REVERB11:AT THE MICRO OR MACRO PERSPECTIVE—NATURE IS STILL NATURE!

MACRO AND MICRO VIEWS OF NATURE, ART BY HALLELUJAH TRUTH

Is NATURE that phenomenon you experience while riding a horse on the beach at sunrise? Is it the feeling of your thighs gripping the saddle of a large warm moving beast, as the wind brushes your face and you look off into the horizon of the endless ocean? The FOUR WALLS of CIVILIZATION have disappeared, and you can smell the rich organics simmering from the nearby marsh and maritime forest. You take a DEEP BREATH and your BODY and BEING fold into the rhythm of the horse’s steps, and you feel you are one with something greater than yourself, which you can only call NATURE.

I call this experience of NATURE, the exalted, romanticized state. It is real, and it is wonderful—NATURE tasted on a large scale of muted horizontal planes of sandy shore, gray blue water, endless expanse of sky. But how often can any of us city-bound folks get to a beach, one that has horse rentals, arise before dawn to go to the stables, and be lead out in a string of horses steady and patient availing themselves to their riders’ AT-ONENESS-WITH-NATURE?

MARCRO-LEVEL NATURE. Muted horizontal planes at Jekyll Island, November 2011. BIG, BREATHTAKING! (photo by Hallelujah Truth)

As bi-peds, we tend to imbibe NATURE at a MACRO-LEVEL, towering above the ground, looking off to horizons, chasing clouds and birds with our mighty glance. How AWESOME is that? Especially when we can “enhance” our presence in NATURE and ability to observe it by straddling a quadruped, a bike, or getting in some contrivance that can help us move rapidly through NATURE and far above it at an observational level? How GRAND and GREAT is MOTHER NATURE?

Then there is the MICRO-LEVEL at which we can relate to NATURE. Going small. Falling to the EARTH, holding it, patting it, putting seeds in it, and watching green LIFE emerge. Oh the critters on small multiple legs that cross our paths before our eyes when we join forces with the EARTH and ask HER to assist us in GROWING something, anything! Or when we kneel on that sandy beach, as if in prayer, to examine and snails moving in shallow tidal pools.

MICRO-LEVEL NATURE. Chiboogamoo stops to examine and photograph snails in a tidal pool on the north end of Jekyll Island, Georgia. Behind him are Pilgrims on horses viewing nature at a macro-level. (Photo by Hallelujah Truth)

SNAIL TRAILS. In the tidal pool is a micro world of pathways and journeys! (Photo by Chiboogamoo)

TRACEMAKING SNAIL. Seeing from the perspective of kneeling on the EARTH opens new worlds and new pilgrims! (Photo by Chiboogamoo)

NATURE to me is the LIFE surrounding us on a MACRO and MICRO level. When we stop to recognize ALL that is THRIVING in the WORLD we live in, we too become NATURE! Hallelujah! 


That is COFFEE WITH HALLELUJAH! SOUL BLOG with me about your relationship with NATURE. And join me to write every day during the last month of 2010! I will be posting a new topic each day. Participate in Hallelujah Truth’s REVERB11.

SOJOURN TO ST CATHERINES YIELDS A PRIMATE SURPRISE

Penetrating Gaze of a Lemur (Art by Hallelujah Truth)

Hallelujah for RING-TAILED LEMURS—primates with extravagantly long black-and-white tails and amber eyes set in impish triangular faces! Hallelujah for ring-tailed lemurs in Georgia! Yes, Georgia! After Madagascar, the second largest community of free-ranging ring-tailed lemurs in the world exists on St. Catherines, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, about 50 miles south of Savannah. It was my good fortune that my brilliant paleontologist husband, Chiboogamoo, had research matters on this incredible island and asked me to accompany him. As the wife of a scientist, my JOURNEY brought me to a 10 mile-long island, with its magical marshes, wetland meadows, ponds, maritime forests, and beaches. And I asked myself, “What does Hallelujah Truth, my creative persona, want to gain from this barrier island SOJOURN?”

Saw palmettos in the foreground and live oaks with Spanish moss in the background.(photos by Hallelujah Truth, aka Ruth Schowalter)

View of the ocean from the maritime forest.

