From Mendocino to Spiritual Mt. Shasta

I have a backlog of video that I need to edit and work on but here are a few to get things started. Above are the covers and all my Gaia art work - photos, carvings, paintings and shrines - from 1970 to present, representing about 30% of my total body of work. The covers are carved out of mahogany and are 12"x12". I have to get the 100+ pages printed in color, double sided before I can bind it all together. Below is feeding time in the goldfish pond. A very calming meditative bit of video.


There's not much to do up in the mountains so I did a lot of hiking. The walks would be too long and boring if I just walked along with the video camera running so instead I used my little digital camera and just stopped every seven steps on the first two videos and every nine steps on the last one.







Below are a few other small experiments with stop-action.



Some photos from Mendocino.

Lizzy the Lizard who used to sun bathe next to me.

Happy and sad dollar plants.

Fungus among us - the same fungus one week apart. A little rain went a long way.

View out of my window.

I went to the ocean with David and Laura and since it was an artist's open studio tour day we visited several places, but my favorite was the lady who made sculpture out of concrete. She actually showed me how to do it and the following week I bought the concrete and coloring. I used some of it to make five heads that I found homes for in odd natural places to be discovered by unsuspecting people.

David carried a hunk of driftwood home from the beach that turned out to be redwood, so I carved it into a Buddha for him.

Mt. Shasta is famous for it's volcano, but it's also famous for it's amazing water. This is the headwaters of the Sacremento River and people come from far away to scoop it up. This is Karin my new friend in Mt. Shasta who spent a few days showing me around.

Below is the Sacremento River in Dunsmuir. We were looking for the water falls but couldn't find them. Next time.

My first day here I took this shot of Mt. Shasta from the road in front of my new home - I'm renting a room in a nice condo. I've been living in small cabins without kitchens and indoor plumbing so I decided to treat myself while I was here.

On 11-11-11 I went with a group of (new) friends up the mountain for a two hour ceremony. I thought I'd be cold but I ended up getting so engrossed in the rituals and meeting new people I never thought about it until I got close to the fire to make a wish and throw some cedar onto it.

Sunset from the road in front of where I live. I can't stop photographing the mountain. I shot some good UFO looking cloud ones today.

Hanging out in Mendocino

Above are the book covers I carved on Maui from leftover wood. I am now taking care of an older dog, 14 yr. old Rowen, who has a hard time walking. Anyway I decided to paint the covers to look like Rowen since she has the same profile as Lobo, the dog I was caring for in Hawaii. I was going to fill the book with my dog photos - I have lots of funny ones - but now Laura wants to buy the covers and fill them with her animal photos, which are pretty good. Below is my friend Rowen.
Since my Wooden Books blog went viral I decided to spend time this year making some special new books to update the blog. Below are the covers for GAIA, carved out of mahogany, and will be filled with my favorite photos of women and women art that I've done over the years. The covers aren't finished - I'm still sanding and refining them. I bought a special wood burner exatco knife so I can do the fine detail of her fingers and toes and the veining of the leaves.

Below is one bed of many that I've been weeding and now most of them have started blooming.
This is a funny story. The heron, below, was moved here when it was discovered that her allures were death to Laura's beloved goldfish. Laura was traveling and when she called home her caretaker told her about the amorous heron she saw humping the pond sculpture. Laura learned later that he also ate nine of her goldfish and that he hit two other ponds in the area before moving on.

Can you see the toad that was unearthed when we planted the vegetable garden?

Laura took David and me out for his 50th birthday. We first walked around Lakeport (because I was curious) then headed for a Thai restaurant in another village along the lake. Of course, we stopped along the way to take photos, especially of flowers, Laura's specialty

I went on two trips. First I dashed up to Eugene and got everything out of my storage unit, and because it was one of those very rare days there - one of a half dozen a year that they're allowed to have with a full day of sunshine - I decided to drive home instead of driving farther out to stay with friends. It took me 21 hours total. Then a week later I drove down to do a painting job for my friends Fran and Patti in Santa Cruz and photographed their house which has been remodeled and made large and sunny. Fran also built a huge bread and pizza oven out back, which you can see partly out of the utility room window below. I packed up my truck with alot of stuff I had stored under their mountain house and for the first time in a long time I have been reunited with most of my art and possessions.

Fran is an avid year round gardener. She and Patti are eating the vegetables it produces whatever time of year I visit.

