Shapeshifting with Ravens

Three ravens photo by Beth Surdut 2013

Watching three black ravens ride the breezes near my studio, wings silvered by the sun, I think I would exchange my human form so I could swoop and play with them in the borderless New Mexico sky.

Nuns, Pagans, and being fully human

I’ve been best friends with a pagan for 30 years, so you’ll understand how unsettling it is to see her dressed up as Mother Superior, a role so unlike the range of wildly experimental and classic pieces in her repertoire.

Actress Lynn Sharp Spears Climbs Every  Mountain

   Considering Lynn Sharp Spears is a professional actress/singer/director/set designer/make-up artist (that’s a short list) and has the voice of a powerful fallen angel, I know why she is currently receiving standing ovations in The Sound of Music in Baltimore.

    Nuns and art also convene in a life-sized cabinet carved by Massachusetts-based Nancy Carroll, whose business is aptly called Luna-C Arts. 

Artist Nancy Carroll gets into a nun's drawers

I profiled Nancy for The Middlesex Beat in 2002:

There’s nothing quite like a classic black dress and red high heels to make  a statement, especially if the black is a nun’s habit and the red shoe seems, in this case, to be on the wrong foot.

“There’s a full human being in here,” said artist Nancy Carroll as she approached her sculptural cabinet, “Bad Habits.” She put her hands on the cold-water faucet knobs of the nun’s breasts and when she opened the doors; dance music started to play. Inside was all pink and fluff-- pink Marshmallow Fluff®.

            “Go ahead,” urged Carroll, as I gingerly pulled open the nun’s drawers edged in carved ruffles and filled with memorabilia of Carroll’s experience as a novice. (She did not become a nun.)

            When she tallies up the time involved in making her basswood nun cabinet, she figures 330 hours of planning, designing, carving, joining and painting and, oh yes, 53 years.

I find the idea of being pigeon-holed into any particular style antithetical to being an artist and a person. Although their unique abilities to portray nuns made the news for both Lynn Sharp Spears  and Nancy Carroll , each artist continually expands into uncategorizable realms linked by curiosity about the next step forward. When someone asked an NPR correspondent to describe what I did, she responded that I was "a creative polymath." I think that describes us all--without boundaries. As Nancy said, “There’s a full human being in here.”

Ashes to Art-- Support Colorado Firefighters

The  Survivor by  Beth Surdut for The Ashes to Art Project

I am one of more than 70 artists nationwide participating in The Ashes to Art Project, creating artwork to raise funds for firefighters. Incorporating charcoal collected from the 2012 Colorado wildfires, the artworks are being sold October 7-21, 2012 via an online auction at Bidding for Good http://www.biddingforgood.com/auction/AuctionHome.action?vhost=theashestoartproject2012

The Survivor, http://www.biddingforgood.com/auction/item/Item.action?id=180442959,  is a three-dimensional shadow box  featuring a pigment print of a young raven standing on branches drawn with charcoal from the Colorado fire. In front of the raven is a collection of charred wood taken from the forests devastated by the flames.

The people in Colorado are my neighbors. The firefighters are my heroes. I just want to help.

The fight to save lives, homes and forest took a tremendous toll. Three lives and more than 600 homes were lost, including several belonging to firefighters. More than 250,000 acres were burned. Proceeds from the online auction will be used to replace equipment for the Poudre Canyon Volunteer Fire Protection District in Colorado, near the worst fire damage and the area where the charcoal was collected.
By nature's power and whim, I could just as well have been in their situations.

I think speaking up,  stepping out in some way is important. I watched the Las Conchas fires encroach on Los Alamos last year here in New Mexico and wrote about the habitat destruction in Orion Magazine.

For my ongoing Listening to Raven series of drawings and collected stories of science and spirit, one of the myths I've come across is that Raven was a beautiful white bird who brought fire to humanity.  While carrying the burning firebrand across the skies, Raven's white feathers became irrevocably blackened by the smoke as he flew. Other stories, especially the trickster tales, put Raven in dire circumstances that he really shouldn't survive. Yet he sometimes literally suffers terrible wounds, puts himself back together, and goes on, as we do-changed, but anticipating the next phase of life.I  hope a  viewer sees and  feels a  piece of  their own story in The Survivor. "

 To view and bid on original artwork, including The Survivor by Beth Surdut, visit BiddingForGood.com/TheAshesToArtProject2012. Bidding will take place October 7-21, 2012.

