Light Between Shadows

When I originally wrote about A Walk in the Woods, several things had converged at once. It was the week of what would have been my father's 88th birthday. I had recently learned that my friend Joni had died unexpectedly in a car accident. One of my children was experiencing a difficult recovery from surgery, and I was still recovering from surgery of my own.

A lot was happening, and much of it hurt. What surprised me was that I didn't feel completely overwhelmed by it. Sadness and uncertainty were there, but so were ordinary moments of stability. Somehow, both could exist at the same time. That feeling brought me back to A Walk in the Woods.

I created A Walk in the Woods while caring for my father. By then, we had developed an unspoken rhythm. There were doctor's appointments, changing needs, and the knowledge that his health was declining, but our time together was not defined entirely by those things. We also tried to make the most of the time we had.

About a year before his death, we took one last significant trip together. We worked with his doctors to make sure he was healthy enough to travel and then left Asheville. My father loved the outdoors and had places he still wanted to experience. Among them were Yellowstone, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Oregon, and the Pacific Ocean.

We went.

Hindsight (2024) - Hartsel, Colorado. Image photographed on my father’s birthday during the last road trip of his life

I knew what was coming, but I did not want knowing that my father was dying to turn the remaining part of his life into an extended period of mourning. He was still there. He still had places he wanted to see and experiences we could share.

That coexistence became important to A Walk in the Woods.

Green, blue, and black move through the drawing in overlapping paths. Within my work, green has long been associated with harmony, blue with peace, and black with what remains hidden. The lines cross, separate, run alongside one another, and occasionally seem to find the same direction.

The composition does not resolve into perfect order. That isn't what I was experiencing.

What I remember from that period is something closer to balance in motion. My father and I were navigating circumstances neither of us could control, but for a time we had found a rhythm within them. Doctor's appointments existed beside bucket-list experiences. Fear existed beside humor. Decline existed beside discovery.

That is also why the landscape photograph belongs with this drawing for me. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains appear beneath a sky filled with both darkness and light. Neither cancels the other. They occupy the landscape simultaneously.

When I returned to A Walk in the Woods later, after my father and Joni had both died and while other difficulties were unfolding around me, I recognized that feeling again. The circumstances were different, but carrying several seemingly contradictory things at once felt familiar.

Holding Pattern developed across the period before, during, and after my father's death. Because I created the drawings from inside that experience rather than afterward as a retrospective account, they preserve different moments within it. Some are fractured. Some are uncertain. Some come from the immediate experience of loss.

A Walk in the Woods belongs to a quieter place in the series.

It records a period when my father and I were still moving forward together, aware that the path would eventually separate but not allowing that knowledge to erase the part we could still walk side by side.

Looking at the drawing now, that may be what I value most about it. It doesn't ask darkness to disappear before light can appear.

It allows both to occupy the same space.