Fields and fields of sunflowers stretch away from my arms, out from the steering wheel, green and yellow nodding heads. They all say yes to this drive I'm learning so well from San Francisco to Chico and back and back and back again. They line the road in numbers I've never seen, rows next to rows making squares of beauty growing, watching that blue sky, neverminding those clouds.
I speed by over and over with my aching back, stiff arms, restless legs, impatience growing. But also ideas and emotions. Like steam rising from a pond in early morning, but imagine it in motion, a mist of ideas and feelings streaming off my watery body as I move from home to home, snagging on sunflowers and catching in the beaks of those black curvy-billed birds I've been seeing the past few days.
This idea of coyotes in my mural, a vision from under the black oak on the hill looking down over the farm and the grinding rock there. Those brokenhearted family feelings of letting go and getting ready to fight, like a cat bunching her haunches. Images of my new home and the creek that runs through it, the black walnuts towering over the little red house and the whirlwind of energy and doing that is my new roommate. More feelings around the massacre of the Maidu at the farm, and how it's actually more than that: everywhere I've lived has been stolen from someone. Remembering the grinding stones beneath my mother's house. The spring next door to my apartment and the shell mounds on the edges of San Francisco. Everywhere I live has been stolen unfairly from someone and this mural is just the first time I've really realized it viscerally and felt like I personally am part of the thieving and the benefitting from the theft. This desire to do what seems most like the right thing in each situation, such an impossible task but still trying anyway just because that's the person I want to be and that's the world I want to live in. The simple plain joy of eating a purple black plum ripe in my mouth as I drive and leave my mists hanging in the sunflower fields.
And always traveling with me there's the thought of you and all this love between us. I want to share each day each thought each affirmative sunflower face most of all with with you. So I am. Like this.
When I travel through the Southwest I often have very vivid dreams about the people before. I mourn their losses too. Even more, I mourn the loss of the earth. It is my hope that more people can realize the simple joys of the ripe plum and the sunflowers. Thanks for sharing this, Diana.
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