My Daily Walk Under Quarantine, an art essay by Jada Griffin

Why is the measure of desire longing? It’s been months since anyone touched me, a Sunday afternoon in Taos back in October of 2019, to be precise. He was a musician with Ulysses on his night table. James Joyce is not for the shrinking violet. “I like women of all shapes and sizes,” he said, “but we’re not romantically suited.” That was almost the end of that.

To thrive during a “Shelter in Place” directive under a global pandemic is counter-intuitive. One step following another, the road climbing, my thighs feel the aching pleasure of being worked. Passing 1313 on Calle Kaa Tay Poeh, a house with a coiled garden hose and a folding canvas chair on the porch, the odor of cigarettes and aftershave reaches me. It is only just past six am. He’s up early. “He” is a stranger watching CNN in bed. I know this because the shade is up, and the lurid colors of television flash through his bug screen. Two doves, the striped male being fancier, peck along the grassy verge. Their movements look choreographed, resembling a pas de deux. Almost tame, they won’t fly away until I’m unusually close, close enough to caress them and sense their beating hearts.

Breathing easily at 7,000 feet, heat infuses the morning and sweat beads on my upper lip. Never seeing a human as I approach Wheatfield With Crows, the pasture reminiscent of Van Gogh’s famous painting by the same name, the first “modern” painting, a tractor remains in place beside the tarp-covered nursery. I am a living scarecrow. A raven, perched high up on an electrical pole sets a murder of birds aloft from the center, plowed-bit of field, black wings moving away to the distance at fractal angles to the crop. Shifting to the bare bones of a bleached tree, the sentinel’s beak is pointed and sharp, and a tiny, twitching eye glistens against jet. As Covid-19 ravages the planet, is it possible I’m acquiring corvid-mind?

Shaded by cottonwoods, the air is cooler brushing along my forearm. Water glides over stone in Pojoaque Creek like creativity. Under the circumstances, its music is an embrace, a kindness. An empty liquor bottle, one of those hotel-refrigerator kinds is snagged in the reeds. I should pick it up, take it away, but I don’t want to touch what has touched someone else’s lips; brown lips perhaps, like the lips of the North African boy who played my harmonica against my mother’s instincts when I was young.

Bent over a stump, what at first mimics a bear sets my chest to racing. An old-timer tells me that caws in the distance are those of peacocks, “Pavos reales, in Spanish, they breed like rabbits,” he teases. I envision exotic beasts quivering, feathers spread wide in the full glory of daylight.

Walking is best before seven. Blue-grey mist hangs between snow-dappled peaks like mystery. Dogs, less responsive to my presence, prefer to stay curled in a ball, evoking an English hedgehog. Horses too, steam emanating from their nostrils, want the warmth of the barn. My four-legged friends recognized me though, expecting a breakfast apple. The dominant mustang is the chocolate-and-cream paint. Lifting his majestic head, he strides enthusiastically toward me. Even his mane asymmetrically draped to one side, is multi-colored. I breathe in the smell of Equus caballus mingled with damp soil, hay, and manure. Imagine being astride his back, no halter, no stirrups, not even a blanket between my skin and his, legs fused to his flank because I was never meant to get off.

Silence has sound. Perhaps I never knew this. Silence is the space-defining sound, the breath in between notes. Wind combs the leaves on branches, fingers running through hair, creating soft, rain-like rhythms, the seeds rolling inside an Indian gourd.

Avian calls are coded messages in the language of another country, an untamed and velvety place where wild, animal intelligence flows from an open and connected brain, as hot, fluid, and flexible as the magma within Earth herself. Renewed intensity invites perception and brings present-moment awareness grounded in space-time. Each mesa, flower, cloud, and creature reverberates with an immediacy of its own as if inhabited by the mystical energy of gods. “Be here now,” everything whispers, “Discover the sky from the sky, discover the blade of grass from the blade of grass.”

Red gate opens to vacant field. Zero breeze. No sleeping dog on Elvis Presley Blvd., a dirt track. A man burning clippings does not hear me say, “Hello.” A hushed and spooky mare stands among the shadows. One blue glove lies discarded in the hedge. A hawk, white mouse clutched in its mouth, flies down the center of the trail.

Coming into view, an ancient, crumbling adobe has cactus growing on its roof. I spy a mini-retablo mounted on a railing. A tiny plastic baby sits on a tiny plastic swing under an archway decorated with tiny plastic roses. Yellow ribbons scattered on the floor, the scene resembles a manger, a child just birthed into a new dawn. A converted VW hippy bus goes by, but no one is driving it. The top removed, row upon row of sprouting plants are in the back. As I turn to watch it disappear over the ridge, I see the license plate reads, DAISY. The voice of Chavela Vargas singing “La Llorona” drifts from an open window, fading slowly in the thin mountain air.

Am I alive only in someone else’s dream?

A person can’t help but feel the sensuous beauty that is all around. It fills the void of human contact, the longing. Green, how I love you green. Green hills. Green fields. Green flesh. Green, how I want you green. On this morning, green is greener. Or is it that my eyes are more open?

Words: Jada Griffin

Jada Griffin is a painter, dancer, photographer, and a published writer and poet. Read her tribute essay to Thomas Paul Augustine, The Man Who Named The Pearl in PORTLAND INTERVIEW magazine.

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Red Gate, photograph by Jada Griffin

Wheatfield With Crows, photograph by Jada Griffin

Silence All Around, photograph by Jada Griffin