01.12.23

     This story starts with a pastel oil painting that sat in our friend's garage for a few years and was donated to the cause when we found our A-frame in the woods. I had scores of prints from Switzerland and the Alps from 2019 and I'd seen the frame itself with a nice matting underneath an unblemished piece of glass. "Please, take it." So I did. As things go it found a place in a hallway between the guest room and my office and sat there with the original picture in it and I quite forgot about it until the other day when I remembered I was supposed to switch out one print with another. You see, at the time I though we were dealing with a cheap print that'd be acquired as a pre-furnishing ornament that some homes come with however, as I pulled the pins and popped the braces and carefully extracted the picture with Hanne's help, a bit of color came off on her fingers and we realized we had an original on our hands. This struck me because I'd been so convinced that it was a print owing to the exacting scale and color and contrast. It was little more than a grassy yard with some flowers in front but I'd been struck by the lighting. I knew that lighting from New Mexico. I knew it from the west coast. There's a reason people wait for those sunsets. It's a different kind of saturation that you only feel once there in its beauty. I found the artist's name on the back: "Carol Satriani", and quickly found her website with a whole plethora of minimalist pastorals to scroll through. The same contrasts and colors. I know why it drives pastoral artists to imagine as they do. The word pastoral is something altogether different from what one tends to imagine until they're immersed in it from a raw, romantic point of view. It's why I choose to ride clock-wise around Lake Mary when I do the little 45-miler. It's why hiking around sunset is something often extraordinarily different than hiking at noon. It's a place and time where shadows create a sense of unending depth for a brief hour before nightfall. 

    So, I stood there with my phone in my hand browsing her paintings and I was struck by this sense of things that I hadn't felt in awhile. I'd been dehydrated for the past few days from the weekend's ski-venture and hadn't taken aims to correct course and accidentally fell into a sort of stupor that had me concerned until I realized I need to drink voluminous amounts of water and push some magnesium and get back on my feet, wherein I came back to life. I've had do deal with these ups and downs as part of my feral ways and metabolism which seems clocked for endurance instead of details. So I felt much better this morning and saw the light in a different, softer way coming through the front windows and I remembered something about why I was drawn to the outdoors to begin with. I didn't show up at Campo for any legitimate reason. I did want to share the experience with my mom as she went through her final days, but I was chasing a more ephemeral feeling. I knew that somewhere along the way I would encounter such sunsets along such alpine lakes below such mountains that it would likely render my heart in a way that might coincide with something greater, counter something chronically amiss in my worldview, and bring me into communion with steady degrees of unfettered beauty. I wondered what that level of prolonged exposure to the real world might do...and so it did. 

  I always ran on inspiration, but it was a delicate thing. It was something that needed constant reinforcement and protection and because it required my own subjective worldview, I often found myself at odds with all the other perspectives out there. I never cared about gear culture or hiker culture or any of the things I tended to find in print and media. I cared about this idea of communion. I wanted the trails and thrus to reveal their magic to me and I to them. I wanted dialogue with a deep sense of  something that only long-distance adventurers can find. There's a magic somewhere in there...and it has something to do with the distinct moments under distinct conditions after so many miles underfoot. Here, I accept an animism that returns me to my proper place within the stars' relationship to the earth and myself. It is some sort of divine wholeness that feels inter-dimensional and timeless and that's all I've gone after for most of my adult life.

I think Carol Satriana understands this on an instinctual level. In my forays into the visual arts I've worked on many paintings and textures and I feel that one may create, through alchemical means, a certain resonance that flows through the Self and guides the hand. It's similar with photography, but there, the game is waiting and watching. The same emotions rise and fall like waiting for the right wave just past the breakers on a warm sunny day. You're out there with your body and your mind and your heart. Waiting. Watching. In the zone. Grateful to be alive.