First, thank you for taking a moment, pausing your day and being willing to stop and step into mine. 

I am blessed. Every morning I wake between 4 and 4:30am. I make my way downstairs, fill the kettle with water and go about the early morning business of feeding Pebble the cat and Sadie the golden retriever. If there are dishes that have waited overnight in the strainer I will often pad around the kitchen and the pantry returning cups, bowls, plates, pots and pans to their various locations. Next, I pour the steaming water over the waiting coffee and chicory and as it makes its way through the grounds, I prepare the morning meal for Disco Kitten who is patiently waiting in the studio, staring up from behind the most beautiful blind eyes that see more than most. ​

Once the coffee is ready, I make my way back upstairs and enter the studio. I sit at the old desk that was once my great grandmothers, I turn the light on next to the desk, light a candle and then I begin. There is always 3 pages of stream of conscious writing in the journal. Dreams, thoughts that are caught in corners and refuse to let go. Questions that continue to be asked. Cycles and rhythms. Stories of love, joy, grief and the everyday. Next is the writing that is done as reflection and self examination. This is the writing that allows me to examine my character and keeps me in touch with what I know to be my truth and, to the best of the ability, live a life of integrity. As I engage in this process, I ask that God continue to hover over me.

This time before the sun rises, and while the world is between sleeping and waking is my favorite time of day. The magical pause before the rest of the world comes to life. Sometimes as I am writing I can hear the squeak of the bedframe down the hall as my beloved rolls over and sinks deeper into sleep. Sometimes, the gentle snoring of Sadie who has followed me in and lays next to my feet on the floor keeps time to the rhythm of my moving pen. Sometimes Disco Kitten rolls between my feet and playfully sinks her tiny razor teeth into my toes and ankles. My extra fine point pen continues carving the lines that form the words that comprise my life across the page as I sip coffee. To me, this is a truly delicious life and I am poignantly aware that I am blessed.

This morning as I moved through my morning routine, I was both grateful and comforted by the ritual; the tending to the seemingly simple nuances of my everyday life. I also moved slower, feeling into the surrounding sadness and beyond. I, like many of of us in this country, slept tenuously last evening. We are such a deeply polarized and divided people. I sat at the writing desk that was my great grandmother's and I wondered what my ancestors would say...what they are saying. I wrote about children in cages separated from their parents. I wondered what my ancestors (only a very few of which came from this land and the majority of whom immigrated to these shores) faced upon their arrivals. I wondered about families and friends whose lives and configurations have been altered by a pandemic and who turn to face empty space where loved ones once stood. I wondered about many things (pepper spray, confederate flags, boarded windows and storefronts, climate change). I opened my most recently completed journal and reread the poet's words that have continued to remain with me throughout the last month.

Among the list of things that I thought about this morning is love. Truth be told, I actually think about love a lot. What does it mean to love your neighbor? What does it mean to love your fellow citizens? What does it mean to love those who are less fortunate? What does it mean to love this beautiful planet, our home? What does it mean to actively practice choosing love?

I wonder, what is the sound that remains after our lives touch another, once we pass by? 

I will end this blog post in the same way that I ended my writing and prayers this morning. 

God, please, hover over all of us.

Yours in love, creativity and art,
Heather

In 2007 I began a project that I called A Sense of Place.  A project in which I made a commitment and a promise that I would actively and consciously engage in a practice of strengthening my relationship with the land that I lived on and the community that I was part of.  The commitment was simple; everyday I would carry a camera and I would walk through the community in which I lived.  My definition of community included my neighborhood/town and the natural world that was embedded, inseparable and interwoven with the constructed world of of our human interactions, inhabitance and the society had been built up around, through and upon it.  I carried the camera to document my adventures, what was revealed through the process, and what my eyes had been opened to that had previously gone unseen.  

I experienced and learned much in that year.  I learned about the watershed that supplied flowing life to my everyday world.  I learned about the cycle of life, birth, growth and death.  I learned of the plants and animals that I shared the geography of my existence and the world that we all knew as our home.  I learned about the impact that we curious humans have on the world around us.  I also learned that the more I became aware of the movements of the world around me, the more I knew of my own rhythm, impact  and my purpose  within it.

The "framing" of this mysterious and gorgeous world through the lens of the camera allowed me to shift my vision.  It afforded me the opportunity to slow down and see from a different perspective what on other occasions I had been moving to quickly to acknowledge, notice and see.  ​There was something exquisitely beautiful in returning to and/or passing the same giant pine tree everyday and watching as its  gorgeous, aromatic, sticky life force flowed in the spring, gummed in the summer and froze into magnificent blue, purple, white and pink crystalline structures in the arms of winter.