Rosh Hashanah

Aspen Vista by  Beth Surdut

The glorious carpet of golden aspen and evergreens accessed at Aspen Vista, just above the city of Santa Fe, is lift-your-heart gorgeous. Hikes from there can be an easy stroll or leg-burning and literally breath-taking challenges starting at over 7.000 feet and climbing upward.

Rosh Hashanah brings the anticipation of  another year as I create a custom tallit that contains a thank you-- Blessed are you, Adonai,  Ruler of  the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.

 Invitation by Beth Surdut

May you walk in beauty and be sustained through life's challenges.

Progress in studio land

Raven is making announcements in front of my high desert studio,

Raven at  Beth Surdut's studio.

the snakes have opted for a new zip code

I chased this gopher snake when it chased a tiny baby bunny.

Survivor bunny grows up.

Studio stinkbug zen by Beth Surdut

Mid-day painted poppies in the  breeze

Early  morning  heart line, raven  feathers, bodhi leaves

Evening in  Beth  Surdut's  studio.

Raven in the wood

“We heard that if you split a raven’s tongue, it’ll talk like a parrot,” said the beautiful girl studying my raven drawings. My breath caught and fluttered in my throat like a trapped bird. She’d already told me that she used to steal raven nestlings in Ruidoso where she was raised up. Then she cut her eyes at me, “but that didn’t sound like fun, so we didn’t do it.”

Raven in the wood carved by Beth Surdut  2012

Flying Lessons in Abiquiu

Flying  Lessons  © Beth Surdut 2011

The first first time I piloted a small plane-- over the ocean through a  lava red sunset drenched in fire--

I described the feeling as delirious contentment.

As Raven and I continue our journey, I feel that same heartbeat of exaltation, curiosity, and mystery.

Resilient enough to survive monsoon and drought, soft as a whisper over my skin, the somewhat battered raven feather I retrieved from the Stone Ladies of the White Place now rides around in my car window, dividing my vision between earth and sky.

The White Place photo ©Beth Surdut 

Georgia O’Keeffe often painted the quietly grand rock formations of The White Place. These are the graceful sisters of the more colorfully dressed forms of Ghost Ranch. Often, I hear only the conversation of Raven, my spirit guide, as I gaze upwards at the cornflower blue New Mexico sky or  walk into the mystery of a slot  canyon.

I stood at the edge of the white place

Anticipation dry and tangy in my heart

Tasting the dust of bones and clouds.

~Beth Surdut, Visual Storyteller

Smartest of birds and an icon in creation mythology, Raven shows himself to me and I respond. We talk in the golden aspen groves; sometimes we walk with Coyote amidst the earth sculptures of the Navajo badlands, discussing who really created the Milky Way. 

The  Compass of My Heart     © Beth Surdut

 I come here to breathe in what Raven has to tell me, to breathe out a new mythology with hands, heart and mind.  Standing in the open-mouthed wonder of Ghost Ranch, I make graaking sounds of hope and welcome to three ravens playing. I would leave this body to enter one of theirs, to fly and swoop in the New Mexico blue sky.

Ghost Ranch  photo ©Beth  Surdut

Darwin should see this

I didn’t hear any screams, so I guess the idiot and the gator survived.Before I tell you that story, let me explain about my painting Circe’s Dating Pool. In mythology, Circe turned amorous sailors into swine. In Florida, aging boys litter dating sites with pictures of themselves holding big hogfish as romantic bait. To me, the move from Circe's swine to hogfish and dating seems a reasonable metamorphosis.
Now, moving from ocean to river, here's the story of that first line--
A curious gator, maybe four feet long, leaves the shore and swims quickly towards our canoe. Soon as he's close enough to figure out what we are, he swims parallel to the boat. The birds have gone silent and instead of their songs, we hear some recidivist rehab diva's voice scratching nature till it bleeds.
The young gator submerges, now invisible, as we round the bend where the air is suddenly scented with cigarette smoke. There’s one man standing--well, sort of swaying--in thigh deep water, his white skin glowing in the tannin-dense river. One hand is conducting with a cigarette, and he's using the beer in the other hand as ballast.
“There’s a gator heading in your direction,” I call to him, and the idiot, showing off for his beer can buddies in their boat yells, “Great! I’ll go meet it!” and dives under water.
I ply the paddle deep and fast, saying to my companion, “This could be a Darwin Award Moment and I don’t want to see it. Just keep paddling.”
Far be it from me to get in the way of that guy's personal freedom.

