The Corridors of Migration

All of the images under New Work: Ornithology 2015-2017 were made in honor of the feathered ones who inhabit the places along the corridors of migration in New Mexico where I reside, the flyways of the Rocky Mountains and the middle Rio Grande.  The image of the wings of a Sandhill crane were painted from actual wings, found in a migratory sanctuary lying in a field like the wings of an angel.  They were attached to a clean breast bone, but no other signs of the bird were in plain sight.  I came upon them walking through a field just at the end of winter’s sleep, in February, after the Sandhill cranes flew north for their spring mating rituals. Emptied of the magnificent flocks of snow geese and cranes, I was somewhat forelorn that the cranes had gone, when I came upon the wings of a Sandhill crane.

Sandhill cranes, (vulernable to loss of habitat and degradation of habitat at major stop over points during migration), a Great-horned Owl, and the wings of a Barn Owl were each painted from the remains of life.

Please click the link at left for New Work: Ornithology, 2015-2017, to see more images.

 http://deborahgavel.squarespace.com/ornithology/

Collateral damage in the eco-system*

Some scientists say birds are more resilient to the perils along the Rio Grande and elsewhere because they can fly above the fray.  But they have to land at some point and within reach of a nurturing healthy habitat.  I found a Barn Owl, Genus Tyro, family Tytonidae, along the 1-25 freeway, in the breakdown lane, with one wing moving in the wind as if it might be waving. It had been very windy the night prior, perhaps it had been hit by a vehicle or crushed by high winds while hunting in the orchard above. The size of it, Its heart-shaped face and large dark eyes reminded me of a human infant’s face framed with a ruffle of lace.

We live in complexity. We consider city infrastructure as “normal;” the result of industrialization and militarization that cannot easily be turned backward on the calendar of our evolution.  There are consequences to our destructive behaviors, to our lack of mindfulness in nature.  On personal levels as well as in the macrocosm and the microcosm of nature, we are all effected by environmental destruction.  All plants, animals and minerals are part of the same earth space.  So much “collateral damage” is the consequence of our seeming inability to walk on earth in equanimity.*  

Just as the bones of our bodies, and the bodies of all living beings, are joined to make the whole functioning organism, so mirrors the larger body of Mother Earth.  We inhabit a system that is conjoined, so to speak, to each and everything through the shared existence of our mother ship’s atmosphere.

* “Collateral damage” see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions.

Valentine: The Voices of Trees

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship.  But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.  Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves.  No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.  ~John Muir

How the land must have pulsed with the magnificent movement of trees. Impossible to comprehend what the great primeval Redwood and Sequoia forests of California must have been like before we chose to cut them down. In 1850, old- growth redwood forest covered more than 2,000,000 acres of the California coast, until the rush for gold and resources changed the situation.

The trees' dusty green needles knitted a fresh carpet each year when they floated down to the earthen floor.  Their branches forming an evergreen canopy mirrored by their deep roots, keeping the enormous vertical giants in place. What our ancestors must have witnessed we can only imagine.

Recently, I mourned the passing of beloved poet, Mary Oliver and noted how close she, as well as Muir, lived with trees.  She writes about her green sisters and how she loved to climb up into their branches and attempt to count their leaves.  She was admonished for this. Some said it was risky behavior for her age and she might end up in hospital.  She replied,

"I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild and want it back."

Oliver's trees must have delighted in her wildness and the feeling of her walking upon their branches, praying attention to their every leaf. It seems she embraced life fully and the great arm of Cape Cod, which held her will not be the same in her absence. Nor will the many who drank up her words like a spoonful of medicine.  Remedy for grief: We have her poems, yes, and all the meaningfulness of them. We have the many voices of nature through her words of trees and leaves and all her feathered friends.  Certainly, the wrens who are singing through the branches around her dear Black Pond.

A Dream of Trees

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?

 ~Mary Oliver

We love you Mary Oliver and we love you John Muir!

