During the 18 months since I last wrote in this space it has been quiet in my garden, as well as in my writing. Another drought deepened. Few monarchs visited, hence few eggs were laid and even fewer caterpillars and chrysalises formed. In these parched and quiet months, my words seemed to drift in perpetual motion, not waiting to be captured: circling, swelling, swooping like the seeds from the sparce milkweed pods that opened, searching for moist soil in which to settle.
Grief for my friend Grant, that has been present with me since his death two years ago, has resisted my attempts to bring it to heel. I have been learning that grief is here on its own terms. It is a teacher and a friend, as Grant was to me. It is here to sing, to illuminate, to create, and to connect, just as he was.
In the first winter after Grant died, I found myself traveling into space, exploring the trajectory of his passing into the complexity of the cosmos. I could see his passage in my mind’s eye. Since then, I’ve been experimenting with ways to communicate this vision in symbols and paint media: acrylic on acrylic, boundaries collapsing, figures merging and reforming: translucent and transfigured. The struggle to allow those images to flow is a great challenge: beautiful and daunting all at once. The effort to communicate a process that is always changing continues. In this time, Grant has traveled beyond my wish, beyond my desire to hold him in this dimension. I guess it is in what they call “the music of the spheres” that I continue to hear his favorite song: “Butterfly.”
This past winter’s floods finally brought deeply welcome nourishment to the drought-ravaged trees, plants and soils that surround my home. Now there’s a bumper crop of new life, including monarchs and their offspring caterpillars, everywhere in motion. Seed pods on the milkweed plants, on which the caterpillars feed, are full-to-bursting. The cycles continue.
