Spring Mountain Moon
Just as I imagined I would after I turned seventy, Kate and I drove over to our local marijuana dispensary, The Happy Camper, to celebrate pot’s unofficial holiday, 4/20.
The Happy Camper on the flank of Mount Rosalie. Decorated. Sort of.
A local food truck offered fried chicken, pulled pork, baby back ribs as part of the 4/20 celebration.
Rigel and Gertie came along.
Often when I go up to the loft, these treat loving dogs await me. They push past me to get there first.
Spring Mountain Moon
Slate sky behind snow loaded lodgepole pines,
Scraping blades scritch, push, push, push
While more white falls, softening the edges.
Our house has a white roof, like me.
Find myself leaning into a favorite phrase of Bill Schmidt’s, “See what you’re looking at.” It’s a mantra now as I drive in the mountains, trying to see their essence. What about their shape, their altitude, their rock, their trees tell me, this is a mountain? Close looking is a skill, a hard to develop one since distractions of all kinds, a key this-moment-in-time issue, lead us away from direct experience to mediated experience. Close looking, like the close reading of poetry, opens up the unseen, the unexpected.
As I continue to develop my sumi-e skills, I’ve decided I want to focus on only a few things: mountains, Hebrew letters, Tarot major arcana, and objects I’ve used and love like chain-saws and axes, garden tools, bee equipment, maybe dogs, too. I plan to seek what I understand is the central objective of sumi-e painting, expressing the essence, the soul of an object rather than aiming for a Western representational rendering. Good thing, since I don’t have the patience to attend an atelier like my friends Lonnie and Stefan Helgeson.