In the Woods: Collaborating With Dirt and Snow. It’s time.

I'm in the woods—and the kitchen. Hello from the table where I sit with a view of the Pike Forest. I can almost see the exact spot where two of my canvases are buried in the snow and ice. 

One thing led to another. Months ago, I was working on the ground, feeling the shapes of the earth beneath me and the canvas, outlining them with a soft pastel—until the season changed. It snowed. I got the urge to bury the paintings. They'd already been outside for months. For whatever reason—not knowing what to do, curiosity, attempted surrender, a deep desire for change, grief—I had decided to let things (wind, rain, dirt, fallen branches) influence my work. Collaborate. That's it. I was collaborating with natural forces and elements, and I didn't know why. I still don't know all the reasons why. 

Back in April 2024, I came to the woods for what I thought would be three weeks. Several things had hit at once—most of them more personal than I want to share right now—but in the mix was this: I had just completed a two-year writing program. I was ready to give up on writing. 

The program had taught me structure—story structure, the whole reason I pursued such a program—and at long last, I was seeing it. I recognized it in books and films and could even sense the shape of the story I was writing. But I couldn't pull it together. I'd spent two years making a huge mess of words, and the mess just kept growing. Words, words, words. I do love words.

The technical term for this, I'm told, is ADD. And maybe that's true. The more I learn about it, the more I agree it's possible. If I wanted to be trendy (indeed late to the trend), I might even (for its creative merits) call it a superpower—except when I leave my studio to grab a Sharpie and clean the whole house instead. At least I'm tidy. Most of the time, I'm tidy enough. But when I step into a bath of rose petals and salt twelve hours later and remember The Sharpie, the bath isn't as enchanting as I'd imagined. Sure, I see the rose petals, but all I can smell is Sharpie. 

Where was I? Oh, yeah. The woods. Three weeks turned into eight months—collaboration. One of the things I was grieving when I first got to the woods was the loss of what I thought would be an extraordinary collaboration—the sort of thing forged by natural forces, impossible to conjure. But it was destroyed by something unknown, something I couldn't reconcile alone.

So maybe that's what this is all about—collaboration—not only with the elements but also with the story I'm writing, the tug of my past, and the creativity that's always carried me through.