Moving Mountains

I’ve been working on a lot of new drawings that look something like this.

They started emerging a couple weeks ago, when I had the privilege of visiting Moffat, Colorado with a few friends. This is Ute land, a place where sagebrush plains spill between mountains. One of the friends, who I affectionately refer to as my Shared Brain, was due to undergo a knee surgery when we got back. We came for the hot springs, three days to soak and rest and be.

This was my first real trip without my wife Julie. We had decided to separate a few months prior, and on the second day, the magnitude of the loss hit me. In one of our conversations before we decided to split, she asked me,

“But what about all of the experiences we will not share?”

And that tender question, as I type it now, guts me. This trip was the beginning of my grieving, and it continues.

I don’t know why the feet emerged. I think they were in the very first drawing I made out there when I dragged the long wooden table in my room out onto the cement back porch so I could draw in the presence of those mountains. It might have simply been a playful thought: imagining walking over and through those distant, majestic peaks. I loved how quickly I could make the shape of the legs, and how quickly the repetition of the shape created texture and depth. I started to think about time: the mind-defying time it takes a mountain to arise and form, and the epic quest it would be to actually traverse one.

Once I returned home, I knew that a groove had been created, and I needed to keep going, to keep walking these drawings. The grief process is opening up, and I think the mountains are taking on some of the burden of helping me cope. Grief, as the great teacher Yoli Maya Yeh has taught me, is without end. It is the way we express love for that which we have lost. The question, for those of us conditioned to avoid or fear grief: how do I keep walking?