Oh man!<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Humphrey’s peak this weekend. It was fabulous. Or, there are few words to describe it, and my vocabulary is far too limited to come with anything truly creative for it. Maybe slim could do it.

So, camped out on friday at the trailhead (literally we noticed after awhile cos there were people walking past the tent all night) and started around seven. The trail only rises about 3 and a half thousand feet, but I definitely felt it a little bit, cos it’s from 9000 to 12600 and the first mile I was pretty short of breath. Or maybe it was just a regular 7am warm-up exhaustion, but as usual that went away pretty soon.

(By the way, cindy´s sleeping bag is pretty good; sleeping with warm clothes on it’ll even go below 32 degrees. Nothing like Steve’s $800 “I don’t even need a ground pad” sleeping bag for 40 below though..)

Either way, it was warm and snug sleeping between Steve and Conor in a 3-people tent.. I swear, I don’t know how they actually measure those things. But hey, we were three people IN there, so I guess they are accurate however snug those tents. Steve told us he’d calculated that he’d spent a full 2,5 year’s worth of nights in that tent. He got it when he was 17. Pretty good, I’d say.

So, the trail starts out with the aspen’s you see on every picture from up there. Unfortunately they had already dropped their leaves, so they weren’t all yellow and purty, but the bark of the trees was still yellow. That was a surprise to me, I didn’t know that. The aspen bark back home is more greenish I think. It was fabulous to smell leafy trees again! I didn’t realize how much I’d missed that smell. It’s funny what you end up missing from home, and whether you even realize that you’re missing it. From the summit we were looking down at this valley full of aspens, and conor said that they are really one big organism, where every aspen shrub has been spawned by the same tree. Isn’t that amazing! I said it reminds of when Dad has me cut off the fresh aspens in the yard of our cabin every spring. Owie on the back, I tell you!

Most of the trail is in the trees, but when we got above the tree line there was a really hefty wind, I pretty much wore every piece of clothing I’d brought with me. But hey, there is no bad weather only bad clothing is very true, I was warm and cozy and really enjoyed it. Every step of the way, I can honestly say. Am I a good hiker now? Hitner told us once that good hikers are not good because they are trying to get somewhere, but because they are having a good time getting there. Same thing goes for painters. I think I am getting closer to be a truly good hiker (hey, I really like getting to the top too!!) but for painting I am maybe not there yet, but on the way I think.

At the summit there was no wind at all and I got this idea of setting up a pottery wheel up there and just throwing and throwing and throwing. It would be awesome. Then lining up all the pots at the top of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Arizona. Fuckin’ eh!

On the way back from Flagstaff we stopped at this place called Arcosanti that Conor knew of. It is an architectural village where they are building this huge dome and tower. People can retreat there for meetings and stuff and they organize work shops for students. I should try to get to go there sometime cos one guy told us he’ll be there for 5 weeks and help out with things, not only artistic but practical. I like the sound of that. Fucking visa I have though with the 2-year deal. They serve dinner there at six, and you get to eat this delicious, healthy grub for 8 bucks, as much as you want! I’m so glad Conor took us there, and the dinner (buffet type) allowed him to eat as much as he could handle too. Great stuff, Italian style.

We got to Tucson around ten and I was so tired I couldn’t even handle a hot tub, however sweet that sounded after our long hike. I haven’t even unpacked, which I should probably do soon before smell starts to appear, hehe. I’m afraid to go out this morning though, because I don’t wanna realize that I’m back in Toasty Tucson. Fuck. It was sooo nice being up in the snow. Thank god I’m going to Juneau and Yellowstone soon!

 

 

This morning I woke up on mT Lemmon. Conor and I hiked up there last night, just a little ways, to spend a beutiful moonlit night outdoors. And beautiful it was. It was so bright I could knit without my headlight on. There is this little top, opne pof many at Mt Lemmon, that is really diverse in vegetation, that is kind of longish in shape. If you walked to the outher edge of it, you find a polace where in the east you have the wilderness and in the west Tucson. The contrast is striking. I sat on that ridge and knit my mits, looking from one side to the other while Conor was sleeping in the tent. It was intense, and I felt good about where I was. It wasn't even that cold. High 30s I think.

We woke up this morning what I thought was at 4am and couldn't understand why he was in such a rush to get off the mountain. Actually, it was 6am and he needed to get to work. Got it. We got to see the sun rise, and the soft light that it casts just befpre rising above the horizon.

Tomorrow we are going to climp Humphrey's peak. I wait with excitement. We are driving to Flagstaff tonight, and camping at the trailhead. Hopefully we will camp tere tomorrow night too, but we will see how our energylevel is. I'm going to approach this prepared and humble. Hum,phrey's is one of the four holy peaks of the Navajo, one of the four peaks surrounding their sacred land, Dinetah. Dinetah broadens wider than the Navajo Nation reservation, and the peaks have looked after them for millenia. It is told one woman broke down in tears on the return from Hweeldi, the long walk, when she saw the eastenmost peak and then died. The Navajos for forced to the long walk in 165 when the US government wanted to move them from their land to Fort Sumner. 8-9000 Navajos were forced to walk 300 miles to the Bosque Redondo reservation in New Mexico where they were supposed to farm in a fruitless land. 200 died along the way and many more at the reservation. Women and and old people were shot along the way if they could not keep up, and a woman stopping to give birth at the side of the road was shot too.

