By 5:45 the sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache, a wetlands preserve along the Rio Grande in central New Mexico, are silhouettes, some headless, dunking to find food in the shallow water. Backlit, they are animated calligraphy doing a one-legged dance on silver water. The moon is rising; I cannot see what’s coming. I hear the gurgling throaty cranes wing flap and ripples. It's dark and light. I take pictures. I’m here and pulled home.

Curious: Cranes and swans sleep with one leg tucked and the other planted on the muddy earth. Read more about sandhill cranes…

Back home, I watch the documentary about Leonard Cohen writing Hallelujah, how it took him years to write the lyrics and still he kept adding to them.

In the studio I struggle to find my own lyrics, how to introduce the fabrics and papers I’ve dyed into my painting and printmaking process. What are they singing, the blues and yellows, silvers and pinks, in this collaboration? It’s no longer a narrative I’ve tapped into; it’s a seasonal work song, a round. No beginning, no end, jump in. Only prerequisite is breathing.
To my surprise the plant pigments declare themselves as flowers.

I get Covid. I am sicker than my friends who barely had symptoms. I live out the creation destruction process that the plant world is teaching me. After 21 days, I emerge. I live. I make a mask for Gloria Mundi and join in a parade to celebrate the journey of cohabiting the planet with all of life.

Song of Gloria Mundi.

It’s the song of life that lives between struggle and hope, grief and the joy, G_L_O_R_I_A’ death and rebirth; the feminine Latin word for Glory, as in awesome magnificence, and Mundi– the big World with the canopy of stars and planets that surround it. The song is informed by the landscape, the plants, aging in place and the song in my heart that keeps going.

Curious: In the 15th century, as the age of exploration exploitation and colonization took hold, the Latin phrase ‘sic transit Gloria Mundi’ was added to the ritual burning of a piece of flax during the coronation of a pope. Flax. Burning. Inquisition spreads through Europe. Climate change.

“So passes the glory of this world”.

Curiouser: ‘sic transit Gloria Mundi’ was the title of Emily Dickinson’s first published poem, in 1852. I did not know this when I heard the title for the show in my inner ear. I learned it while watching a documentary about her on Netflix, A Quiet Passion.

Despite the puritanical underpinnings of her upbringing, which cautioned against falling for earth’s lusty temporal glory, Dickinson doesn’t take the bait.

I live in the glorious material world, one foot in the mud the other tucked under wing. Got my eye on the moon and one foot on the ground, the gift, this beautiful tangle of life. As the world turns, the lyrics change. Hallelujah.