I cannot say anything about the oil bleeding and vomiting into the Gulf of Mexico, because I cannot say enough.
How much unwitnessed suffering of bird and animal and fish, oil in the small eye, oil on the ruined wing, wild nests gone and gone. How much loss for the people on the shore, and in their fishing boats.
Detail, "Raising Morning" by Lou Rogers, my mother.
"Shaman," by Lou Rogers, my mother.
Memorial Day was the day my father was found in the river by a fisherman.
Those pins of fate around which lives turn -- his disappearance two weeks before was the first one in my life, though I was unaware, being a baby. My mother was 27, and how she managed I do not know. Though I believe she already dwelt largely in an internal world of tales and visions, and that she fled there.
I woke at 4 this morning with yet more clear a sense of the echoes down the many years of that first event in our tale. Things of great regret, yet perhaps necessary.
What do we do with these things, for our own healing and perhaps the helping of others?
I remember seeing great barges turned by tugs on the rivers of Pittsburgh, slow, slow and with so wide a wake. Turning a life seems as gradual, though with moments of sudden, forward clarity if one is fortunate and receptive. One thinks one is there, and one is not, yet. And the rocking of the waves stirred in the process, what currents and cross currents do they send out that wash through the lives of others in ways we cannot know.
I am convinced that this life is a dash in a continuum, that there are no throwaway beings, nary a flea, and so I think we have no choice but to pour all our misadventures into an alembic and strive to transmute them.
Will we never be who we might have been, or are we who we were meant to be, precisely because of our blunders and the patterns of mischance?
By Lou Rogers, my mother. Oil on canvas. I do not know the title.
The Morrigan, washing blood in the river. By Lou Rogers, my mother, oil on canvas.
Much to report of a remarkable workshop... soon.
Another version of the Wendigo, by Lou Rogers, my mother. A smaller painting, oil on canvas.
Wendigo by Lou Rogers, my mother. Oil on canvas.
A hungry wind was crying ‘round the house last night in bitter cold, tearing the skin off the snow. It put me in mind of this image. My mother painted her vision of the Wendigo at least twice, and I knew its name when I was very small. Her favorite tale of the Wendigo was the literary one by Algernon Blackwood. The Wendigo is a legendary being of Algonquian-speaking cultures. Its name appears in various forms: Windiga, Witiko, Weendigo...
By Lou P. Rogers (my mother), who loved the local Turkey Buzzards...
Lou Rogers, working at the Rudolph N. Rohn liturgical arts company in Pittsburgh, PA, in the early 1980's.
And on the Mountain, over Boulder, CO, at 20 years old. She saw the Mountains both as entities in themselves and as populated with numinous beings, which manifested in her paintings and writings.
"White Whale" by Lou Rogers. My mother painted this when I was quite small; it's one of the images I remember best, growing up. Happily it is still with me. I hang it again today. My mother loved Moby Dick, and spent a good bit of time in high school limping,
being Captain Ahab. All her life she pursued the numinous. The solitude in her work speaks not of loneliness but of relationship with the vast and transcendental.
...that squeeze the heart: I was sorting all manner of things today, and found a loose, bright orange 'post-it' note wandering the drifts of paper. Upon it my departed mother had written, in capital letters:
GLOBULOUS GRAY BEING.
What the label was for, I know not. But that was the mark of my mother, and no mistake. We'll see if I come across the Being, as well.
My Mother's take on Frodo and Samwise. Oil on canvas.
"He Is Not Here"
'He is not Here' by Lou Rogers. Oil on canvas.
Thank you, kind and faithful Friends, for sticking with me through this time. I'm
hoping to have a memorial show of my mother's work in Boulder, Colorado,
September 14th 2007, at the Myriad Gallery. This must be finalized, but that's my aim.
Soon I should be posting more images of my own creatures, too.
My best to you all,
Forest
'Bast' by Lou
Arthur Machen was one of Lou's favorite authors, and her painting above was
inspired by him.
And then there’s social media, of course:
