East Entrance to Pojoaque Pueblo Under Lockdown, New Mexico, April 2020. Image available as a 3 x 5” greeting card in a box of 9 cards & 10 envelopes at $22/box. Contact artist for orders.
The photograph, Closed in and Closed Out was taken on April 7th, 2020. It is the east entrance to Pojoaque Pueblo on the east side of the freeway, just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. My home is along a narrow, winding dirt road, Old Callejon Road, that begins just to the right, and that leads to the legendary High Road to Taos at its other end. Since lockdown, I’ve been in the habit of taking a daily walk in the hills above my house. Beautiful trails climb and meander through land owned by Pojoaque Pueblo, whose residents are always welcoming. On April 7th in my neighborhood, things changed. Access, both to walking trails and through the pueblo itself by car was halted. Today, it’s strictly controlled by this dramatic, padlocked gate at one entrance, and police in squad vehicles at the other. Only tribal members are allowed through.
The photograph to me embodies the stark reality of our current generic condition of separation. But in the American southwest, more and more news is circulating about the singular plight of Indigenous communities, in particular the Navajo, whose nation straddles 27,000 square miles across New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. Pandemics affect marginalized communities more than others and increase existing inequities. Covid-19 is the not the great equalizer. In these contemporary times each of us is closed in and closed out, both literally and figuratively, but the degree of our condition of separation varies greatly. This could be the felt reality that my photograph conveys.
Words and Photography: Jada Griffin
Red Gate, taken along the road to Nambe, New Mexico, 2020. Image available as a 3 x 5” greeting card in a box of 9 cards & 10 envelopes at $22/box. Contact artist for orders.
My Daily Walk Under Quarantine, an Art Essay inspired by Red Gate
Why is longing the measure of desire? It’s been months since anyone has a 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; but one step following another, the road climbing, my thighs feel the aching pleasure of being worked. On Calle Kaa Tay Poeh, passing 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 just past six am. and he’s up early, “he” being a stranger watching CNN in bed. I know this because the shade is up, and the lurid colors of television flash through the window. 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 almost caress them and sense their beating hearts.
Breathing easily at 7,000 feet, heat infuses the morning and sweat beads on my upper lip. Not seeing a single human, I approach a pasture reminiscent of Wheatfield With Crows, Van Gogh’s famous work recognized as the first “modern” painting. In this very New Mexican tableau, 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 central plowed area 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 coursing in a creative mind; 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 graceful North African boy whom I invited to play my harmonica in spite of my mother’s racism when I was young.
Bent over a stump, what at first mimics a bear sets my chest to racing. An old-timer rises up and 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 mysteriously between snow-dappled peaks. Dogs, unresponsive 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 recognize 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 multicolored. I breathe in the smell of Equus caballus mingled with damp soil, hay, and manure. I 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 indigenous American gourd.
Avian calls are coded messages in the language of another country, an untamed and silky 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 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 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 and Photography: Jada Griffin
Nest with Feathers, New Mexico, 2020. Image available as a 3 x 5” greeting card in a box of 9 cards & 10 envelopes at $22/box. Contact artist for orders.
Ephemeral, New Mexico, 2020. Image available as a 3 x 5” greeting card in a box of 9 cards & 10 envelopes at $22/box. Contact artist for orders.
Sunday Blue, New Mexico, 2020. Image available as a 3 x 5” greeting card in a box of 9 cards & 10 envelopes at $22/box. Contact artist for orders.
Morning Nourishment Along the Road to Nambe, New Mexico, 2020. Image available as a 3 x 5” greeting card in a box of 9 cards & 10 envelopes at $22/box. Contact artist for orders.
White Feather, near Yachats, Oregon Coast, 2019. Image available as a 3 x 5” greeting card in a box of 9 cards & 10 envelopes at $22/ox. Contact artist for orders.
Cornfield with Crows, after Van Gogh. Along the road to Nambe, New Mexico, 2020. Image available as a 3 x 5” greeting card in a box of 9 cards & 10 envelopes at $22/box. Contact artist for orders.