Acoma Water Vessel

A hand-cut staircase was the original way to enter Sky City, the place of the People of White Rock. The stone stairs lead up a cliff wall to the top of the mesa, where the Acoma people have their centuries old village; the place Willa Cather called, “cloud-set  Acoma.” An island rising out of a vast expanse, still much as it was hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago. The place of Sky City is believed to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the United States. Once an ancient ocean bed, high sandstone rocks like fortresses grow up from the old ocean floor. Sky City rests upon one of these mesa tops, 357 feet up, built between 1100 and 1250 AD. It is still inhabited today by the Acoma people.

Simon Ortiz said in the book of photography by Lee Marmon, The Pueblo Imagination:

Aacqumeh stdah. Daistih-meh studah.

   I am an Acoma person.  Here is wherefrom I am.

When you see Aacqu in the distance, say looking from the mesa to the north above Ghoomi Springs, just before you descend into the Acoma Valley, you think that or you say it out loud. 

An exceptional place, a place it is said, "that always was." Even though the dwellings are austere and small, the views alone are worth any sacrifice of comfort. There is no source of water, so those who live there must bring up all they need for cooking, bathing and drinking just as they always have, though now they can bring it up by truck.

Francesco, came to replace the water heater (our contemporary water vessel) in my city residence last fall. While he was working we had a conversation about the convergence of cultures here in New Mexico. He shared with me that his wife is from Acoma pueblo. They reside and work in Albuquerque now with their five young children. His wife is the honored lineage bearer for her Grandmotherʼs water vessel. An earthenware jar that was used to hold precious water, it is painted with patterns which encircle the form, in the style of the Acoma people.

Francesco told me that his wife had this pattern tattooed on her left shoulder in reverence to her ancestry, her Grandmotherʼs history and her own. It is a pattern that runs deep like the water itself. I cannot imagine how the vessel has survived at least four generations.

Acoma pottery is traditionally painted with fine geometric patterns that have a curvilinear grace, a oneness with the roundness of the vessel. They often have absolutely exquisite designs. Usually three colors, a white ground with black lines and red-ochre details. I believe that the Acoma pueblo descendents must have a centuries old connection to the Mimbres and Anasazi pottery designs, ancient pottery from the southwest region which is now part of New Mexico. 

One contemporary Acoma artist, Dorothy Torivio, uses just black lines on the white clay, striking a net of connections with the forms of circles, and six-pointed flower shapes. The pots have very smooth surfaces made from fine clay. The lines are painted on the vessel, not with brushes but with fibers from a yucca plant. Yucca are spiky plants with long thin and pointed leaves. An Acoma potter, with a beautiful smile, showed me how to cut a spike and pull back the skin with his teeth, to expose the thin hairlike
fibers within. When the fibers are exposed they spread out into a fan shape and the resulting tool looks just like a brush, an organic natural brush. Holding it in my hand, there is a delicacy to it that invites me to try it with paint on canvas.

Some words I came upon in a gallery in downtown Albuquerque, where Dorothy Torivio shows her work, describe the process of creating the pottery:

Authentic Acoma pots are made from local, slate-like clays. When traditionally fired, these clays produce a very white vessel. After they are fired, these clays also are strong enough to allow the production of very thin walls. ... the Acomas use both mineral and vegetal based paints for their designs. The characteristic white backgrounds allow the Acoma potters to produce crisp black images, as well as rich polychrome designs.

The people knew how to live in connection with the Great Spirits of the air and land and little water, in harmony with all that is.  Their vessels were not art for arts' sake, but considered constuctions with beautiful function. I wonder if we as a society would be more cautious with our water usage if we had to carry our water each day, not in plastic vessels but in ones carefully crafted and hand-formed of fired clay?

Something of a holy relic now, this water vessel from Acoma, I want to know more.  I want to ask a whole lot of questions.  And I want to see the holy water vessel in person, but Francesco does not respond to my message to interview his wife.  I am still thinking about the story of the vessel over a year later.  Like a vessel, the story holds.

Excerpt from a book in progress, The Forever Wilderness of Mother

From the book Spiritual Ecology:The Cry of the Earth

Hozho by Lyla June Johnston

It is dawn
The sun conquering the sky
and my grandmother and I
are singing prayers to the horizon.

