It is Sunday morning I sit before the computer, the computer glows inside the studio and outside, the world become light. Dawn breaks over the world. I cannot see the sun rise or look to the east, from my studio, but if I could look to the East, I would be looking towards Taos pueblo. The sky to the north west and west is a pale blue green, and at the horizon, it is a subtle color, which is hard to name. There are clouds which are grey with highlights of gold. A lone cricket sits near my door and chirps his morning song, all else is quiet, there is a sense of waiting.
Peggy Pound Church writes in Bones Incandescent, "The moment today when I realized that to live here we must not only think the mountain is holy but know it --think of its holiness each time we look at it--focus upon it the spirit of all holiness which we feel in us." She is not writing about Taos mountain, but the words could apply. I do realize how lucky I am to live in the shadow of the sacred mountain. I think there is no other place like Taos. But it is a power center and the power or energy here does not agree with everyone. It is said if the mountain does not love you, soon you will go screaming out of this place. And for others it is a place of good energy, and I am lucky it is good for me. It is a place I can work without interruption, and when I look up to look out from the studio there is beauty in all directions. My life in Taos allows me to follows in the footsteps of other women artists, like Georgia O'Keefe, Florence Pierce, and Janet Lippencot who worked in New Mexico. And Mabel Luhan, is not to be forgotten, though she was not a painter, she was a lovely writer, and she encouraged the painters, invited them to Taos to stay in her home, to tell the story, to paint the West.
The oil paintings I started the day before yesterday, are quietly waiting for me to come to them to continue. And soon I will be at work, subtly changing the color, layering more paint, following the path of all painters, who have come before me. Our way of life is a quiet one, alone in the studio, making thousands of choices each day. We must focus, and "The art of focusing itself has beauty and meaning; it is the art that continues..., turns art into meditation, into poetry (into painting). The question of place resolves itself into point of view." --Peggy Pond Church, Bones Incandescent. And it is in this place I am creating the work I call, "Poems of the Desert." And it is here the door has opened into silence, "like the old roar of ocean in a seashell..."
May Sarton, A World of Light.
"There is no separation between poetry, the stories and events that link them, or the music that holds all together, just as there is no separation between human, animal, plant,sky and earth...The land is a poem of ochre and burnt sand I could never write (paint)unless the paper were the sacrament of sky, and ink the broken line of wild horses staggering the horizon several miles away. Even then, does anything written (painted) ever matter to the earth, wind, and sky?"--Joy Harjo And she also says, "A story leads to a dream leads to a poem leads to a song (leads to a painting), and so on."
So today in the studio I will seek the "story" which will lead to a "poem" and I will sing the "song." I will be the artist that I am, applying paint, following the thread, on the unfamiliar path, where there is no destination, only the journey.