You’d think that telling “gator and the idiot” stories would be cautionary tales, but a park ranger at Myakka told me that there are people who emulate whatever bad behavior they hear. Warn not too feed gators, and picnickers are right on the river bank tossing in hot dogs. Might as well be tossing their kids and canines.
The sad thing is that any gator seen being fed is “removed” for future human safety, because an alligator not only comes to associate humans with food, but doesn’t distinguish between the food and the hand that holds it. Potentially, you’re just one big snack, bubba.

Want more wild life? Read Gator Girl (terror masquerades as aplomb) and Raptor Rapture
(owl prowl and oh my, what big teeth you have).
Circe's Dating Pool , from my Enigmatic Paradise series, is available in print.
Idiosyncracies: Female hogfish can change sex and have a harem. (See, there is a Cosmic Jester.) Wonderfully snarky poem from Circe’s perspective in The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy.
The Darwin Awards are given "to people who kill (or sterilize) themselves in really stupid ways, and in doing so, significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race."

Obamas Beets

“One thing the president and I, we don’t really like, are beets,” the first lady said in an interview Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “We don’t have beets. We’re a no-beet garden. We believe there’s a beet gene. You either love beets or you hate ‘em, and neither of us have the beet gene.”

Beets Me by Beth Surdut

As part of my  Art From the Kitchen~ Painted and Served, I have a beet recipe that  makes grown  men  lick their plates, so perhaps the presidential  family--famous for their open-mindedness-- will give it a try. 

Beets Me, the recipe ~ painted and served by Beth Surdut

Golden beets (oh my!) or red beets (oh yes!!) or a mixture of both

Maché or baby arugula—just a few leaves per serving

Crème fraîche or Greek-style yogurt

Honey to drizzle

Lemon—a few drops into the honey

Separate plates

Remove greens, clean and cut beets into quarters.

Steam till easily pierced about 8 minutes

Cut into bite size pieces

Prepare a welcoming bed of yogurt or crème fraîche

Sprinkle a light design of greenery

Arrange beets on top

Mix honey and fresh lemon juice to taste and drizzle delicately over  beets and yogurt

Serve beets warm or at room temperature

Watch diners surreptitiously lick their plates.

Conniving, vindictive and terrifyingly intelligent

The Gathering  of  Ravens  by Beth Surdut

A neighborhood association in Santa Fe county let loose a hawk and an owl to keep the ravens away because they were busily destroying roofs. I know the neighborhood-- it's one of those places where you can't paint your door in a color not approved by the neighborhood association. They vetoed the traditional turquoise blue that keeps evil spirits away.  Enough said.

One of my collectors in Alaska sent me this: According to the Anchorage Daily News, landfill workers are distraught by their inability to out-think the raven, "It’s the ravens- the conniving, vindictive and terrifyingly intelligent ravens- that really wreak havoc. These are the same ravens, everyone swears, that somehow picked out the personal truck of a worker who had been on harassment duty and proceeded to eat all the black rubber off his windshield wipers." When the harasser changed his truck for a red one, they did it again!

Say cheese

Between Taos and Embudo, NM by Beth Surdut

My heart opens with joy every time I drive the mountainous road between Taos and Embudo. The rift gorge is still aflame with golden cottonwoods leaning over the Rio Grande, and I wonder how to paint the emotions of this day. 

Glory fades as the road eventually widens and flattens into the traffic lanes and ratty median strips of Espanola where a dead dog lies bloated in the sun. Some kind of cattle dog, the spotted fur still visible—Australian or maybe Blue Heeler. The truck in the lane next to me passes, the silver trailer hitch glinting and wobbling so much that I consider honking to tell the two guys in the truck cab that something is wrong, but this being Espanola, I better be damn sure, so I speed up for a closer  look.

