Mysterious Night Vision Journals

Out of the Cave

2012-01-27T09:26:00.000-08:00

Out of the Cave
I often draw in front of the TV, and this particular evening, I saw an image on TV of white bat shapes coming out of a cave. Then we started watching the Geronimo special, and whenever I glanced up, I'd see a shape of ocotillo cactus or the compelling shape of a desert wind blasted standing stone. I drew whatever shape implanted itself on my retina. I like the results. I see people under the protection of the cave and in the powerful companionship of the Soul Stone.

Juggling Fruit For Fun

2012-01-16T14:49:00.000-08:00

It was January 10th, 2012 and we were all rusty. Many of us had not painted over the holidays. Juggling Fruit for Fun started as a ten minute warm up class exercise. My students painted and I painted with them. It is not cheating to go back and complete the image later and that is what I did.

Fast warm ups often produce fun and energy, on the paper right where you want it. It is a good way to put the muse on alert, solicit the help of your art guides and convince your subconscious and other invisible sources that you are now serious about getting on with painting.

Playing with Artist Studio iPad ap

2011-11-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

I downloaded Artist Studio onto my iPad 2 last night and started fooling around while Cheryl and I watched Season 13, Week Eight of Dancing With the Stars.

This was my first sketch, all done with my fingers on the iPad2 surface. Taps change the color and pen size and other features.

The experience is surprisingly satisfying. It feels very much like finger painting, and I find the result expressive of my mood, which is what I have always liked most about doing my kind of art, the people's art, art therapy, play, expressive art.

I have ordered a stylus, a kind of pen or brush sensitive to the surface of the i-Pad. I understand I can also do doodle-cartooning and screen capture a movie of the moves the hand makes in its creation. THAT could be fun!

Hand with the Blue Agate Eye

2011-07-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

This blue agate eye is very ancient and was given to me by the late Tibetan dream yoga master Tarab Tulku. October 22, 2007

Attunement Intention Hand

2011-07-21T07:41:00.000-07:00

This is my exploration practice exercise for the Attunement gathering at Edenvale this weekend. I purchased 9 x 12 black construction paper so everyone would have enough room to trace their hand. I take them back to their childhood, perhaps the last time they traced their own hand. I ask them to first put inside their hand qualities and interests that they love/ appreciate about themselves. Then I ask them to depict their attunement world and the areas of interest and responsibility that they connect with most often . I will give each of them a chance to debrief and they will go home with a cover sheet on their art. What do you think, will it work?

So Many Bright Stones on Fort Ebey Beach

2011-07-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

July 9, 2011, painting with Cheryl, writing with Peter at Ft. Ebey State Park on Whidby Island

So many bright stones turn in shoreline surf
that when I close my eyes at night, they still
shift, roll, shine in the water sliding down
the cave wall of my sleep.

In half lit trance I gather again green jasper, slick,
hard as jade. White quartz, rounded into thousands
of small bird eggs, is beach punctuation
in the grammar of the shore.

Once again, in dream I said, “Pile the clearest agates
on my grave when I go, fresh
from the tumbler of the sea.
Find them for me here, on this
sunny, specific strand of gravel beach,
headland to headland, where

even the oldest cliffs dissolve
to polished agates moved by waves."

The Bluff Trail entices us from headland to headland

The wind driven shapes of ancient trees

Art lessons on the picnic table; Cheryl's beautiful soft washes

my paintbrush overloaded with all the colors of the evening sky

Sandy Brown Jensen
Photos by Peter Jensen
Art lessons by Cheryl R. Long

Spring, As Usual

2011-06-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

tempts me to the barbeque hootch
in the back yard, traps me there
between the drum of rain
on the plastic roof
and the smoke of charring steaks.
Six minutes per side of beef;
nothing to do but sit
like a neighborhood cat
in the canvas chair, spatula
in one hand; bubbles
in the other. For the first time
I notice how our backyard is like
being inside a green glass jar,
how the wind shakes the pear and
cherry blossoms in wind spirals of petals,
how flocks of kinglets with their high,
distant voices never stop commenting
on their aerial world and the worth
of bud burst.

--Sandy Brown Jensen
Last April 2011 sometime
Notes retrieved from my journal

Heceta Beach Rain Agates

2011-06-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

Heceta Beach Rain Agates

Time folds green over

each line of dissolving surf.

When I was a child, the sky was this soft with rain.

Headlands reared up dark

as horses over rushing creeks

entering the sea

like me

after a long run

through clear cuts

& old growth red cedar.

Pelicans like synchronous

pterodactyls circle

the sanctuary of birds.

I have always found myself

in Heceta's black sea cave,

walls streaked down acid green

with algae; white guano splatter.

Boom of surf and now

as then

in & out

of the surf line of time,

one agate is mine.

Today,

translucent blue like

old glass,

layered in the matrix

of hard sediment.

This agate is about time

and the Pacific surf.

childhood and the Cascades.

Vultures hung out for the night

sway on their roost tree

like heavy, dark jewels,

shoulders rounded into themselves:

All my agates are about life.

All my agates are about death.

Some agates are left for a life of looking
on the rich clam flats and pools
that rise and fall between the tides.

-Sandy Jensen
June 12, 2011
Happy birthday to Cheryl and Lisle!

Paul Martinson, Painter of Birds and Dreams

2011-06-04T09:50:00.000-07:00


Limbo of the Mother Venus by Paul Martinson 2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper

My friend Maria Middlestead purchased this painting and sent me the link to Paul Martinson's work. Martinson is a famous painter from New Zealand specializing originally in scientific bird illustrations.

Two Black and White Creatures in Trance and Sleep
by Paul Martinson
2007 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper

Live Trance Performance
by Paul Martinson
2009 Acrylic and watercolor on paper

Later in his life (and this interesting material from his gallery website): "The artist acquainted himself, at a rudimentary level, with Freud's concept of the "free flow of ideas" from the subconscious. This idea, with its basis in psychoanalysis, fundamentally informed Psychic Automatism, a method of expression predominantly influencing art and literature in the third decade of the twentieth century.

The Destination of Oblivion
by Paul Martinson
2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper

Psychic Automatism subsequently formed the basis of Andre Breton Surrealist's Manifesto of 1924. The Manifesto claimed that, "Pure psychic automatism...(meant)...thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.”

The Creatures Must Sleep
by Paul Martinson
2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper

While Martinson acknowledges that it is impossible to give oneself over entirely to the "flow of information" from the subconscious uncensored by the intellect, he attempts to work by intuition alone without censoring on the basis of reason, scale and anatomical accuracy.

"Automatic drawing for me is a personal thing, but has in common with its origins in the Surrealist movement, a "sanctioned" right to draw spontaneously without conscious reference to normality, morality and social taboos...it is an attempt to allow a " free flow" of imagery and ideas as a painter. I feel such freedom is an important aspect of personal expression.”

The Meaning of Mother
by Paul Martinson

2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper

The Aquatic Trance Trio

by Paul Martinson

2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil, gold foil and gouache on paper

For this artist, it is as if his subconscious is filled to overflowing with myriad experiences, thoughts and ideas around the depiction of birds, both extinct and existing, and they will make their presence felt. Martinson believes we are therefore, at any time the sum of our entire experience which includes on one hand the connections we make throughout our life with all other creatures on the planet, even fleetingly (this comprises the great range of relationships we make), everyday experience, and the swirling, interlocking personal reality of our subconscious, and all that it comprises.

Therefore, at the end of a decade of painting birds objectively they continue to dominate current work, although in contexts far removed from their purely representational origins - often in isolation, but more often, with a Venus figure." (Source: Sanderson Contemporary Art Online Gallery)

The Creep of Cats
by Paul Martinson
2009 Acrylic on board

As a viewer, I respond on two levels to Martinson's work. I respond as a birdwatcher, as an admirer of fine bird illustration to his scientific renderings. I respond as a poet and a dreamer to the staged psychodramas caught in the halflight between worlds of waking and sleeping. Each painting is an illustration from a story I seem to be telling myself that is too deep and too important to lose.

Seed Pot

2011-05-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

This mysterious strangeness emerged when I was thinking with my hands. Late on a Thursday night it came into form, I assume hinting at things still gestating, not yet born. She looks a bit alien so who knows what it means.

I also had a dream last night - you were whispering to me in a secretive way that you had an incredible new project.

Nest Building

2011-04-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

Nest Building

A soft brown wren pecks for tiny seeds

strewn from yesterday’s weeding.

On closer look I see

she collects not seeds but tiny dried grass -

slight as a thought.

A beak full of bristling grass,

mustachioed she tilts her head,

making me laugh.

Then she lifts off, flies west toward home

to line her silky nest.

April 24, 2011

I'm All Out of Long's Farm Raspberry Jam!

2011-04-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

Sad but true: I'm all out of Long's Farm Raspberry Jam!

White Bouquet Vision

2011-04-07T09:31:00.001-07:00

When I am in the flow of artmaking and the flow is going very well, I close my eyes when I am going to sleep and I see many visions. Because I have used this black paper for so long I believe my art guides are feeding me the beauty of their dreams. This came to me as a twisting, writhing, dancing bouquet of white flowers on an an inky dark background.

Two Composition Assignments

2011-04-01T16:55:00.000-07:00

A Conversation I Keep Having with Myself

Rainbirds of Wenatchee: A Quilt for Toren

These two paintings are in response to assignments from the Steve Aimone book I am in love with right now. Here is the link in the side bar. The top one is putting angular shapes and curvilinear shapes in to what Aimone calls a conversation. I really have the sense of the ovals/circles being the soul and the geometric shapes are the world. The lines say that I both struggle to integrate AND embrace the geometries of the world from a soul place.

The second assignment was to draw a grid as a foundation for a composition. I got the grid and it was fields. I but the fan shapes on, and they were Rainbirds of the Columbia Plateau. I got a rubber stamp and stamped in the rainbirds, but it still seemed incomplete, so I started writing in all the names of our family and friends and placenames of Wenatchee, and it became a memory quilt.

Cosmic Being With Astral Body

2011-03-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

This blot technique is revealing all kinds of layered strangeness. I saw this alien being immediately. Later I realized that if I turn it on its side it could have been a landscape with reflection in water.

But no, we see what we see and that is what makes this technique fascinating. Lately I am seeing these otherworldly creatures - right about the time I am feeling overly grounded and stogy. Be sure to scroll down to see the entire image. Is this a girl alien being or a boy alien being? Androgynous perhaps.

