Road Kill

I generate a lot of ideas but act on so few, and follow through on even less. I hear that my grandfather was the same way. He would make grandiose promises that never came to pass. I am very excitable but have no discipline. Or that is how I've told the story of myself. But there is another narrative; one that says there is something alive and curious and wonder-full within me that too often gives way to expectation and practicality. I have such visions of artistic ventures that would help me make sense of engage things: the world, relationships, feelings, myself. I quickly abandon these cravings to the tedium of an 9-5. After all, how could I possibly begin to make sense of things without the money to feed my coffee addiction?

I was outside one day watching a squirrel be a squirrel, leaping through piles of fallen leaves, when it found itself on the road at the same time as a car. Delighted  preparations turned to confused panic. The squirrel's inner drive to store for winter now told it to pull its legs in tight and make careful movements. I thought all was well, but at the last moment, it seemed nothing but the tip of her nose met the final spin of the car's back wheel, and she fell limp in the exhaust of the mindless vehicle. Now I was looking at a squirrel no longer being a squirrel. All her preparations for naught. No more bounding in and out of leafs. No returning to a warm nest in the trees. No twitching eyelashes and snow dotted whiskers hibernating through the cold months. No warm thaw of spring. Dead. And for what? The hasty passage of a human in a gas driven metal transporter, transcending the slow, innate, patient cycles of the Earth.

I wanted to capture every moment like this on film. In anger I wanted to magnify it and show people what we leave in our tracks. But there was more to it than anger or even sorrow or shame. There was love, regard, solidarity, and concern. We are numbly rushing through time, indifferent of life. Maybe the squirrels open mouthed expression, as though still watching something slip away, would get our blood flowing again as it drips from her nose to our hearts. Probably not. There's a script for that. "Ew". "Weird".

This is (some of) the reaction photographer Joy Hunsberger  hears about her collection or artist Adam Morrigan receives about his show, Absolution and Redemption.  I see them as beautiful responses to human indifference or oblivion. An alternative. Engagement. Wendell Berry calls us to practice resurrection. Wake up. Come back to life.

The squirrel sat along the side of the road for a few days, a feast to the still-living as they make their own preparations for winter. The world practices redemption, reclaiming the fallen and atoning us of our sins in a grace and balance that governs a world so different from our judicial realm of scarcity. Why is my mind polluted with pre-stocked opinions and heady sense-making while a raven follows the air in front of her beak?


I have a recurring dream that I have forgotten about my child.  In the happier dreams I hold this child with great guilt at my neglect. In less fortunate scenarios I search for my forgotten child to no avail. I see the dream as a reminder; a call to return to what is important; to what I have abandoned or mis-prioritized.

A friend and I were walking by the railroad tracks one soft gray day when we saw a fallen owl on a bed of broken stone. The drizzling rain dotted her feathers which hung open. Abandoned eyes peered at us through a glossy film. Before and beyond her lie the tracks of human evolution. I felt the urge to bury her. In my mind it would demonstrate respect. But that idea of respect comes from a script that says the world is bad; that scavengers are bad; that death is bad and that the body of respectable beings should be "saved" from beast and bug; hidden away somehow from a visible transformation from the host we knew to a new life.

The Deer

By Mary Oliver

You never know.
The body of night opens
like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,

like so many wrappings of mist.
And on the hillside two deer are walking along
just as though this wasn’t

the owned, tilled earth of today
but the past.
I did not see them the next day, or the next,

but in my mind’s eye -
there they are, in the long grass,
like two sisters.

This is the earnest work.  Each of us is given
only so many mornings to do it -
to look around and love
the oily fur of our lives,
the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
Days I don’t do this

I feel the terror of idleness,
like a red thirst.
Death isn’t just an idea…

When we die the body breaks open
like a river;
the old body goes on, climbing the hill.