The Jx Farm Residency has opened back up and we’d love to have you out here. Applications are free through December - check it out at jxfarms.com or @jxfarms on instagram.
artist in residence
Twelve Oaks Residency 19
No one tells you in church that heaven ain’t all at once. Heaven is in stages and over a series of years and so quiet you caint always tell til it is gone.
And all the good and saved memory glowing.
A sweet satsuma off of a tree.
Reading back through so much writing it seems all last year i was lookin for rain and here it is just the same.
This house out here a heaven of overwhelming, light leaking up in the clouds, we see but never knew, it seemed. A quiet rooting to all of a sudden be so planted this way.
Roots carefully dug up, a summer garden, a summer tomato still making offerings. Roots dug up again ad again, hands knowing & gentle, that it is bound for a better place.
Knowing like all of earth knows when it is spring here in this hemisphere, and the pecan tree knows to blossom last thing.
The azaleas around here wilted, some of them dropped, after the cold. It feels like fall outside, sitting on the porch in the dappled sun.
Little bursts of flowers on bare branches. Winter left them for dead, but the ground and sun been all preserving through and through.
Ferns, each kind, and all of them, little fuzzy fists bursting from the ground, from the bayou, unfurling again from the trees. Strange dinosaur plants, shelled as they unroll into the sun. A garfish with roots, a season with leaves.
Green darlings sprouted over night, everywhere, steadily studying. Easy to get caught up in their capturing, once you are noticing.
No stop to stopping, once you start stopping.
All the sun seeking creatures coming out now. Me too.
There is light in everything here.
Peace & penance & prayer moving forward & watching everywhere.
Lists & listening.
Talking, a lot of talking, a lot of writing, a lot of barking. Silence broke up quicker than it falls.
Spring slow and steady though at first and in the moment it seems like lightning, but it is a month or two months and then maybe summer isn’t so quick as it used to seem, either. Always looking up the road instead of down, where we came from.
Done the workshop, and it was wonderful to see the house filled with warmth and smiles and patience and listening. The light was good and the people were the best, and family gets held close and we get to speak all of our names proudly.
Art under the oaks. Mother Nature and Providence partially present and smiling, they knew these Twelve Oaks had us in good hands. A sunny and warm and cool day fell into night and into Sunday, again sunny and overcast and kind. Running these roads and helping folks and seeing all the lives living out here.
Walking to the truck, i believed they were car lights from the road at first - surely. Some strange new light like sometimes happens out here in the darkening of dusk.
They really was there - it really were lightning bugs. Buzzing, glowing, blinking. In a trio, all alone, little paint spatters of phosphor, little sulphur butterflies for night. A dozen, thinking of Georgia, then Oxford, Mississippi, out near Faulkner’s grave, and Providence might be Providence or she might be God, too, and we all slowly moved by a gracious and knowing hand to land.
The lightning bugs began on the leap year day, in their own timing, in their own planning, and it is a dream all over again to be here among them.
Twelve Oaks Residency 17
Twelve Oaks Residency 16
Twelve Oaks Residency 13
Today:
You can tell by my words and every photo before, i am no flower photographer, but all of this all at once, like a secretive new beginning to the world, this thing that happens every year without fail, on a predictable but unpredictable schedule, too beautiful and new and hopeful to neglect as it bright greens all around.
This past fall we lost an uncle, and two days after i was sitting with a great-uncle, he was approaching his 90s. We was all at dinner in the mountains, and he knew every mountain’s name, and every road that brought you to them. He was named after his father, and i was named after his father, and this new baby was named after his father, too. He smiled, leaning, sitting, “Look at him, not worried about a thing.”
Here is spring:
Get your gladfull glasses on and get along.
You can see Providence been mighty hard at work. Must have finished up in the bayou and began to call down the rain. From the low tide to the muddy land to the trail, green is coming up all over. Before long, you’re right, she will have touched every part of her earth and it will be spring. Vines will curl in close and even the devil’s walking stick will be in bloom.
(worse monsters to come than winter, life all short and good for teaching.)
