To live

On page 91 from The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd,

"For falling asleep on the mountain has the delicious corollary of awaking.  To come up out of the blank of sleep and open one's eyes on scaur and gully, wondering, because one had forgotten where one was, is to recapture some pristine amazement not often savored.  I do not know if it is a common experience (certainly it is unusual in my normal sleep), but when I fall asleep out of doors, perhaps because outdoor sleep is deeper than normal, I awake with an empty mind. Consciousness of where I am comes back quite soon, but for one startled moment I have looked at a familiar place as though I had never seen it before.

Such sleep may last for only a few minutes, yet even a single minute serves this end of uncoupling the mind.  It would be merely fanciful to suppose that some spirit of emanation of the mountain had intention in thus absorbing my consciousness, so as to reveal itself to a naked apprehension difficult to otherwise obtain.  I do not ascribe sentience to the mountain; yet at no other moment am I sunk quite so deep into its life.  I have let go my self.  The experience is peculiarly precious because it is impossible to coerce."

Although I have not had that experience in the mountains, I had a similar experience when I was in my early 20s while sleeping in a nest I had dug for myself in a steep slope of warm sand when I was alone on the north end of Montara Beach on a cool windy sunny weekday. Although I have looked for a photo in Google images showing the steepness of the beach, I couldn't find one.  Perhaps the nature of that beach has changed in nearly 50 years.  Perhaps the nature of the beach changes from summer to winter.

Nan Shepherd's words brought back my experience.  That place and time was where I experienced paradise.

It's been 10 years now since I've visited the ocean.  That was also the last time I visited the Sierra Nevada.  I have lived closer to mountains than to the ocean for most of my adult life here in Northwest Washington and yet I rarely visit the mountains except in my dreams. Reading Nan Shepherd's book was like revisiting the recurring dreams I've had of walking in the mountains.  Some of my ancestors lived in Scotland.  Maybe some memories of the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland are in my DNA.  I am grateful to Nan Shepherd and John Muir for their celebration of life in the context of walking and resting in the mountains.



















For now, I walk close to home near the shore of a 14-mile lake with a view of mountains, surrounded by woods, just a few miles from the Salish Sea, finding a measure of peace and celebration in doing that.

(Thanks to Brain Pickings for inspiring me to arrange to read The Living Mountain through our local library's interlibrary loan program.)

Visions of Montara

When I found this photo a few days ago, it was just like being there. It's a long narrow steep ocean beach. After walking from the south end to the north and part way back on a sunny day, I used to make a nest for myself in the warm sand and sleep peacefully there. That was in the early 1970s. Much has changed in California since then, but the headlands, beach and ocean look just as I remember them. Many of my paintings from the 1980s and early 1990s were painted from memories of Montara Beach.

















Source for photo

The ocean wild like an organ played
The seaweed wove its strands
The crashin’ waves like cymbals clashed
Against the rocks and sands

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself ’neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum
(Bob Dylan, from "Lay Down Your Weary Tune")

Listen

















("Beloved Ocean With Fearless Room In True Colors"
by am)

Cloud Lifting / Four Suns (2002)

Untitled Ocean #4 (1997)

This is my only painting from 1997.

Calendar Series: 22nd Month / Sunrise (1987)

Now I am beginning to remember that, over and over again, the ocean scene I was painting in the Calendar Series was from my memories of hours spent walking on the bluffs and beach at Montara on the San Mateo County coast in California, just about 12 miles south of San Francisco but a world away in terms of population and sense of place. 

On my way to the beach, I used to buy a "lunch" of golden raisins at the tiny organic food store (in those days it was called a "natural food" store) in Montara and then spend the afternoon walking and taking in the extraordinary multi-sensorial experience of feeling part of the ocean, clouds, sky, horizon, wind, sun, fog, gulls, killdeer, sanderlings, sandpipers, crows, sea lions, seals, orcas, whales, blue-sailed jellyfish, kelp, sand fleas, broken shells, driftwood, agates, chaparral-covered coast hills to the east, coastal plants growing on the bluffs and in the distinctively golden sand, all not far from eucalyptus groves and straw-flower fields. 

Sometimes when it was sunny but windy and cool, I would dig a bed for myself in the warm sand of that steep-sloped beach and sleep and dream. It would be almost 15 years before this experience of loving and being loved by a place would show itself in paintings. During the time when I lived within weekend afternoon driving distance of Montara Beach, I was not drawing or painting at all but working with brightly colored carpet warp, making small colorful tapestry-like images using a macrame technique.

(the photos are from an online album of splendid photos of the northern California coast by Daniel Wolf-Root that I found while looking for images of Montara)