This morning she is
teaching me the meaning
of hozhó.

Although there is no direct
translation from Diné Bizaad
(the Navajo language)
into English
every living being knows
what hozhó means.

For hozhó is
every drop of rain.
It is every eyelash.
Every leaf on every tree.
Every feather on the bluebird's wing.

Hozhó is undeniable beauty.

It is every breath we give to the trees.
And every breath they give us in return.

Hozhó is reciprocity.
And my grandmother knows this well
for she speaks a language that
grew out of the desert floors
like red stone monoliths.

A language like arms
out of the earth
reaching into the sky,
praising creation for all
of its brilliance.

Hozhó is remembering that we are a part
of this brilliance.

It is finally accepting that
(yes)
you are a sacred song that brings the Diyin Diné'é
(the gods)
to their knees in an almost
unbearable ecstasy.

Hozhó is re-membering our own beauty.

And my grandmother knows this well
for she speaks the language of a
Lók'aa' ch'égai snowsstorm.

She speaks the language
of hooves hitting the dirt
for she was a midwife and would
gallop to the women in labor.

She is fluent in the language
of suffering mothers;
fluent in the language of
joyful mothers;
fluent in the language
of handing a glowing newborn
to its creator.

Hozhó is an experience.

But it is not something
you can experience
alone.

the eagles tell us

as they lock talons
in the stratosphere
and fall to the earth as one.

Hozhó is inter-beauty.

And my grandmother knows this well
for she speaks the language of the Male Rain
which shoots Lightening Boys through the sky,
pummels the Green Corn Children
and huddles the horses against cliff sides in the
early afternoon.

She also speaks the language of the Female Rain
which sends the scent of dust and sage
into our hoghans
and casts rainbows in the sky.

Us Diné, we know what hozhó means!

And deep down I think we know what hozhó
does not mean.
Like the days we walk in sadness.
Like the days we live for money.
Like the days we live for fame.

Like the day the conquistadors came,
climbed down from their horses
and asked us
if they could buy
the mountains.

We knew this was not hozhó
because we knew
you could not own a mountain.

But we knew we could make it hozhó once again.

So we took their silver swords
and we took their silver
coins
and we melted them
with fire and buffalo hide bellows
and recast them into beautiful
squash blossom necklaces
and placed it around their necks.

We took the silver helmets
straight off their heads
and transformed it into
a fearless beauty.

We made jewelry:

Hozhó is the prayer that carries us
through genocide and disease.

It is the prayer that will carry us through
global warming;
through this global fear
that dances like a shadow
in our minds.

This morning my grandmother is
teaching me something important.
She is teaching me that the
easiest (and most elegant) way
to defeat an army of hatred
is to sing to it beautiful songs

until it falls to its knees

and surrenders.

'It will do this,' she says, 'because it has finally
found a sweeter fire than revenge.
It has found Heaven.

It has found Hozhó.'

And so my grandmother is talking
to the colors of the sky at dawn
and she is saying:
hózhónáházdlii'
hózhónáházdlii'
hózhónáházdlii'
(beauty is restored again...)

It is dawn my friends.

Wake up.

The night

is over.

-Lyla June Johnston.

from the book, Spiritual Ecology.

Feather

Feather: Colaptes Aurastus


"ATTENTION," A VOICE BEGAN TO CALL, AND IT WAS AS THOUGH an oboe had suddenly become articulate.  "Attention," it repeated in the same high, nasal monotone.  "Attention."
-Aldous Huxley, Island

I lost my keys. The car key, house keys, mailbox key, all on a clear plastic stretchy- cord that had been hanging from my wrist like a clunky bracelet.  I was walking in the woods with my puppy, Belle, when I noticed the all important keys were missing.   Just when we had started our walk, I heard a woodpecker, tap tap tapping on a tree.   Later, I thought I heard the same distinct sound above my head when I noted with a shock, that the keys were no longer around my wrist.