(February 7th
Everything too beautiful to understand, too breathtaking, beginning to know, beyond realizing: heaven is here. We just built up all of our own so much, we cant hardly see it anymore.
February 8th
It would be so troublesome to be in love with an island.)
Night creatures tap tap tapping into my dreams - morse code to a soul to get along, a generous spirit in the land, a generous spirit in the house.
Out here steady walking all of the time, even the most attentive eye won't catch all of these sudden blooms.
i believe if i put a face to Providence she would be beautiful but she would also by my grandmother or great grandmother. Soft, her most important feature in her heart, soul, back, hands - working hands.
Mother nature’s face is different to everybody, so goes Providence.
In North Carolina, mother nature is a cool blue morning in the shade of the mountains and walnut trees. In Louisiana, a cypress in muddy water, secretive cypress knees and a cloak of bright humidity.
In the Delta, she goes on forever, obscuring her face with generosity of fertile ground & threats of flood and wind.
Here on the hidden coast i am in her arms so i cannot see her face.
But Providence moves all around and i catch her eyes smiling in the sun and while it rains in the woods.
We was out runnin the levee in New Orleans and i was glad and surprised both, to see the city deep in the fog of the river. This is how it goes, another non-day, another dream of living in New Orleans when i should be in the woods. Fighting my own sleep the whole day. Providence is awful loud if you can see how to listen.
A flock of whistling ducks in the new moon night. Irises blossoming in the ditch. The cool of the river reaching us in the fog, we are breathing in the Mississippi and shaking hands. Out of the levee and down the road, humidity weighing down our clothes.
We borrowed us a boat and went down to the water. The mud generous in it’s giving - soft and stickless and turtle-less and we sank down before we lifted out and in, on to the bayou. Now i have seen much of the trail from the inside and the outside. The trees once distanced from me by water and marsh-grass now next to me and smiling.
The brown water holding all of it’s creatures in safe obscurity. Little bubbles race ahead of us, and lazy bubbles follow our paddling. We came to an arm of the bayou where pollen had collected. We traced our trail from the water until the kayak breeched and we back-paddled.
Mazes of marsh grass, inlets, outlets, muddied platforms for surely nutria, and probably our last great land lizard. A turtle balancing on a root fairly flailing to get back to the water. Twice a blue heron startled us, knowing our approach before we could dream of his. Great blue wings to the sky, a great clattering rising.
Another unseen creature loudly leaving near the water. Pouncing, our silent approach still startling and alien, this is the quietest we have ever been out here, on the water instead of traipsing the woods, and still scaring all things out and away.
All of the trees nearer and closer and looking down to us. Eagerly & strangely growing in their mudflats. An egret flew up into their arms, starry against the green needles and grey sky.
Quiet. No one on the water. Not a soul in the woods. Traffic buzzing and droning up river and side river and down river. One egret and me, and all the untold things beneath.
Providence splashing in the water and whispering to the strange creatures in the roots. Strange creatures i can’t hardly see and can’t puzzle to sense.
Twelve Oaks Residency 12
Monday we went to Horn Island. It was a halcyon day, as Anderson might say. It is still too beautiful and strange to comprehend, a love so true & secret you won’t call it’s name. Someone said it is like going to the moon, and they were right. Those photos will be for you one day, but now i can’t even bear to look at them. The world is too beautiful and people are too good. Coming back to the real world, the sky so close to the water, heaven got to be within jumping distance.
We were very quiet in Shearwater pottery. It had just been restocked, newly, brightly decorated bowls and figures and cups, horses and cats and folks. A mule angrily pulling. A woodpecker as a handle. Turquoise, white, trick colors. All of the pottery cooling and sparkling, creaking and singing and popping to us in the silence of Shearwater. A mourning dove on the ground.
Tuesday, friends and artists came and we sat under the oaks and ate lunch in the New Orleanian way, and it was beautiful and the weather held. A strange planet, woodpecker feathers scattered, a small green treefrog bright in the red pine needles. This trail known to me, its low spots and muddy spots, and fall-apart spots, and hopeful it calls everyone on back. The light is always changing and nature has a whole swell of promises.