It’s an aluminum scrotum sack...about the size of a bull’s, complete with bulging balls and little indentation marks like rippled skin, just swinging low to the rhythm of the road.

My potential Good Samaritan act foiled, I returned to wondering how best to describe the sound of  wind moving through the cottonwood  leaves like dry  rain, or how to paint the flash of pinon jays lofting in blue notes of  surprise.

Raven Walks in Orion Magazine, Roosts at the NM State Land Office

The wind comes up cold in August.

Coyotes bark in the valley

I sit on the mountain

Raven wings brushing my hair

Pay attention to me, says Raven.

I will. Tomorrow. 

Right now I’m distracted

Tied up. Tied down. 

Raven sits in the juniper

Watching me as I draw him

Looking at me

He swoops in to untie a knot

He talks to me every day.

Light glancing off his feathers

Six drawings later

My eyes are reflected in his

As I walk in the desert morning

Raven lands in front me

Listen, he says

     And finally I do.       

©Beth Surdut  2011 

Nov/Dec  Orion Magazine--Walks Like a Man and my thoughts about habitat and wildfires

Another Reason Why

The  Reason Why  by  Beth  Surdut  2011

 I walk through this desert with Coyote and Raven, discussing who really created the Milky Way. I stand under these big open mouthed skies of New Mexico and let the stars flow down my throat and into my veins. I hike through the Bisti badlands, the towering playground of Tent Rocks, and hear the thrumming of the ancient earth.

At night I take my flashlight out into the brush, following the sparkling shine of eyes in the darkness. By morning the sun lights the gold chamisa and lavender sage carpet of my  dreams.

This is my home, though I haven't a house. 

This is my succor,  though water is scarce. 

I came from the east and can't imagine life without the west.

This is the place where I live.

The Reason Why

The character of Raven appears as trickster and bringer of magic in stories that fly through time and territory, his cleverness ultimately providing humans with surprising benefits.  

 Enduring creatures, Ravens appear in the Lascaux cave paintings, the Bible, Babylonian flood myths, Norse, Celtic, and Native American stories and more. Raucous, rowdy, defiant, sensual and smart, their cleverness is admired by scientists, their mystery acknowledged throughout world cultures.

A jewelry maker from Boston, graduate of the esteemed North Bennet Street School, gave this Raven to a dear friend in New Mexico who knew the pleasure of sitting with her dog named Bear and talking to ravens. Soon after the dog died, a raven feather appeared on the front stoop. The owner believes that the feather is a message from Bear. 

Solo  exhibition of Listening to Raven including this drawing and  story  at Wells Fargo Bank Gallery in Santa Fe,corner of Paseo de Peralta and  Washington Ave. Open 6 days a  week with  free parking.

Walking by Moonlight in Bandelier

Listening  to Raven  series  at  www.bethsurdut.com

Walking with the ancients by moonlight, my feet joined 10,000 years of  footfalls.  A resident raven listened to my questions as the moon rose over these ancestral pueblo dwelling places.Then we were silent in a landscape full of night sounds.

It was a poetic night of the senses.

Of rushing water in a dry land

Of drumbeats linking the centuries

Of heartbeats calling to the dead

Of surprises.

I  was changed.

I will not tell you more.

Go.

http://www.nps.gov/band/planyourvisit/nightwalk.htm

To hear more  raven  adventures and see portraits of this clever corvid, visit  Wells Fargo  Bank  Gallery for the  month  of  July,  corner of  Washington  Ave and  Paseo  de Peralta, open  Monday through Saturday with free parking.

Walks Like  A  Man  by  Beth  Surdut

The Middle of Nowhere is Somewhere to Me

Great  Basin pastel sketch          c Beth Surdut 2011

  All this talk about getting back to nature...some of us never left.

Creativity--the natural high.

Out of the Lion's mouth

Yes, I drew this, but there are days when I can't tell if she's being swallowed or launching herself out of the lion's mouth.

In Balinese myth, a big moon faced ogre swallows the moon goddess each month until she's a sliver of light and hope, but he never succeeds entirely, because he only has a head. She always emerges, serene and beautiful, with a knowing little smile. It's something to aspire to--outwitting the ogres, knowing where the lions are-- don't you think?