Marsh surrounded by maritime forest. This pathway was established by alligator traffic.

I decided I would be CURIOUS and SEE what I could LEARN and be INSPIRED by. The next question was, “How could I enlist others in my QUEST?” I found that the island’s intelligent and well-educated naturalists were not only supportive of my endeavor to learn and capture my experience creatively, but they were also passionate! One of my pursuits involved BEING with the ring-tailed lemurs!

Visual beauty! Draping lemur tails and Spanish moss!

Lemur Buddha pose! Lemurs love to sunbathe!

Imagine these devilish looking primates peaking around trunks of pine trees and lounging on the bosoms of ancient live oaks draped with Spanish moss. Researchers who have the privilege of conducting studies on this privately owned barrier island experience delightful encounters as they happen to drive by at feeding time.

Who's conducting the research here?

Because of conditioning that a truck at a certain time equals food, lemurs, small, medium and large ones, bound toward research vehicles. The babies ride piggyback, tucked on their mothers so tightly that their hold is referred to as the “death grip.”

Baby lemur "death grip" on mama.

On the last Friday in July, I accompanied Susan Inman, the lemurs’ caretaker for the past three years, on her daily routine of feeding them. As our truck laden with buckets of food arrived at the first site, the lemurs jumped on the truck hood, then catapulted to the side mirrors, and next on top of the vehicle to the back of the truck. We sat quietly observing them. Each time the lemurs paused on the truck, they rubbed their hindquarters on it, looking through the window at us and smiling clownishly. Susan talked knowledgably about their behavior. “Lemurs are very scent-oriented,” she explained. Since scenting is one of their important methods of communicating, each one leaves an individual mark. Males are known to have “stink fights,” Susan continued to explain to me. They depress glands on their chests with their paws, rub the scent on their long beautiful tails, and then whip them around dispersing individual “stinks.” Females, apparently, use scent differently--more for attracting than repelling.

Susan Inman at work, getting food from the lemur truck.

As we sat in the truck watching the lemur antics, Susan talked about the lemurs by name and pointed out individual characteristics of some. Identification is simplified for researchers by the collars worn by the lemurs. Each lemur--except the infants, which are still rapidly growing—is adorned with a differently colored radio collar that is then associated with a carefully chosen name. Great attention and fun is given to naming these St. Catherines’ primates. This breeding season, the babies were given names from Greek mythology such as Zeus, Orion, Morpheus, Celine, Hera, and Pleiades. The previous season, newborns were named after characters from the old west, for instance, Butch (male newborn twin), Cassidy (female newborn twin), and Annie Oakley.

Lemur antics at meal time.

Once we were out of the truck and as Susan distributed the food, the lemurs actively meandered around these treats, which are placed in several different locations either on the ground, on a stand under the pines and oaks, or in their pen, which they use in winter.  A large female lemur named Jen is the first to move toward the metal bowl filled with carrots, sweet potatoes, blueberries and protein biscuits. Lemur societies are matriarchal and the females feed before their male counterparts. The babies eat alongside their mothers, feeding happily but not completely because at the end of July, the time of my visit, they are still nursing. Later during the day the lemurs will supplement this meal with muscadine, palm berries, wax myrtle, and grapevine leaves.

Yum! Fresh carrots, sweet potatoes, and blueberries.

As Susan and I moved from feeding site to feeding site, the dense green undergrowth of the saw palmettos, the draping Spanish moss swaying overhead, and the golden sunlight filtering through the tree canopy awed me. Life can bring us on brief and intensely beautiful JOURNEYS if we are present to our experience!

Over the course of an hour or more, Susan and I visited each one of the six troops that the lemurs have established in the island’s maritime forest. I learned that each troop’s name is somehow poetic in its practicality, revealing something about the troop’s location. The first established troop is named Windmill because it is located near an old windmill. Its society now consists of 21 lemurs. It is from this Windmill troop that the others have “splintered” to form new families or troops.

This deer is waiting for the lemurs' leftovers.

