Mapping

September has found me back in Minnesota... and with some time to spare. Yesterday, I headed north for my family's cabin. The cabin at Lake Inguadona is still new to us, so I'm still learning the area, its shapes, its contours.

"Mapping" the lake seemed like a step in recognizing and familiarizing, so I unfolded a regional map and made a little woodcut of Inguadona. Taking time to carve away its shoreline was an intentional gesture to pay attention to this new landscape. It was also repetitive, quiet, even meditative. A good activity for this rainy day.

Then while out on a walk I found this piece of bark in the very same shape as Inguadona. A perfect mate for the woodcut.

Harpers Falls

From an afternoon on the river...

My focus is interrupted by a visitor. A wiley and mischeivous insect, six legs, a slender body, antennae. She lands just inches from my left hand (she's about the size of my thumbnail bed) and observes the river with me. I stop to watch and she seems to notice my intrigue. Dramatically, even theatrically, she rubs her front legs together slowly as if plotting her next move. The fine hairs on her legs scratch like stubble. Then, with a quick and precisely articulated movement she lifts off and zips downstream into the afternoon glare on the river. I lift up, too, and find a slightly different perch, pulling my legs closer to my body and settling my bare feet into the rocks and small pebbles of the creek. As I lean back a hand lightly brushes my neck where my pigtails are pulled away. The fingers belong to a mass of foliage with arching, lanky copper stems topped with flat green phalanges. If I were ever to learn the names of these riverside plants, I think I would do best to memorize their silhouettes.

Internal Landscape

I just read Barry Lopez's "Story at Anaktuvuk Pass" and his description of two types of landscape (internal and external) made my imagination run wild.

"The [internal landscape] is a kind of projection within a person... deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature, the intricate history of one's life in the land, even a life in the city..."

If our interior is a reflection of our place, is there an aesthetic quality to this internal landscape? Even if it's deeply subconscious, I like to think that our homes - past and present - leave an imprint on our internal landscape.