Wednesday, today, it rained just like they said it would. It began when they predicted and it never let up for hours. The light came on in my studio mid-afternoon, the sky glooming towards night. The front and the back of the house became warm rivers of rain (puddle-wonderful,) then the fog began to move, the mist, like a dream. Everything here seems to be all-encompassing first, but then it is either a dream or a jewel, and that’s just how it is. For Anderson it was halcyon or almost-halcyon and i can see the unbelievable beauty of it all now, beyond my own simple wording or understanding.
Painting and sketching and thinking. A little restless and a moving easel. Climbed the rarely-used stairs, and visited every quiet and warmly-lit room, a new perspective among the trees and an audience to the rain. A pleasant & cheery blue bathroom with its windows to the trees. Upstairs seemed glad to have my visit, and i was glad to be there.
Obscured + defined out on the trail, browned & wintery with everything growing towards spring deeply green saturated and bright. Proud. The camellias especially, hollering in their greenery. The bayou is high, the water is high, the trees erased into sleep. Something about the deep water, the fresh rain water filling it to the brim & it climbing, made it safe. Made it clean. Barefoot we went in, often to just below the knee. Clear, cool, pine and bayou water. The muck all loved up by Providence and welcoming, hugging, even - safe.
This morning just before the deluge we were out in the woods, everything heightening in it’s vibrancy, our old brave turtle at his turtle crossing, as unafraid as ever. The woods getting louder before the storm, for most of the trail we were shielded. Thunder rolling holy-holy-holy, rumbling and grumbling, lightning flashing. Before that, we stood on the threshold of the house, after a run. During that run we was watching the rain come in over the bay and us all unworried. Back home, i shucked my shoes and pondered going or staying, does lightning hit the trees then cross the ground? and would we be safe? We are safe. It was safe. We went out and on and barefoot and gladful.
Not good at reading signs and not good for knowing much. Just out, looking, practically rolling in the pine needles with joy and needing. Numbers and constant turtles, maybe like crows, they are just there, on their way, always going, and it’s no secret to come upon one. But it is. It must be. Life, little life, little mushrooms we saw two days ago, then yesterday, then today, completely changed and beautiful. A bright mango color in the wet decay around it .
Branches and leaves, rain and trees, needles and mud, all of the contact i have. They brush my head, like a mother holding and petting her sleeping child during Sunday service. Many promises to myself broken. This new-clean-mud welcoming and holding and safe as we crush down upon their mud-hidden branch-bones, leaning into the cool water. Cypress knees with their moats, steady moors in changing waters.
The water is crawling towards the house from the bayou, but it will be days and months of this before it could truly reach us. Anyhow, i reckon. Mother nature, well, you know. It’s supposed to rain more tomorrow. All of the rain gathered in the back, at the feet of the younger oaks and an old magnolia has drained already, down the trail to the bayou. Did the trail come first from nature, or from folks and their engineering? A little laughing & sure river, a microscopic Mississippi.
An alien planet. By alien, just forgotten. All of us turning to our old ways because we have already forgotten - history repeats itself - it’s true. Before long we will all be plowing and sewing and planting and pickling again. We forgot.
The night colors floated down. It rained and leaves fell and all of spring’s creatures thrilled with the day. We will sleep through the night and see what nature has planned for us tomorrow. It’s supposed to rain.
Twelve Oaks Residency 9
There’s been gospel all through the house. Music quiet in the evening with raccoons scuffling around, maybe on the roof, my heart in my throat at two in the morning. But it’s just age old nature and her daughters, the trees dropping leaves & limbs in the wind, the raccoons and all of their kin out looking to eat. The trees and their canopies covering us at all times, in the pouring rain, where everything gets to be so glistening & bright, and new paths sure enough open up.
we was in New Orleans in November or December. And i was out in the French Quarter, the whole Mississippi river keeping me from home. And looking at those buildings. Tiresome just to get back. Tiresome to walk in all the pastel colors on the dirty pavement, and the tourist music shrouding in the humidity. I looked up with tremendous regret & sadness, that i had lost all of my love & wonder for a place that used to be my only dream.
