Friends –
Let me start off by saying that this is a painting of a real place near our home where Bob and I hiked on January 1st. If it seems surreal, perhaps I was influenced by the unbelievable actions that took place on the national stage this past week. Or maybe the spiritual overlay results from our intent to replicate at a distance what we normally would have been doing on New Year's Day. Either way, the necessity of adhering to landscape painting conventions seemed irrelevant.

Our usual intent for New Years Day is to be up in Yachats, Oregon to celebrate a Peace Hike with some extraordinary people, many of whom have become our good friends. For Yachats, the annual event serves as a renewal of peaceful intentions between Coastal Tribes and the Anglo community that had become the unwelcome occupier of their home. It is centered on the true story of Amanda who suffered enormously when she was forced to abandon her home and her daughter and march for miles barefoot along sharp volcanic rocks, arriving at a prison camp built for Native People in Yachats. She was not the only person forced to hike, but because she was blind she could not choose footing that would save her feet from becoming deeply cut. Her path to Yachats was therefore marked in blood. The Yachats Peace hike has grown to be a beautiful expression of where we all need to go on a much bigger scale and Amanda is commemorated in a statue in a gently beautiful grotto adjacent to the Oregon trail. Go There.

I think I will leave this story at that and instead provide you with a YouTube link that better demonstrates the emotion and beauty of this celebration. Note that Coos Bay tribal leader, Doc Slyter, is playing the flute that you will hear throughout.
Go There - You Tube

Go There.