Ink Blot Landscape

2011-03-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

I tried Cheryl's ink blot technique. In my book, the sun is in the upper left hand of a horizontal page, but it scanned out like this and revealed a new world of reflection, emerging objects and beings...

Kahlo Diary-esque

2011-03-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

I also tried a new expressive technique this morning from a book Peter bought me called "Expressive Drawing" by Steve Aimone. It's very Kahlo Diary-esque. You write a full page of narrative, journal entry--I did it in mixed black pen and watercolor pencil. Then you use paint to "reveal and obscure." The handwriting acts as a unifying visual element.

This journal talks about umbrella walks in the the spring, cherry blossoms and daffodils, so all those elements ended up in the painting. The handle of the umbrella made "J," so I added my other initial, "S." Certain words stand out from the texture of handwriting: the light, the light, brief, to hold on, to not forget, memory."
Posted by Sandy Brown Jensen

Angelic Being of Light

2011-03-25T23:17:00.000-07:00

This is a fascinating techique - a variation on scribble drawing to tap the subconscious. I folded my black paper, dropped in some Chinese white watercolor on one side, closed it and rubbed the back, then dried with a hair dryer. Draw as usual with colored pencil.

I have a strong sensing that this is a specific entity and she has something to do with Nancy Rose. Maybe Rose will recognize her.

Van Gogh's First Drawing.

2011-03-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

"When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. "
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)

Spirit Tree

2011-02-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

Once again, the Oregon coast deepened my thoughts and perceptions about the landscapes of my life. The cedars may no longer the original great giants but I can actually remember old growth tress from my earliest childhood. I played alone under a massive fir tree at the Haskells. I was pretty young, six or seven and I was aware of the living presence of the tree. Even then the tree breathed for me - scared me a little. The branches were so thick I could hide in there, building my make believe world away from little sisters and the neighbor kids.

Now the trees emerge as a major theme in my art. It has taken a long time for themes to make themselves known. Birds, trees, landscapes. It is shaking down, finally. This is a Spirit Tree- I saw it on our way home as we drove through gray turbulent clouds and driving rain, then enough sun to need sunglasses, then into snow and sleet. The Spirit Tree is a composite of the coastal mountain trees, wet and heavy with green gold moss.

Cheryl Does Picasso and The Guardian Owls All On

2011-01-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

This is what you get when Cheryl does the massive SAM Picasso exhibit, eats excellent Mexican food then goes home to watch The Guardian Owls. The Guardian Owls movie is great animation - I was absolutely fascinated how they could give so much expression to an owl. The Picasso exhibit was dark but inspiring. He was a genius but when I compared how I felt leaving his exhibit say versus an O'Keefe exhibit, I know who I would love to have on my walls. Picasso showed only one landscape. He primarily painted people, especially women. Usually women unhappy or crying. I like our stuff better!

Spirits in the Cave Wall; Stories on the Land

2011-01-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

I like this double page spread in my new art journal. I learned to lay down paint, then to press Saran Wrap on top and let it dry. Organic shapes were left that I could draw, trace, paint and generally have fun with as this combination cave wall and narrative landscape emerged from my meditation.

Interestingly, this painting was followed by the short story currently on my sandybrownjensen blog called "Endangered Species."

Three of Discs

2011-01-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

I am starting a new long term art project I'm calling My Tarot. I pull a card from the deck, study it and paint my own understanding of it. This should take about twenty years!

The card for this weekend is the Three of Discs, which is appropriately the card of the writer and artist. That said, it means applying the qualities of pure hard work, discipline and dedication.

When I painted it, I noticed that for me it is a sort of triple mandala. The great sources are the Sea of the Unconscious and the gifts it throws up on the beaches of creativity; the Sun of Insight and Inspiration; and in between, struggling for consciousness, is Craft, the Human as World Tree.

Map of Tuesday: You are Here and Dress on Fire

2011-01-12T08:45:00.000-08:00

A Map of Tuesday: You Are Here


Dress on Fire

Somebody

locked the kid in the car again.

The fox is on the tracks.

Her dress is on fire

with stories.

--Sandy Jensen Jan. 11 and 12, 2011

Three Self Portraits with Insect, Birds, and Animal Spirits

2011-01-11T08:43:00.000-08:00

January 10, 2011 Three Self Portraits with Insect, Birds, and Animal Spirits

Warm Up Monster

2011-01-06T21:37:00.001-08:00

Still warming up, this Warm Up Monster showed up over the last two evenings. He says he is a sentient being but is not willing to show his true face. So he looks however he wants to look depending on the day.

Gospel Singer

2011-01-06T21:33:00.000-08:00

When we were kids, Mom and Daddy had Mahalia Jackson records. I liked her music and I especially responded to the album cover. This is a warm up scribble drawing. I took a long break from teaching and doing very much art - this is my way back in.

Glen Ivy Eucalyptus

2010-12-27T21:23:00.000-08:00

This eucalyptus tree has waited patiently for me to paint it for at least 20 years. Two weeks ago I approached it with a warm "Hello, remember me?" I searched for a safe place to sit and spend some time with colored pencils and sketch book. This was the service road - the road where all the Latinos work endlessly to keep the grounds perfectly beautiful. This is also where a person could encounter a rattler, even on this 88 degree December day.
I chose a rock where I could sit comfortably. The tree and I communed. I chose my pencils but kept adding colors as I saw the subtle variations in the pale bark. It was quiet except for the red headed woodpeckers. They are always there as far as I can tell. I seem to be the only one fascinated by them. The locals see them too often I suppose.
I did have a visitor during my hour perched on the rock. A golf cart strained to make it up the hill and the driver stopped directly in front of me. He respectfully hesitated before he addressed me. "Senora, you draw?" He wanted to see my barely started sketch. "Muy bueno." Big smile. I asked him what he was working on? He gestured up the hill at the ancient cabins. He said he lived nearby and he was very happy. He could go home to his wife and children every night. Not like other times- at least that is what I think he said. He seemed very sweet - it was so nice to meet someone like that.
I found out later from a handsome and strapping Irishman that they were replacing the 1940's plumbing in the little cabins. He looked so capable, the Irish guy and I could tell he would have liked to walk and talk. He is new to the United States. But no, I had no extra time to talk. I was missing spa time to get in some art time. Then another attunement session. Seriously, I would like to go to Glen Ivy for a personal art retreat. The place is a visual feast and is loaded with source imagry I probably do not even know is there yet. This is the year of doing things differently.

Christmas Painting 2010

2010-12-27T15:45:00.000-08:00

For Christmas, Cheryl gave me this cool journal with really thick, rough-edged, hand-made watercolor paper. Here is a vision of our Christmas Tree two ways to initiate the journal on a festive note.

The Green Gold Cedar Giant of the Mountain

2010-02-15T19:50:00.001-08:00

Stoney Way Creek, Oregon

2010-02-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

January 31, 2010 Stoney Way Creek, 5 miles south of Yahats, just south of Bob Creek.
Our new puppy Ryle, a golden streak of baby fur and bursts of energy. He is teething and a stick of driftwood is his teether of choice.
The Pacific Ocean throws small round black rocks skittering all over the beach.This highest tide of the year tumbles them endlessly, a prehistoric sound to my ear. Tom already found a good sized agate- large as a human eye, golden and clear. 10 Mile Creek runs high on this full moon. Recent rains crash with considerable forch against the pushing tide. Salty white foamy spume only makes so much progress against the fast steady stream before the wave subsides.
I identify with the with this brisk stream, collecting from hundreds ecosystems. It delivers them all to the Source. My job as well - deliver them all to the Source. There I can safely deposit it all, and yes, once again, with no concern for results.
Near offshore, 8 brown pelicans undulate in a line. They patrol the backlit waves for little fish. Brilliant blue sky today with only the sheerest glaze of white clouds lifting.
We leave the beach, driving the 10 mile switch back mountain road. We stop at a hunters camp. The aspens hide at least one frog. What a relief, a frog. Too many stories about disappearing amphibians. I am happy to be here with my little golden dog sleeping in the sun. Tom is scouting a dank ravine - lured by crystal cluster agates and hard red jasper. I would not follow him there today but remain in full light. This clearing has every element of my earliest childhood landscape: wet sword ferns, devils club, the smell of forest floor. Birds that never bothered to leave this mild winter. The frog again. Twitchity, twitchity. I will identify that one on my way home.
I wanted to stop a mile or two back down the road. I wanted to be in the green gold moss forest by the river but it was posted, "we shoot trespassers." We didn't go in. But I want to look again at the massive old cedar. I looks like a green giant dripping irridescent gold moss - the ancient wise one of the mountain. I should have stopped to get my picture. I will never see it quite that way again. Me dreaming of dripping green goldness; him dreaming of clear yellow agates plucked from dark cold waters in a dank ravine.
I cannot waste precious sun, not even for precious stones. I doze in the warm winter light. Tom returns with a smile and a yellow red carnelian the size of his fist.
I make us go back to search for my shaggy moss giant. The light has changed. I find it, the massive tortured and twisted green cedar. I photograph it and I have the bones, the basic structure that I need for a painting. The light, the impression of a living breathing entity, of ancient years and eons of water and mist and moss are all in my memory. I will have to remember - the camera cannot give it to me.

Mysterious Night Vision Journals

2010-02-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

Mysterious Night Vision Journals

2010-02-11T08:55:00.000-08:00

Feb. 8, 2010

From Sandy's Dream Journal

NIGHTMARE MANDALA

A figure of a boy about 10 years old staggers out of the dusk dressed in 19th century dark trousers, jacket, and cap. He is begging from me, but I am scared and rush away.

He grabs my arm. He's heavy, solid, and strong. "Help me!" he says to me.

I stumble away and he grabs me. Our combined momentum takes us over the edge into the ditch of the irrigation canal.

"Help me!" I cry over and over so the children who are behind me might hear, "Help me!"

Hibernation

2010-02-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

Hibernation

Every winter she remembers how the ice

came down out of the north,

locking the land in creaking sheets

of weighted white. Bears froze

in their dens. Ptarmigan and hares

stayed white all year round.

The big animals, the mastodon

and dire wolf, even saber-toothed cat

stayed south of the Big Ice, obeying

that single law: Eat or Die.

She lived those ages out in a high cave

on the Prince of Wales Island looking south.

She scambled together a denning nest

of dry seaweed, lichen and moss,

living on mussels and crab and finally,

gone into that hibernating sleep,

on her own fat reservoirs.

Last November, she left me, traveling

back in time and north to that cave

where now she sleeps the long north nights

dreaming perhaps of our life together

or perhaps she dreams of her glory days

with The People.

