New title starts today: Apprentice to a Mountain
Hello and happy May (Beltane!) to you all, the sun is peaking out between big, billowy clouds this morning, after days of rain. Minuscule maple leaves are beginning to emerge, creating a glorious electric green wash on the mountain sides, here in Marlboro, Vermont.
Today we will start in with book number two (if you subscribe to my SubStack, you will have access to this new book and to the Archive with the first book, A Maternal Line). Apprentice to a Mountain was written and the paintings were made between 2020-2022.
Here’s a short description of this new book, written by my editor, so you know where you are headed, somewhat:
“This book is a place-based narrative set in rural Vermont, offering a poetic picture of a woman painting a mountain, and becoming a mountain in mid-life, through the process of learning to make her own natural paint pigments, during a pandemic and growing climate crisis. It asks the question, how can we become intimate with our bittersweet and temporal existence? Seventeen works of original art, made with hand-crafted inks, illustrate journal entries, short essays and poetry of rural life, the creative process, and the tender human condition inside a crisis.”
Thank you for your support and enjoy the first half of chapter one!
Apprentice to a Mountain
Paintings and writing by Jess Weitz
(Please do not use the images and text of this book without author permission.)
Here, where the land sings, where the worlds meet, is a way to be that resonates with both the soil and the soul. Making a garden sing, for the unseen to be present, is a simple act of welcoming the worlds our ancestors knew, the spirits of the land as well as the beings of light. I have found it is simplest through an openness of heart and a deep knowing that we are surrounded, nourished, and met in ways beyond our rational minds: a multidimensional kinship. The colors of the flowers then reveal a vibrancy beyond the physical, and even the stones in the garden feel awake. --Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, Sufi Elder
Chapter One
Glacial
We are witnesses to this opening of time, vertical and horizontal at once. Between these crossbars of geology is a silent sermon on how the world was formed. Seas advanced and retreated. Dunes now stand in stone. Volcanoes erupted and lava cooled. Garnets shimmer and separate schist from granite. It is sculptured time to be touched, even tasted, our mineral content...
-- Terry Tempest Williams, Red
The I that walks with two legs across this land is a time capsule. Jessica Winslow Weitz born May 2, 1972, alive today, is an accumulation of time in a flesh suit. My body moves through influences inside and out, a collection of causes and conditions. Many generations’ cells assembled inside me, setting the future into motion.
I am an evolving carbon life form, dancing with the beautiful geometry of this physical world, among millions of other forms. A being that ingests life in order to live. A being that holds the saline waters of the ocean, the iron of the earth’s ochres, the minerals of the soil, energized by the sun and swayed by the moon. Sprinkled with stardust.
What is the difference between a mountain and a pile of rocks?
Perhaps a mountain is a time capsule like me. A dynamic being born out of the causes and conditions of this planet, born out of tectonic shifts, expanded and eroded simultaneously. It’s body is made up of minerals, fossils, ocean clay, rotted trees, boulders, held together by gravity.
Time is an accrued stratum of horizontal slabs, piled one upon another, of skin, rock, vegetation and experience. It is a thing and everything all at once.
March 2020, when the snows melts and mud appears
So many hawks have appeared close to me in the last week - inviting me to gain a higher, pulled back perspective, to be calm, and decisive. The health of one has become the health of many as the Covid virus spreads across the world.
A new normal is shifting rapidly as people quarantine, a crashing viral wave across continents. What orientation am I invited to have?
Feel the beat of the planet. Leave no stone unturned. Your senses are heightened. Like an animal, smell the path. This is a time of spiral. The pattern is changing. Maintain an inner compass. Some people around you may feel paralyzed. Stay grounded.
Prayers of light, for all beings are fed by your acts of meditation. Hold your center and radiate out. Open your heart wide, taking in all of life’s flow. Look for love in each circumstance.
Is this virus as serious as it seems?
Many will die. This is the great balancer, necessary for life is death. Rock with it and witness. Stay away from human crowds. Simplify as much as possible. Watch as temperatures change and adjust
No one can corral this beast. It has to take its course for a reason. Trust the flow of nature, but with vigilance. Your mind must be released. Believing you can control the outcome is false, awareness yes, precise action, yes, rumination no.
Here are the books on my bedside table right now. Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud Moment by Moment by David Budbill Red by Terry Tempest Williams Being-Time by Shinshu Roberts Music of Silence by Devid Steindl-Rast I am an artist librarian and this is what happens when I write a book. My mind weaves in geology, poetry, spiritual guidance, the desert, and wondering about being on this land, in this body, with unseen forces all around. Throw in daily life on a Vermont mountain and my art practice, and we have entered the space of this book together. I live on a mountain of metamorphic rock. I pause and read this sentence a few times. Metamorphic - of or marked by metamorphosis Metamorphosis - a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one, by natural or supernatural means
I am writing to you from inside a planet in crisis. I am writing to you from inside a pandemic. I am writing to you from inside Vermont, in the southeast of the state, to be exact. I am writing to you from inside middle age. I am writing to you from this incarnation of a life form. I am writing to you from inside a family.
My family’s house sits in a large field. The house contains myself, my husband, our teenage son and daughter, and two dogs. There is a barn directly behind our house, in which I create art in the summer, our son creates music upstairs, and our barn cat lives. My husband grew up in the house next door, where his parents still reside.
Part of the field, the part between our house and my in-laws’ house, holds a large cultivated plot of vegetables, berries, and fruit trees. But most of the field is open and wild, cut only once a year to keep it from reverting back to forested land. It is a beautiful canvas of metamorphosis itself.
The field invites a contemplation of the hundreds of shades of green.
fern green
sap green
forest green
hunter green
moss green
olive green
jade green
mint green
A seasonal succession of plants, a raucous expression all entangled together.
chattering chrysalis
of last year’s beech leaf
wrapped around itself
dangling from botanical thread
harbinger of the turning wheel
to the three awakening buds
tips of green in golden horns
unfurling to the sun
one branch, one tree, one forest, one land
a tender simultaneous expression
of how the juicy robust fool
merges into the desiccated quaking sage
one minute, one day, one year, one eon
Late Spring through Fall, this alpine meadow is the source of both my inspiration and my color, my literal pigments. I make my own inks from this land and through this act, I am able to directly paint in concert with a cross-section of life on this mountain.
I guess it all started with curiosity and admiration for the raw beauty of my surroundings. A desire to make art with nature, from inside nature.
But I am not a craftsperson or a scientist. I am not part of a tradition of weaving baskets from reeds. And I got a D in college Biology class. I needed to find my own way.
The title of my painting below is - late July watching a wasp nest nestled in the window, blueberries ripe, hot sun with a light breeze, butterflies moving from blossom to blossom, working with the soft energy of little sleep. It’s made with poppy, lady’s mantle, bloodroot, quince blossom, and clematis.
A painting as an expression of time.