Trace - 2/21/17


The word for this week is "trace," in the sense of the passing of something.

My drawing is of a desert storm. I was thinking about stormy weather because I went to Yosemite with some friends for Presidents' Day weekend, and it was snowy and foggy. Whenever I visit Yosemite I think about the passing of time. The park is significant to me (as it is to a lot of people) because I used to visit every summer with my family.

There is a writeup in The New Yorker that was published earlier this winter about the death of a sequoia in a winter storm. I had not "met" the tree that the essay is about but the way that Nathan Heller writes about it describes how I feel about Yosemite in my most solemn, macabre moments.

Visiting a place again and again, year after year, annunciates the slow progress of human growth. A kid that you recall shows up, abruptly, with the problems and the powers of a woman or a man.

That’s what the tunnel tree in Big Trees State Park meant to me: the function of eternity to graduate the progress of a life. 
....

Old trees do not give life meaning, but they give it scale. They force us to acknowledge that “tradition” bears a very human weight. Our history is a weak conception of the past.

Yosemite February 19, 2017

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