The oaks here gave me new eyes. Sometimes those eyes come in on my heels, leaves all over the ground. Now in this time, this year, New Orleans echoing all of it’s ever-present love and even the terrifying river bubbling in chorus on the pavement shores. The colors & the light & the sound all vibrant and beautiful & embracing. Ducks and their partners all across the water, canadian geese loud & proud, a heron stretching his neck to croak low down across the river. Pelicans all strange and lizard-like on their piers. The river is high but the land doesn’t seem worried. They reckon they’re all the same.
We are here always at our crossroads, there is left & right, up & down, sky & ground. We are at another crux of winter & spring. Summer seems to still hold us in it’s loving arms. All of the tender green things are bravely curling upwards. Winter and it’s passing hanging down & skeletal, pine diamonds rainy & saturated. Brush washed down with water & tide & calling. All of these paths always opening to us if we are out looking for it. Vivid in the rain, living in the rain, all of these trees an umbrella, forgiving their weather-mother and letting some through down on us, happy and spattering in the water and mud. Trees is blushing with spring.
I was afraid and i am still afraid to lose my sight like i had with New Orleans. To go home and see Louisiana is another harsh shake. To be here at Twelve Oaks sure seems like heaven within all comparisons. The rain carried us back to Mississippi, just like a portal, again. We came through safe and glad. New eyes came to greet me, all the leaves, in the woods, in the rain.
We are here in the quiet resurrection, the restoring of life to death among the plants and animals. It is so silent out here. Birds and squirrels and other creatures quiet in their winter. The rain muted by the trees. The resurrection swelling from beneath our feet, spring is always promised, but before it is spring, it is mighty cold and mirrored, everywhere. All of nature watching and all of nature knowing just when to come through.
Blossoms just as beautiful in their pre-blossoming.
Twelve Oaks Residency 6
Been reading Lewis Nordan’s “Music of the Swamp.” He made me remember all those times in the woods with my old dog, Tanner, and we used to go all the time. It seemed then as i know now as a levee road, holding in the little Tallahassee lake. I tried to build a deer blind in those slight woods, just to watch. Never seen much. Only ever found. Used to go to them woods, like i do now, if it’s not every day it’s pretty well near. All of the excitement of their shade and stories and hope building up to where we practically running to get there. Used to go - and Lord did i cry when they cut some them trees down. Just a few, here and there, no particular apparent rhyme nor reason. Weren’t enough to make a difference, probably. But i cried. Because it meant, eventually, surely - they’d be gone. Couldn’t fathom i’d be long gone before they was.
They didn’t seem to have bramble out there like they do here. And it doesn’t rain anywhere on earth like it does out here in the bayous. Met my first liar out there. Couldnt - cant - understand. All them walks. All them tadpoles and that little alligator before the 4th of July. Out in these woods in the ouroboros we walk and walk and now we feel like friends, maybe, i might be acting too familiar. All of these beautiful things obscured by the next beautiful thing.
Birds sing, crickets sing, frogs sing, we sing. You might find me out there if you’re walking, i’m wondering. Sometimes i catch Wilbur staring and i begin to stare as well. Between the wind and the branches, the birds, frogs, all of these hidden creatures, we are listening so that we might begin to see. You might hear me saying, often, in the squelch of the marsh, “i believe! i believe i’m sinkin down!” and Robert Johnson rolls his eyes again. Never fallen down on my knees and raised up my right hand in this swamp, just at least not yet.
These waters is gentler waters. (this land is your land) and i been dreamin so good out here. Carrying you on my mind as all of these fern-coated oaks green & dream-misted, “holding patterned” waiting for our storm & it still ain’t stormed. Out wondering and staring and listening in these woods, quiet in the morning, birds shaking dew from their feathers as they sing in the trees, the trees showering us in our dawn and at a night a boy and his boat circle and circle, ripples find us in the grass and we sure-nuff sinking down, squelching, searching, one day these vines will be summer snakes and these logs alligators but i wont know til i know.