Musical confluence--Wondering Where the Lions Are by brilliant Bruce Cockburn

Listening To Raven~Drawings,  Myths & Realities by Beth Surdut

While I was creating The Ravens of  Truth and Memory with pen and colored pencil, heart and mind, two tiny Zuni fetish ravens carved by a married couple into black marble and bound together with turquoise and coral perched on the paper's edge. I found them through the grace of the Bronwyn the White Raven who owns Keshi in Santa Fe.
The Norse God Odin sent two Ravens out each day--one named Thought (Hugin), the other Memory (Munin). Here, I've changed Thought to Truth.
Memory allows Truth to gently pick through her feathers until both birds shine. Chosen by bird guide author  David Allen Sibley for the exhibition For the Birds at Brush Gallery in Massachusetts until June 18.
For the beginning of the Raven story that brought this mermaid to the desert, start with Drawing Raven.

Ten Generations en la troca

Ten Generations from Listening to Raven series by Beth Surdut

La troca (the truck) is as iconic here in New Mexico as Trickster Raven-- the older rounded forms made by man mimic the languid curves and patinas of this high desert that color my soul. 

The Listening toRaven~Drawings, Myths and Realities series of intricate drawings and stories is the current focus of this blog and my professional life. From Alaska to Australia, Croatia, Canada, and all over the map, people contact me with raven tales.  
Come meet my raven family and their stories roosting at the Wells Fargo Bank Gallery on Washington St for the entire month of July 2011.

In Alaska, Mark has been caring for ravens and eagles for the past 16 years. Although there are certainly professional nature photographers with admirable patience, skill, and talent, this man’s love is uniquely communicated through his actions and photographic documentation of his avian friends. His photographs and the stories he tells me gave flight to this drawing as well as  The Ravens of Truth and Memory which nods to the Norse God Odin’s ravens.

Mark writes: I must say I think your drawing of Raven is the best that I have seen yet...

 Raven flew over the office of the apartment complex where I worked. I put some meat out for him and soon he came down and got it. Next, he brought his partner and although she was much more tentative they both started stopping by each day. I started to develop a call that sounded like when the male Kushka called the female Feathers. After time, when I called, they would come down off the mountain. That summer, I noticed that they brought their fledge down to my truck and from that time on I became their babysitter.

  After 10 generations of fledges, I believe the original couple moved on and now all their children come back in the winter to live nearby cause they know I will have food for them if times get bad.

Speaking of la troca: I carried Martha Egan's collection La Ranfla (The Ride) to the mechanic's while he fixed my brakes-- I read the entire collection, nodding and grinning, wondering if I should go looking for a literate cowboy and a good cash crop, when Guapo brought me to tears right there in a chilly waiting room.

When your friends back East ask what New Mexico is about, send them this book. Then get them out here, drive them around in a troca, show them the land and sky and a good taqueria, reading them Jim Sagal's Unexpected Turn if you can find a copy.

Mining for Bats

Visual  Storyteller Beth  Surdut 2011

 

 

 

 

Two miles up straight up a rock-pile masquerading as a road in the Ortiz Mountains of New Mexico, Thompson’s Big-eared bats swirled out of the old Santo Niño mine shaft at sunset. Wings beating like tiny bellows in the deep lavender air next to my cheek, they looked like spirits, their forms limned by the full moon. 

This is the kind of thing I live for—I’ve stood in a sacred and odorous bat cave in Indonesia that looked like a view into a many-storied tenement building; held a grinning fruit bat and stroked its suede-soft wings after leaving a sacred monkey forest in Bali, and was now standing in the cool of a starry evening in a mountain preserve given over to the Santa Fe Botanical Garden by a mining company.

About a mile up the road, which looked like one of those middle-of-nowhere ads with the disclaimer that reads “Professional driver--Do not attempt at home,” I had to ask my two volunteer passengers in the back to get out and walk. I realized that this was the first time I ever had second thoughts after signing one of those “if you die, it's not our fault" waivers. 

