Myrtle Tree Arts Journal

The writer Robert McFarlane brilliantly expresses reflections about walking in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind. While walking, we get to know a place, but more deeply, we are shaped and changed by the landscape. Walking gives me a magical entry into place. I feel that I join with archetypal beings whose feet, hooves, boots, and paws have worn away the same ground. A walk in nature can generate a map of profound emotion, which I can experience as awe, love, grief. Like a ghost, I pass through a world of feelings and try to access the traces of other ghosts that have traveled the trail before me.  Creating the Fire/Land piece is an “art walk” to explore feelings like love and grief about landscape.  I walk to contemplate my connection to place in the face of my climate grief. I’m grieving with the forest as a biological creature that can only hold so much. It can only bounce back so far. The new USDA Forest Service report on California tree mo

A tree is a solid and constant being, free of human weaknesses like discontent and striving. So wrote John Muir, the environmental philosopher and early advocate for land preservation, about the symbolic nature of the tree. Yet, in another way, a tree might have discontent about ecological disruption in the forest, for the tree is not an isolated being but part of an interconnected network on which life everywhere depends.   That’s where the art piece FIRE/LAND starts, by asking lyrically how a tree actually feels. Not only poetically inspiring, this idea speaks to me of species survival through adaptation and migration. Does a tree move and adapt? Do humans change in ways that make a difference to a tree? A tree moves through its seeds. Species that can adapt and move successfully can reduce their risk of mortality and become survivors.  A long time ago, my dad taught me to grow vegetables and take care of a garden. That influenced my path in life ever since. The plant seed is the fi

FIRE/LAND: Knowing the Territory is an exploration using music, media, art, and performance. As a public arts experience, FIRE/LAND : Knowing the Territory is a forest journey and exploration of national and local history, diverse cultural perspectives, and scientific efforts, to deepen art appreciation and inspire community engagement around ongoing wildfire experiences.  The project is an opportunity to bring together a broad spectrum of residents to examine, reflect through the lens of art on a very real threat, its attendant anxieties, and many factors that have brought us to these current conditions. As a personal creative journey, the piece is being birthed through my own learning process with people I meet, including from those from the US Forest Service, CAL FIRE and other agencies, to wildfire survivors, scientists, land stewards, Indigenous culture keepers and other artists. The idea for the new piece, FIRE/LAND, is rooted in personal and collective trauma experienced i