36 “ x 24 “
Acrylic on wood panel
Wire hanger on the back

As I mentioned below, I really took a great deal of time, walking and looking at Tinker Creek and also looking up online almost every event, animal, plant or phenomena she described.
It really slowed me down.
In the meantime I’ve been practicing on my own present moment living through two practices
Reading the Stoics and raising gratitude and physical awareness to the present time.
For me, living in this in incredibly fast paced, technological world, where things are rushing at you as a flood of information, taking the time to think and slow down my thoughts on all that she described, related to the floor of this gorgeous area in the Blue Ridge Mountains …was very helpful for present moment living.

This was a visual feast in reading this book then reflecting on it…both through walking Tinker Creek about seven times and searching for almost every event or animal or plant that Annie Dillard mentioned in the book online.
I was shocked that I enjoyed this technological advantage: if you’re reading an e- book, you place and hold your finger on the word you want to look up and then you select “look up”and then you select a search engine and … voila!!! … incredible images and photographs of what you’re reading about.
It took me forever to get through the book because I looked up about 90% of the animals, places and things she referred to.
And what a joy that was.
Most of what she mentioned is right here in the place where I live…. What a contemplative miracle THAT is… makes me want to save it from environmental loss

In reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I came to find affection, deeper affection, for the life forms she described. Even the repulsive ones fascinated me and I appreciated that she intertwined beauty and horror, life and death, repulsion and attraction …that is so much part of what nature really is…
Like Zorba the Greek says: the FULL catastrophe.
Her describing the fullness of life, and not an overly sentimental way, but it in a way of awe, helped shape my work. Not only do I have some of the beautiful things illustrated on my art piece –an indigo bunting, a song sparrows, monarch butterflies, but also the enormous termite mother laying her thousands of eggs, a dead snake skin, a wriggling, red worm.
The only thing I did not include that I wanted to in this piece was the “tree with all the lights in it” and I will try and create another art painting with said tree.

As mentioned above, possibly a painting with “the tree with all the lights “, and I continue to wish to explore portrait-like images of things in nature in an iconic way… and possibly portraits of people in this iconic way, immersed in some form of nature…
Much like Kahynde Wylie’s portrait of Barack Obama in a suit nestled in an incredibly large bush of leaves.

All of the above.
And mainly how long it takes to take an idea and bring it to fruition.