There is Beauty in Decay

There is power and possibility in the process of decay
Breaking down what no longer matters,
Releasing energy from life patterns and rituals
That no longer enrich a life,

The past has lessons we can learn from
Yet often the past is
colored in a rosy glow or 
Darkly veiled and skews the truth.
Romantic notions of what used to be
Are not helpful to those looking to find a way forward
In dealing with the challenges ahead.

Better to view the past with a clear eye
See it as a part of the learning curve,
Accept the shame or the blame for mistakes made, 
Find forgiveness for wrongs committed.
Celebrate the wins and let go of the losses
Remembering the anniversaries and memories.

Let Mother Nature restore the balance.
She weaves magic with what gets left behind,
There is no limit to her patience,
And no lack of resources she can employ.
She encourages decay and decomposition
To become fertilizer for what comes next.

We too, are a resourceful lot,
Building new worlds,
Creating new technologies,
Never a lack of ingenuity.
If we could find a way to work with Mother Nature
Instead of at cross purposes, 
This world be a grand place to live.

By Cheryl McDonald, 2023

If you can listen to me read this poem by clicking the link below.

It is Wednesday, and I have just finished, I think, this new digital painting. I missed writing last week, there was a lot of chaos around my home because a feral mama kitty and her 6 babies decided to move in under the bushes of my front yard, and I have been working at catching them all and taking them to the shelter where they can get the care and a new home they deserve. So it was a little hard to focus on art and poetry. However, I did start this piece above, and I think it is finished.

These are my original photos of this house taken in about 2013 from my series of Abandoned Places. According to Bodie.com, the house belonged to Bob Conway who owned a freight business that ran between Bodie and locations in Nevada and he was one of the few that remained till sometime after the start of World War II. The final image began with the photo on the right. Even though the decay is very apparent, there is great beauty here also. The decaying process in the room is full of textures and colors that are reminiscent of the desert I live in. Mother Nature is working her magic to make this abandoned place part of the landscape again, and I just decided to help it along a little by adding local sage, garden-grown daffodils, and sand dunes to add to the story.

The photo on the left is of the front of the house and I love the railing lined with Hops vines and lots of desert sage growing out front. In my rendering of the digital painting, I decided to add some of that sage which may someday make its way into the residence as well.

People often ask me “Why did people leave so many of their things behind?” If you have ever been to Bodie, you probably can figure that out. Even today, the road to Bodie from Hwy 395 is 13 miles of dirt road and in the winter Bodie gets snowed in on a regular basis. And yet this somewhat prosperous mining town lived from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. A wealthy gold mining town supplied by freight companies that shipped in goods from California’s West Coast and across the country from the East. When it’s time to move, imagine trying to pack your ornate furnishings, lace curtains, and even toys of your children in a wagon to take with you. It would be difficult and expensive to ship them, and when you’re not sure what your new life will be like, not really feasible. Mining in California was a precarious and dangerous business, filled with hard labor going deep underground, using poisonous chemicals to extract the gold which then had to be transported hundreds of miles to process and sell. It was risky and often not a good way to make a living.

Few of us have been in a similar place before in life, however, we have been through many other life experiences like life-changing illnesses, losing a job, a marriage, or just deciding to move to a new location to take on a dream you have always wanted to pursue. In all of these cases and many others, we find that the things we have collected may no longer suit the life we want or need to now pursue.

If you think about it on a grander scale, we are now in a time of great upheaval, climate change is forcing us to think and live differently. It’s hard to make the adjustments needed because we don’t like thinking about change. We are used to jumping in the car whenever we want, used to just using plastics because they are convenient, throwing things away when we are tired of them or we want to try the latest and greatest. All the while the weather is getting more untenable and the droughts and floods are affecting world economics and causing mass migrations because people can no longer make a life where they are. It’s not just because they want to move, they have to move in order to survive, a lot like those people long ago in Bodie.

We are in a major time of change for this planet and all the people and creatures on it. We really need to push as hard as we can to change hearts and minds to make the shift toward necessary adjustments and we ourselves need to do more to make personal lifestyle changes that are more sustainable before we too, have to leave our homes in hopes of survival.

There is hope, and we can do this, we just need to get clear and stop making excuses. Think about the changes we have already made, we are making progress, however, what can you and I do to make more? How can we help to be the solution instead of the problem, not just leave it to our children to fix?

Have a happy day,

Cheryl