The promise of fireflies in March. The promise of spring and threat of summer. Alligator tunnels, nutria, fox, raccoon, rabbit tunnels, all around us, turtles waiting for the turtle hour. Snakes for the snake hour. We will see (eventually.) I am here among my southerners and alone all at once. A man and his motel room. An artist and her tree house. A person and their land. Waiting for blessings.
stories stories stories, the whole world stories. i want to hear all of your stories, all of them. i see what i know now - looking and hunting for stories and i got some but the priority is stories- books books books - all of your stories. Make this world more perfect with your stories; amen, hallelujah, praise God, amen.
Twelve Oaks Residency 4
Said it out loud the other day, it feels like i’m in high school again - back then i was driving to Monticello, Florida, or to Thomasville, Georgia, every moment of it breathtaking and heart swelling and so beautiful. It has been a strange thing to feel the chill of, i guess, adrenaline (a word i would volunteer with? anything else) or excitement or, well, shivery love. All of this music, all of this vision, all of these people, too much to bear in all of their shimmering beauty. Ocean Springs, East Beach, Biloxi, Diamondhead, Shearwater, Cat Island, all of the names of these places - thank God!
Hoping to keep new eyes all of the time, small snails all clustered as milky ways, gulfy-salty-blue-gray-days, to see and keep seeing in this new world. It seems on the edge of magic. (Wilbur has his long-leash now, been hooked on cypress knees and sturdy trees but he is always quiet, always watching, star-gazey, mid-day and helps me hope.)
Been out walking on east beach, where Wilbur can run at liberty without me (he is snoring on the couch now), and there was these strange formations, strange like oyster shell buildings but on the flat of the beach. Looked just like rocks - just like lava rocks, porous, scrapey. Put my boot on one of them the other day. Exclaimed out loud. Whoa. It sunk into the sand, because it was sand, too. (humans, all tender humans, too)
The sky was vivid, cerulean, blue, against the next rain cloud. The pine tree patterned up as a warm and crimson brown quilt. Grow how you want to. So much of what we come upon seems so jaw dropping and too purdy to be true. We still sleep at night with no real understanding of all we have seen and said. Been interrupting folks, too, too excited to be polite though that’s still shameful. I know less-than, less-better-than, and please forgive. Life has begun to feel extremely important, extremely rare, extremely flash-in-the-pan. And i guess that means i got to shout out loud at the worst times, all of the time. (shh - like a —-)
We woke up this morning! Hoping to see the fog that carried us down out and through New Orleans to my parent’s house. Thick and terrorsome, like a dream before it turns to a deep water night mare. The last two days all fogged up like maybe they never happened in real human time. We woke up early this morning, hoping for fog. There was no true fog, just a steady and obscuring grey, nothing creeping up and blanketing to the house (yet but still praying.) Wore my boots out, but i been sinking down, ankles and socks attentive to the mess around them that soaks. It’s January. The snakes are all hidden, the mosquitos mostly-quiet, we could be barefoot. We could be barefoot.
A finger-drawn notice on the back of a traveling and hauling truck, sooted, it said winning lottery numbers next week 11 21 2010 etc all of these numbers and all of these words and all of these people, all distilled in the quiet and by the spirits of this house. I don’t want to win no lottery. Done already won.
Galaxies and jewels all around. We woke up this morning! Like i said. Been out through the morning, no fog, just coating, out through the new-mud, through the champagne glasses, through the pearls of rain and dew, another patient dinosaur at our feet among the leaves, their amber eyes perfect. We met a dog and his human, too not-awake to be quiet, interrupting like i said - interrupting their morning. This house is mine, for now, for a moment, but this land has belonged to this man and his dog longer than i could know it.
The thing about the woods is, when you are in it, with your dog, it feels like it belongs to you, and it’s your own quiet no trespassing sign time, and i done trespassed for the fog that weren’t there. We won’t wake up to trespass no more. Every wildlife, every change and shift, like a single gift and sight i have never seen before.
