Quests

One of the memories I keep going back to is that day in late winter (January, February, now) in ninth grade when my art class walked up the river deeper into the canyon where our school was to find red clay under a crust of old snow. A treasure of color, of pliant earth, that could later be shaped into a bowl, a face, an animal—whatever our hands made of it.

Everything was thawing, spring was flirting with our adolescent hearts. We ducked under unravelled strands of barbed wire, tossed teasing snowballs, hyper-aware of every motion of our own and others as if it were fixed on film, in time, in the red clay that took our impression before being fired forever. It was an unbearably bright day after the months of gray and gloom, scented with sun-touched juniper, piñon, moldering leaves.

That journey of an hour has become for me a kind of touchstone of promise and quest—the archetype of going out into a strange, alluring world to discover what might be. One of my first journeys to self.

And even farther back, in first or second grade at Blythe, on the same Santa Fe River, a few miles lower down and later in the spring, another class of mine walked up along the gentle banks looking for pussywillows, the soft gray buds beginning to open on their upright branches.

These exploratory lessons were more lasting and important than the ones I learned indoors.

The epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins. There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that belong to it de jure, if not de facto; that must, that is, be taken possession of if life is to continue.
(John Dewey, Art as Experience)

image: Cyclamen coum in melting snow, Meneerke bloem