I see lots of materials for making memory books in stores now, but the real thrill is discovering that I have been keeping a memory book--this one about a sabbatical taken in 1978 when my partner and I camped across Canada and then hiked up the Rockies from the base of BC to the Yukon.
I decided to keep an art journal, and to fill it with lessons from going to nature school. Although now the pages are yellowed and frail from time, my memories are clear of those high mountain passes and the art I painted and drew in the evening after camp was made. In rediscovering this journal, I also discovered that many of the lessons received during that remarkable 14 months are still teaching me.
Many of the shamanic insights I have about how everything is alive and is conscious of its form of aliveness, I learned in alpine meadows and beside glacial lakes above treeline. My years of
shamanic painting and
drum making have been my efforts to honor with a face and a voice to the fragile, powerful spirits of wild places.
I think my body may be too old now to hike through the first snow storms of August in the Horseranch range, to wade barefoot the streams of glacial runoff above
Mt. Robson, or climb to alpine lakes in
Kluane that are so high the clouds are like gauze curtains on the shore.
Some parts of me never age, though. The willingness to take a risk, get dirty and have an adventure is with me still. My willingness to give effort as food to the spirit world is as much in the 18 years of my work on the
Journey Oracle cards as it is in the new drum drying in the living room. My memory book of wild places is always fresh in my art.
