between here and there

Category Archives: Whereabouts

The places I go and the experiences I have.


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Jashita

 

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Tonight I watched the blue sky to the East reflect back the pastel pink of the setting sun to the West. The clouds drifting above me in puffs holding into their whiteness, gave depth to the coming of night . I watched the sky over the turquoise of the the Caribbean ocean as small white birds flew in a group before lighting on the water’s surface. Night comes to this small cove where Jashita  rests, my home for the past few days.

Tonight, after the sun has set and the Eastern sky has changed from its multi layers of pastel pink and blue to the darkness of night, I meet for the second time, one of the hosts and owners of this tiny resort hotel. He stops with evenings greetings and adds to my night another glass of Prosecco that he opens special for me. Another color from the one I have been drinking. Delicate pink, like the sky beyond the clouds. Dry, he adds. The taste is lightness in the night. The candles surrounding me bring presence to the room and it’s thatched roof. He speaks with an accent, I ask which country he comes from. Italy, he replies. The family of Jashita is from Italy, near Venice. I rethink my experiences of the past few days here. Italy, Italian hosts make the connections of this experience to others in my life. The beauty, detail, combined with love of life, with casualness, is Italian. The place, Mexico, is warmth for mind and body.

 

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I settle back for steamed, fresh mussels to arrive at my table. Candles flicker. Warm scents fill the air, a fire burns between me, the lit swimming pool and the cabana at the edge of the ocean. Their family gathers for dinner. Salt, paper and olive oil is set at the table, along with the glasses for Prosecco and wine. In a way , I am home, in another I am still in a foreign country. Night flickers at the base of the Buddha in the entry hall. All things seem possible .


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Nature and the Metropolis

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how do we find nature in a world that is overly built? And how do we convince those living in urban environments that the magic of nature is there among the streets and buildings and cars? That we have a choice to see or not to see.

We all make choices. to live fully immersed, or live a life half-way between what is built, what we build against and that which is unbuilt, that survives beyond us. We make choices to allow electronics to encircle our lives, to structure our days, and then we want to blame something that has no “legs” that it rules our lives.

Some of us just can’t cut it. Cannot take the relentlessness of humanity, its pain and joy. We cannot find the place, space, or time to recharge. To wake up happy the next day after some tumultuous previous day. Looking for some archaic purity that never really existed anyway. Because certainly in the “real” wilderness we would be hunted while hunting. Nature made calm, nature removed of its power and original struggles is nature controlled. These are degrees of the world held within our control, just a version of agrarian reality. The inability to soak into the fullness of humanity leads us to believe that we must choose its opposite, even though it might not exist anymore….

Learning to live with the wild wolf and the grizzly in spite of fear is easier for some of us than the trauma that arrives from the constancy of an overpopulated and densified piece of land we call a metropolis. But are we really learning to live with the wild creatures that are left on the planet? Or are we simply living beside them as we do in a city when we learn to tolerate the neighbors and their peculiar social activities that we cannot relate to? These are the annoyances of living.

The real issue is where do we come face-to-face with transcendence? Where do we feel at home most in a world that is difficult and risky to navigate? Where does our truth lie? Do the woods, stream, mountain and desert allow us to ignore the aspects of the world that we cannot fully come to terms with in the same way that thousands of people surrounding us on an urban street corner requires our attention more than any speck of nature that may be present at the same time and place.

believing that the urban condition reduces the presence of the natural world allows us to ignore the real work that must be taken on to retain a creative mind. Blaming the fact that we live in a dense human environment is no excuse to not daydream, to watch the moon rise or the sunset. To smell the rain on pavement. To see the green of plants growing between those things we build and then ignore.

I chose this more loosely defined, blurred environment between the built and the unbuilt, between the rural and the wild, between dogs running lose on the streets and grizzly bear swaggering down trails and mountainsides because it makes the most sense to me. This reality is the one that feels the most accurate to me, churns my mind and stirs my creativity. this place is where my god lives, where I transcend myself to something that extends beyond me. In this choice I gave up the day to day stimulation of a collective human nature, a creativity that feeds upon itself. I gave up the experience of the constantly spinning greatest cultural expressions. And I am willing to go without this, while recognizing what I lose and what I gain. This giving up is not to say that a certain great culture does not exist where I live. Great culture abounds, but it is not the culture that grows from the human intensity of a metropolis, not the culture that spins at such a high rate that change happens in the single spin of the earth.