Interestingly enough, I do not enjoy carrying a camera when I travel to a place that is new to me or when I am a "visitor". I have a natural resistance to doing so.  The further away from where my life is centered and lived on a daily basis - when I am a "tourist" so to speak, the carrying of the camera can somehow feel rude or strangely wrong.  My eyes, being and senses are already so engaged and swimming in the multitude of new sounds and sights that the camera can feel like an unnecessary intrusion.  In these times it can feel like I begin to rely on the camera to shift my vision and only succeed in creating a distance between myself and the newness of the environment and experience.  It can also feel like I am using the cameras ability to "remember" instead of my own.  I travelled to New Mexico twice a year for 5 years and completely moved my life there before I ever took a photo of that land.  

​However...in the place that I inhabit, in the place that I rely upon as a daily source of my existence; the camera becomes a pause and a shift in the way that I can see.  It is an opening and an invitation to the world around me.  I am called to notice, to see differently, to not take for granted what surrounds me as a result of the regularity with which I pass by and/or my familiarity with it.   

I have now been living in my current home and location for  little under 6 months.  I have once again found myself carrying a camera for the same reasons I did in 2007.  The reason or intention that I am engaging in the process is the same as it was ten years ago.  It is the process itself that is now slightly different.  Technology sure has come a long way in the last 10 years.

​After taking an initial photograph I do a very similar process as the one involved in the creation of my paintings.  I "shift" aspects of the image; altering qualities of light, hue, distortion, inversion, contrast, etc.  I think of the process and its actions as a series of doors.  One door opens to reveal the next - each door revealing what had been previously unnoticeable  or unseen to my eyes.  

In Gratitude, Love and Art,
​~Heather

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For the last year the water in my dreams has been steadily rising.  Even when the dreams have been rooted in the sands and surroundings of this desert home, they have been messages speaking of the water's arrival.  The rising of tides.  The dry riverbeds of the arroyos flooding.  In this nightly realm, even when the speech and messages have spoken to the absence of water, they have spoken about the events that will occur upon its arrival. 

What of the last five years of my inhabitance in this desert landscape has been or has served a purpose of "drying me out"?  An evaporation or hollowing, a burning away of what is no longer needed or necessary for me to carry.  Old ways of thinking like ancient aquifers that no longer reach to the places in need of irrigation, baking in the sun to dry and crumble and once again return to the earth.  What if I have been training on how to survive and thrive in conditions such as these?

As of late, the liquid landscape of the dreams has been increasing in intensity.  Their message growing in strength, and speaking of a quickening.  What if the magnificent Ocean Mother has been calling to me?  Letting me know of our meeting or perhaps more appropriately of our reunion?  When I made the journey to this arid land that has been my home for the past five years I thought then that I would root here for the remainder of my life.  I had been called here in dreams by the voices of those whose legacies and lives have been seeped into this ground.  This beautiful, rugged, wild and carved landscape has taught me much.  She opened her arms and embraced me, and then, as she held me tight, she began her tempering.  One lesson after another...parasitic infestations...the plummet of financial instability...near death by carbon monoxide poisoning...lessons on love and betrayal...a touch with bubonic plague...boulders falling from mesas and destroying my transportation...a swarm of locusts devouring the fruits of the garden...the list goes on and on...

I wrapped my arms around her neck and held on tight, praying that she would change her embrace.  I prayed that she would kiss me gently, whisper in my ear and speak to me of our love for one another.  There were moments of such tenderness.  Moments when she and I held hands and matched our footsteps to one another.  But as a lover she would not marry her hand to mine.  As is the case with lovers who sometimes magically enter our lives, the passion and the desire for union was intense, beautiful, epic - they teach us much.  They hold a mirror of reflection up and we are blessed to see more clearly our own faces.  She has done this for me.  She has revealed pieces of my landscape that I had yet to know, that I could not see, that I refused to look at.

As the marking of time passed and the events and happenings of the previous year drew to a close, an unexpected man entered my life.  He arrived in this desert land with the whisper of the Ocean.  The smell of her wind and body carried magically and embedded in his skin, being, words and way of existence.  Recently I have found myself wondering if she had sent him to carry me in his arms to her.  The cargo is being prepared.  The route is being mapped and the sailing crew is almost assembled.  The voyage from this land of sand and sun will set sail on August 20th, making a voyage that will lead to the waters.

Mother, I am coming home to sit upon your shores and fulfill the promise that we spoke of in the watery realm of the dreams.

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