Tree dash

Look carefully at this photo — especially the shadow area beneath the feet — and it appears that Melanie Mowinski is flying, paper in hand, going from tree to tree, drawing, drawing, drawing. Charcoal brought from America was soon used up. Charcoal from the Peace Fire, charcoal from elsewhere. Everywhere, broken, worn bits of charcoal littered the ground as Melanie tried to capture the essence of “tree” onto paper.

Urgency?

You bet. And not just because Melanie only had a month at Windgrove as the resident artist. She, like all environmentally aware people intuitively knows that messing with the environment gets one into a mess of trouble.
Like hurricane Katrina.

Any mention of global warming behind the fate of New Orleans?

How many will suffer because of a lack of commitment to tackle this issue? Bush might continually state that “the American way of life is not negotiable”. He may live in denial about weather patterns changing because of America’s prodigious appetite to consume. But the handwriting is on more than one wall and what happened to New Orleans is about to happen more frequently and with more devastation to rich and poor alike regardless of Wall Street.

And this brings us back to Melanie climbing trees. She does so, not literally to escape the rising flood waters, but in a metaphoric way to search out, through drawings, how humans might connect with “tree”. In this way we humans can regard trees as our kin, if not our kind, and learn to live in a way that is protective, rather than destructive, not only of trees, but of all of life. Not to do so imperils the whole family tree.

Melanie, as a visual artist, wants all of us to look at trees the way the poet, William Stafford, did when he exclaimed: “Part of me.”

My advice. Either start protecting the environment or install an inflatable raft in your attic.