But what I find difficult to accept is those who live in these places of great human density, where the built rivals the unbuilt, who claim that there is no inspiration where they live that comes from nature. That there is no ability to capture transcendence in their lives, in the things they make, in the raising of their children. We must all seek out the truth of the places where we live. This is our responsibility. If we do not easily find the truth then we must seek it out. Truth is us in nature, however large or small. Truth is the rain we run from on a winter day, it is the line of grass that arrives between the cracks in the concrete, it is the sun that rises on one side of the city and sets on the other, with all of the colors that come with it. Truth is the reflection of sun on our buildings. Truth, if we recognize it, is transcendence, the vastness of the world and our smallness in it.


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Exploring the Tetons

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I’ve always wondered what a real backcountry emergency would be like, and now I know. Summer Remote Studio had its first overnight backcountry trip in the Tetons this week. We followed a common route for us, up Philips Pass Trail. We ate lunch and proceeded to follow the trail through the Jedediah Wilderness and down another drainage into Idaho. Within minutes we were no longer on earth but hiking through snow. The snow grew deeper and we spent the next couple of hours searching for the trail that came and went like a true hide-and-seek game. The snow was knee to thigh deep. Downed trees made movement slow. But everyone remained in good spirits. We found our way old-school with compass, topo quad map and landmarks. We made it into the Mesquite drainage to spend the night.

I was exhausted. My pack was heavy. Not too many summer daylight hours before I was asleep in my tent. At 1 am I was woke by one of the students who told me his tent mate was not feeling well. It was at this point I wondered in the Wilderness First Aid training would pay off. I went through his symptoms. His current overall condition. He was not in Shock, but he was in severe pain. Too much to walk out. I thought about hiking out with headlamp down a trail i had never hiked….He calmed down about within the hour and we made it through the night.

The pain returned in the morning and I was faced with 1 sick student and 9 others waiting for direction. I knew we needed to get a 911 distress call out. And I knew we would need to find a higher elevation to find a signal. I thought that my sick student might be about the have a ruptured appendix. I took another student with me and left the others to break down camp. On the trail going out it was steep and there was more snow. After about two miles we reached the highest point of the trail and finally got a but of service. With the GPS coordinates we could tell them where camp was, we described symptoms, and asked for airlift evacuation .

I hiked back to camp to wait with my sick student and one more who could hike out with me after we sent the group out toward the trailhead. It didn’t take long for the helicopter to start circling and then land at the nearest meadow. A hike further down the drainage. A team of three arrived from Idaho search and rescue and they were great. They inserted an IV into the patient for pain killer, told him (and me) that he had a kidney stone and away they took him.

There were three of us to hike out together since the other students had gone ahead. It was a slow go in more snow fields and making the days mileage twice as long down the same trail. But it was great to reach the cars, and a huge relief to know that we all got out ok. But one of us had a great helicopter ride out over the Tetons into Jackson, safe and with great care.


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Living Place

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I am on the plane returning from a visit to New York City. The last six minutes in the city before getting in the car headed back to the airport were a panic. Panic is not a place I like to visit. But my smart alarm was smarter than me this morning, and while I set it for 4:30 am, it was inadvertently set for Thursday and Friday. Not Tuesday. Not today. My boyfriend commented to me before my trip that smart phones are smarter than we need them to be. This experience was one instance where the phone was smarter than I needed it to be, with at least one more feature than I needed, or use. But somehow the phone was set, smartly, and I almost missed my plane. Luckily, the sun is up at 5:26am and it was the sun and birds that woke me. Even in New York the power and pull of the living world brings me around to action.

Traveling brings out the question from most people: what are you here for? They are thinking, business or pleasure…and I respond that traveling is always both for me. I believe business, that thing we do to pay the bills should be enjoyable, but mostly it is both because the different experiences of the world challenge and transform how I understand the world and understand myself. And it is these understandings that combine to create my work. Both teaching and art. I move around, and the world comes apart and reassembles like one of those prismatic kaleidoscopes. New lessons are learned and old ones are reconfirmed. The world looks the same and it has also changed. A place like New York City is the same, but dramatically different. I first visited New York in 1976. a milestone celebration for the country and the city was all dressed up in red, white, and blue. For a child, I was impressed with certain child-like experiences: the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers, Circle Line Ferry….in 1986 I moved to New York and began what is now a life-long relationship with a place, even after leaving it to move West in 1992. Visits became less frequent over the years, and I eventually recognized that I could no longer lay claim to feeling more like I belonged to New York. Instead I belonged to the West. I watch the city change and remain the same as a visitor now. I am learning the place like good friends we see rarely.

