1944 Learning to walk and on the road to a life
Created by rainnnn on Jul 4, 2008
Last updated: 03/04/13 at 08:20 AM
I was taking my first steps as this timeline began. One step at a time I moved through life. These are bear paw prints from the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park. Coming from somewhere and going somewhere but who knows where.
Today I feel like this picture. I have done some things. Learned some things but more is ahead. Life is like the path of a canoe, undefined and open to possibilities.
Hiking with friends led to new discoveries of beautiful places not that far from the farm.
One of my joys at my age is to build a fire in the fireplace on one of the cold, short winter days.
digital painting opened up whole new avenue of expression for me. They are a way to paint dreams, music, and feelings.
Summer is so good along the creek and for the thirty some years I have lived here, I have never quit appreciating how wonderful it is to live on a creek, to see it in its many moods
the creek is a favorite refuge after laying irrigation pipe on the farm
This painting, as well as another, came from a dream where I saw a woman as a Kachina figure.
The imagery for this painting came out of my cave experiences, my feeling that we emerge from the womb of water at birth and throughout our lives, that warm cave with steam rising and from whence we will become what we were born to be. It happens again and again
taking a break along Bear Creek Trail
me and my camera. Monument Valley was another of the places I'd never been and had wanted to see. It was not disappointing. You could see the beauty and feel its history everywhere
The first time I heard this song, I was not expecting what I heard. I wanted the soothing meditations and then suddenly something more was there. Tears ran down my cheeks as it all came together for me. One wasn't right or wrong. Truth ran together into a oneness. It still sends shivers down my spine when I hear it. Stay with the song until it becomes Amazing Grace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLLAUPS2C1A
Every chance I got, I was in Montana and if I could find a great rock that I couldn't take home, I'd sit on it for a photograph
Rock Creek is one of my favorite places to look for round rocks. I had begun a few years earlier looking for the perfect round rock. It was a good excuse to wade and led to baskets of them in my house as well as larger ones outside.
One of my many spirit places. Here I was to begin learning to cast with a fly pole on Slough Creek
Painting what I was feeling about my life
October 13. I call this a zen picture because it says so much about the moment. On a rock, one of my favorite places to pose since childhood, in a stream that was going who knows where, and hiding my feelings behind sunglasses
Some years change a lot and this was one of those for me.
camping with the family in Southern Oregon, a remote area in the sage brush and juniper
We now owned a home in Tucson, Arizona and this was a trip to Chaco Canyon New Mexico. Exploring another of those scared places, very natural, very beautiful and sleeping in the van at night.
I didn't paint this computer painting in 1998 but rather just last year but it seems to say a lot about what I was feeling in these years. Reflections. What is going on? Who am I? These were years of discovery also in music with artists like Brulé.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGVLTAtqzhM
This was the summer where using a meditation CD, I spent quite a few days and hours doing deep meditations for past life memories. I finished up with a trip to a hypnotherapist. One of those past life stories could have taken place in country that looked much like this east of Tucson in the Dragoons.
With my hair now almost black, I didn't even feel like me but it was fun for awhile. Stonehenge in the Gorge was created by Sam Hill to be an exact replica of the real thing. It has a feeling to it that I can't describe but Solstice celebrations are held there. Obviously this was not one of them
My hair had frizzed up into a ball, not to mention being color depleted after major surgery and a permanent too close together. What to do became an adventure in hair coloring that continued into my 60s when I gradually got off the stuff.
My son married and my mother died all within a few days. Earlier in the spring, I had had a major surgery that solved my health problems for years to come.
A time of change, my first year to get online, also health problems that were as yet undiagnosed but causing me a lot of grief and pain. The Metolius River is a place for healing of spirit and body. It might not solve problems, but it always helps.
An ancient Sinagua site in northern Arizona
Trying to paint something that I would paint again and again. What was going on outside my life was now not as much as what was going on inside me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv6VW4tMZbE
Caves have so many symbolisms and perhaps returning to this one reminded me of that as part of my growing spiritual interests
When I turned 50, I wanted to do something special and decided it would be to return to Oregon Caves.
Camping was done with a van that we slept in, sometimes a sterno stove or some lawn chairs. It was free and a time of going wherever with no plans except that it be in western mountains.
For the first time I began to do oil and acrylic paintings that were of spiritual feelings I had, not scenery but things I sensed more than saw
Parts of the west that I had never experienced opened to me. Some of the art galleries had western art and with it slowly began my collecting of cowboy and Native American flavored art.
My daughter was married in 1991 and I began an exploration of alternative spirituality that is ongoing today. Bear Butte, sacred to the Lakota and Cheyenne, was, even though I would not have seen it at the time, the beginning of this time of new directions toward mysticism, astrology, reincarnation and stepping away from traditional religion onto an unknown path.
Looking back through these photos, It seems my favorites were always along the coast, in the mountains or at the desert. Of course, the ones at home often had someone else in them also.
Even though it's not far away, I hadn't been to Montana until I was 46. I fell instantly in love and haven't fallen back out yet.
Life was again changing. Children growing up, moving out or preparing to do so. Into my life came a new love-- Montana with its mountains, rivers and wild places. Driving in for the first time, I felt I was coming home. Montana, Arizona and Oregon are definitely spirit homes for me. Wasn't yet thinking about reincarnation but it did feel I'd been there before.
Yes, it was what I wore. Always had things I liked that when they got past the public stage, I could use around the farm. Earrings are ones I wore all the time for a few years. I tend to do that with jewelry even today.
Well I was but it didn't bother me. Not 30, 40, nor 50, none were different to me after I got past leaving girlhood at 27. Change was yet ahead.
I like to have photos taken in the same places but years apart to just compare.
My daughter who was just beginning to bloom as a woman was in this photo. Since I didn't want to use photos of anybody else aging in these, I cropped it. Take it from me, she was gorgeous. It's strange to have your daughter becoming the woman you were.
We had a Polaroid camera and for a few years, they are all the pictures we took. At the time it seemed like a good lLess so with years of perspective and looking back on grainy pictures
who had been to Hawaii and brought back a lei for my daughter and me
In the fall, my father (both parents lived on the farm in a mobile home) would die, and life would change again. When your parent dies, you might expect it. He had a heart condition. You can be grateful that they had a good death as he did; but you never cease missing them or thinking about them sometimes.
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