This past spring, the total population of lemurs on St. Catherines increased to 83 when twenty-four infants were born between the beginning of March and the end of April. The names and numbers of the other troops are Yankee Bridge (21); Engineers (9): Terry Lynn (5): East Road (8); and Picnic Bluff (9). Three younger male lemurs are without a troop now because they have splintered off and been unsuccessful in joining a new troop.

As we finished the morning feeding rounds, I asked Susan, who also works with the exotic birds and hoof stock on the island, how she would describe her experience caring for the lemurs.  “It’s unique to manage an exotic population without boundaries,” she answered modestly. “The lemurs manage themselves. I just have to be there for them.”

Susan distributing food at one of the lemur stands.

And what did, I, Hallelujah, find from this visit with Susan and the ring-tailed lemurs to feed my creativity? I love the incongruity of these impish primates’ presence amongst the pines, oaks, Spanish moss, and saw palmettos. I feel positively connected with Susan through her careful tutoring about the lemurs’ behavior and the research being done on them about their breeding and feeding habits, as well as, how they figure out complex problems.

I have lived this JOURNEY to St. Catherines fully because I was TRUE to myself and my curiosity, resulting in a new understanding so that I can write, take photos, make watercolor images, and share my knowledge with you, my SOUL BLOGGERS.

That’s COFFEE WITH HALLELUJAH! Soul blog with me and tell me how you stay true to yourself on your JOURNEY. What do you think about ring-tailed lemurs free-ranging on a Georgia barrier island?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: To Susan Inman, I am so grateful for your patience and ability to communicate clearly what you know. Thanks to all of the knowledgeable people who work on St. Catherines and make it so easy to learn about the island’s wildlife. And, very importantly, thank you Chiboogamoo for being my life companion and taking me on JOURNEYS to the barrier islands of the Georgia coast!

Chiboogamoo with curious scent-marking lemurs.

Hallelujah Truth photographing lemurs on her first visit to St. Catherines Island in 2008 (photo by Chiboogamoo, aka Tony Martin).

SUBSTITUTING BEAUTY FOR THE SPIRITUAL: CAROL RUCKDESCHEL--SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIM INTERVIEW #4

Carol Ruckdeschel holding a coachwhip, a fast moving snake, on Cumberland Island, Georgia, May 2011. (photos by Hallelujah Truth, aka Ruth Schowalter, unless otherwise credited)

Hallelujah for the spectacular miracle of NATURE! Hallelujah for the PILGRIMS who spend their lives observing the wonders of the SEA, AIR, and LAND! In mid-May 2011, I found myself at the north end of Cumberland Island, Georgia, interviewing my fourth SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIM, Carol Ruckdeschel, a longtime naturalist who augments her documentation of the island’s ecology with illustrations.

Nestled amongst the long leaf pines and live oaks, we sat on her front porch drinking morning coffee surrounded by a myriad of mini-gardens bursting forth with squash, corn and tomato plants. Fledgling zinnias were emerging amongst established beds of mint, rosemary, and oregano. Two roosters crowed from their pens out beyond us. My Chiboogamoo sat silently with Carol and me, counting the numerous ruby throated hummingbirds (see the short video) visiting the colorful red and yellow sugar water feeder, which was so nearby that their “humming” was an audible part of our interview.

PRE-INTERVIEW NOTE: As the wife of the brilliant paleontologist, Chiboogamoo, I find my ARTist-self in extremely exuberant moments surrounded by other bright and talented scientists in the most amazing locations. Part of my practice of “having coffee” with Hallelujah (my creative persona), is being present to my SPIRITUAL ART needs and not only filtering “field experience” through my imaginative lens but also engaging the scientists present in my pursuit of the JOURNEYING SOUL. I am forever appreciative to Carol Ruckdeschel, biologist extraordinaire and ARTIST, for supporting me by being the FOURTH SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIM interviewee.

HALLELUJAH: What is SPIRITUALITY?

Leatherback Egg by Carol Ruckdeschel

CAROL: It’s different things to different people. But to me—I don’t know.

HALLELUJAH: Can you address how SPIRITUALITY relates to nature.

CAROL: It’s about learning….

HALLELUJAH: What do you want to learn?

CAROL: Whatever I can learn about the ecology of this island.