There are places I like to visit each time I go to New York, mostly to the museums to see certain artworks that captivate me – even after so many years of visiting them. But also to places that I like the feeling of, or the taste of, the smell of…and to learn new things. To learn a new sense of the place. I go for the thrill, I go to make sure that the place and all the experiences still thrill me. That the art I have fallen in love with over the years is still a thrill. I believe this is the reason to visit a place again and again. It is the reason we retain our friends and our loves. Not because they are convenient or easy but because after all the years, they still thrill us, challenge us, transform the world for us, sometimes stop us in our tracks, make the world spin or stop, inspire and encourage us, push us forward, remind us of what we have committed to in our lives.

I go to re-mix these experiences with the West, with my life I have chosen and committed to. I come home to my life, my love, the activities of my work, to weave these experiences and sensations into how I teach, how I think about making, how I make and how I live and love.


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Favorite places

 

 

 

San Jose, Looking in

San Jose, Looking in

Courtyard

Courtyard

Breakfast!

Breakfast!

Bar Courtyard

Bar Courtyard

to the room

to the room

One of my favorite places to visit is the hotel San Jose in Austin. It’s not my favorite because it’s posh, or hip, or at a great location. It’s because this place inspires quietness, observation, rest, and beauty regardless of season.


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Temperatures

I am flying again. My brain clears as distance is gained from living life up close and without pause. Now, with distance, perspective and writing is possible.
A 4 am alarm woke me this morning to ensure I get to the plane before it leaves the tarmac in Bozeman.
Once above my home ground I watch the dark sky change to early morning light. I have recently learned that what I witness from above the dark clouds this morning is called a double horizon. It looks like this: The uneven horizon line of made from clouds reveal the morning white light that fades perfectly upward to dark night blue holding a delicate crescent moon daintily in it’s darkness. This is the first and obvious horizon. Sun rising above clouds. The second one is the fire red line of light that cuts through and between the dark line of clouds below me. If it was fire season I would think it was a line of fire running across the ground below. But I know this ground, the mountains I am flying over are covered in snow. I accept that the line of red looking like a pen exploded across a black sheet of paper is the sun rising below me. Light stuttering in and out of the clouds. Here, the second horizon calls out the shape of the Earth below reminding me of the intense shards of sunrise that sparked above Teton Valley this past Fall. These sunrises were captured over many mornings for photographic volleys exchanged between my point of view in Jackson Hole and another’s found in Bozeman’s early morning hours.

Soul mates are discovered as our spirits respond to each other. Marking life, matching perspective, listening for the crackling of energy exchanged in ideas about living. Smelling for the fire that sparks a brighter sense of the world. Witnessing the single sun we orbit around as it manifests a double horizon between us. Between earth, cloud, and vapor. Day and night co-existing for a few moments before passing from sun to moon, light born over and over again.

earth meeting the morning

earth meeting the morning


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The Sound of Silence

The Tetons

The Tetons

Yes. It’s an over used phrase. Perhaps because we are still learning to practice silence. The truth that come from silence for us seems impossible to recognize in these days of constant buzz. I even struggle in the mountains of Montana. A week ago I was in Texas preparing to leave for Montana. The miles pass fast in a car at 75 mph. We arrive to anything but silence. The humm of our anxieties, the blurr of the road. Arrival. Leaving the last place a distant memory we cannot tie to our present. But here they are. The mountains standing against our travels, our anxieties, the unmoored condition of the my days, the loss of identity as we move somewhere between here and there. And if we could learn to practice silence, if we could recognize silence from within, perhaps then we would learn the sound of silence.


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A Dog’s Face

 

 

 

Noel, 36 hours or this...

Noel, 36 hours or this…

 

Dog’s know what they like. And they show us all the time. I am also impressed by their memory of places. My dog Noel travels a lot. Almost everywhere I go, she goes. After being in Louisiana for five months we made the journey home to the mountains. She happily hopped in the car when I loaded it for our trip. She thinks anywhere with me is better than staying put by herself. After 12 hours of driving she let me know how she felt (see the picture for yourself.)
The next day, more of the same. Driving. And then at the end of the day the landscape changed. About three hours from Jackson Hole she could smell the difference in the landscape. Could she recognize the distant peaks of the Wind River Range?

finally.

finally.

oh, yea. now this is home

oh, yea. now this is home

An hour from the Tetons she definitely knew where we were. Just take a look at the rest of the photos, shown in sequence. We arrived to Remote Studio and I unpacked while she sat on the table looking out the window.
The next day, under a beautiful blue spring sky, we took our first hike of the season. A place well known and loved by her, where leashes are packed away and the creeks flow abundantly with clear, cold water. Six miles of peace and joy! She remembers each side trail and every bush from her previous experiences. She knows her truth and she knows her place.

my place

my place