes remained closed. I continued to call to her, “Mom, I am here with you, can you open your eyes?” which she struggled to do, but immediately smiled when she saw me, and said, “you are here with me.” I was very afraid I would be called home when I was bush whacked in the dunes, but now I am completely available.

Only once a year does the Holyoke Mountain Range turn that ruby red that I so love to draw. But now I have to accept the turning of the season that flips the mountains back into their burnished siennas and umber-oranges.  The winds and rains of Hurricane Sandy forced the leaves off the trees before I was ready to stop drawing. My drawing is now done for the season.  The rain poured down at a 90 degree angle, trees bent almost parallel to the ground, and birds flew backwards. To further the point, in a day or so the mountains will turn grey-beige, and then I will have to wait a whole year all over again for ‘that ruby red’ to show up again. (But that’s not to say that I won’t fall in love with the very first stubbly subtle yellow-green of Spring 2013, let alone the imminent snow that reflects the sky about to show up).

I am painting much better than a few weeks ago when I spent most the time scraping back down to surface at the end of each day. I was trying to paint the lava flow of 100 square miles, 40 feet deep, from Malpais, ‘(badlands),’ of my recent visit to New Mexico: the painting began with a myriad of grays from black to white, but I could not hack that, (I, the colorist). I am surrounded by emerald green mountains and hummingbirds back here in lush New England. I have birdsongs and wind and now the sound of rain from which to paint. (My friends in New Mexico told me that when they visited New England, they were blinded by all the green). I had no idea what I was painting for days, (I, who don’t want to waste an ounce of paint)! but alas, in retrospect, I go through this each and every beginning of a painting. As an abstract painter, there is nothing in front of me from which to work. I have to pull ideas out from nothing, but in the end, one always senses landscape anyhow, and I have no idea how I ever got there for the painting yet to come. I love and crave the solitude, from where imagination comes.  Giacometti stated that at the end of each day he destroyed all that he did that day and began anew the next day, day after day like that. Only an outsider would say, “oh, that is too bad,” but another artist would know what it takes to ‘get it going.’ Once Brahms was asked how he had spent the day. He responded: “I was working on my symphony,” In the morning I added an eighth note. In the afternoon I took it out.” A month out in the barn painting like this, the painting is “Sweet Rosy Peonies,” filled with seasonal colors, as I now face the beginning of a new painting all over again.

