Tracing Life
NOTES:
Mesa Verde, Colorado 20 years ago:
Absorbed by the experience of entering the cliff dwellings themselves.
Climbed ladders, moved through tight spaces.
Imagined how people had lived there.
Petroglyphs at Mesa Verde, human and animal forms etched into stone, traces of a once active world.
Second visit
September 2026
NOTES:
Struck by the silence.
No birds. No wildlife.
Yet evidence of a once intensely lived-in place.
Envisioned a people who
climbed, carried, worked.
Babies. Toddlers. Children playing near dangerous edges.
Food grown. Gathered.
Water collected. Carried. Stored.
The structures remain.
The life that animated them does not.
The Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde
The unsettling absence.
Like entering a room after someone has passed on.
Their marks remain.
The active force of life - their voice - is gone.
Milky Way, Mesa Verde, Dark Sky Park
Above all that silence - the sky:
The Dark Sky Park tour
NOTES:
Stories shape the sky.
Years ago taught the story of Ursa Major - the Great Bear.
Never questioned the tail.
A bear with a long tail?
Tonight. Another of many interpretations.
Coyote tail.
The stars had not changed.
The story had.
The Great Bear
Thinking:
Marks on stones. Dwellings. Absence.
And the sky that remains.
How does something like this enters the work?
I don’t really know.
But it does.
It could happen later.
But something settles within.
Working quietly.
Revealing itself in traces.
