Forest Inspiration with Andie Thrams
Andie Thrams is a visual artist, educator and occasional publisher as Larkspur Graphics. She will be leading an art and hiking retreat called "A Sense of Place" with Balanced Rock from June 10-12.
Text quoted from: IN FORESTS, Volume XVI: Great and Graceful by Andie Thrams; all images © Andie ThramsThis book is part of an ongoing series of artist’s books documenting my experiences in wild forests. This volume holds original journal pages made in August 2008, during an eleven-day backpack with my husband, Dennis Eagan, in Sequoia National Park. We spent much of our trip exploring Redwood Meadow, a complex of several wilderness Sequoia groups in the upper Middle Fork of the Kaweah River watershed.
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In the stringer grove, above Redwood Meadow, midday. A creek meanders steeply down, appearing in pools and little cascades, then disappearing under ground or logs or boulders. The Giant Sequoias here grow along this unnamed creek, nearly in it, in places. It is steep terrain & quite shady. This grove follows the creek down to Cliff Creek where we slept last night beneath two Sequoias. A few Sequoias continue downstream from there, eventually linking up with the main Redwood Meadow trees.Nearly always these trees grow in groups. It is hard to put words to the sense of connection amongst them and the other giant trees like Sugar Pine, Jeffery Pine and White Fir that grow with them. But the term, forest community, seems perfect. A wild ancient forest like this feels unlike any other. It is all pattern & chaos, ordered & unkempt. It feels deeply complicated, interwoven beyond comprehension. And, best of all, it feels like a place thriving, and of grace.After a bit of time in forests like this, I also start to feel like a thriving being & filled with a sense of grace. I hear flickers, jays, nuthatches, chickadees, chickarees, woodpeckers, moving water, wind up high, juncos, winter wrens, and more I don’t know. Bracken & lady fern, California hazelnut, alum root, pyrola, gallium, a beautiful tall grass in the creek bed, pinedrops, & dried up still crimson snow plant, grey squirrels, bees, funnel-web spiders, and ants, no end to ants. (A person has to accept small creatures crawling on skin around these trees.) Also: snowberry, gooseberry, thimbleberry, currant and kit-kit-dizzee, dogbane, white-stemmed raspberry. I’ll never know them all! It is hot in the sun, but cool & breezy in the shade of these trees. Chickarees cut down cones, which sometimes crash through the branches to the ground. Wind blows down twigs & sometimes limbs, rarely a tree—we thought we may have heard a tree fall last night... so very good to be back here.