In 1868 the goverment realized their mistake and let them return to Dinetah and there are now almost 300 000 Navajos, being the tribe with the biggest population in the US. So a little history lesson there!

i must be on now   .a.

 

so, i mentioned ceramics is very different. In ceramics you are of course too able to express an opinion or similar, but we are mostly making pots and utilitarian things. Like something for you home. Pretty things, which of course would make Hitner puke.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

These things I do become very attached to. It is such a looooong and elaborate process making about starting with working the clay, sometimes even mixing the clay, and then going all the way through to mixing and applying the glazes and then the firing. It is like a nine month pregnancy in some ways I'm sure.

I like it just as much though, and I don't mind that I sometimes get to work mindlessly in must perfecting the shape or the color, where the two work only for the purpose of each other, one matching the other, and in some cases coming together in order to serve a purpose for someone.

This morning was awesome in the ceramics studio by the way. We started by firing the raku kiln, and then getting the pieces into the trash cans with the newspapershreds where they through reduction made all these beautiful colors. I love raku!!! It is an old Japanese technique of firing teapots and cups, of course you can firing anything, but that's ehat they were doing then. So yeah, I believe it's the oldest way of firing, and it's very quick, it only takes a goo 4 hours opposed to the 19 hours of  a regular kiln. You see the results immediately and you never can tell beforehand exactly what the results are gonna be like. The kiln gets fired up with gas, and you slowly increase the juice, and then keep it there, and as I said the colors happen when you move the pots into airproof cans where they set fire on the newspapers and reduction causes colors to form on the glaze.

 

It's like magic! And I'm lucky enough to be able to take ceramics all of next spring and work on this further. To really get into it- I am at the peak of my life, it feels.

I love living here, much thanks to good friends and good possibilities offered by my ceramics studio. Not to mentioned the mountains I get to climb!

 

We are going to try to conquer one of the 4 peaks holy to the Navajo; next week Conor and I and hopefully some other folks go to Flagstaff where lies the highest peak in Arizona: the mighty HUMPHREY'S PEAK!

So, i've learnt this new way of respecting myself as an artist: by disrespecting the actual artworks that i do. Ok, this is gonna be a hard one to explain. First off, let me say that none of the following applies to the ceramics I do. I shall deal with that in another chapter.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Ok, so what I was telling early about Hitner  putting emphasis on us having a major idea behind the pieces we make. Art should not exist only for the beauty of it and "being nice to look at". You must be able to put something in it, that expresses you opinion or thought of something more than just the motif itself. Am I making any sense here? So this agrees really well with art being merely a medium, not having a purpose in itself. Well, I must say I kind agree with both philosophies. If I didn't I wouldn't be able to any longer appreciate the life work of O'Keeffe. True, no? but at the same time I can't just sit down and say Hitner is entirely wrong either.

 

What he talks about in making a successful piece of art, more precisely a painting, is taking that idea you have an presenting it without stylising it, but however go about it, you'll probably get where you're going best by not caring so much about the outcome. You've heard about artists saying that once they've completed a piece it becomes meaningless to them? Well, that's what I'm talking about. It is useless to become very attached to pieces. I know I do that. So I have this experiment on my living room floor, in fact the one place where I walk through all the time, an there two of my paintings ended up while I was showing them to someone. So true to my habit of having things lying around the paintings are still there. They're not stretch out on a canvas or anything, so I step on them. At first just little careful steps on the sides of them, but now I'm able to step all over them. I mean, nothing too elaborate, just walking where I'd normally walk. I don't know what meaning this exactly will have on my work, but we'll see. It's funny though, cos we're just rambling through as many paintings as possible, and I think it's a really way of learning how to paint at this point in my "career".

yet another awesome weekend in the old pueblo!

well, to tell you the truth friday started off a little slow, somehow i managed to sleep until 4pm, but saturday conor, his friend verity and i hiked douglas spring trail in the saguaro national park. or whatever that park is called. god, i have the memory of a 86-yearold.  anyways, there's trails there as much as you'd like, but we decided to do a 16mile there-an-back trail with lots of sunny skies and sticky seeds up your shoes. man, hiking was great, i almost felt weightless some of the time, and coming back i was so tired and ridiculously happy i almost felt drunk. anyways, it was great.

we planned on going to a desert party (read: young and old hippies smoking pot and sharing everything from spouses to underwear, i'm sure, in the middle of the desert) but we ended falling asleep on the couch watching one of ingmar bergman's movies. it was without subtitles and apparently i fell asleep right in the middle of sentencing a translation to conor. it was refreshing to watch and old swedish movie though!

sunday we visited the farmer's market and i did the most ridiculous thing, i still don't know exacrly what was going on in my brain at the time, with all the delicious farmed veggies and fruits i had a goddamn hot dog for breakfast. a hot dog!  oh well, i did purchase some green beans and dades. they are GOOD.

oh, and my wrist is doing so goos. sometime in the last few days i just decided i was sick of worrying whether it hurt a lil when i did things or not, so i just started doing whatever, a lil pain or no pain. and i have about 90% of my strength back i'd say. mobility range is good too, but a little stiffness. that's nothin some corn on the cob can't cure though.

off i go, school and yucky homework is calling. by the way,  i've decided to do 50% of my credits next semester in ceramics. it's gonna be awesome!