Yukon - Large in your own life

Total expansiveness -- Tombstone Range, Yukon Territory

A dear friend wrote me the following words before I left for my artist residencies in northern Canada this summer, and I have carried them like a souvenir seashell in my pocket for months:
  

"So much movement -so much change- so much magic

You are living in the middle of the best magic and we all can tell 

because the world is giving you everything you need 
not many people can travel this path with you 
and not many ever travel this way at all.

  

Be large in your own life - the universe says so."

Small home, big world -- mixed media on paper by Rebecca Barfoot

It is mid-November and I am back in southwest Colorado, savoring old friendships while also longing for the north-land and the slow earth pace of life there. This morning I woke thinking yet again, be large in your own life.  Me, you, are we doing this? 

I know that now is the time and it's all about leaping and bounding instead of walking with measured constraint across the open vistas of our lives.    

Large as life / bull caribou, Big Alex Ridge, Olgilvie Mountains - Yukon

Least Weasel - smallest carnivore in North America! - from a backpacking trip to Fold Lake, Blackstone Uplands - Yukon

I remind myself that a leap like this is what delivered me to the northern latitudes this summer, and what allowed richly cross-pollinated opportunities in art, ecology, and education to present themselves so that my original 5 week engagement flowed quickly into 5 months!!!  Back in the States, a similar trajectory continues and I've just been riding the waves, letting life spill over while landing softly and solidly and bound by gratitude. 

Rooted and Rising -- mixed media with Yukon blueberry dye on paper -- by Rebecca Barfoot

One of the things I noticed immediately in the Yukon was the striking juxtaposition of an impossibly vast macro-landscape with the equally luminous world of the pixie-sized microcosm - and how each biome informs the other.  The tangle of sphagnum moss, bog cranberry and reindeer lichen at my feet describes the endless arc of unbroken wilderness spinning to the horizon even as they seem to exist separately and as opposites.  I know this relationship is important to explore in the work to come, and that the intimate as a gateway to the infinite mirrors the idea of small lives lived large.
  

Dall sheep - ewes and young - dwarfed in the immensity  -- Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon

Bearberry foliage, high tundra -- Blackstone Uplands, Yukon

Autumn highlights and color swoon -- Discovery Ridge -- Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon

A fairy forest of wintergreen called 'Single Delight' - late summer near Dawson City, Yukon

Be large in your own life and the work you choose to do, I think, because the world needs this from all of us right now. 

Nurse log comes to life with sphagnum moss, pixie cup lichen, bearberry and more - Klondike River Valley, Yukon

Hang on, Yukon -- mixed media on canvas by Rebecca Barfoot

Saxifrage -- brilliant, adaptable survivors of the north  -- Angelcomb Peak, Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon

Writes Sally Kempton, Buddhist scholar and Dharma teacher, in her recent book Awakening Shakti:  "Our awareness is not only connected to the power of awareness in other creatures, but it is also a miniature version of the great awareness that is the source of all that is. The subtle worlds that lie between the transcendent vastness and the physical universe are also inside our own subtle bodies, ready to be experienced by anyone who has the stamina and grace to enter into the inner world of the heart."

And the heart of the world, I would add. The microcosm coursing through our ancient aliveness, firing the pulse of our being.  We share this and yet we have forgotten it.  It is time to remember. 

Swallowtail at rest on caribou moss --  Olgilvie Mountains, Yukon

Small Work, Big Ideas: YUKON

Late night after rain, North Klondike River valley, Tombstone Mountains, Yukon

A sliver of blue braves the milky white cloud-sky this morning, giving me hope as I unfold myself into the wet world outside my tent.  Day after day delivers rain in these Yukon mountains and a nearly sun-filled pause in the low dome of moisture leaves me grinning.  I can cling to blue and its possibilities. 

The bluest blue.  I live for these days!!!

 I didn’t know I’d be spending the whole summer in northern Canada.  It’s become late August.  I am pioneering an artist in residence program at Tombstone Territorial Park, camping and working with the park’s Interpretive Centre on arts/ecology education while also tending the fires of my own creativity.  I’m exploring the land as much as possible, smitten by a revolving presentation of rainbows and ethereal twilight as we move deeply into fall. 

Rainbow and oncoming storm near North Fork Pass, Tombstone Mountains, Yukon

Beneath the daily flow of art and teaching I'm privately trying wrap my head/heart around the sense of raw wilderness that – delightfully and astonishingly – surrounds me here.  It is truly awesome, in the same way that glaciers and icebergs were for me in Greenland.   I am small here, surrounded by dreams as fast and wide as the waterways that cleave these moss-covered hills.  And I am learning to let the earth cradle me when it feels like nothing else can or will.

"Drunken Spruce / Forest Family", acrylic on tree-free paper

Tundra Raven, Olgilvie Mountains, Yukon.  Mixed media on tree-free paper.

 I’ve stumbled upon what I call a last place, an ecosystem still incredibly undisturbed.  We have no reference point for this in the South - the lower 48 - and I understand how fragmented everything has become. Wilderness like this takes your breath away, leaving you mute and grasping for a tether to guide you home across the tracks of moose, caribou, grizzly and wolf.

Caribou antlers fall where they may in Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon.

I haven’t had much online access here this last month.  We are solar powered and off grid at the visitor center where I work.  I’m finally returning to social media and this blog, overwhelmed with how to begin and what to say of my current experience in the north.  I know that photographs are a great place to start, though they reveal only the surface rather than the soul of these cloud-topped mountains, spruce forest, and sub-arctic tundra.  

"Small home / big big world", mixed media on watercolor paper

Artist’s residencies are one part making/creating and one part looking and seeing.  I'm constantly alert as if I’m scanning for grizzly on the horizon.  Right now my days are heavily weighted to accommodate a growing cache of impressions to be doled out slowly in the coming months.  I am the alpine pika stockpiling food for winter.  My voluminous notes, research and outdoor adventures in the Territory are crucial sustenance to carry me forward.  Creating art from raw experience, distilling wonder into something articulate and palatable while capturing the ephemeral - it takes time.

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"Ravens over the Continental Divide", Tombstone Mountains, Yukon.  Mixed media on watercolor paper.