Loggerhead Egg by Carol Ruckdeschel

HALLELUJAH: You are so passionate about what you do. Can you explain that passion?

CAROL:  Beauty can be anything, a baby bird or art…anything that really moves me. You really feel that this is so beautiful. Beauty is something that you are almost just in awe. Beautiful. Like when the swifts arrive, I’m uplifted. They’re here! They nest in the chimney. They are part of my life. They are seasonal.

HALLELUJAH: So your SPIRITUALITY is experienced through the beauty of nature?

Dolphin Skull in the Cumberland Island Museum

CAROL: Spirituality is a word that has bad connotations. I used to have to go to church. I never understood it. The story of Jesus walking on water would lose me flat. As a kid, I would give my nickel and go outside and play.

Loggerhead Nest, by Carol Ruckdeschel

HALLELUJAH: Yes, I understand that attending church is where some people meet their SPIRITUAL needs, but attending church is not what we are talking about here in the SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIM interviews. My own SPIRITUALITY is more related to my focus on the life force in each living creature, the ephemeral, and immaterial. And you, you were talking about BEAUTY.

CAROL: Beauty is much more meaningful to me. It could substitute for the spiritual. Beauty can take many forms. It can be a piece of machinery. The Carnegie buildings on the south end of the island were built with real craftsmanship. They are beautiful and remind me of a time when people were proud of what they did.

A wingless wasp we found on the secondary dunes on the north end of Cumberland Island. Look at that trackway! (Photo by Chiboogamoo, aka Tony Martin)

Then there is natural beauty. For example, if I discover a new trackway, and then there is a revelation that it was made by an ant and not a beetle. That is a revelation to me because it answered a question (See the photo that Chiboogamoo, Carol, and I had made the previous day of a wingless wasp, Timulla floridensis, making a trackway that we previously had not identified).

There have been times in my life when I’ve invoked the “great spirit,” when something needs to be thanked for something, but I can’t formulate thoughts about that.

Carol's random garden composition.

HALLELUJAH: How would you define ART?

CAROL: Again there are many kinds. What I do as art is different than what you (Hallelujah) do as art.

HALLELUJAH: Is it? Why do you do ART?

CAROL: I don’t know why I do it. I get the urge to do a particular scene or something. It is done selfishly for me. That’s beautiful. It was fun that I could do it. It is not from any motivation like yours—which I think it is much more admirable. You create a design and do it.

HALLELUJAH: What kind of ART do you make?

Adult Loggerhead, by Carol Ruckdeschel

CAROL: What I do mostly is illustration. I’m too much of a realist. I want to paint more island scenes. That is different from what I’ve done. What I’ve done in the past is to use art to make figures for scientific illustration.

Carol turns and asks Chiboogamoo if he makes any art that is beyond scientific illustrations for his articles and books. And he and I discuss the more imaginative artwork that we are doing for the Darwin exhibit at Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History in September 2011. Then Carol continues….

Random bone composition on museum steps.

I would like to push myself back into it.  I have really felt the urge to do more art.  Who else can paint an alligator with a big amount of mud on its nose?

HALLELUJAH: You did these turtle drawings that seem so much more than “illustration” to me.

CAROL: Those drawing come from how turtles develop in the egg. The turtle grows at the top of the egg. When the baby turtles hatch, they start out rounded and have to stay in the nest a while to straighten out.

HALLELUJAH: What is the connection between SPIRITUALITY and the ART you make?

CAROL: I like it to be pleasing to the eye and to be beautiful. No it is more than that…. Sometimes it is an emotional expression. But most of the time, I don’t indulge myself that much. To me, I have to have nothing to do, to make art. I have to feed my chickens, water my garden, and my book has to be written. Art takes second fiddle.

Random frog composition on Cumberland Island Museum shelf.

HALLELUJAH: Who or what has been the most influential in your life with regards to ART?

CAROL: I have been doing drawing and art since I was a kid. I was given a piece of paper and pencil to occupy myself. It was my “Gameboy.” I remember my dad was a hunter, who liked guns and got those outdoor magazines like Field and Stream.  One of those magazines had a full page of someone’s art. That art page always intrigued me.  For instance, there was one with a person on a horse hunting a bear at the edge of a mountain. That really impressed me. These scenes always had animals.  But it wasn’t just a scene—action was involved. My interest was in the animals and how well the person could paint them. Oh my gosh, these scenes were beautiful!

