Intimacy and Celebration
My favorite feeling is awe. I travel and hike to new places hoping to be struck by awe. I go out looking for it but more likely awe finds me when I am paying attention. Clearly, there are places that strike awe in many, hence the old time guide books and 10 best lists of internet searches. These grand places tend to make me feel both very small and part of an immense whole. Other times, I stumble upon places that raise a sense of awe. I think of these as more personal, fermented in my own experience and thinking. Spirals are such a fermentation. Sighting a spiral in a plant, in clouds, in the flow of a river may strike me with awe and connect me to the immense spiral world I cultivate with my attention to spirals. The act of cultivation connects the physical world to my mind and heart. My art work and writing is the product of both shared and private awe.
In my sixtieth year, I decided to work on a project that would mark the year with a different kind of feeling, one of intimacy. I wanted to see if intimacy and awe can coincide. Specifically I wanted to build intimacy with a place. The idea of intimacy of place is not new for me. In fact, my Art Life started with such a desire at an Art Residency at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I wanted to know the Grand Canyon as well as I could in three weeks of hiking, sitting, sunrise gazing, sunset watching, storm chasing. In such a grand place with grand feelings of awe crowding out delicate feelings of intimacy, becoming intimate was hard to do. For this sixtieth year project I chose the Coast to Crest Trail in San Diego County, a place in my backyard. It is not so much a place as a meandering line from the coast to the crest of the coastal mountains following the watershed of the San Dieguito River. I had walked some of the trails for years, some never, so at least we were acquainted. With trailheads close by, there was opportunity to develop intimacy if I put in the time and attention.
After five years of hiking and writing and making art I am attached to this place I know as The Coast to Crest Trail. Have I found familiarity, intimacy? If anticipating the return of swallows to build their nests because I have witnessed years of building, nesting and fledges flying with a feeling of shared energy is intimacy, then I have achieved my goal. I can say the same for nesting night herons. egrets and osprey. The trail has taken me into her confidence and shared the subtle and not so subtle changes of the blooming and dying back of tumbleweed and buckwheat, the bark cycle of Manzanita, the coming and going of Blue Eye Grass and Shooting Stars in the spring, the changing of grasses from green to gold to grey, the erosion of trail and riverbed. The trail does not hold back in sharing the tragedies of the death of old Live Oak trees due to the Golden Oak Bore, the parasitic action of Mistletoe. If remembering stories of meeting roadrunners, deer, quail, bluebirds, kingfishers, golden eagles, bobcat and badgers on the trail brings an internal sweetness every time I cross that place in the trail then, yes, this trail is my intimate.
I have received the gifts of this relationship for four years - exercise for my body, curiosities for my mind, life stories for my heart. I ask myself where is the reciprocity? What do I give this place in return? I claim a relationship with this set of trails. That is easy; the kin blood we share is this earth, this air we breath, this water we consume. But intimacy asks more. Intimacy asks me to share myself as well, asks me to open myself to this place. How do I do this across the space that divides human from rock, human from tree, human from bird? Art is the answer. Art can start the circle of awe and intimacy. I invite you to enjoy these images of intimacy, hike the trails, and join in the work to keep these places alive and open to all who seek relationship with them.