But I am abandoned here in the rainy green,

her pale girl, flap-armed marionette

with nothing real to say.

How long before a lengthening sun

sends puffins to the cave to wake

the sleeping Giantess? There will be

spring-run salmon to fuel

her waking blood. When, oh when,

will she remember me and follow

the line of the warming sun south?

In my cold garden, the apple boughs

are still bare, but I have built

a fire circle of green sea agates

and a red carnelian to call her home.

Big Surf at Bob Creek and Dream Animals (Two Poems and a Video)

2010-01-27T09:56:00.000-08:00

Peter and I had a fabulous day at the beach last Sunday. I've posted a couple of poems and a short video here to celebrate.

Surf at Bob Creek

About a million seagulls in hover-hold

over Bob Creek; about a million more

duck-diving salt water out of wings

down in fast-moving fresh water creek.

Sun beating down on high, turbulent

surf throwing its waves back like

about a million wild colts

in the spring when you’re up there

in the Kiger Range and you see them

running in a herd of young’uns, five

colors of blowing, tangled mane,

tails flying like spindrift blown

back off the big surf at Bob Creek.

Fish crows bucking winter wind like

Steens Mountain ravens riding

hot summer thermals down Big Indian Gorge.

--Sandy Jensen

Jan. 24, 2010

Dream Animals

Sunset over Baker Beach

where the protected plover

hides its spotted eggs in the sand;

where on my fiftieth birthday we rode

stable horses on the beach

and I gave my black horse his head

and he charged the in-coming waves.

I still feel the lift of the sea

as we rose up

on the incoming wave.

One night at Baker Beach

a black bear

came down out of the hills

and crossed the road

like a dream animal,

giving us fair warning of the wild,

which is all around and never further

away than the clack of claws

on asphalt.

The shuddering mist claims

what once was a fair day,

and all the light is falling

into the golden sink of the West.

--Sandy Jensen

Jan. 24, 2010

Milk and Blood

2009-11-13T17:24:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, the Giantess lived in the woods beside our house for a while. She was raising her own girl at that time, and they were on a learning circuit from the north in the Queen Charlottes down the rocky coast in the Chief’s wolf-prowed canoe.

They had visited the Makah, the Queets, the Quilute, the Puyallaps and had heard of our small, displaced clan of Wenatchees in suburban Seattle. My parents were both Skagits, and our family life together as Wenatchees was still ahead of us, but the Dzonoquas are time travelers, and she knew who we were before we did.

The thicket by our house was small as the black tip of a Sitka deer’s tail, so they couldn’t stay long, but the little Giantess-in-training found me. She jumped out from behind a cedar stump and grabbed me. I screamed as children scream in play as she ran through my familiar woodland with me bouncing in her little burden basket.

I was not afraid until the old mother appeared, tall and dark-furred, her eyes upside down moons of leathery brown, those sunken cheeks and enormous hanging dugs. I was still in the basket when the girl was put to the breast. As she sucked, drops of milk flew about from her vigor, and I, being a hungry child myself, did not hesitate to put my finger in the frothy cream to taste.

The milk, bitter as nettles, sweet as roasted camas bulbs, moved through my body like a swooning narcotic. The big mother watched me closely through the sleepy slits of her eyes. She knew who I was, that her daughter had claimed me for her own. I was, as I said, only five or six years old at the time, but I remember clearly even now in my middling age, the twin streams of the familiar and the strange that flowed with the Giantess’s milk into my veins:

The landscapes, more ancient by far, but I knew them already, the coasts, rivers, mountains, forests of my Northwest home. I knew the spirit of the longhouse, the heart of the giveaway, but strange indeed was the land of myth where Dzonoqua and all her kind and kin live in a dreamscape. I saw how they traveled through time, how they moved between worlds by the power of the story, the mask, the dance, and the song.

In disorderly chaos it has taken me decades to sort, I saw the dancer leap with his strong legs in the firelight, the booming drum, the great lifted beaks of the beautiful Cannibal birds. I saw into the future then, as now I dream the past by the power of the milk of the Giantess.

Her daughter is the Old One now, and we are milk sisters through the peculiar interweavings of time, which is like the pattern of oak leaves in the canopy overhead—laced and layered, living, dying, green, gold, yellow, brown; shadowed by day; starry dark by night and swept by the owl’s wing; called again to day by the dawn whistle of Dzonoqua, the mythological Giantess, Wild Woman of the Woods, Guardian of the Chief’s Wealth, my red cedar blood and milk.

I Asked the Giantess What She Likes

2009-10-29T09:28:00.000-07:00

Painting "Forest Path" by Cheryl R. Long
in the spirit of Emily Carr

I Asked the Giantess What She Likes
(for Charlie Two Legs)

and she said she liked the Cassiar
jade from Charlie Two Legs, rough and smooth.
“Only the Skeena River is that color,”
she said,” That glacial till,
reflected Red Cedar green, smoky
and rich.”

She said it reminded her
of Emily Carr painting in Haida G’waii
and over in the Git’san country,
all those greens on her palette,
the way she never felt
she could get the greens right
(leafy green, blue-green, emerald green, lavender,
greenish black, deep cedar/Big
Leaf Maple/Sitka Spruce/ Doug Fir green;
Devil’s Club, Stinging Nettle, Horsetail,
Vine Maple, tag alder green).

Emily Carr knew the secret
of Cassiar jade—how the north
forest cedars and Skeena green
got locked in the stone long before
even the Giantess was born, she
who lived out the Ice Ages
in a sunny cave facing south.

Before any of us, she had her
Cassiar jade, stones in a circle,
dreaming a land bridge,
dreaming a people,
dreaming her own totemic face
high over Alert Bay,
her own mask at the chief’s side,
cedar, jade and Skeena green
her oldest gifts
to the people she dreamed.

“And I also like," she said,
but I said, "Hush.
I am silenced.
That’s enough
for now.”

Oregon White Oak Agate

2009-10-27T08:01:00.000-07:00

I am slowly being changed
from the inside out by the giantess
who lives in my tree—we
have become an Oregon oak
struggling to connect
the sky to the pure agates
hidden in our roots.

I vote for acorns;
she votes for falling leaves,
for shrugging off all color.
She wants to brood,
wrapped in her thick wood
until not even the sharpest stars
can pierce her dream.

I grub for the lost agates with both hands.
Stuffing them into my apron
pockets, I climb up her
chest limbs to Raven’s
unruly nest. I can place
the round stones there where the moon
can imbue them
with milky light.

Still held tight
by her dry, mossy hands,
I can turn the cheek
she can’t see to a salt breeze
coming from a sea
not far from here—
over the hill by the river’s mouth
where my jade horse still stands,
bridled
and ready to run.

--Sandy Jensen

Pear Tree of Life

2009-10-18T22:55:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a magical party at a place called Featherstone Arts. Set deep in the woods at the end of a dirt road, I first viewed the house immediately following the first major rain and thunder storm of the season. Cloud cover completely obscured the sky and white, wraithe like ground fog added to my sense of being in fairy land. I needed but did not have a flashlight to find my way along a dirt driveway to get to the house. I found it by following the glow from the windows and the sound of a a female vocalist. I looked up at 10' granite sentiels surrounding a pond. This marked the entry and I stepped into a house filled with estatic art, music and food, wine and amazing artists. I have lived here for 14 years and I just now met my art community. It is a homecoming, a true deja vue experience. I accept with gratitude and complete bewilderment. Once again, the very best things that I have ever received in my life have come to me on a silver platter, overflowing.

Witness

2009-06-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

Witness

The painter, Renee, caught the Jaguar Shaman by surprise and in a private jungle moment. Quiet and intense, she had been working out the details of a composition involving butterflies, blue, and orchids of a speaking pink. She had been startled when her increasingly detailed vision added a hidden snake, green, then another, blue.

Then the eyes appeared and the hair on her sunburned arms flushed all goosebumps, for the cat’s eyes had clearly seen her long before she picked his jaguar shape out of the wilderness mass. Then with another jolt, the shaman herself resolved as a figure out of the ground. Her brown face was tattooed with gold cat stripes, her eyes and lips pale as an albino’s, yet vivid with soul life. She had not seen Renee, for she was hunting spirits in another world.

Renee captured the introspective face of the working shaman and her animal familiar even as they faded like green mist back into the jungle. The cat had seen her; the shaman had not. Her hands shook as she put her painting kit away and found her way back to the thin thread of a jungle pathway.

The artist continued walking until she came to a swirling green river with a mind of its own. Many people were gathered on the shore crying. Men were building a small byre, and as she approached, they lit a fire under it. The flames ate at the small figure of a child in angry orange gulps. A woman with a scarlet shawl thrown over her head knelt on the ground and keened.
A teenaged boy left the group of mourners as the smell of roasting flesh rose into the air. He politely greeted the strange woman and offered ferry service over the river. “But you must wait with us an hour,” he said, “For a jaguar has taken the life of my cousin.”

Renee sat under the shade of an enormous, twisting fig tree and unpacked her painting kit, which the boy studied with great interest. She opened her sketch book, and the boy yelled when he saw the Jaguar Shaman. He snatched the book out of her hands, held the image high and ran toward his relations, who in turn stared and shouted. One older man stuck his hand into the fire and bloodied his fingers on the child’s burning body. While the teenager held still, extending the sketchbook, the old man crouched down and like a cat stalked the painting. The young man moved cagily away, and they played predator and prey in an intricate dance in the dust. Then with a feline roar and rising scream, the old shaman put all ten fingers directly on the image of the Jaguar Woman, leaving bloody dots.

Renee jumped up and held both hands to her cheeks, for she felt the man’s red fingers on her own skin. Not far away in the bush, she heard another cry that repeated the man’s scream. A long, low wind sprang up and blew through the forest with a moan that ended in a shower of hot sparks. The byre collapsed with what remained of its tender burden, and the men pushed it with long poles into the river. The mother in the scarlet shawl fell silent and watched the burning brands consumed in the green rush of the river with a mind of its own.

The young man closed the sketch book and returned it with a little bow Renee remembered from another, more courtly world. She was almost afraid to receive it, but she took it from him as he said in her language, “We can cross now.” She clutched the sketchbook to her chest as she climbed into the sturdy dugout.

The young man accepted the two coins she pressed into his hand. He took great care to point out to her which path she must take to get to her destination before dark. Renee faced the jungle alone as the wind breathed its last and the leaves settled into a waiting calm.

