Convergence

Rock House garage, Wupatki National Monument, AZ, 2024

Materials: Steinway grand piano, one-seeded juniper (Juniperus monosperma), pianist Janice ChenJu Chiang, ponderosa pine pollen and charred wood, cottonwood leaf

 

March 6, 2020, is when I first noticed them, the dead and the dying. We were on our way to Salt Lake for a dear friend's memorial after he had committed suicide - the final step he needed to take in the process of healing himself. Our friend had been a paradox, a person full of stories and laughter for us around him, but inside he had gone through a life long in depression, of deep inadequacy and loneliness. He had told me 20 years earlier that he did not know how long he could go on living. In the end, he did not kill himself - the disease of depression killed him. Suicide was Glen's way of healing himself.

As we drove northward on Highway 89 toward the Painted Desert, the early evening sun cast its light on groves of gray and dead junipers. Typically, drought tolerant, these one-seeded trees, Juniperus monosperma, had finally succumbed to the increasing heat and a long multi-year drought. The greater ecosystem surrounding Wupatki National Monument had seen a 47% die-off. It seemed to me that some groves had an 85% - 90% mortality.

Three years later, I found myself an artist-in-resident at Wupatki. Unable to go off trail within its boundaries, I decided to leave the park and explore the length of Deadman Wash, which begins in the White Horse Hills just north of Dook'o'oosłiid (San Francisco Peaks) and continues to the Little Colorado River some 30 miles away. I walked through black cinders from where it flowed underneath Highway 89 to the park boundary. 

What I came to appreciate was the tenacity of these treees, the black cinders they were born in, and how they have learned to live with little to no water, their pale violet berries creating a bedspread below, protecting and reflecting the hot sun. They are examples illustrating that we are not the only species that breathes, lives, loves, and dies. In honor of them, let us fill our fists with cinders, in supplication, in grief, love, and loss, for all that call Earth home. Let us help each other to heal.