Even before I left Cape May I made a decision that I hoped would help me stay in the creative mode and continue to work on my poetry instead of letting it sit until the next workshop came around. I decided to spend one day each month visiting a different art museum or exhibition gallery, walking among paintings and sculptures and installations that express without words and seeing what they might evoke from me.

This came from one of the exercises at the Cape May workshop that particularly intrigued me -- that of choosing a postcard image and letting it lead you into writing. Peter Murphy, the director of the event, asks for one picture postcard from each participant in the year following a Getaway. He now has many cartons full of them, which he dumps onto several banquet tables. The suggestion is to choose an image that either repels or attracts and work it into a poem.

I chose a postcard announcing a gallery show opening. The piece pictured is called “The Course of My Life,” a 1998 work by Eric Rhein. It is 9” x 6” x  1/2” and is described as being of “paper and appropriated object.”

It is indeed a sheet of paper (the 9x6 part), a plain piece of a certain yellowish cast (against the gray ground where it is hanging) with slight dogears and a small ragged section along one edge. In other words, it looks as if it has been carried in a flexible folder inside a soft backpack. Just below and slightly right of center is a very dark green runcinate leaf  which has probably been dipped in some kind of fixative to prevent its deterioration.

That’s it -- a sheet of paper with a leaf (an “appropriated object”) stuck on it.

I was attracted to it by the title and by trying to figure out how a leaf stuck on a piece of paper represents the course of a life. I like to think that I am very sophisticated when it comes to art and that I understand that the creative process is difficult to understand. My own medium -- words -- is used every day by every person who can speak or read or write, and I know that for a “word artist” it can take as many years to produce a haiku as it does to produce a novel of 500 pages.

But I wonder sometimes, and I know this might sound naive, about the process by which one arrives at the idea of sticking a leaf on a piece of paper in such a fashion that when one is finished, one has a piece of art instead of a leaf stuck on a piece of paper.

So at Cape May I worked with the image, appropriated some objects from the beach, and in the end used another appropriated object -- a shopping list I found in the bottom of a grocery cart about fifteen years ago -- as the basis of a poem.

When I returned from Cape May I began planning my year of gallery visits. I live in an area so rich in this regard that I could visit a different excellent venue once each month for the next ten years without venturing more than about two hours from home. My cast came off yesterday, and so today, after my Thursday morning spiritual support group session, I drove downtown and miraculously found a place to park in front of the Pennsylvania State Museum.

One floor of this facility is devoted to the natural history of Pennsylvania, including dioramas detailing the movement of humans into this area and the evolution of Native American culture. There is also much information about how archaeological work is performed and historic preservation accomplished.

I had seen these exhibits before, but until today I never thought they had anything to do with me. The earliest inhabitants of this region came with here around 15,000 years ago, when melting glaciers still fed what is now the Great Lakes and the animals they hunted were the sort most of us know from seeing Northern Exposure. But they paddled their canoes down the same river I grew up beside, walked in forests that look not a lot different from the one which borders out property, and lived in the shadow of the same mountain I can see from my study window.

When I meditated in this space on January 1 about my Celtic ancestors and their experience of moving into the darkness of winter on a rocky North Atlantic beach, I spoke of my need to “be more grounded, to work some nourishment into my roots, to know more fully the place where I stand.” 

Loren Cruden in The Spirit of Place writes, “Anywhere you enact ceremony or live, there are ancestors of place to consider. In some places these spirits are formidable presences . . . keep in mind that just because there are no physical dwellings in a place doesn’t mean that no one lives there.”

I came away from my first Gallery Walk of The Year of Writing Seriously with a new awareness of those who walked this land before me. And when I say that I mean very specifically, this land, this tiny section of a former meadow not far from an ancient river, which rises up into an old-growth forest where the deer and the pheasant still play. I have often felt that I do not walk the meadow and the woodland paths alone. Now I know.