Shaman With Jaguar

2009-06-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

Wildness, wilderness, jungle. It has been a year since I visited the Mayan jungle of the Yucatan. The wild in myself sets up a resonance in certain landscapes. The jungles of Sian Kan, the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, the Alvord Desert, the Steens Mountains, the Canyonlands, the slot canyons of the Paria. Many savage, magical places that pull at my solar plexus when I stay away too long.

I saw this young Mayan shaman in Tulum, Mexico, joining his friends for a few moments as dusk fell and the band played. Like any teenager, he hung out with his friends. I observed him, his parrot feathers making him beautiful, his bow and arrow making him seem powerful and dangerous to me. I observed him so briefly. He felt my eyes perhaps and he literally disappeared as I tried to keep him in view. Maybe he merged with the crowd or slipped into the night. The way I saw it, he vanished.

I think of him often-here in my suburban home, my cul-de-sac. Yes, I honor wildness in my gardens. It is represented as a house cat could be said to represent a jaguar. But I know there is knowledge and ways of being that I will never touch. There are landscapes more seductive than a lover. And so I draw, I paint. It is my way of extending my hand into the unknown. It is my call - and I wait.

The Girl In The Red Kimono

2009-05-04T23:14:00.001-07:00

The Girl In the Red Kimono

Turning 63, and soon.
I realize with conviction
that my banked fire still heats-
but I will not be the same again.
My red kimono is now for the mystery.
The moon is no longer for bleeding
but for seeing.
The white bird whispers in my ear -
I listen.

Coyote with His Rose Petal Eyes

2009-05-04T19:34:00.001-07:00

Eyes in the Sand
By Sandy Jensen

When the boys asked her what she was looking for on the black, sand beach, she said she had lost her eyes. She was looking for replacements, she said, a pair of perfect gold agates. It was known these could be found here at sunset when the baby selkies lost them in the surf after a day of play.

“But Grandmother!” the boys cried in praise, “You have beautiful pink rose petals for eyes now! Surely your view of the world must be complete.”

“These are not my eyes,” she said. “One days I was walking along Cascade Head minding my own when I heard Coyote inside a Cedar Tree muttering to himself as he pushed his nuts out a hole Woodpecker had just finished drilling for him. The nuts fell on the ground into a pile of cedar shavings. Next came his long golden tail, each of all four legs, his black nosed snout and then his eyeballs connected by the optic nerve. I wasn’t the only one who saw this, and a bunch of us gathered around shushing each other and trying not to laugh out loud so Coyote wouldn’t know we were there.

Coyote ran around reassembling himself, which was a sight to see. He felt around with his paws for his eyes, but Raven stuck out that thick beak of his and snatched them right out from under his pat, pat, patting paws.

Well, I couldn’t help it. I bust out laughing and Coyote’s ears went up. You know he hates to be looking foolish. So he runs into a wild rose bush and comes out the other side with the most amazing rose petal eyes stitched on with a couple of rose thorns. I admit I coveted those sheer pink satin eyeballs and through them Coyote could see my sudden flush of green envy. After all, my eyes grew at the end of stalks and even though I could see in all directions in every color of forest shadow and sea storm, I didn’t know what I had. But Coyote. He knew.

‘Mrs. Snail,’ he said. You know that honey voice of his. ‘I see you admire my rose petal eyes. Shall we trade?’

All my kind loves a good swap and next thing I knew, I was looking at the world with a soft dawn glow—morning, noon, and night. It was Raven who flew by and told me I could find new eyes on the black beach sand.”

The boys laughed and emptied their pockets. Agates dribbled on the sand like two dozen gold selkie eyes. A sneaker wave came up between their legs and like Coyote, ate them all in one bite like yellow marmalade.

Elsewhere in this blog I have posted illustrations from this story about Coyote. He has had to dismember himself to squeeze his way out of a cedar tree and Raven stole his eyeballs. Coyote replaced his eyes with wild rose petals and when Mrs. Snail asked about them, he said, "These are special eyes. With them I see visions. With them I see spirit rays."

Of course, she trades him her eyes for the rose petal eyes...who tricked whom, Coyote?

I see also that with this mandala, I have honored my dear friend Dusty, who has passed to the other side of the veil and now I'm sure he sees spirit rays and visions.

Mandala For Water, Air Earth and Fire

2009-04-26T09:52:00.001-07:00

This is a cosmic image that says, what is, is. Nature bats last, life goes on. Action and movement is our defense against stagnation and death. The planet keeps moving, and logically, since we are part of the planet, we must as well.

Poem for Dusty

Once again the wheel turns-
13 seasons and the golden dog
returns to the sun -
leaving daffodils and tulips
in his wake.
He parted as he came,
in spring.

Controlled Scream

2009-04-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

The Controlled Scream of the Moon

You know--when you feel like screaming but there's nothing anybody but you can do about the situation?

A Mandala for the Blossoming of Cherry Trees

2009-03-22T12:59:00.001-07:00

The plants know that is is spring. I woke to 36 degrees outdoors but the fruit trees are blossoming and the bird have been busy for months. The red breasted sapsucker stakes out his space, attracts a mate and they build thier nest, the business of the season.

Our culture would have us associate sex with the young and the beautiful. I associate sex with the oldest rhythms of life. Even the ancient cherry tree blooms. My friend Linda meditates under the tree's massive branches. The gentle bees hum and keep her company. Today is her 60th birthday and with the cherry tree, she blooms.

A Mandala For New Beginnings

2009-03-19T23:18:00.001-07:00

The way I work, I create one step at a time. I only move to an area when I know what to do. This mandala emerged the evening after an especially rich session with my therapist. When I started I assumed that something would develop for the middle portion. It eventually became apparent that the void was intended for the center. This time of my life is a new beginning as I free myself from old emotions that I no longer need. What is coming next is far from clear, no inkling yet but I am reasonably sure something will show up.

Ghosts at the Night Picnic, Coldwater Creek, Glen Ivy 1981

2009-03-19T19:04:00.000-07:00

Ghosts at the Night Picnic, Coldwater Creek, Glen Ivy 1981

March 1, 2009
I am trying to balance my chair on the uneven ground under the big oaks. I can hear Coldwater Creek tumbling down the little falls where I know two bottles of champagne are in a weighted bag at the bottom of the catch pond. The stem of my crystal wine glass is cold between my fingers on this hot summer night in 1981, and the late-harvest Zinfandel is the color of a pirate’s trove of rubies and garnets in the firelight.

Greg Botz’s kind and handsome face is ruddy with heat as he tends the steaks on the fire. He’s dressed in a tuxedo even though we’re a rough mile away from the inn where we all live.

I’m wearing a long peasant dress with a little off-the-shoulder black sweater my Aunt Nan gave me. The table under the trees is covered with a red and white checked cloth and a big bowl of steaming spaghetti and a green salad sparking red tomatoes have just arrived by the hands of three more friends emerging out of the dark.

They have hiked the mile up the glen for this dinner in honor of my 31st birthday: Doc Lynn Scecina is one face that comes into focus out of the shadows. And there is Eric Crocker.

If there are any jealousies flowing between us, I don’t know about them; if there are troubles to come, I don’t know about them. I am at a time and a place in my life that feels balanced on a gimbal of timelessness. The forward motion of our lives halts and some part of me steps back, outside the circle of the fire and looks in, clicking the deep shutter of memory, letting all the light in I can.

Heartsong Snowstorm

2009-03-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

Heartsong Snowstorm
(after a form by Lex Runciman)

March snow storm—fast, fat,
furry flakes from the Coast Range
all the way across the Valley
floor to the Cascade
rim of our white ceramic
Willamette bowl.
Windshield wipers
parse glimpses of newborn lambs
suckling first milk:
white on white on white,
snowy air of my heart.

Skies of my heart cover
the woven basket of wetland
reeds, alkali flats,
sagebrush steppes: myths and rivers
of my childhood. Passive blue eye,
you who have seen my father’s curiosity,
followed his red socks into the desert,
trained his eyes to see
your Great Web, you will not blink
when my river, too,
has dried to a sand arroyo under your
pitiless sun,
burnt landscape of my heart.

And I have been followed by people
I do not know
into streets I have had to name myself.
At dawn, when mist rises
from the river and the fishermen
drink coffee, string line under the pilings
of the creosote docks,
the lovers find each other by the jade elephants
in Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe and children
tag their way to school through the back
alleys and dusty lots
of the lost city of my heart.

Be adventurous and kind,
tragic people of my heart,
I am inventing you
while my lungs still breathe
and the snow still falls
cold and white:
air of my heart.

--Sandy Jensen
March 12, 2009

Mandala for the End of Winter Quarter 2009

2009-03-14T08:04:00.001-07:00

My personal interest in graphic expression leans heavily toward spontaneous art that lets various aspects of the unconscious have their say in the daylight. Mandalas are particularly suited to this because they are an ancient form understood at a pre-literate level. They are soul maps. In my mandalas, the spiral frequently shows up , and I identify it as my joie d' vivre, my creative life essence.

Here I see myself as the spiral energy barrelling along under the central garden.
The garden is full of my students standing like fireweeds in full bloom with their seedheads blowing away in the wind of change.
On the right, in the West, is an apple tree, and that is my writing about childhood, an actual manuscript called "West of Wenatchee."
The most interesting emergent energy to me is the long path swooping across the bottom under the spiral. I take that to be my novel on the move as I try to wrap things up at the end of the quarter and get ready to go to St. Louis to take a workshop dedicated just to that project.
The red streak that comes down to join with it is my physicality, but every mandala contains unspoken mysteries, as well.

Dreadsnake Mandala

2009-03-12T19:23:00.001-07:00

Life is red as a barbecued steak
shared beneath the grape and oak;
dread is long as a diamond snake
the color of grief and smoke.

Glen Ivy Moon

2009-02-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

Glen Ivy Moon

The Old Glen Ivy Inn

I lived in an old inn
whose balconied stories
rode the heaving surf of the hillside
like a tall ship with many masts,
square-rigged,
riding at anchor
above the valley floor.
Old-fashioned windows hinged
like wings you could shove open
to the winking moonlight. Gables
gave portholes to the ragged roofline,
and there was something in the way
the bow breached the air
over the hill that made the old
home seem to hove to and rock
in the wind. Hundred year old
Washington Palms rattled
their dry skirts and slid their slim
gray hips from side to side
like old hula dancers
who never forgot their moves.
A pair of white owls flew
up out of the dark, perched
on the top balcony’s high
rigging, then sailed off, their twin
faces holding the moon.
In those days, I often
kept the dawn watch,
that still, dark hour when the cool
mountain breeze flowed downhill
and rocked the great ship in its arms,
before the sun struck my windowpane
with its hammer blows of gold.

--Sandy Jensen

Where Does Art Come From?

2009-02-22T21:48:00.000-08:00

Art returned today
slipped in while I wasn't looking.
One moment the canvas seemed
a fine white cottonwood with colbalt shadows
that must fall just so.

The next moment, a yellow square
unbidden -
and a sheer purple glaze
blending space to unify
a pale skeletal snag,
roaring smoke,
fire and sky.

This is new art
and I ask
myself once again-
where does art come from?
I look under my skin; I look at
the memories of artists past.
I ask my sisters, my brothers, my mother,
and I ask my friends.
Where does art come from?

When Friday The 13th Turns Bad

2009-02-16T21:21:00.000-08:00

The Utterly Fantastic Smoking Orange Volcanos

2009-02-09T12:48:00.000-08:00

This is what happens in the dead of winter in the Pacific Northwest. The gray, the rain and the moss finally drive artists to total distraction and we find a way to escape to some warm, strange new land. In search of new experiences, Cheryl and Tom launch thier canoe into the previously unexplored lake of the Smoking Orange Volcanos.

Totem Duck

2009-02-03T22:20:00.001-08:00

I am a student of Michael Harner, the famous teacher of shamanic journeying. During my first successful journey to the underworld I met my totem animal. This duck is unlike any I have ever seen with my binoculars. He remains in my consciousness after 15 years. I never fail to pause and watch ducks and I always remember that I have a special connection with them. They have something to tell me - usually to remind me that I am not separate from nature. A short 3 mile hike through a local wetland can reveal not only ducks but flickers, sapsuckers, redwinged blackbirds, herons, egrets, bald eagles and much more.

Earth Mandala With Tree Forms

2009-02-03T22:16:00.000-08:00

Larimer Eyeglasses

2009-02-03T22:08:00.000-08:00

12/28/08 Crazy Larimer Eyeglasses, a hermit for over 20 years, holed up in a cabin in Estes Park. Known to be a brilliant but mad professor, he finally broke his solitude to have a chance to eat, drink and talk with the reknown Shakespearean scholar, Peter Jensen. Rumors that Larimer might do harm to visitors proved to be false when professor Jensen was found unharmed drinking a latte and eating croissants while sketching in his journal at an Estes Park coffee shop.

The Blue Door

2009-01-30T22:39:00.000-08:00

The Blue Door is an illustration for the book Journey Through the Blue Door, written by Nancy-Rose Meeker and Angela Cecil, compiled by Sandy Jensen. The poem expresses my feelings about the passing of Angela Cecil December 28, 2008.

January 16, 2009

GRIEF

How does grief find me?
A visitor camping at my door.
She pitches a tent, rolls out a bag
waits for many days more.

At first I do not hear
the soft tap, tapping.
I‘m busy and the guest
continues
she continues softly to rap.

I do not sense, I’m unaware –
as the first dark days go by –
I know the guest is calling
but I do not cry.

I am not feeling well now
my body twists and cries.
I think I hear the door now,
what is on the other side?

Grief finally tires of waiting
disguised as a really bad day.
My guard cannot match - she enters and
I, disarmed cannot delay.

My friends lost a daughter -
we all have daughters
we openly and deeply grieve.
Together we drink down the bitter
None will turn, no one will leave.

Tonight I cannot turn grief away
necessary as tornados
certain as the birth of lambs.
Tonight I sit with her and I pray.

Cheryl Renee Long

I Ask My Students to Remember and I Am Still Writing Long After They Have Left the Room

2009-01-30T13:22:00.000-08:00

I Ask My Students to Remember and I Am Still Writing Long After They Have Left the Room

I remember being surprised when the saw
came up to meet my face,
by the log truck in my lane,
by the sound of a storm cloud cracking open,
how the rain stripped the roses from the vine.

I remember screaming when I saw my own blood,
when the truck wouldn’t swerve from my lane,
when I realized part of me was dead
and part of me alive, when I was overwhelmed
I screamed, and I screamed when I panicked,
and once I screamed for joy.

I remember the smell of ozone after the lightning strike,
the faint whiff of skunk on the wind,
the landfill in the distance. Then the smell
of orange blossoms filled up the valley. When
I came in from the snow, the smell of
peach pies on the stove.

I remember the first time after that time
I was afraid of the dark
and it occurred to me
there might not be a God,
that the soul and the breath and the moment
might be all I got this first time,
this only time.

I remember dreaming my father was alive,
that I could fly, that I still
lived in the big house on the hill.
I dreamed the silver fox, the golden dog,
and I dreamed the yellow spider on my sleeve.

--Sandy Jensen

Harney County Still Life

2009-01-30T13:09:00.000-08:00

Harney County Still Life

The slow windmill fills
the galvanized steel tub
which reflects the lilac sky
and four phoebes drink there
and a heron stands guard by the spigot
of bright rushing water.

“Write a Map of Your Spiritual Journey”

2009-01-30T12:56:00.000-08:00

“Write a Map of Your Spiritual Journey”

But childhood was not a plateau,
birth was not a low point
from which all other points
arose; childhood is not a bar graph
or a Gantt chart,
nor is it a star chart
of comparative brightness:
it is the soul’s bright geography,
the dark woodlot where my sister terrified
me with a headless snake
still writhing toward me
fifty years later.

Do you remember the place on the hill
toward which all people
streamed for twenty years
that flashed green and bright
as the Emerald City
then snuffed out
as if it had never been?

The soul’s journey has
her animal companions,
the repetitive landscape
of nightmare and dream,
murky with memory.
This journey needs a map
with rivers that run underground,
that run backward through time,
that loop through
reconsiderations,
love affairs that blossomed and fell from the tree,
evenings that dazzled,
trees that burst into flame still standing as
landmarks in a burning swamp
where St. Elmo’s blue breath
throws the antique shadows of ibis
into time’s rippling stream.

If we speak of maps dangerous
as these, you must know there is a man
holding three fingers in warning;
there is a crossroad almost unseen
out of the corner of your eye.
This is populated wilderness—
even the desert has its signs of banded gold,
as sand shifts down into the dune
of geologic time.

My hair has stood on end
in an electric wind.
The sealstone on my wrist tells a story.
Helen, the world’s treasure,
has spoken personally to me, and I
have tried to turn her away.
I follow my own dreams—
a silver fox, a golden dog,
a woman named Nightwinds,
and a soul boat on the River of Stars.
I have been stopped by barriers of height and stone,
by fire and snake.

I have been known to turn
reasonably away, and thus
a map is shaped, some neat
and faded label re-inked,
strengthened on the page:
“Here lies true north,”
and south--I’ve been there,
to the east, memory,
to the west, terra incognita,
the calling land
and the road ahead.

--Sandy Jensen

2009-01-30T12:25:00.001-08:00

Three Dolls and a Horse

In the hour between Should and Would,
three dolls dance
and a spotted horse with a lightning bolt tail
reaches his neck in a twisty gallop
to taste the streaky meteors
hissing out of the Persiad
to pepper his pasture with stars.

Frida Kahlo Doll dances
with pain in each small bone—she
is all wires and screws
and insistence on free will.
She would call the Silver Fox
and trap its face in a necklace
woven of wild rose thorns.

Snow Kachina dances his own
culture’s dream of rain or change,
blessing or corn,
healing or chance. His eyes
are black slits, his costumed
art elaborate.
He has something to say about
exigency, but I don’t know
what it is.

Sandy Doll smiles and smiles:
she thinks she has
all the answers.

--Sandy Jensen

The Old Glen Ivy Inn

2009-01-30T12:05:00.000-08:00

The Old Glen Ivy Inn

I lived in an old inn
whose balconied stories
rode the heaving surf of the hillside
like a tall ship with many masts,
square-rigged,
riding at anchor
above the valley floor.
Old-fashioned windows hinged
like wings you could shove open
to the winking moonlight. Gables
gave portholes to the ragged roofline,
and there was something in the way
the bow breached the air
over the hill that made the old
home seem to hove to and rock
in the wind. Hundred year old
Washington Palms rattled
their dry skirts and slid their slim
gray hips from side to side
like old hula dancers
who never forgot their moves.
A pair of white owls flew
up out of the dark, perched
on the top balcony’s high
rigging, then sailed off, their twin
faces holding the moon.
In those days, I often
kept the dawn watch,
that still, dark hour when the cool
mountain breeze flowed downhill
and rocked the great ship in its arms,
before the sun struck my windowpane
with its hammer blows of gold.

--Sandy Jensen

Ruby Heart

2009-01-30T09:33:00.000-08:00

Ruby Heart

If she were a mountain,
she’d be Diamond Peak,
sharp-edged and cold,
sea to her west,
continent to her east,
face to the northern wind,
California has her back.
If she were a song—
play her name on an Indian flute,
fiddle her home to grandma,
fill her up with lilt and longing,
call her “Song for a Daughter.”
If she were a time of day,
sunset would dry her tears
and paint her arms
with the spindrift tattoos
of the scarlet surf.
If she were a river,
she’d flow green and slow
as the Siuslaw,
shadowed by cedar,
dreaming of spring Chinook,
flickering trout
where her hair waterfalls down.
If she were the heroine of a film,
she would ride a camel
around the world, find
the ruby heart of the world
and bring it home to you.

--Sandy Jensen

Art - a Solstice Poem - 2008

2008-12-27T22:09:00.000-08:00

Art

Where does art come from?
Who has the ideas -
whose hand moves the vermillion brush
running into green-gold skies?

Who is it that loves water
and a glaze so sheer it
shimmers with melting light?

Who is in love with the tender line,
the blackest storm and the crack of light?
It is me and more than me-
the hand of God loves art.

I bow my head,
stand slightly aside -
hands, brush, heart.
we wait.

Cheryl R. Long
Solstice December 21, 2008

Dream Mandalas

2008-12-25T14:30:00.001-08:00

Dream Mandala of My Father Entering the Museum of the Dead. Mom and Me at a Cafe in Paris, One Empty Chair, Both Sun and Moon

Dream Mandala

December 3, 2008
(From a in-class exercise in my Linfield College Creative Writing class Fall 2008. We tracked our dreams all semester, then chose one particular image to express in a mandala and a write.)

Pothole
May 18, 2008

Peter and I are driving in our Subaru on a local highway—I am at the wheel. The asphalt begins to get rough, so I low down. There’s plenty of traffic, all slowing. Some people are driving off the road out into the fields, apparently on detour.

Now we see why: an enormous impact crater has destroyed the road. The river has run into it, filling it with deep and dangerous pools. This isn’t a pothole you can drive across, although we see people driving out on dead end ledges, unable to get back.

I propose one route, but Peter points out the steep drop on the other side. He gets out to look around and goes to talk to someone. An official waves his arms and opens a way for my column of cars. I inch forward, thinking Peter will see me and follow, but the traffic and the crowds of people on foot increase and I lose sight of him.

On the other side, I pick up two men; one drives and the other sits in the back seat, and we inch along through traffic, then suddenly we’re passed the crater and moving free. But where is Peter?

“Stop! Go back! We have to find Peter! I order the man driving. My body is flooded wth urgency and anxiety.

“I’m not going back there! Hitchhikers have rights, too, you know! He replied, not slowing.

“Turn back! Turn back! I have to find Peter!” I beat on his muscled arm and wrench the wheel in a circle so that he is forced out the door, and I take over the wheel.

I turn back the way we had come, re-entering the chaos of the crater blast zone. People are milling around in a panic. I ump out of the car and try to find a familiar face or an official and finally spot someone. “Have you seen Peter? Do you know wich way he went?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I saw he ran into an old acquaintance of his, Glasses Larimer. They went off together.”

“Do you know where Glasses lives? Tell me!”

“Oh, if he went off with Glasses, you’ll never find him.”

I look again at the crater and its green, cold depths blocking the road.

Volcano Woman Refugia

2008-12-25T14:15:00.000-08:00

Volcano Woman Refugia

December 1, 2008
(From a in-class exercise in my Linfield College Creative Writing class Fall 2008. We heard a tribal story about Frog Woman/Volcano Woman; we listed the images in the story and chose one to draw; then we wrote from the persona of the image.)
This is an image of a mother and a daughter staring out of a cave in the mountains. They have taken refuge there against the erupting nearby volcano that is running rivers of fire down the valley and all around them. They are sitting out the fire. Everyone, life as they have known it, is being annihilated. But if they wait, they will atone the sins of their village to Frog Volcano Woman and be taken up under the wings of Eagle and join the Eagle People.

Volcano Woman sends forth
her rivers of fire like
slow-moving serpents with
red crystal eyes
as my mother and I hold our brilliant shawls
over our streaming hair.
We sit cross-legged in the doorway.
We are the last
of our clan.
Through the smoke
that blurs the morning sun,
we will see the Eagle.
One under each wing,
we will fly to a land
where the Eagle People
scatter lodges along
a river bank and we
will become them:
out of Fire--Flight.

College Girl Mermaid in her Christmas Sweater

2008-12-23T09:10:00.000-08:00

College Girl Mermaid in her Christmas Sweater
December 23, 2008

These past couple of weeks, my mind has been a blank, a reflective surface bouncing light off winter snow. I awoke at 4:00 am thinking I should start drawing again to wake my Muse. As I drew, I understood that mind is in the head with glasses and soul is in the body, which swims in the sea of unconscious memories, dreams, desires.

Today I Open The Cage

2008-10-31T21:35:00.000-07:00

Today I Open the Cage

Today I open the cage.
Cobras leave for their rightful home and
vultures will have to eat alone.

Today dead bees fall
heaped beside the abandoned hive.
Brittle black grit on snow.

Today, snow, bees, leaves.
Cold and dirt bury the dead
and also the living.

Tomorrow and far too cold, cherries bloom in snow.
Bees resume their ancient work
succulent and golden.

Cheryl Renee October 2008

Joy Packed Up and Left Today

2008-10-31T21:33:00.000-07:00

Joy Packed Up and Left Today

Joy packed up and left today
or maybe she’s just hiding
cowering in a corner
waiting for high winds to pass.

She says I am an unsuitable host.
Although joy is my daemon
she hides from me today
hunched down, eyes slit, ears back.

She will come back on her own
like a calico cat invisible on her perch
she peers down calmly, sizing me up
looking for signs of clearing skies.

Cheryl Renée October 2008

Today

2008-10-31T21:28:00.000-07:00

October 12, 2008

Today

Today the last outdoor lunch
Under the broad leaf maple -
green-gold leaves littering our deck.
No one stops them.

Today we dug the last of the potatoes,
Pulled the shivering tomato plants
And rescued the pimento shaped
red orange beauties – tonight’s dinner.

The tomatillos we never planted
they just crashed the party
welcome guests but very late
green striped suits with parchment jackets.

Today we walked
the Cedar River Trail
and smiling dogs
with black lips.

The river runs clear
now green, now gold.
puffballs - the river’s fall companion
white delicacy in the grass.

We walk until
it really is too cold.
The cedar fire warms our home
With fragrance and with heat.

Dinner is soft acorn squash,
creamy yellow in a hard green shell
heaped with puff balls,
the pointy red tomatoes on the side.

The cedar fire is banked
Tonight will be first frost.
The black lipped dogs smile,
turn tightly, then sleep.

Four Way Seeing

2008-10-26T08:44:00.000-07:00

FOUR WAY SEEING
By Peter Jensen

You start viewing at the top with the Star People and meditate on the mandalas clockwise. Prismacolor.

Today

2008-10-12T10:27:00.001-07:00

October 12, 2008

Today

Today the last outdoor lunch
Under the broad leaf maple -
green-gold leaves littering our deck.
No one stops them.

Today we dug the last of the potatoes,
pulled the shivering tomato plants
and rescued the pimento shaped
red orange beauties – tonight’s dinner.

The tomatillos we never planted
they crashed the party
welcome guests but very late arriving with
green striped suits and parchment jackets.

Today we walked
the Cedar River Trail
and smiling dogs
with black lips.

The Cedar River runs clear
now green, now gold.
Puffballs - the river’s fall companion
white delicacy in the grass.

We walk until
it really is too cold.
Inside the cedar fire warms our home
with fragrance and with heat.

Dinner is soft acorn squash,
creamy yellow in a hard green shell
heaped with puff balls,
the pointy red tomatoes on the side.

The cedar fire is banked
Tonight will be first frost.
The black lipped dogs smile,
turn tightly, then sleep.

The Day Kendall Found a Magical Pool

2008-10-11T19:44:00.000-07:00

We could call this, The Day Kendall Found A Magical Pool at the very top of a razor ridge. She was walking carefully, placing her feet and looking down. The rock face on one side, a mountain face dropping, dropping on the other. A tiny pool in a crevice at the side of a mountain goat trail. She spotted what I am reasonably sure few adults would have the eyesight to see - crystals scattered like diamonds under a foot of water, in the deep shadow of the undercut cliff face. "Grandma, grandma, come here! Look at this!" The almost 11 year old hand opened to show me pure white dazzling crystals, the size of almonds. I doubt she could have been more excited if they were diamonds rather than quartz crystals.

So there we were, rock hounding on the edge of the world. The Cascades spread out in a 360 degree panorama, one range in etched relief with jagged black mountains glazed with the first white snow. The guy with the rock hammer pulled out sample after sample - chunks of volcanic rock embedded with swaths of crystals. The man thought about how exciting it would be to take them to the next rock club meeting. The little girl, how thrilling to show her geologist father and the best ever new specimen to add to her rock collection. I can relate. I think of another time, another curly headed dark haired little girl with a passion for rocks. It must be the DNA.

When I Was A Child

2008-10-09T18:55:00.000-07:00

When I Was a Child

When I was a child
The early autumn moon rose like a Silver Fox
Over the distant black cliffs
Of the Columbia Plateau.
Down in our Wenatchee Valley
So many apples fell to the ground:
Winesaps and Winter Bananas,
Red and Golden Delicious,
Jonathans and MacIntosh--
Every May blossom
A handful of late summer crunch
Juice from every petal,
Every grain of pollen to the hive.
Up on the Plateau
The unresisting wheat
Broke like surf behind
The combine’s simpler blade.

Silver Fox, you
Who run backwards through time, tell me
Of this year’s fruit,
The bushel yield of grain.
What have you learned
From that old river of myth and blood,
Apples and wheat,
River of snowmelt and memory?

--Sandy Jensen
10-08-08

School Starts September 8, 2008

2008-10-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

This awkward hybrid animal lumbers forward on flippers, has a beakful of fire and is loaded with people,stories, masks, dances, songs and all the unformed future of the school year to come.

Mandala for My Novel
The school year crowds forward and my creative projects have to take a back seat. Here are the elements of my novel whirling inside its own soulmap.

And here is a poem written in the form called an apostrophe in which the poet addresses something or someone directly in poetry. In this case, I am addressing my inner creative aspect, also known as the Secret Partner, or the Wonderful One Within, or the Muse in most ancient times.

To Be Worthy

Muse of all Muses, my musing Dzonoqua,
Sleepy giantess, you stand like a cedar
In the cedar shadows, swaying
In your endless dream.
I cavort inside the fire’s light,
Cut capers, pass my hat:
Money for the monkey.

Sometimes you flare awake,
And I see your sunken eye pits
Whirl with stars, suns,
The slow cold spiral of distant galaxies.
I have seen you turn away and run,
Remembering your rich lodge
Hung with furs and fossils,
Basement caves and crystals,
The lost bears in the hot mist
Rising at the far end
Of your home meadow.

And I have followed you there,
Although there were times you captured me with a gesture
Beckoning me near,
My cautious approach,
Fire warmth dimming on my backside,
Then your thick, black fingers
Like beaver’s leathery paws
Closing on my shoulders,
Lifting me like a recalcitrant child,
Popping me in your burden basket with a smack
Of your bright red lips.
Jostled, scraped, bleeding,
I have been muted by your distances,
Unlocked finally, tumbled
Foolishly down among your riches,
One more toy on the floor.
I have seen the chief’s wealth you guard.
You have dressed me in my miniature
Button blanket set the cedar bark wreath
Upon my unruly curls: You have fed me
Wilderness in a stew of venison and drums.

Dzonoqua, you have tried to teach me that song
As the crying wild geese passed over and I have stood
And sung after them, understanding for a stanza
My place in the family of all who tell the story, wear the mask,
Dance the song.
Dzonquah, giantess, my captor and keeper:
Twist my wire arms and let them hold
Your necklace of shining pitch.

--Sandy Jensen

A Wraith From the Gray Mist Brings Good Things To Earth

2008-09-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

The Wraith From the Gray Mist brings an armful of good things- hope, peace, joy, eroticism, playfulness to encourage people on planet earth. I just spent the last few days at a plein air paint out on Whidbey Island, WA. A gorgeous place, perfect weather and a fun event. Whidbey is near Seattle but very far away- it seems 50 years back in time. In spite of idylic circumstances - in my gut I was aware of the massive changes in our country and around the world. Banks collapsing, extensive loss of life due to war and weather; an overall undercurrent of fear and unease worldwide.