A terrible sinking feeling passed through me as I realized we had been walking a long time, two hours perhaps, and I had no idea where I dropped them.  Everywhere underfoot, crunchy dry leaves and dusty earthen paths, much the same coloration as the gold and silver-toned metal keys.  It seemed impossible to find them.   I thought, "maybe I dropped them when I took off my sweater and tied it around my waist, but where was that?”  Talking to myself, "just maybe if I go back and retrace my steps, I will find them."   Each step back seems to bring up more dread, impatience and fear.  "How will I get out of this mess?" Cell phone locked in vehicle.  Feet hot and tired.  Thirsty.   I become increasingly agitated, but a small clear voice of intuition tells me twice to go back toward the sound of the woodpecker.

This is a story in two parts and I am telling it a little out of sequence. The day prior, I met a young man visiting New Mexico on a spiritual quest.  He was spending a night at the end of his trip with my friend who co-parents Belle, our shared puppy.   Belle lives with my friend full time and I get to visit her each afternoon.  That day Belle and I went for a walk just after meeting this young man, Kyle, to a place along a clear ditch.  When we came to my favorite spot, I looked down and there was a beautiful feather, a flicker feather, at my feet.  Colaptes Aurastus is named for the brilliant flash of coloring under it's wings and tail feathers. I made earrings from their magical feathers a couple years ago and then immediately lost one, so I was grateful to find this one, so similar, a near match, to the feather that flew off my ear.   Tears welled up in my eyes when I saw it bright on the ground. I picked it up and turned it over and then carefully put it into the breast pocket of my coat, where it would be protected while we walked.

Flickers live across America, yellow shafted in the north and east and bright orange/red in the southwest. Common along the river and ditches here, this winter I watched one perched on a branch at a close vantage point.  They have a bib of dark feathers, like a necklace, just below the throat and a breast almost polka-dotted with black and white feathers, a dashing red brushstroke under their black round eye. Very handsome birds. 

     I feel certain that all of life is consciousness and that we only have to recognize that mysterious wonder, to be open to receive.  Communication is happening between all aspects of nature-humans, animals, plants-all the time.  The more I connect on this level of unity, the more I find it to be true. 

When we returned that afternoon to my friend's property, Kyle was resting in a hammock, reading a book by Aldous Huxley, Island.  There is an awesome illustration of a bird on the cover of the book, but I didn't catch that synchronicity at first.  We chatted a bit and I shared that I have been working on a series of paintings for several years of specific birds, bird wings and bird feathers. He said, "Oh, let me show you a feather I found ..."   Somehow, I knew in that moment, that he was about to show me a flicker feather. Indeed, he pulled out the same exact species feather from between the pages of Huxley’s final book, a story coincidently, about a place of utopia.

His feather was the same length, with the same striking black and orange pattern as the one I had just found.  I showed him my feather and we compared them. Both were black on one side, except for the shaft and orange on the other with a thin quill, a shock of orange almost neon, running through the center. His was a right wing feather and mine, a pointed tail feather.

The next day, when I lost my keys, it was the same type of woodpecker, the northern flicker, who called to my attention with it's drumming-like sound.  "Go to the area where you noticed the keys missing from your wrist..."   So I turned around for the second time, unsure and feet dragging, calling Belle along, we walked to the area where we originally entered and where I first heard the woodpecker drumming.  With very little effort, I found the keys laying in dry leaves, near a crumbled old can, I had noticed earlier. The current keys to opening my all important doors, were in hand. It would be an understatement to say, all my anxiety lifted at the sight of them.

The keys in the leaves had the look of something real, for sure, very real, indispensable to getting into my vehicle, that I very much identified with as more than metaphor.  Witnessing the interconnectedness of everything was further underlined for me, with the momentary taste of utopia, when everything worked out perfectly. As I consider all of this now, I am aware of “key” as something else, having to do with the way, the path, as in the key to the mystery.  Or “key” meaning someone pivotal, as in an individual of significance. I am turning the key, turning around these metaphors in my mind as a way to appreciate, to deepen this experience on even more levels.  I imagine it will be with me for a long time to come, I can’t resist saying, this opens new doors of perception.