Leaving the lush yellow-green beginnings of spring for the New Mexico desert brought enormous challenges. After long travel, including a 7 hour flight, (haggling with the car rental agency employer about the ‘toy’ matchbox compact car’ offered me, of which I could not see the road over the dashboard, and insisted on an upgrade), I arrived in Grants 3 hours west on highway 40, dodging 75 mph ‘semis.’ I was greeted warmly by my hosts who waited up for me, and slept three hours. Still on Eastern Standard Time at 7am, I looked for breakfast, which I never found, having walked one mile each way in the startlingly brilliant desert light. The poignant pinion smell, or, “New Mexico” smell, brought me immediately into the land of dust and sand and enormous sky. There were many one-story adobe storefronts, (which I could not eat), with dusty old and broken ‘open’ signs, all closed, at that, of signs that said, “Texas Watermelon,” “Turkey Vultures,” Tattoos.”  Town had no life in it, except for passing cars and trucks en route to the next towns, and a continuously running cargo train bringing goods east from China, returning to the west coast empty to repeat it again. There were no crosswalks.
My first visit was to the Sand Bluffs at Malpais. ,”(Badlands),” of twisted rolling liquid lava mass frozen in time from 300,000 years ago, which runs 100 square miles 40’ deep. Lava never changes, but it is pores, so that tiny little roots can grow, forming little blue bushes that obscure the lava. Now I have a sense of the power and age of a volcano. The next day I took 371 north, (right between the Continental Divides), off 40 west, at the very road I was instructed to take east to Chaco Canyon, but it was closed, and I had to drive all the way south again to catch another road east, driving and extra 80 miles, but so what? I could not get enough of the space in the landscape.  It was as though I was not even driving…I was flying through the landscape. I saw a house built way far deep ‘way out there,’ with electrical wires connecting it to the world. Dust from sand suddenly whipped up like passing ghosts. I saw an antelope, and passed signs that said things like: “Rodeo,” “Bingo,” Bible,” “Talk of the Town Carwash,” (the only action in town), “Church of God,” all of which had in common that they were worn old signs falling apart. Radio stations preached what the Lord says you are supposed to do, and Indian Language shows played their music or told the news or stories…I have no idea which. Once I got back on the right road, there were no road signs, but according to the map, this had to be the right road, I prayed, 14 north, but soon it became a ‘non-road,’ the surface of which was a washboard, dusty of sand that whipped up into the air at every split second my tires touched surface.  My first impression, having arrived at Chaco Canyon, was physically being so high up in the sun scorched desert, present at this sacred site, of a people disappeared like @ Macchu Picchu, who chose to live in bitter cold winters and seething hot summers. One is forced to imagine so much about whom these people were. Why did they build here, and why did they leave? At Pueblo Bonito, the architecture informs much about its former inhabitants. The rooms were small, and there were so many of them one could get lost in the maze. There were common entertainment amphitheaters. Wood was carried from a forest far away, used as roof beams in the stone structures. One particular window was aligned to allow the sun to come through at solstice, perfectly aligned for four days. There were moon alignments and stars alignments. Driving back south, Mt. Taylor was parallel to me at a distance, but then jumped ahead, way far ahead, like 100 miles ahead, and I don’t know how it did that, unless I was driving backwards.  Out of curiosity, I took the detour onto a sandy road and was instantly asked if I was lost. The people responded well to their new stranger, but I was afraid they would invite me to dinner. There were oil rigs in action and the town smelled thusly; Hosiah is a town of long dusty roads to nowhere. People looked Indian and/or Spanish, with pleasing countenances.
I walked many miles through the beautiful town of Santa Fe. I passed a Guatemalan Church that had a glass box with many handwritten notes dropped in it, stating wishes. There was a poster asking people to do so, if they believed in: doing good in the world, believing in a great power, many things which sounded just fine to me, so I qualified to make a wish as well. As I was writing my wish, my cell phone rang. It was my sculptor friend Janis Mintiks, so I asked him if he ‘wanted in’ on making a wish. He did not hesitate: “To go back to France,” so I wrote a paper for him, too.  I then visited a painter in Galisteo, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, and her Hopi husband Phillip, a Crow Indian, a geodesist. I had been navigating maps and directions, driving great distances, for days. That day was extra hot and dry. I arrived unknowingly dehydrated, with a red face and a headache. Phillip greeted me warmly, and Judy hugged me right away, and gave me water and ‘clean,’ good food.  Judy took me into her studio, where we stayed talking for hours. Her work is elegant, inventive, playful, intelligently imaginative, working with strings of glass, (things one would never imagine could be done with glass), animal parts, things she finds, (like the skeleton of a crow: she uses everything). Suddenly here in my life are new friends. They live in a refurbished old adobe filled with light, space and love. Philip gave me a DVD “The Mystery of Chaco Canyon,” in which I later discovered what a large part he had as one of the narrators.
From their house I drove on to Albuquerque, another hour’s drive through endless open space, brilliant light, to return my car rental. The man who accepted the car back clocked in that I had driven well over 2,000. miles, (I, who do not like to drive). There I met up with a painter with whom I attended undergraduate school decades ago, Louie D’amico, who runs a clay studio. When Louie touches clay, it turns to gold.  He took me to the Rio Grande where we both painted, in Corrales. An impending dust storm closed the roads, so we walked with our easels great distances, fine with me but hard on Louie.
Back in New England, I have been floating through the walls of my house, or, more like flying/hovering, getting stuck in mid-air. My familiar New England landscape welcomed me back home lovingly. There are more birds than when I left, and the trees are coming into full blossom, and lush yellow green in the fields and mountains.
My Aunt Pearl passed away two days after I returned, but the vast New Mexico landscape keeps throwing itself in front of me.

Good painting comes from the pure pleasure of touching paint and moving it with brushes and pallet knives, mixing it to the exact color range of cools and warms. (I was unable to touch paint for a few months even though I was always drawing. I don’t always have paint, but I do always have crayons). This new painting is, in equal increments, full of both struggle and search, lost and found; back and forth like that, I feel like I am at a construction site digging earth and then building earth back up again, carving my way through to the other side.  I am still fine tuning this very same painting; it’s has moved along as far as it possibly can, I believe, but then, with fresh eyes the next day, I see yet more to do to pull the painting together even more. As I make these minor changes, major ones are affected and get repainted, so this painting has not released me yet. I could thrive on this canvas for the rest of my life, (just as monks did in Florence at the Academia, painting on the walls of their cells all their ‘praying lives),’ but I want to travel to another country, to explore new ideas that rise up in my ‘dream-sleep. ‘ I always feel so free  when I begin a new painting. (I must like being completely lost, because I keep choosing this behavior: thus, a life time spent searching for an image all over again). The success of the last painting in no way helps with the new one, as there are a whole new set of explorations with which to hackle. Once I locate a particular light through the colors, the ideas become engaging ‘en route:’ I just hang around in order to follow their pathways.  It is  always a color problem that gets me in gear. The color creates the shape, rather than the shape that then becomes a color. Imagine sets of colors, then, that become a whole new place in which to thrive and wonder, a place so compelling that there is no where else I want to be, (until it is time to move on again)!

