Check out my illustration in this month’s issue of The Wildlife Professional! This was done for an essay by Bob Wilkerson and Rodney Siegel which discusses the absolutely crucial role that giant sequoias play in the lives of wildlife – including providing nest sites for the endangered California Condor.
What is so utterly invisible as tomorrow? Not love, not the wind, not the inside of a stone. Not anything. And yet, how often I’m fooled– I’m wading along in the sunlight– and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining days ahead– I can see the light spilling like a shower of meteors into next week’s trees, and I plan to be there soon– and, so far, I am just that lucky, my legs splashing over the edge of darkness, my heart on fire. I don’t know where such certainty comes from– the brave flesh or the theater of the mind– but if I had to guess I would say that only what the soul is supposed to be could send us forth with such cheer as even the leaf must wear as it unfurls its fragrant body, and shines against the hard possibility of stoppage– which, day after day, before such brisk, corpuscular belief, shudders, and gives way.
Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
