Notes from Pisgah Mountain

In all the overgrowth of vegetation, a small jewel-like bird makes a life, knowing things I do not know about terrain, flora, and climate.  This tiny bird also knows how to navigate by the stars to fly south for the winter.  I believe this reflects how all living things have unique forms of genius in their individual organisms, in the ability to solve the problem of living.

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Nightlife

We often discover what lurks in the wild only when it is fragmentary, broken.

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Future Primeval

I’m fascinated by the human need to collect and impose our own sense of order on the wild, both in the arts and sciences, while all around us nature behaves according to its own enigmatic laws.

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Bird in the Hand

The hand is my essential tool.  With it, I bring the wild into my world.

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Down to Earth

I’m fascinated by the microcosmos of the forest floor.  There all the decomposers—snails, burying beetles, millipedes, fly larvae—are busy with their essential vocations.  What then, I have to wonder, is my essential vocation in the scheme of things?

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Notes from the Miocene

Recently I drew fossils at the Gray fossil site, a Tennessee excavation near my home.  In this drawing, an extinct fossil turtle swims beneath a living, equally ancient, dragonfly.  Why is one species buried forever under clods of rock, while another thrives near the reeds of the woodland pond?

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Nothing's Going to Change My World

An oriole perches on a 5-million-year-old fossil leaf.  How do creatures understand change, extinction?  How do animals experience loss when a species, such as the American Chestnut, is gone?

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Night Moves

From an underground cocoon emerges the Pandora moth, a mysterious olive-green hawkmoth.   I get a thrill from the thought that its life cycle takes place every season with total disregard of our human dramas.

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Notes from the Underground

Perhaps this Jordan’s salamander had never encountered a human before I lifted his log, cupped his slimy body in my palm for a brief moment, then let him crawl into his dark burrow again.   What was he thinking?  Will I ever even vaguely know how he experiences the dim-lit world under his secretive log?

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A Noiseless Patient Spider

I’m obsessed with the idea that it’s often the page which connects us to the life we observe.   For me, it’s my sketchbook page, with the drawings and notations side-by-side.  In A Noiseless Patient Spider I’ve painted a page black behind the web.  It looked good that way and suggested the night when this beautiful spider’s drama unfolds.

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Spontaneous Generation

When I observe the mysterious emergence of animals from the profusion of muck and decay, it occurs to me that if I’d lived centuries ago—before our knowledge of “evolution by natural selection”—I might believe in spontaneous generation!

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Nest Sight

Observing a bird’s nesting ritual brings to mind both the optimistic and harsh.  From a perfect egg the new life enters the indifferent, unpredictable world, full of cats, crows, and storms.

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