I had one friend in Rochester, New York, an older guy, who did beautiful things. He painted the Franklinia alatamaha, a small flower on a really large scale. He had a dedication to art.

HALLELUJAH: I am so moved by the way you have organized your yard. Everywhere I look, I see mini-compositions as if every object has been placed with thoughtful intent.

A random arrangement outside Carol Ruckdeschel's research lab on Cumberland.

CAROL: The compositions are a result of randomness. (Carol pauses and then nods her head in realization toward a line of five gallon buckets arcing around one of her vegetable gardens.) Well, that orange bucket offends me terribly. It was with the blue buckets, and I had to move it. There is thought given—but very little.

Random blue bucket composition.

HALLELUJAH: In the future, what ART do you intend to make?

CAROL: What I call real art. Instead of illustration, something that means something to me. Like this watercolor I have in the museum that I did because the buzzards had pooped on the roof and I could see it in the moonlight. That’s really great!

Partial view of a watercolor by Carol Ruckdeschel of the roof of her research lab. Notice the streams of vulture scat streaming down from the top where Carol's "buzzards" like to perch.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Immeasurable thanks to Carol Ruckdeschel, founder and curator of the Cumberland Island Museum, co-author with C. Robert Shoop of Sea Turtles of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States. She is a generous and kind SOUL, who attended to me and my simultaneous interests in FLORA, FAUNA, ART, and SPIRIT. In addition, she hosted and “played” with both my Chiboogamoo and me along the shores, in the dunes and maritime forests of Cumberland. She is a friend. Gratitude to V.J. Henry, one of the foremost coastal geologists along the Atlantic coast, who died in May 2010 and hosted us along with Carol in 2008 when we camped on the bluffs above the north end marsh. Thanks and love to my dear boon companion Chiboogamoo, whose deep curiosity and book writing (Life Traces of the Georgia Coast) keep us returning to the wonderlands of the Georgia barrier islands.

This saying by Michelangelo resides next to the door of Carol's research lab. 

Carol Ruckdeschel with Chiboogamoo at the dunes on the north end of Cumberland Island, Georgia, May 2011. (photo by Hallelujah Truth, aka Ruth Schowalter)

Carol Ruckdeschel with Hallelujah Truth after a fun day in the field tracking snakes, insects, lizards, bobcat, coyote, alligator, and turkey. (photo by Tony Martin, aka Chiboogamoo)

See the first three SAP interviews: Cecelia Kane, Robey Tapp, Karen Phillips

That’s coffee with Hallelujah! SOUL BLOG with me (http://coffeewithhallelujah.blogspot.com) and tell me about your JOURNEY!  I want to know about your PILGRIMAGE and the BEAUTY you are experiencing!

ETERNAL SACRED IMAGES: WE FIND OURSELVES IN NATURE

Hallelujah Pilgrims! My LOVE of NATURE often startles me.  Living on the edge of Atlanta, a city populated by five million humans, I find myself incredibly challenged to HONOR MYSELF in relationship to this great ancient altar: NATURE. Within all that is vegetative and animal is the fabric of bouncing molecular energy. And from this ENERGY flows ETERNAL SACRED IMAGES. But where to FIND this ENERGY and EXPERIENCE these IMAGES?

 In our Decatur townhome, Chiboogamoo and I live amidst concrete roads, pathways, and walls with only north facing windows. Within our shadowy walled enclosure, we harbor parsley plants for the sheer pleasure of seducing butterflies to enter our lives. Our birdfeeders house “peppered” sunflower seeds to attract the local finches and occasional woodpeckers to our windows and successfully discourage the squirrels who visit everyday to shred calcium from the cow’s skull I have hanging on the east garden wall. How my HEART BURST with WONDER this past June when I witnessed baby praying mantises dispersing across the wall above our front door!