I’m not an adrenaline junky, but there is much that I will do to get to the great view, the sacred place, the isolated island, the animal adventure. So, singing  Bob Marley songs with  a guide,  I’ve ridden a jumpy polo pony into the hills of Jamaica, kayaked alligator infested waters in Florida, flown strapped onto a bench in a skinless home-built plane to see sea turtles in the Hawaiian ocean—you get the idea.  But this time, I turned to my companion in the passenger seat and said, “This is just plain stupid and there’s more to come--we’re going to have to maneuver this in the dark. Should have brought sleeping bags.”

We gathered under the light of a mica moon and walked up a small incline with wildlife biologist Mike Roedel, who said wryly, when I asked the name of a flower, “I don’t know, it doesn’t have wings,” but was otherwise informative about his field, so much so that he encouraged questions while we waited for the bats to swirl up from the mine. We learned that the majority of the bats we would see were males and that the maternity colony, as many as 140, were literally hanging out with their pups in the much more accessible Mining Museum in Cerrillos.

They began to arrive in ones and twos, about  4 inches long with rabbit-like ears, dancing a pas de deux, sometimes announcing squeakily that they were coming up the shaft, which was lined with a large echoing metal cylinder covered by an iron cupola to keep us from jumping in, I guess. We counted the bats; numbers ranged from 25 to 42. Wings swooshed by my head as I peered and listened for the next arrivals

There is so much to know--the set of the constellations, the rounded curves of the mountains, the moods of the desert, the creatures that have been here longer than we can remember. We came down off the mountain, every one of us enhanced by the wing beat of bat under a night sky.

The Compass of My Heart by Beth  Surdut

  This trip is no longer offered. However there is guided hike information on Santa Fe Botanical Garden properties that include mountains and wetlands at  http://www.santafebotanicalgarden.org

portrait photo credit: David Holmstrom

Calling peacocks

Power without Sacrifice--silk cape by Beth Surdut

"There are baby peacocks loose in your neighborhood," the head of the Conservation Commission called to tell me. In a rural quintessential New England town that had seen one murder 33 years before I arrived to work as a reporter, small events masquerade as big news. The murder remains unsolved, but this time, I was prepared.

Ordered through the mail,  the peacock youngsters, too young to achieve brilliant coloration (not that the peahens ever would), weren't supposed to take flight until they'd matured, but like airplane schedules I'd encountered in Indonesia,  they took off when they pleased, especially since the owners had yet to build a covered enclosure. So, with a lot less effort than it took to escape the local penitentiary,  the birds had flown the  coop.

"Look up in the  trees, " the Con Com lady advised me.

Not knowing when a peacock caller would come in handy, I'd bought one for $2 from a jolly man who owned a downstairs shop on Boston's tony Newbury Street. The two reeds, a few inches long, bound together at each end with red twine, emit a piercing unbeautiful sound when you blow through them.

Too Much Beauty 

 

When I lived in  Florida, where a neighborhood was  known for its  free roaming  peacocks, a group of residents lobbied for an ordinance to rid the neighborhood of  these strikingly gorgeous birds with the voices of harridans.

For two years I worked for a newspaper that covered this lovely town of 5,000 people west of Boston complete with apple orchards, a village green, churches, livestock, dogs, cats and wild things-- fierce Fisher cats that howled like banshees,  hungry foxes, and bold coyotes that trotted by clenching little squealing bodies in their jaws.

"What about the cats and dogs," I asked the old woman who showed me the 150 year old house, a former commune with a hand- built Swedish sauna perched by the pond spillway.
"Guess they run a lot faster than they used to," she said grimly.

A neighbor came by to tell me he'd seen a Fisher cat in my yard early one morning. "Cat" sounded like a big kitty. I had no idea what hellishness roamed the forests until another neighbor brought me to the rotting corpse of this fearsome beast from the wolverine family.

I'd seen a determined fox take a gosling from my pond, a hawk snatch a sparrow in mid- air right in front of me, found baby deer legs behind my house. My two inquisitive Khaki Campbell ducks no longer knocked on my front door with their beaks

I now wandered the back roads of what felt like an H.P. Lovecraft horror story, honking my peacock caller, hoping that I would be triumphant.

Nothing.

