Myrtle Tree Arts Journal

Arriving at Fort Worden sent me on a hunt about fortification history and architecture. Following trails through the woods to the top of Artillery Hill, Paul and I encounter the ramparts, solidly built gun emplacements known here as “batteries.” “Bulwark” is another term that feels related to the work from my first week at Centrum: large pencil drawings of entangled old growth cedar and spruce branches and roots. The “bul-” part of bulwark is related to bole, “tree trunk,” while -wark is related to English work, wrought, and wright.  The last of the guns at the fort were removed in 1945, and the defunct battery enclosures, tunnels, stairwells, rusting doors and pipes, lichen-stained concrete, a stately sign with the name, Cornelius Tolles, a captain who died from his wounds in a Civil War battle—comprise these eerie tombs. We start to hymn and sing into the dark reverberating chambers. “What a performance venue!”, our eyes circling in their sockets as we imagine the possibilities.  May

I begin with pencil and paper. Simple. Meditative, airy gestures make marks and smudges . Alternating light and heavy pressure. My eyes try to study forms and shadow. Squinting and relaxing my gaze. Playing with seeing and not seeing.  Drawing involves continuous choosing, extracting and generalizing, while trying to dance across the paper. The inspirations are coming from walking in a very small fraction of the vast temperate rain forests on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington. I'm choosing to notice the stability of old growth spruce and cedar in Quinault, the twisted movement captured inside roots, bark, veins, and eroded paths along the Sol Duc. Man-made entanglements formed into artificial log jams fortify the banks of the Hoh. Artistic partner and spouse, Paul Godwin and I are on a trek, each day taking a bike ride into the bracing wind, and or a hike as light fog settles between the trees. We spend a night in a lodge next to a very still lake. My bathing suit fills with fin

The present is just a moment in the continuous unfolding of perceptions and experiences. In meditative practice, I actively try to observe the arising and vanishing of the present to develop the skills to be in the present with deeper awareness. Similarly, the rapid passing of frames of video, the interweaving of streams of images and sounds, is for me, a way of observing an ephemeral present. "Right View" by Ameera Godwin   In this state of mind, I can start to experience a quality of "right view.": seeing what is true, and discerning how to respond, compassionately, ethically. I try to cultivate a relationship to temporality, "as an on-going purposeful effort to create one’s time and keep up one’s sensed continuity in time," as described by Estonian researcher, Kätlin Pulk . Working with digital video and using various non-narrative film approaches, my raw materials are the moving pixels with attributes like duration, speed, frequency, synchrony and as

Paul Godwin & Miguel Noya (Dogon) Music for FIRE/LAND: Knowing the Territory has been a huge part of the creation process for this "Art Rock Opera for the Forest." We began with a gorgeous and somewhat somber composition that came about in 2018 when Miguel Noya, the Venezuelan electronic composer attended our artist residency at Talking Tree Ranch in Placerville. The composition is routed in a repeating piano pattern nested rhythmically in the key of C# minor. There is an interwoven melody taken up by piano, then violin and finally a synthesizer enters with a counter theme -  swirling, gorgeously rising with an inherent longing and perhaps, sadness. The piece was not released until now, when it found a home in the opening FIRE/LAND  Overture – recast as “Whichever Way the Wind Blows.” The piano ostinato will return again as a foundation for “A Moral Dilemma” and then “We All Play a Part” as our Finale.  How does one create music for an “art rock opera for the forest”?  A

History is part of us even when we are unaware of it. I’d been living in and hiking around the Foothills for years without knowing much about the complex factors that shaped the history of this heavily forested area. I set out to learn more about what has brought us to the perilous wildfire conditions of the present moment. With the Caldor Fire of 2021 taking out more than 200 homes and 250,000 acres, and the increase of mega-fires across California generally, wildfire brings a strong connection to grief around the disruption of family life, the loss of generations of trees, damage to soil and wildlife, and release of masses of carbon. What historical forces might be relevant to understand where we are now? The forest holds a history that can explain our current state. Last fall I had a conversation with Tony Valdez, an energetic rock climber and passionate storyteller who worked for 37 years with the US Forest Service. Tony lent me his copy of the book by Timothy Egan, The Big Burn .

A recent classroom-based workshop on Prescribed Burning was my first immersion into learning about fire behavior and concepts rooted in science, law, and practice on the ground. Beneficial Disturbance. Heat Management. F.R.I. for Fire Return Interval. Learning about burning and its connections to culture and biodiversity was a first step toward overcoming my own negative perceptions about fire.  The course was led by experts Chris Paulus and Cordi Craig of Placer County, and coordinated by Kestrel Grevatt and the American River Conservancy, and emphasized the benefits of careful, legal burning. We were introduced to fuels and forest types, fire and wind behavior, state statutes and personal liabilities, Indigenous cultural burning and native plant adaptation. The experience was surprisingly rich.   “The forest has memory,” announced Chris, a well-spoken and commanding retired CAL FIRE Battalion Captain. “The forest has to be allowed to remember itself.” I’m going to borrow that, I th