 For me, this HEART BURSTING WONDER is magnified a hundred fold when I am visiting along the Georgia coast on one of its numerous barrier islands—Cumberland, Sapelo, Ossabaw, Little St. Simons, and St Catherines—to name a few. These slender finger like islands built from accruing and eroding sands for almost 50,000 years are fortresses of ancient maritime forests towering behind oozing muddy marshes which release their rich organics out into the ocean’s eternal ebb and flow. ENERGY VIBRATES HERE.

(How magical these Georgia barrier islands are. On Christmas Eve 2008, I saw this photograph of a fish crow on a young buck's back displayed on Royce Hayes' fridge in his home on the island of St. Catherine and knew I had to paint it! How surprised I was when he as the island manager picked up the phone and called the island's ornithologist, Jen Hilburn, and asked her to make me a copy! It appeared on our cabin's doorstep that afternoon. Island hospitality!)

I must say here that I am knowledgeable of these Georgia Golden Isles because of my Chiboogamoo.  As he nears the completion of his book, “Life Traces of the Georgia Coast,” we marvel at the beauty that exists a 200-mile drive and ferry ride from our townhome front door. His research and documentation of the thriving wildlife on these everchanging and moving islands has brought us into the caring hospitality of island naturalists such as Jim Bitler, John Crawford, Jen Hilburn, Scott Coleman, and Carol Ruckdeschel.

(Here I am with my Chiboogamoo on Cumberland. Vernon J. Henry and Carol Ruckdeschel took us there to look at a Pleistocene outcrop in December 2008.)

 My sweetheart and brilliant husband Chiboogamoo has had me accompany him on these island adventures as his worthy assistant and sincere LOVER of NATURE. Hallelujah! HALLELUJAH! H A L L E L U J A H ! ! ! Zeroing in on my AUTHENTICITY, I greet all that I see and all of those that I meet as COLLABORATORS in my PILGRIMAGE, my quest to find and document the ETERNAL SACRED IMAGES. The beaches, marshes, forests, and ponds THRIVE with LIFE. Most recently, Gale Bishop has been posting daily photos from St Catherines as baby turtles emerge from their deep sandy nests along the dunes into the endless moving sea—an eternal cycle of life, one for the sea turtles that has been going on for more than 100 million years.

Last week in the middle of September, Carol Ruckdeschel, a naturalist living on Cumberland, was kind enough to send me some images of the black vultures that are part of her daily environment on this southern most Georgia barrier island.  I had asked her for “island” stories in my absence of experiencing island NATURE directly for the past six months. These vulture photos were her response, and they were ENOUGH. Carol’s portrait of a vulture spoke to me profoundly and deeply. I had to paint this greatly misaligned bird, despised by humans because of its carrion feeding ways, in the way that Carol had captured it.

I titled my portrait, “I AM HERE.” I use the verb “to be” in present tense to address the simultaneous presence of LIFE and DEATH that the vulture represents to me. While being very much alive and experiencing hunger, parenthood, the breeze through pine trees, this bird also reminds me that I one day will be carrion but long after its own demise. I AM HERE. Yes, be present to THE NOW. I have a goal in MY PILGRIMAGE, my creative odyssey: to greet TRUTH with a HALLELUJAH! Hence my name—Hallelujah Truth. Hallelujah Black Vulture! Hallelujah NATURE!

I began this blog entry with the question as to how to find and experience the ENERGY of these ETERNAL SACRED IMAGES found in NATURE. My answer is this:

 Fellow Pilgrims, follow your intuition, listening to what you already know. Our spiritual paths are often a rediscovering of what we already know deeply within ourselves. Honor nature and see how its life reflects back your interior.

 This carrion eating bird is essentially me, as much as a sea turtle or American oyster catcher! I AM HERE. YOU ARE HERE. WE ARE NATURE! Hallelujah! 

(I painted this image for Scott Coleman, who is the naturalist on Little St. Simons. He was kind enough to meet us on a cold Saturday morning in March 2010 and take Chiboogamoo and me for our very first time to see this jewel of a Georgia barrier island. His office is located in an old home sitting on the marsh, where Scott frequently watches otters frolicking. Viewers have responding to this image positively. Is it because of how I have made these creatures look very human like?)