As light filtered through the trees at day's end, I returned home to find a message from the Con Com lady scribbled on paper and tucked in my screen  door.

Peacocks returned of their own accord.

I have yet to have another chance to try out the efficacy of my peacock caller, but you just never know when it'll come in handy.

javelina and the meaning of fierce

From the notebook of  Beth Surdut, after seeing --with a friend as witness--10 javelinas cross the road in the Gila Wilderness where 17 ravens swooped and played in the winds over the mountains.

There's a neighbor who thrives on alarm, so when I told him about the javelinas, he said they were fierce.
The last one I saw walked like she had her tampon in crooked. It's hard to be fierce when you're that  distracted.
Then he told me, that yakking  neighbor, that we had a coyote problem and he wants the game  warden to  kill some--
hang 'em up  in the trees.
"That'll scare the others," he said, eyes gleaming in his piggy  face.
I think the KKK tried that in the South.
 All it did was make people fierce.

Healing Scarf For Gabrielle Giffords

 The Hebrew prayer Misheberach asks for “complete healing” –r’fuah shleimah in Hebrew-- of body and spirit. As I began painting, saddened by the death of songwriter Debbie Friedman and the Tucson shootings,   I heard the melody of Debbie’s Misheberach and realized the scarf was destined for Congresswoman Giffords.

So, here it is—The Heavens scarf, inscribed with r’fuah shleimah and inspired by the power greater than us, who created the star-filled universe and gives us the strength of spirit to heal.

Death and Cookies

Death stands next to me in the kitchen watching me make cookies.

He gets way too close, his murky odor distracting me as I measure portions of raisins and oats.  Death's shadow and I have been keeping company a lot these days.  I think he especially wants beautiful Sara because her heart's so good. A bad-mannered suitor, he grabbed her breast and slid into her spine, not realizing what kind of backbone he was dealing with. That woman's faith has gotten her through fifty-some-odd years of more than you want to know. We know she needs a miracle, and she's gotten sidetracked from what she does best, which is full-time ministering to people as a pastor.  I think when she comes through this, she'll fill her kitchen with people seeking the warmth of her great spirit.

I add a teaspoon of ginger and listen to a public radio interview with a Unitarian minister who has esophageal cancer. He got himself so right with God and Death that for a long moment that man forgot his family was in this, too. Then he got a year's reprieve. When Death came knocking a second time, "My family and I had already had the dress rehearsal," said the minister. Bet his wife and kids didn't look at it that way.

I hear people say, "I'm not scared of dying."  Maybe all the people who love them are scared. So think of that next time you get all philosophical about leaving this earth. We still want you.

Death still hangs around as the flour and rising agents fall gently out of the sifter. At least one of us is disturbed to see something wiggling. I scoop out the little wormy things and give Death a few treats.
 
"That's all you're getting from me today, buddy," I say, as I cream the healthy substitute butter with the natural substitute sweetener that's supposed to help keep me on earth longer.
Some of the cookies are for a rabbi with a sweet tooth. "Who will say kaddish for me," asked the bachelor Rabbi in a sermon twenty years ago, when he could still tap dance. Possibly everyone he has ever met, I think, as people come up to him whenever we go out. From birth to death, he has been a part of every life cycle event. Now, at 82, brilliant and sparky despite crippling spinal stenosis and Parkinson's, he taps sitting down, his feet clicking to Gershwin and the Beatles.

I'm making these cookies in my writer friend David's kitchen. "So what happens when Jews die?" he asks. His lymphoma has him walking the tightrope between Christian Science and modern science. So far, he's finding his balance.
"No heaven and hell. We're about the here and now, though reincarnation would be great. I can't get everything accomplished in one lifetime," I tell him as I plop cookie dough onto the next baking sheet.
When I bend over to open the oven door, Death pokes me as rudely as a wet nosed dog.
He leans close, rotten breath whispering, "Make room for me." 

I slide the second batch into the oven. Then, fed up, I shove Death in, too, and quickly close the door. No matter how much sugar you add, death stinks, but for the time being, the comforting scent of oatmeal cookies completely fills the kitchen.
I divide up the sweets for Sara, David, and the Rabbi.

Post Script-- I wrote this essay in  2009 before my father's heart broke into little pieces, floating through his bloodstream, trying to find their way back together.