I'm doing a barter with Keith Canova, a musician/music teacher who teaches at the Ukiah Music School. My part of the bargain was to shoot video of his annual student show at the local Playhouse. While doing that this young man, Jalahn, performed with one hand. It's amazing. He's 12 years old and is already writing his own music.

Hawaii, Hermosa Beach and a Mendocino Mountain Top

I hike down the mountain every morning to this spot, then hike back up again. Since I still don't know where to settle I'm settling here with my friends in Mendocino for as along as it takes for me to figure out what the heck I should do, where I should go. My cabin used to be Laura's office but has been turned into rustic guest accommodations. This will be the second time in five years I've lived here. Laura's animals like me and they are getting to be very old. Laura wants me to look after them when she travels. It was Laura who taught me about photographing flowers. I've set up a work area in my cabin and have been carving a mahogany book cover. What I love about this cabin is that if I wake up in the middle of the night, I can carve if I feel like it. I spent the whole last year looking for sharing situations so I wouldn't have to be alone all the time. Now I'm finding out that I really need my own space, but I need to find people to hang with during the day. Laura and I share a meal every day. I've only been here a week but the weather has been warm and sunny, before that they'd had rain and snow. I'm meant to be here.
Above is my cabin and below is my desk and the view from my window of a madrone grove. This is where I wrote my first book and intend to write my third book.


Janice, below, is the best tour guide. She always takes me places I've never been before. Whenever I visit we take her coffee can of coins to the supermarket and put them in a machine that counts them. This year the leaden mass turned into $144. This was our mad money - meals out at restaurants, movies and parking. She drove me down to San Pedro along the coast one week after the tsunami in Japan. I kept thinking, why are we hanging out along the coast?, but it was beautiful. She took me to see the Korean Friendship bell, then we stopped at White Beach where they have rocks riddled with holes. I found two small rocks with holes perfect for making into pendants for necklaces. I spent two weeks in Hermosa then Janice drove me up to Mendocino, after a short stop in Santa Cruz to see Fran and Patti. It all worked out amazingly perfect, especially because I'd bought a lot of books (60 books from the Hermosa Beach Friends of the Library Bookshop for $15.) I also bought a ton of hardwood to make a new series of my books: oak, black walnut, mahogany, and beach. Janice and I are into tools and she encouraged me to buy a router, which I'm now using on my first book cover.




The night before I left Maui the big earthquake hit Japan. The next morning Hawaiian Airlines announced that all of their flights were canceled - luckily my flight was on Alaska Airlines and took off as scheduled. Their hub was in Portland where I switched planes - to exactly the same plane and only one row off of my previous seat - and landed at LAX around 11:30. Every time I fly I swear I'll never do it again, well, until next time. The next morning Janice took me out for breakfast at Scotty's on the beach using our mad money, then to the Hermosa Beach St. Patrick's Day parade.

I hadn't seen my Aunt June (below - she'll be 88 soon) and cousin Ron for many years. Ron and Lynn invited us over to their place in San Juan Capistrano and we ended up having a great time. They constantly travel - I'm not the only wanderer in the family. We spent hours talking, then they took us out for a Chinese dinner and brought us home to teach us how to use their new Wii game. We had good fun.

Below are a few more shots from Hawaii. The bowl with flowers are from the plumeria (frangipani) trees found everywhere in Hawaii, filling the air with their powerful scent.

One of Deb's orchids, below.

The weekend before I left, Maha and Deborah took me to a wine tasting event (really delicious wine made from pineapples), then drove me down the coast where a massive lava field was created in an eruption in 1820.

Oh heck, I forget the name of the island.




Before I left for Hawaii my friend Janet told me to watch out for the deep crevices that are found all over the Hawaiian islands. These crevices, created from old lava flows, are very deep and usually filled with trees and other growth. Evidently there are cases where people went hiking and left the trail to never return again, falling hundreds of feet to their death. In back of Deborah's house was one of those crevices. In the photo below you can see the tops of some trees. They are dangerous also because they can fill with water in a storm and flash flood. It seemed to me like a lost country, hidden away, littered with bodies and dinasaurs (why not?).


The girls sitting on the Monster Tree, their name for the tree because it snakes along the ground long enough to provide a bench for three kids before bending up with its many eyes looking at you.


Pucalani, where Deborah lived, means hole in the heavens because it rarely rains on this part of Maui, but when it rained, it really rained.