The woods along the river

a mystery lurks in the woods along the river...

more peru images

Peru

looking down into machu pichu 

from trail to the old inca bridge
the city of machu pichu

where the water dances with the cosmos

there is an aspect of my life that i have been sidling up to and then shying away from for years and this year,  in Feb., i went on a journey to Peru and this aspect of my life, that is very difficult to articulate, seems to have burst open. 

 this thing i'm unable to express has everything to do with light but  I'm still looking for the words to describe this specifically rather than the vague exclamations of how amazing the trip was and what exactly opened up in my life but still after all this time the words seem like soap bubbles .  they rise and float and pop when i try to catch them leaving a faint residue in my palm.   the residue is just a ring of cliches.  you know like i was in awe...machu pichu is a place of tremendous power... it was a life changing experience... blah blah blah.  On top of this crisis of the cliches,  i also have a tendency to speak in exclamation marks and so my enthusiasm manages to diminish the explanation even further.   yes,  the words are already spiraling  and so i will leave this all  alone and post the images. 

 

these images,  taken with a toy pinhole camera,  (a pinholga which can be wildly inaccurate and absolutely perfect all at once,)  come far closer to how i felt in the experience of being that close to the sun.  surrounded by light.   invited into a culture that still walks in two worlds,  that of the earth bound and that of the sacred.  

 

Spring

These images cannot begin to do justice to the sheer extravagance of this tree. When other trees are still waking up and slowly beginning to unfurl their leaves this one bursts open so wide that everyone who sees her (she seems to be a her) has to stop and exclaim. The other night she literally seemed lit from inside, she glowed with life, shouting in tree language, "It’s Spring! Yippee!"   

 

Spring is so amazing after the long long months of bare bleak beauty. And spring in the North East teases us. It’s sunny and warm one day and then blustery and freezing the next. I pout. I long for real sun.  Hot sun. This tree reminds me not to lose patience. Her lushness is shocking. And then there is her scent, Stupefying. Fat bumblebees buzz and bump into each other, frantic to get at her. 

The other night when she seemed to glow from  an internal light I stood underneath her, put my face up and watched her radiate against the dark and breathed in her sweetness.  I did a little secret dance.  Sang a little secret song and after a while I feel sure she sang back.  A gentle wind joined us  and her arms shivered and swayed.  bliss.  

And so today, I made her portrait. Here she is. Best I could do to pay homage to her beauty.

Te amo,for sure.
And Gracias.

the face

Where i live, on a farm in the hudson valley, there is a native story about the origin of the longhouse. In this story two boys come upon a living face in the land and the face directs the boys and tells the people how to live with the land and build their society.

These are the pictures i began making after wandering around the farm for about a year, just observing and wondering about the native people who lived here before the europeans  came and what it must have been like then. One day the idea of a face placed in different spots came to me and so i bought a cheap halloween mask and began fiddling around with this idea. i began making these pictures long before i knew the native story of the face.   mysterious.  

We are so much more than i can begin to imagine. this is so exciting . i love this. i love when inklings of vastness come dropping down in physical form.


xx

te amo

Thought for the day,
I picked this idea up from Eckhart Tolle in his widely read book, A New Earth.

He is talking about true love, unconditional love, and the understanding that this love which we all yearn for really contains no idea of want on the part of the lover.  Needs no reciprocation. 

And he says in Spanish they use two expressions to say I love you, te quiero which means I want you, I love you and te amo which just means I love you with no need or want implied.  

Of course the more common usage is te quiero.   te amo is much rarer.  

I immediately called my daughter, Rosie, who happens to be a brilliant linguist ( spanish is her language) and poet and asked her what she thought.

“hmm.” She said “very interesting. That’s true. I suppose that is exactly how I would differentiate between the two.”

So this expression has been rolling along with me for weeks now. How many times can I honestly say te amo? And how wonderful and free things are every time I can say that with absolute truth.

Loverly.

These photos are from a day that Rosie and I were exploring the idea of fairies living in the city.

Te amo , Ro

Xx
Your mama