The Spirit of Raven and My Father

The Things I  Do for Love

Raven welcomed me home to the big sky country of New Mexico after my father's death.

When asked if I knew where my father's soul was, I realized that for now, it is on my breath.

And in my hands and spirit.

Each day I put out an egg for raven.

Each moment, I miss my father.

They never met each other, but somehow, they are connected.

Protective Coloration

Protective Coloration , from the Enigmatic Paradise series by Beth Surdut

Once upon a time or two or three, I raised a little cane in Jamaica and Hawaii, where the colors of the sun and the moon gave truth to purple fields graced with gold light. Gauguin’s art didn’t lie, even if he did. I never wanted to leave the stains of experience behind, for its colors painted me to be who I am.

"When they see us coming,the birdies all try and hide..."

Things I Do For Love (drawing) cBeth Surdut 2010

Raven hasn't heard about the egg scare and let me know quite loudly that he didn't appreciate my withholding his treat for two days. Although I do have a fondness for the twisted Tom Lehrer song Poisoning Pigeons in the  Park (hence the title of this post),  I consulted an ornithologist about the raw chicken eggs I set each day in the hot desert sun.
"What are you worried about? You're feeding birds that eat road kill and festering carrion." Point taken, and yet, I scrutinized this current carton of eggs trying to ascertain if the eggs actually came out of Arizona chickens, or if the company was a distributor of any of the potentially salmonella laden 550 million eggs that were recalled from designated Iowa culprits.
Speaking of carrion eaters-- hearing that the resistance to stem cell research lies in the the use of cells taken from early fetuses that have been discarded, I  wonder how many of those chicken embryo-eating consumers support stem cell research. Just a thought...

Ten Generations

Ten Generations by Beth  Surdut 2011

Listening To Raven series

In Alaska, Mark has been caring for ravens and eagles for the past 16 years. Although there are certainly professional nature photographers with admirable patience, skill, and talent, this man’s love is uniquely communicated through his actions and photographic documentation of his avian friends. His photographs and the stories he tells me gave flight to this newest drawing as well as  The Ravens of Truth and Memory which nods to the Norse God Odin’s raven.

Mark writes: I must say I think your drawing of Raven is the best that I have seen yet...

 Raven flew over the office of the apartment complex where I worked. I put some meat out for him and soon he came down and got it. Next, he brought his partner and although she was much more tentative they both started stopping by each day. I started to develop a call that sounded like when the male Kushka called the female Feathers. After time, when I called, they would come down off the mountain. That summer, I noticed that they brought their fledge down to my truck and from that time on I became their babysitter.

  After 10 generations of fledges, I believe the original couple moved on and now all their children come back in the winter to live nearby cause they know I will have food for them if times get bad. 
Come meet Ten Generations and the rest of my raven family at the Randall Davey Audubon Center exhibition opening July 9, 5-7 pm in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Ravens Roost

Truth and Memory

and

Walks Like a Man

may be the current top two favorites so far, with The Compass of My Heart an active Contender, but this swaggering guy is the one who's been going home with people. I love the stories you are bringing to these characters--bird tales, spiritual experiences, intolerant neighbors and macho husbands!

See you at the solo exhibit opening July 9, 2010 at the Randall Davey Audubon Center in Santa Fe!

Raven talks about water

Author and adventurer Craig Childs is a man born thirsty. Under Solstice skies in the Galisteo Basin where Raven gurgled and shouted like a rowdy commentator from a peanut gallery, Childs talked about the secrets of water.
Beneath us, earth's lifeblood flowed and to prove it, digging a hole (not even as long as your arm) gave us fresh water.
Raven, content to drink at the trough under the windmill, mimicked the sound of bubbles rising.
Come meet my raven family--from the little juvie shaman to the brassy one who walks like a man -- from 5-7 pm at the opening of my solo exhibit at Randall Davey Audubon Center in Santa Fe.
PS-- The Audubon exibit  was 2010. My  Ravens are currently roosting at  NM State Land  Office until Nov 30, 2011.
The Reason Why (Raven Head) drawing by Beth Surdut
Galisteo Basin just before sunset photo Beth Surdut