We interrupted and trespassed and dreamed in the morning with no real fog. The alarm started at 6 am. We went back to bed after our 6:50 am walk. Two dreams just like an actual living life, a dog at the windowsill curious, and a strange man peering through once his dog had done. We got up and got out, but it never felt like i was awake til noon. This has been my experience for a few years now - dreams so strange and sometimes terrifying and at the edge of knowing if it were true or false. Dreams so mundane (mundance!) sometimes that its hard to distinguish later what really went on.
( i feel my feet are ruined by just a handful of years in the stables of racehorses - water and rinsing and drying and rinsing and walking) woke up this morning (thats three times now) and knew how to say. Every time i get up to walk around these days i feel like i’m not in my own body, but in my grandmother’s. Her slight and leaning and bending frame, like an old wind whipped pine, hovering over all of her young pines & peoples to help them instead of her own. She seemed as though she was always seeing right. People that see me, despite me and all of the strangeness i have, i smile, and they see her. All of her justice commonplace now. Was never, ever, somehow, still twistingly grangrishly about this fact: never my great grandfather i was named after. He was, his sister, his brothers, these long-and-tall-and-strong-folks. Simple, i guess. Plain-working. Proud? Angry? Strict. Providing. Despite now having and holding his name i am not him, and can’t resemble him, or any of his family, except barely by the truth of blood. I’m his great-granddaughter and i am more Welsh-looking-raised-by-wolves-family. And i never been mad about it. Only pining.)
All of that is to say, i can’t believe you could have read all of this. Thank you. My whole heart a tall person-named, strict & wirey & a thankful body of love. Grandmotherly or modernly. We seen a toad, after all of our meditations. He was hopping, nervous, outside of our reach and strange from our turtle-hours. Patient for photography & thankful for that. All of nature around us is alike, in some way that we do not immediately see (how could we.) Barefoot, amongst the sleeping snakes & syrup mosquitos. Barefoot into the hazy water, gladful for it’s cool-warm ripplings, like maybe if we go out this way in a semi-holy baptism, God will look on and smile, smile, smile.
Twelve Oaks Residency 3
It turns out the oaks here, in the front, they’re already named. Who? What? Why? When? Hard to tell to know. Faith, Hope, Charity. The storm came through, a couple days late, i can’t tell about mother nature or it’d be a sin. Like making fun of the teacher while they’re teaching. She is all powerful and she is assertive, and she came through. These trees, roots below & limbs above, they encircle us and it is hard to worry, with that knowing. They might be her children from longer than before hurricanes was invented.
so she came through. It rained, there was thunder, i had heard Walter Anderson say thunder rolls holy holy holy. This was more a growl, the way Wilbur grows at folks from the windows, because he feels deep down he should, but he loves everyone, he doesn’t - couldn’t - mean it, really. It were a growl. It weren’t a hymnal nor a psalm, either.
There was no wind to tear our crosses of power lines down. There was no wind to shake our foundations and our sidings and our roof. We always had our power - the lights never shimmered scared. Thankful it werent hurricane season. But the way i love this place i’d lay out on the roof if that meant i could be here somehow, in the peak of a hurricane, hollering and angry as hell.
(the truth is i have holes in my pants and paint on all of my clothes and for as safe as i feel i am always scared)
it seems as if all of nature is here to mirror. in a broader world, you can imagine what that might mean. here, the mirrors in the leaves cup the sky plainly. The water, all around, all secretive about how deep the mud is. Shattered with pine needles, same as champagne glasses. Taking photos, not seeing good yet, not knowing i am in that murk, too.
i am borrowing this computer that i’m typing on and photo editing on. The camera is borrowed. The house is borrowed. All of this time is mine, truly to my soul its mine, but its borrowed, too. Everything looks so fine on this camera, on this computer. Can’t quite tell if it’s just being here, where everything is better and more alive, or if it’s some technology that i won’t ever know, or if it’s rose glasses cuz this fountain of youth water helps the vision and your memory of it all (making everything looks sharp, and well exposed, and intentional, and ultimately, beautiful - in a world so exhausted by beauty)