Coyote Father & Coyote Mother (with Clouds and Rain) 2021

Coyote Father(with Clouds and Rain)

Coyote Mother(with Rain and Clouds)

I know that coyotes are in the pasture behind our house when our two small dogs begin their shrill, constant, hysterical barking, running up and down alongside the fence(on our side), hackles up, ears pricked, vicious threats hurled across the wire at the coyotes.  The coyotes trot casually along, paying the little dogs no mind(although we all know they would love to have either both or one of these small dogs as a midday snack). One day one of these coyotes stayed in the field for a very long time, mostly laying down.  She was there for the better part of the day, and I didn't know if she was ill or perhaps getting ready to have pups. I  took my camera out every hour or so and took hundreds of photographs of her across the fence, laying in the grass, or moving from place to place. Afterward, from studying the photos, I got to know her well, her face, her markings, her movements. She was the pasture, she was nature, she was part of something I existed on the outskirts of. She was a wild thing that let me into her life for the briefest bit of time.

 

 

Horse Grazing 2020

 

 In February of 2020 I was brought back into the world of horses through a series of coincidences.  I found myself with a new set of friends that included two horses, two Sheltie dogs, and two transplanted South Africans. Although I had been familiar with horses for as long as I could remember, it still took me some time to get used to being around them again.  Their size, the power, and their unpredictability all induced quite a bit of anxiety in me when I would first enter the corral. They were big guys and one of the horses, Stormy, was young, just four when I started riding him. His galloping around the corral at full speed and his wild bucks when I went to catch him were simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. As the time went by, I still felt the same cautious concern when I entered their space, but it grew less and less, and now, it's pretty much gone. The opposite feeling to that anxiety is the feeling I get when I am around them when they are grazing.  Their precise, careful steps, their big powerful teeth cropping the grass as they slowly move forward, and their quiet, calm presence is a soporific for me, giving me the unspoken feeling that all is, and will continue to be, okay. This painting, quite large, was an attempt to capture that peace and calm.

 

A Life 2020

My mother died in October of 2019, and I recently put this little video together of her life.  It helped me, among other things, to see the entire arc of her life and not just those last ten years as she began her slow slide into dementia.

Coyote and Rabbit 2022

 Raised on PBS nature documentaries, there was always the confusion for me of who the "good guy" was.  Was it the young antelope, separated from the herd, then stalked and chased relentlessly until brought down by a pride of lions working in tandem?  We see her head, eyes still open, moments before she dies, the lions covering her body.  Or is it the mother lion, greeting her cubs after returning from feeding on the antelope?  Without this food, the somber voice-over tells us, the mother won't be able to produce milk for the babies,  and they will weaken and die.  We watch as the cubs swarm the mother's belly as she collapses on the ground, stretching out her long body so that there is room for all to feed.

As an adult, I came to realize that there was no one good guy, or, perhaps better said, all in nature is the "good guy".  Without one, we can't have the other.  Rabbits, and there are a lot of them, are eaten by predators, and predators, which there aren't so many of, face starvation if they don't find prey. They both live by their wits, and if they don't, they die. The reality, beyond the death of one animal or the other, is that both coyote and rabbit live on, headed in different directions but sharing the same world of sky and forest, life and death.

Jesus Leaving 2021

 

In the fall of 2019, before the craziness of Covid19 hit, my mother died. Before her dementia set in she had wanted to be cremated. However, when I ran it by her a few years before she passed, she was adamant that she did not want be cremated, and also adamant that she not be buried.  Now that the time was getting closer, it became clear that she just wasn't ready to die. But, finally, she agreed to be cremated(although it turns out the person who dies really doesn't have a say in the matter). We had planned on spreading her ashes that spring, but, of course, with Covid, we had to delay our plans. So, for almost two years, her ashes rested in a lovely box provided by the Neptune Society in our family room, underneath a little  hummingbird that my husband had carved. In September of 2021, fourteen of us, most of her immediate family, hiked in to a favorite spot of hers in the foothills outside of Santa Fe where she had regularly hiked with my brother and her dogs over the years. Each one of us took a handful of ashes, said a little something, opened our hands and then let the breeze take her away.

Ghost 2022

 My mother-in-law died on Dec. 25 at the age of 95 1/2.  She had severe dementia, but up until the very end, she was still gracious and polite, her hallmark characteristics. I wasn't there when she died, but the staff at her care facility had been looking for signs of her coming death(skin color and feel, depth of sleep), and they had alerted the family so that they were able to be with her when she died. My mother had died two years before, and with both, I wondered at where they were, where they wandered, what they saw and knew when they left their bodies.  At her service, her eldest son, an evangelical minister, talked about the glories of walking on a road paved with gold, able to rejoice in no longer being demented, able to see and hear again with ease, and able to know all in the presence of God.  I thought it curious that he was so sure of where she was and what she was doing, and I wondered to myself if she felt lost and alone, confused by the sudden end of all that she knew. Was she afraid, or, as her son felt, free of all the worries and concerns that burden us in our lives? Or, as my fantasy goes, having searched and having found the perfect new life, was she ready to be reborn as someone else, in another body, with another life to live?

Woman with a Baby 1991

In 1991 my husband and I had two daughters.  One daughter, Ramey, was four at the time, and the other, Teal, was one.  It was a mind blowingly new experience for me.  The two girls, were, of course, polar opposites, so what we had learned from being Ramey's parents didn't really apply to Teal-- completely new rule book.  Having the girls was such a cataclysmic event that I now see my life being divided into two halves: before daughters and after.  I hadn't gone into motherhood with any confidence about the kind of mother I would make, but the powers that be knew what they were doing, and, to my surprise, I found I was actually a capable  mother.  They girls are now adults and recently Ramey presented us with a grandson, who is currently one year old.  I was filled with trepidation about how I would be as a grandmother, all my parenting of babies skills being long forgotten. But once again, the gods smiled on me, and I found myself head over heals in love with this small, extremely powerful little man. The main difference being that this time I know just how quickly time will pass, and that, in the blink of an eye, our new baby won't be as a baby anymore.