The perfect Indian summer sun could not keep away the grayness in my belly, not just for myself - I was fine, but even without seeing the news I knew that I was near the site of a recent shooting where six people died. I was also near the location of the death of a family member, just last week.

My daughter was born on Whidbey Island, and her birth was a win for Life. Her grandfather came over from Norway and was born on a boat just off the coast of Whidbey Island. I have deep history there. The armful of happiness and joy delivered by the wraith from the gray mist is most welcome. She can visit anytime.

Mr. Bachelor from Lake Hosmer or The Appearance of a Strange Black Shadow

2008-08-31T22:41:00.001-07:00

Because of my ongoing love affair with eastern Oregon, I have many sketches of Mt. Bachelor so I am pretty familiar with the mountain. This color sketch took awhile. I worked away on it, head down, well into the early trance state of flow that happens when art is going well.

I looked up to see a solid dark shadow. a distinct band across the mountain. I looked at the sky and only the lightest wispy clouds appeared- certainly nothing to create a heavy solid shadow form. I watched without blinking for at least 40 seconds. The dark line remained long enough me to quickly add it to my sketch, then the shadow slowly dissolved and was completely gone. I cannot explain it.

Dark Angel Ally Tries to Get My Attention With a Message

2008-08-13T23:39:00.001-07:00

Dark Angel is a new ally and I had to inquire if he/she was friend or foe. She assured me that she is friend and she is waving a colorful cape, trying to get my attention. I quizzed her with automatic writing, trying to get some idea of what she wants. She advised me to start paying more attention to my allies and asking them for advice and support more often. She does have something to say, but not yet. Her answer was: stay tuned and pay attention to Life. It is always hinting, giving me clues.

I am glad she is on my side!

Skateboarder from Slipstream

2008-08-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Lately I am reading Haruki Murakami's work and the most current is After Dark. I cannot explain why this odd scribble drawing emerged as a skateboarder from that story. The novel does not introduce this character, so obviously I am making it up on my own. He seems to belong in the disturbing, strange atmosphere of darkness and detail created by Murakami. I was referring to work like After Dark and the Wind Up Bird Chronicle as Japanese Magical Realism. But they refer to fiction as weird as this as Slipstream. It is not sci-fi, it is not magical realism, it is slipstream, broadly defined as the fiction of strangeness.

Fire on the Horizon Near Bridgeport

2008-07-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

July 3, 2008 Fire season begins with smoke in the air, smudging the crystal clear blue with a gritty yellow and gray glaze. The locals tell us that the fire is on the reservation and it started with a lightning strike last night. We travel on the back roads through rolling wheat fields. We stop to water our dog at an old but still active Grange Hall in the minute town of Farmer, Washington. We notice the smoke on the horizon and we follow it steadily for miles. In the lower picture you can see a small cluster of erratics; stones that dropped out of glaciers long ago.

We arrive back in time in the tiny town of Bridgeport to visit the uncles and the aunts and the cousins and the second cousins. We hear news of the impending death of one of us. Todo Brown married my father's brother Russ. He died tragically young in a logging accident years ago. But his wife Todo remained with us, unmarried and very much part of the family. I saw her at Cherie's wedding lat summer, looking very thin, very gaunt. I wondered. And now I hear news that she may not make it the summer. Lung cancer, brain cancer. It was the cigarettes I suppose. But she has always been here with us. How can people just die?

Our family is growing faster than it is shrinking. But for me- the core family of my life is shrinking, almost one a year lately. We get our turn on this planet. What a crazy twist in our lives that we still cannot predict our given time. Even the best science and technology is not able to help us out with that the biggest mystery of them all.

In Praise of Roses

2008-07-06T21:57:00.001-07:00

This is a strange little watercolor to indulge my fascination with roses and my barely controlled need to acquire far too many of the time consuming and high maintenance flowers. " Oh, but they give back so much! They are so worth the investment!" I say to convince myself that 24 rose bushes are not quite enough. Buying two more cannot qualify me as obsessive.

Lets just say that I have enough time up to my elbows in roses that my sister and brother-in-law gave me long white deerskin rose gloves to keep the thorns at bay. I thought they were kind of surreal so I painted them disembodied, dancing through the rose bushes with a mind of their own.

Mayan Calendar With Panther and Bees

2008-07-06T21:36:00.001-07:00

Mayan Calendar With Panther and Bees started out as a quick mandala study, intended for a birthday card for my sister, Sandy. I visited Tulum, Mexico this April and I became fascinated with the Mayan culture, especially the current Mayan society and how it relates strongly to the past. In spite of this sense of continuity with the past, the Mayan culture is very much of this time. They practice sustainable hospitality, sustainable energy, recycling - they are the essence of the practical application of the green movement.

It is often small moments that define my impression of an area, of a people. One afternoon I saw massive sculptures of bees decorating the entries of the ruins at Tulum. The same day we talked to people who practice bee keeping to this day and see themselves as part of a long unbroken line of Mayan peasants or farmers who kept bees since the beginning of time. I purchased bee salve for arthritis in my hands, with assurances that ancient Mayan medicine has special cures for any disease.

Triangle Lake, Midweek, Midsummer

2008-06-22T07:43:00.000-07:00

Triangle Lake, Midweek, Midsummer
(for Peter, for all the paddles)

Some summer lakes,
if you go there,
if you do not postmark a card
or photograph
or sketch,
will slide away; no memory
but the faint
unstitching in the ear
where jet skis ripped the water’s belly open
like a four-stroke knife
gutting a rainbow trout.

Fumes of gasoline over any urban pond
may tremble in the back breeze of recall,
but here find Avery,
who was afraid of being towed on a blue rubber raft;
Keenzie, whose father threatened her with cold beer
until she jumped
screaming
from the dock;
Annabelle, the narrow black Lab you were told would jump,
didn’t, and licked your hand;
Simon, the wide black Lab who carried an open Coke bottle
on board his master’s fishing boat,
carefully, head up, Simon,
the Coke dog.

Fourteen years ago,
seven years ago,
last year, yesterday, today
we paddle to a far shore wild
with alarmist kingfishers flashing
blue white crested shadows
over open water.
Flat perch shadow dart beneath the lily pads—
we nose our yellow craft up
to the Ruined Dock of Our Former Love,
as we call it, recalling a bar
of melted chocolate and all the sweet
body parts it sweetened;
long swims with children now grown; night
watches for the beaver family—
quiet paddle back
flashlight in the bow.

One Thursday afternoon in June—
lamb chops and tabouli
red Nehalem wine—
we were close then
in our double camp chair,
elbows touching. 8:04 pm, 74°,
extravagant gold light on that far shore,
dark green smell of night water
rising from concentric circles
of silver running out
from the jet skier
towing the screaming children in the blue raft .
Avery, who was afraid,
watches from the dock
and cries.
Simon is gone;
Keenzie is gone;
Annabelle lifts one last leg
against the steel dumpster,
and Annabelle is gone.

We watch together
until ghost fingers of cold
creep down from the mountains
behind and warn us it’s time to leave.

--Sandy Jensen
June 2008

A Brief Vacation

2008-06-16T09:20:00.001-07:00

The Sun Behind a Cloud Looked Like a Fried Egg

After our final grades were filed, Peter and I took "un breve vacatione," as the Italian movie is called. On Friday, we had a picnic at Fern Ridge. We sat at a picnic table at water's edge and looked out over the reeds to the distant hills as the wind-driven waves slapped in. The clouds scudded by and covered the sun until the bright disc of the sun shown through like a Polarized fried egg in the sky.

The Drowned Forest of Crane Prairie Rez, Cormorant Apartment Buildings, and Peter in His Pongo 120 Kayak

Saturday, we went to Cultus Lake and had a five hour, against the 12 mph hour wind paddle. We had planned on a picnic, but the mosquitoes near the shore kept us out on the breezy water. We had dinner safely inside the lodge restaurant and rented a cabin with a fireplace. At midnight, the smoke alarm woke us out of a "dead" sleep, telling us a back draft down the open chnimney had filled the room with dangerous levels of smoke.

All in all, we were happy the next day to move on to Crane Prairie Rez , which was mirror-calm and bird-rich. The herons gronked in and out of their heronry, cormorants looked out from their apartment buildings in the Drowned Forest with mild interest as we paddled by, and three bald eagles fought each other in the sky right over our head.

We picnicked on a point under a huge old Ponderosa Pine, and for some reason, there were no mosquitoes. We DID see a black and white spotted lizard and two green and white striped garter snakes and enormous breeder trouts in the crystal clear waters of Quinn Creek.

As Spring Quarter Comes to an End

2008-06-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

Ruby Woods

Owl Woman

Zephaniah at Anchor in Bowman's Bay May 25, 2008

On the Cave Wall: Mermaid with Wolf Eel

Mandala for the End of Spring Quarter 2008

And the Wind Blew White Earth, Reluctant to Give Access to the Elusive White Opal

2008-06-07T22:09:00.000-07:00

Our destination - the diatom pits, a mining operation near George, WA. Not far from the famed ampitheater and Cave B. However, visualize a dirt road to nowhere though endless sagebrush, generally headed for the basalt cliffs of the Columbia River far below. The DANGER, NO TRESPASSING, OPEN PITS signs start a half mile before the road curves into a few utterly featureless buildings. The buildings and the heavy equipment are shrouded with white. The open pits and tailings are endlessly white, towering over our parked cars. When we arrive the day is clear and sunny. Instantly, before we get out of our cars, the wind blasts down the powdery white road, covering us, our cars, and filling the Forester with fine white grit. The rock hounds suit up with white paper masks and jump out to search for common opal. The opal is mixed in with the diatoms somehow and they litter the tailings with chunks of rock larger than a brown bag full of groceries. We have special permission to take the opal – a form of recycling for the mining company.

The whiteness pervaded everything. The scene eerily like the initial scenes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I did not dare take my camera out of the case so I pulled out my black sketchbook to record the wild scene. The hounders had no trouble getting enough opal for the day and we left after only a half hour of digging. I was happy to see that there were conditions even too hard core for them. I was beginning to question their sanity.