One has to be a very healthy, strong person to ‘just hold tight’ while listening to branches crashing onto the side of the house, then thumping heavily onto the earth, one branch after the other, not knowing if a window would be hit or the side of the house opened to the cold wind, or when the last branch would hit what. A weighty wet snowfall stuck to the leaves in the trees that had not yet fallen, until the branches could not hold the weight. Autumn came late this year and the snowstorm early. My 3 month old kitten Ruby kept 1/8th of my body warm, and me all of hers, under a folded down blanket. The entire neighborhood was dark, not a sound could be heard. At sunrise, so happy for light, I learned that it was not just my neighborhood or town that lost electricity, it was many towns and cities, that many people would suffer. The mountains were hazy, flat and white against a pure white sky, a very physical fog sitting on the open hay fields, as though it was glowing from within. The rising moon did not know how thick with wet snow the sky had been the night before.
‘What is lost holds possibility’ is how I saw my new situation. I was lost in my own house, (without the beloved wood stove that I had in Vermont all those years back), 35 degrees inside, and then there was the grieving of my beloved lost trees, each one a personal friend that I had planted, (except for the ancient catalpa), with it’s own personality. I heard the birch’s three tallest branches that bent onto the house the night before snap like toothpicks. An hour later the air became crisp and clear, the cobalt blue sky holding big white clouds, as though the storm had been a mere dream. But the remnants of fallen trees across the roads as I drove into town, the cables and electric wires sprawled everywhere, declared otherwise. Town looked like a war showed up. Some people died, of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to heat themselves.
One of the more embarrassing moments in my life was, on that second morning when I knew I could not stay in my house, right from my bed I drove into Amherst, not even knowing where I was going. I pulled into Amherst College, thinking I’d go to the Campus Center and sit by a fireplace, but it was closed. I saw students going to another building, (Valentine Commons), so I followed. I felt so powerless, lost, confused, cold. The woman checking students in knew me, (she lives on my street), and let me get coffee and scrambled eggs, and would not take $.  I devoured the coffee and breakfast like a hunter eats. Three students sat near me. We smiled. I said, ‘good morning.’  I had not slept, and my hair must have been sticking out on one side, but I am around students all the time so felt perfectly comfortable asking, “Do you know if the gym is allowing community members to shower?” (I wanted a hot shower even more than I wanted food). The three girls looked at each other, got up and moved to another table. I think they thought I was homeless, and really, I was, and had a first class experience of what it would be like to not have a home, to have to ask for something like that, something that basic. I was still shivering, could not warm up, and then was misunderstood. I worried about the homeless people I have come to know at the Survival Center whom I visit. It becomes all too easy to just step over the line and be there, even with a phd, (in one case).
Friends’ got their electricity three towns over, so I had places to go, and chose the home of the friends who said, “We want you to come. It will be like our usual social dinners, and you will be warm and fed and take a shower and sleep well.” They let me bring Ruby.

My least favorite job is building stretchers. The corners have to be exactly right-angled and there are 6 paintings to build. I got three corners perfect and then one is off. I fix that one and the others are off. Finally all corners are perfect. That job done, I will next put on corners and braces; easy, because these are a mere 40 X 50″. For 35 years I worked 66 X 74″ because that was the size when I reached my arms out. Most of these paintings are now collecting dust in the racks. (Only Corporations and Banks have purchased some). I like working small other than for practical reasons anyhow. (I can make the space in a small painting as wide and open and deep as on a big canvas).

I had to move many of my 66 X 74″ paintings in the lower part of the barn in order to stop rain from coming in by casting concrete against the rock foundation. I want to burn the paintings; they take up space, are heavy, collect dust, and remind me how hard I worked from a place that no longer exists for me now. Seeing these paintings again makes me realize how much my spirit has shifted, how many life times I have lived, to be painting the paintings I am now painting. The painting flows as the search continues; I don’t waste paint like I used to, (even though I still am a ‘scraper.’ I reuse what I scrape, ‘cooling down’ or ‘warming up’ what looks like mud).

I made the discovery of three hand prints on my mirror of my 3 year old grand niece’s hands. I myself did this as a child, and as a traveler, have seen hand prints from different cultures as a way of expression  to mark territory, in Honduras, (of which I have photographs on the walls of peoples’ homes in the Garifuna communities), in South Africa in the Townships, in Australian Aboriginal paintings, and they also exist in North African homes. My own hand prints are embedded in concrete all around my house, on steps and walls. I shall not wash the mirror. It probably means that the culprit will end up spending a lot of time here in this house.
  

