Map of Becoming: A Daily Walking Ritual
Eagle Rock Lake, Questa, New Mexico
Cottonwood catkin ink, lake and Red River water, and mixed media cyanotype on paper on panel, sealed with cold wax
18 x 24 inches 
2025

What happens if one walks around the same tiny, high-desert lake four times a week? A few days into the experiment, I’m hooked.

This work maps a year and a half of early-morning walks at Eagle Rock Lake in Questa, New Mexico.

Guided by gentle curiosity, I arrive at the lake, stand at the water’s edge, then cross the first bridge over the Red River, pausing to let the moving water carry away worries. In this contemplative moment, my senses open and I begin to truly notice who is around me. I walk East listening to the birds - fog rises, frost glistens, snow flakes flutter, wind whips, river rushes, squirrels scamper, deer startle, leaves unfurl, buds swell, flowers bloom, sun shines, rain falls, leaves turn, seeds disperse. Sometimes I sit and draw what I see, write what I’m sensing. 

I reach the second bridge and pause, inhaling a sense of belonging before walking into a tall grove of ponderosa and fir trees. Along the North side of the lake, I walk the water’s edge, watching ripples, ducks, geese, dippers and sometimes river otters revel in this rare, desert, aquatic habitat. I pick up tangled fishing line, hooks and more. I often meet people and chat along this stretch. Then I walk beneath a canopy of narrow leaf cottonwoods and I’m back at my car.

This daily ritual cultivates personal resilience, wonder, reverence, and kinship with the more-than-human world and the rhythms of the seasons. Eagle Rock Lake is a place of confluences: ancient and contemporary, still and rushing waters, riparian corridor and state highway, humanness and wildness. I find a potency in these meeting points. Through drawing, painting, cyanotype, photography, sound, material experiments, and acts of care I explore the ties that connect us to place, one another, and the more than human.

Might individual resilience ripple outward into community resilience, and over time global resilience?

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