We finished out our day at the Petrified Wood State Park at the Vantage Columbia River Bridge crossing. We ate our smoked turkey salads, dining comfortably on a picnic table with green grass and graceful trees to provide cool and shade. We were too dirty to enter the museum so we headed home. Driving west on I 90 the cloud formations looked like a fleet of circular flying saucers. I have never seen clouds like that before. Maybe the opal myths are true. Legend has it that there is something spooky about opals. Not just anyone gets to have them. We came away with our share but I think the opals had some resistance that day.

The Ancestors

2008-05-31T17:01:00.000-07:00

The Animated World

May 31, 2008
Dream Journal: “Daddy Shows Us the House Where He Grew Up”

I am riding with Daddy and two of my sisters, Toren and Keesha, in the dry desert backcountry of Idaho. He drives on a dirt road deep into country and finally parks in a gravel pit.

“Where are we, Daddy?”

“I want to show the house where I grew up.”

The immediate area rose and fell in a rough series of dark sand hills or windrows—not like dunes but more like tailings from a mine. The tailings scattered back under pine trees where I could see old homesteads and shacks and people here and there.

A small stream of clear water ran through the trees and over the black sand gullies at our feet. Daddy and others bent to drink, but I was leery of drinking from any open running water that ran out of human habitation and mine tailings.

Daddy led us into the area, and we three girls explored happily. I could tell he was looking for something hidden in the depths of his childhood memory.

A line of three identical box houses appeared—company housing—and fell apart in a rapid time lapse.

As we clambered about, we came upon a rambling, old, wooden boarding house and entered, out footsteps echoing. People came and went dressed in country clothes.

An old woman came to greet us, and she seemed to know Daddy, but he didn’t know her.

“Are these your girls?” she asked kindly.

“Yes,” he said.

I jumped in and said, “I’m Sandy, this is Keesha, and Toren, and we have another sister and a brother at home.”

“Oh my,” she said, smiling at Daddy, “Such a lot of girls!”

But he was thinking, “Is this the place?
__________________________________________________________________
My Notes: I felt the old woman in the dream was a pioneer ancestor—Daddy’s great grandmother, as he didn’t recognize her, and this must have been the 1870’s or 80’s, and while I thought it was Idaho, I think it may have been on Grandma Petersen/Price’s side of the family in Longmont, Colorado.
__________________________________________________________________
How does this relate to this picture?

I began by drawing a deep spring with roots deep in the earth and a long flight of stairs underground that the women had to climb down to fill their pots with water. Then I drew the pot, and then the woman appeared holding the pot, looking out across the landscape. In the landscape she saw the animals.

I thought she was also a deep ancestral figure, prefiguring the dream ancestor by perhaps millennia.

The Iguana That Ate the Wedding Flowers

2008-05-17T21:10:00.000-07:00

Iguanas seem to be everyone's pet in Mexico. This guy had the run of the restaurant and Ricardo, the bar tender let him take dainty bites from the wedding center piece.

At another tiny bar, deep in the jungle next to a beautiful fresh water cenote, the proprietor kept a 3', bright green iguana on the bar for the delight of the customers. Never mind that the iguana received better tips than the rather taciturn bar tender.
In Mexico, not everyone could speak English but most everyone would smile. At the Tulum ruins, an man did nothing but pose with a 5' iguana and pass the hat to the French tourists for taking his photo. He had enough money in the hat to feed his family or buy a large round of michiladas for his friends.

Mayan Chronicles, Full Immersion

2008-05-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

Tulum, Tulum. In the jungle, on the Carribean, an hour and a half south of the big city Cancun. For me a week in Tulum means that I will remain connected and engaged there for the rest of my life. Many years ago in my mid 20's, a psychic told me that I experienced a past life as a Mayan artist and priestess. I neither believed or disbelieved it but my sense of connection with Mexico has run like an underground river through my psyche since my first visit to Mexico when I was 16. Here are the images I managed to produce during my full time in Tulum - more to follow.

Tulum Palm With Moonrise

2008-05-17T20:46:00.000-07:00

Our guide, Pablo explained to us about the sacred palm. We were hiking in the jungle of Sian Kan, the biosphere park reserve near Tulum. " The palm is sacred to the Mayan people. The palm is their roof, their shelter from the heat, the hurricane and the rain. A good palm roof can last up to 30 years if the palm is properly harvested on the full moon. At that time the sap is running and the plant is full of protective minerals. If the palm is cut at any other time and the sap is low, the roof will last three years, no more."

Vine Snake and Nesting Birds

2008-05-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

The beautiful aboreal gold green Vine Snake eats mostly lizards; lucky for the nesting birds and thier eggs. I did not spot this well camofloged snake. I tramped through the Yucatan jungle and wisely stayed on the trail, keeping a sharp eye out for scorpions or snakes. Thor Janson's book Maya Nature made me aware of the presence of pit vipers including the formidable Fer-De-Lance.

Doorways Between This World and the Other Worlds

2008-05-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

Doorways Between This World and the Other Worlds

Map of the Journeying of the Ancestors Back to the Dream-time

2008-05-03T10:58:00.001-07:00

Map of the Journeying of the Ancestors Back to the Dream-time

I thought about how it is that as I grow older, I feel further and further away from my childhood and who I was as a child. If I think about it in a certain way, I feel lost, and that makes me realize what people mean when they say they are lost, that they don't know who they are anymore.

In this picture, I am lost in a maze of trees, looking for my way back to who I am supposed to be, what I am supposed to be doing. In this picture, I am going the wrong way on the road back to the Dream-time. An ancestor grandmother in a long skirt is on the road back to the Lake with the Bluest Eye, and before her is a Conestoga wagon with our ancestors of yet the more previous generation. The Lake with the Bluest Eye is at the foot of the Mountains of Memory. Today, at sunset, the Dream-time Mists have cleared for a moment, and the light of the most distant sun lights up snowfields and meadows.

Since I drew this, the sun has set, the Mists have risen from the marsh around the Lake, and I am once again alone on the Cedar Trail.

Curtain Up!

2008-04-26T10:24:00.000-07:00

Curtain Up!

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
Rumi

Coyote, Raven, Sea Otter Woman

2008-04-17T07:56:00.001-07:00

COYOTE JAM

April 17, 2008

I am working with a book I got at Manzanita News in Manzanita Beach called Crone Trekking in Coyote Land: A Storymaking Book by local Nehalem author Gwendolyn Endicott. She retells the famous story of Coyote and the Cedar Tree. After I read the story, following her suggestion, I made a list of the images that I remembered from the story, chose one and drew it.

Later, when I did this with my 18-21 year old students, not one of them listed as an image Coyote trapped in the Cedar Tree calling out for help, and six out of sixteen of them drew the beam of light from outside the tree going down the little hole to Coyote. This still startles me, as I believe it is symbolic of each of our generations.

I understand what it is to be Coyote, caught in a jam of his own making, held unmoving in the grasp of a situation where the only remedy is to dismantle the self limb by limb, push the parts through the hole and to have to reassemble myself on the other side.

But what does it mean to be the age where I am the beam of light shining down the Woodpecker’s breathing hole to Coyote?

Raven Steals Coyote's Eyeballs

The second image I did working with this story was Raven stealing Coyote’s eyeballs. This strikes me as macabre and funny; I always see Raven as some trickster shadow of death. Raven is gallows humor. Interestingly, three of my students also drew this image, but I’m already guessing they did so attracted by some very different energy than that which I perceived.

White Sea Otter Woman Brings the Gift of Eternal Life to the Nehalem People

The next story was “Ice and White Sea Otter Woman” in which Nehalem fishermen paddle to a spirit world, enter a shining lodge, find a beautiful woman, and the youngest asks her to come home with them. “And the woman came with the man willingly, carrying only a small, woven basket. She held the basket on her lap as the men made their long journey homeward, back toward Neahkahnie.”

I was drawn by that pure moment of willingness. She is sitting happily in the canoe and all is promise. She is bringing a wonderful bride gift to her new family.

Of course, this story doesn’t end well. Like Pandora’s box, the men get to thinking it might be a food box. It is trickster Ice who tears the box from her hands even though the others warn him, “Do not bother her; you do not know her.”

He sees with revulsion little living human beings in the basket and throws it overboard. Of course, she dives in after it saying, “Those are my lucky lifetimes,” the gift of eternal life she had been bringing to the people, lost now, and Ice and his buddies cursed to paddle forever. “The men paddled and paddled, but the harder they paddled, the further they drifted from Neahkahnie.”

3 Faces of Spring Break 2008

2008-04-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of Spring Break, the outer persona slips, and the soul named NightWinds is surprised in the act of thinking her mysterious, cave wall thoughts.

During Spring Break, the spiral that was so clearly front and center only a couple of weeks ago has become a left hand moon. Vast quantities of energy flow out of the prescribed circle of my life out into another universe.

March 31, the new term begins and the whole structure of multiple classrooms is thrown into an uncertain construction zone. The spiral has slipped in a puddle of blue water to become an underground lake. Three feathers are back at center, with a fourth and a fifth new friend coming in from the wings. Moons, seeds, centers of self-propelled energy are making their way through the still ill-defined labyrinth to find their place in the Great Mandala.

Sandy Chases the Elusive Yellow Butterfly

2008-03-31T23:39:00.000-07:00

This drawing is a name I made up. It is a meander. I put my pencil on the page and do not lift it until I am ready. It differs from a contour drawing in that I am not looking at anything except my own memories.

In Search of the Red Carnelian

2008-03-30T22:55:00.001-07:00

March 29, 2008. We got up at oh dark hundred in order to meet our rock hound group in Kalama at 8 am. Soon I was once again thankful for our Subaru Forester slogging up a mountain road in 8" of snow. In our group one vehicle after another just couldn't cut it. We ended up getting three vehicles up the long timber road climbing snowy Green Mountain.

We entered a secret gate on Longview Fiber timberland. Our club president had permission to enter and the key. Still, I felt a little bit like we were sneaking in. I helped dig for carnelian for about an hour. I found one good specimen but soon lost my motivation. I retired to a warm car to observe a wood filling with snow. The trees, mostly Douglas fir and second growth. Impressive size. I had three hours to make this drawing, watch the snow fall, listen to the melting snow rustle and plop all around me. I took a long walk, taking care not to get lost on the many branching roads. No worries, my size 8 boot tracks were the only ones for miles. Except two sets of deer tracks, very fresh. I had the distinct impression they were peering at me. Also some other tracks, possibly cougar but not so fresh.

We made it home by 11 pm. Tom was so charged up over his booty that he took the time to clean each specimen. His hard work with a shovel produced many fine crystals and one really spectacular palm size red carnelian. One red carnelian, one nice drawing and a quiet day in pristine woods. No people except the rock hounds. A very good day.