The sky got really so dark that I could not see color, late afternoon. By sunset the heavy rain had stopped and I was able to go for my usual sunset walk. Upon my return, I ran back into the barn to look at the painting on the easel again; (I had carried it in my mind, continuing to make changes even while I walked).When I got back, I could see just enough color as I was mixing paint, working on the painting which I had never intended to do at that time. Not being able to see well freed the ideas to flow, more than I had experienced all day, all week, so now I have an exciting new beginning for tomorrow!! I waited for that lower left corner to open up all day long, (actually day after day), and it just did not; it just got more and more rigid, painted w/ideas that I have already learned, applied, painted again and again. (It is hard to break old habits). I applied paint in the dark, knowing how much that lower left corner stagnated, risking what was there, having been worked and reworked, not afraid of losing it at all. I loved how the freedom made me feel, how my hands moved the paint across the surface;….simply, I did not like the ideas that got me so stuck, reminding me how set in my ways I can become. The rest of the painting was so alive but the lower left corner was not reinforcing that source of life. Painting in the dark was more about painting allowing the imagination to soar, as the ideas were flying in from elsewhere, from cultures and travels and from outer worlds. The presence of the rest of the painting was now being honored, reinforced. Breathing life into that lower left corner was much like breathing into an asana pose at it’s maximum stretch, holding it, breathing into it until it really opens, then staying in it as though I had learned to levitate.

“Yesterday we walked between rainstorms along the shores of Goats Neck Beach and then Wrights Beach. I loved one beach right after the other. Goat’s has the mouth of the Russian River running into the ocean. Birds float on it’s current like little kids going down a sled, over and over again. Just before the waves come crashing in on them, they fly up and over, only to start over again riding the River. We saw seals sunning themselves, and seals diving into the River at its mouth for fish. So much life!!!  I called a sculptor friend who also sails and loves the ocean just as I do, so that he too, could hear the waves.  There are signs that say, ‘keep facing the ocean to watch for ‘sleeper waves,’  peering backwards to see if you are being followed by a monster wave about to eat you up.

One would not think the mind and body and soul could carry the weight of mountains, the ocean’s waves, and all the things we each do and say and feel from how we live our lives on a daily basis, but, they do.

Port Reyes is a protected national park; getting there entailed a drive on windy twisted steep roads through pastureland. Black cows look like toys silhouetted on the tops of rolling sensuous hills. We passed eucalyptus trees along the roads, poplar, and Monterey pine.  Californian Live Oaks are so expressive that they draw themselves; they would be so easy to fall onto the sketch paper, as they are already drawn. The twists and turns of their limbs are knarly like apple trees only larger, right up to the sky, and even horizontal along the earth where they have rooted themselves. The textures of different trees is enjoyable, similar to the mixtures of different scotch broom brush textures I have seen in the southwest.  The rain has made the green of alfalpha an emerald green; when the sunlight hits it, which it did for all of five seconds today; it ignited with a streak of white green. The usual grey of brush and unplanted earth has turned a pink-grey from yet even more rain. It rains heavily night and day, day after day. A little piece of blue sky reminded me that there is a sky behind the clouds.  We passed the Bay River that got wider and wider as it ran into the ocean. We saw both a white and a blue heron, egrets, small deer, a skunk that ran heads with our little white puppy who almost ‘got it,’ and a fox.

Just as we got to where we were to hike, Abbots Lagoon, the rain stopped. We came to the Lagoon two miles later, a pristine, large body of water around which we walked.  I could hear the roar of the ocean, convincing my cousin Neil that it was not miles away, but maybe another mile. (I should remember that he is 9 years older than I am). Through sand we walked to the ocean. As we came up to the 20- mile long stretch of beach, the roar of the waves I will always be able to hear again  ‘on recall.’

From the air, Nevada is barren, of one muted color brown, and one big Lake, (Tahoe)? Next comes Utah, with mountains and more color variations of browns, many snow capped, then Colorado; the Rockies are one straight horizontal, the tops of which are consistently craggy and snow capped, catching the sun setting on them. To the east are endless miles of beautiful patterned farmland, completely flat, with geometric divisions, also changing browns with more hue variations, with the exception of an undulating tiny river cutting through the geometry. These patterns were paintings I wanted to paint, that I will paint, (another stored visual memory for me).  In the night cities all lit up came through the clouds; I did not know where we were, except that we were ‘high, high up.’ The sensation of flying is such an insecure feeling in my solar plexus, especially when we lifted up into the air as the earth was moving farther away, or when there was turbulence, and then again when we came in for a landing.”

Mid-day was warm enough, but then as the sun suddenly dropped at 4pm, coldness set in quickly before I was finished drawing, crayons dropping from frozen fingers that did not even seem to belong to me.  I never quite remember the light being as sharp as it was a year ago at this time.  I could see color best from morning until 3:30; then, suddenly, I could not even see the mountains, because it was as though they were being lit up from inside themselves, blinding me. Everything became chiaroscuro. No color. At 4:30 I closed up shop dejected.  ‘Brrrr.’ Cold went right through me for hours after I returned home. The color made it so worthwhile to endure, and start out again the next morning with new eyes.