MINERALARTS: Iron and Thorn

We spent last weekend at Joshua Tree National Park, hiking among the giant yuccas and granite tors and  photographing blooming cacti and Mojave wildflowers that were new to me.  The park is not grazed, so desert plants are astonishingly abundant, diverse, and healthy:  wildflowers, flowering shrubs, cacti, desert trees, and of course the famous giant yuccas.  I put a few photos from our trip on this page:

http://www.mineralarts.com/cactus/JoshuaTreeNP.html

I especially enjoyed the hike to the 49 Palms Oasis.  The trail wanders over rocky desert hills covered in brittlebush and barrel cacti, offering occasional tantalizing glimpses of a cluster of native Fan Palms (Washingtonia filifera) glittering green in the morning light.  Once among them, I was amazed at their size.  This tree is cultivated throughout the Southwest, but the wild ones have much more presence - they are taller and their trunks are more supple.  The huge leaves create a cool wind that constantly stirs them with surf noises, yet their shade holds the same ancient peace that I found among the tiny palmettos on the North Carolina coast.  On the way home, southern California’s blasted emptiness (largely man-made) hit me full force, and the memory of the tiny, fragile palm oasis became all the more precious.

The golden glow of this Blazing Star (Menzelia involucrata) captures the Mojave desert light very well:

The two great horned owl nests that I pass on my morning walk are active now, with three young birds in each.  I feel honored to have two nests so close to my house, and watching them has become a wonderful spring tradition.  The young birds watch us with suspicion:

Even this Needlespine Cactus (Echinomastus erectocentrus var. erectocentrus) is a reminder that this time of year belongs to the owls:

April marks the first anniversary of our exploration of the Empire Mountains.  This is a small mountain range (geologically, the northeastern extension of the Santa Ritas) and the highway passes very close to it, but access to the interior is only by hiking and (to a limited extent) by 4WD vehicle.  We have found unique plant communities, several rare plants, and a great diversity of common desert, grassland, and mountain flora.  I have been developing a plant list for the area (as far as I know, this has never been done).  

http://www.mineralarts.com/cactus/EmpireMtsFlora.html

Although not intended to illustrate every species, the webpage includes photos of some of the showier flowers, and will eventually include photos and descriptions of typical Empire Mt. plant communities. 

Here’s a new set of six forged iron cone bells that are designed to be tied onto a drum, a bag, or anything that needs some earthy metallic rattling energy.  The three small cones have a very high, tinkly sound, and the larger ones have a more assertive clank. They are photographed on a copper/iron ore boulder in my yard.

This is the desert anemone, Anemone tuberosa.  It is a close relative of the wood anemone (A. nemorosa) of the Eastern forest, but the desert plant is more succulent and usually has some pink shading on the flowers.  Today I gathered anemone leaves for a tincture.  The active compound is anemonin, which slows the heart rate and relaxes smooth muscle.  It is used in tiny amounts, since too much can easily be toxic.  It is surprisingly effective for calming anxiety or even for treating panic attacks. 

Seeing the plant, this use is not surprising, since the flowers seem to glow, pouring out the loving, living radiance of the early spring earth itself.  They appear in the most unlikely places - the dry, gravelly bajada slopes where their companions are the most drought-tolerant cacti, such as this Needlespine (Echinomastus erectocentrus var. erectocentrus). 

The cactus in the photo is a giant of its kind, since most plants of this species have only one stem.  If you look closely, you can see anemone leaves at the base of the cactus.  Each anemone plant has several leaves (usually three) and a single flowerstalk with a tiny leaf on it.  The tiny tuber is several inches underground, where it can endure extreme heat, occasional hard freezes, and months without rain.  In very wet years, plants grow several leaves and may be over a foot tall, but even in such ideal conditions, they vanish by mid-April.  In dry years, such as the past two springs, the plants do not appear at all.  This year, the anemone plants are two to six inches tall, and the leaves are quite small.  For the tincture, I collected a single leaf from half a dozen plants, leaving the flowers, roots, and remaining leaves undisturbed.

Wildflowers are beginning to bloom under the saguaros - golden poppies, purple larkspur and lupine, dark blue chia, yellow corydalis, and others.  Many of them have close relatives in the eastern deciduous forest.  In the desert, the show of color is all the more welcome because it happens only when there is sufficient winter rain, which is about once every three years.  The photo is Ragged Rock Flower, Crossosoma bigelovii.  It is a flowering shrub that grows in vertical cracks in cliffs and outcrops.  For most of the year (or all the time in dry years), its thin, arching silver twigs and small, sparse leaves may go unnoticed.  But when it blooms, the white flowers sparkle against the dark rock, and their heavy fragrance smells like honeysuckle - a sweet contrast to the musky-medicinal jojoba flowers and bursage plants that grow all around them.

Mostly cloudy today, but cleared up in time to view the first half of the lunar eclipse.  Cloud veils are drifting in now, obscuring the red moon at totality, but we got a clear photo first, just as the coyotes began to howl.

Molten silver in the moment before melting, when the metal is still reflective, yet glows red from within…

Old carnelian bead, with the ghost of a white hydration rind from long burial in the earth…

Hammered copper vessel, riverworn, washed up among rocks, filled with glowing coals…

My moon oracles will need eclipse pictures - maybe Sarcographa tricosa or S. labyrinthica for the lichen oracle.  For the Sticks and Stones, perhaps a picture that combines both.

The top stone on this pendant is a tiny slice of the Esquel pallasite that I bought several years ago.  The other stone is native terrestrial iron from Siberia, which I bought as a small slab and cut to match the pallasite.  Together they are an image of the boundary deep in the earth where the iron-magnesium silicates of the lower mantle give way to the pure nickel-iron of the core.  The iron hook is strung on a leather cord at the moment, but I plan to make a silver and iron chain for it.

Pallasites are rare meteorites that contain glassy transparent pale green or greenish-brown olivine crystals in an iron matrix.  They are some of the most spectacular of all rocks, and probably represent fragments of the interior of an ancient shattered proto-planet.  Each pallasite is unique in appearance.  Some have many olivine crystals, others have very few.  Some have large olivine crystals (the Esquel is especially notable for these) and others have tiny dustlike particles.  The iron matrix may be smooth and shining (as in Esquel) or it may reveal complex interlocking crystal patterns when etched (these are called Widmanstatten patterns, and were first described from meteorites but are also seen in certain steels, such as railroad rail welds).  The drawing below shows a tiny piece of the Imilac pallasite.  This meteorite was found as a few large pieces and many small fragments, most of  them with only the iron “skeleton” holding the remains of highly weathered olivine crystals. 

The other stone in the pendant is native iron from Siberia.  Pure iron metal is very rare in the earth’s rocks, since iron is unstable when oxygen is present, and usually combines with oxygen, silica, sulfur, and other elements to form many common minerals .  Metallic terrestrial iron is known from only a few localities.  The Siberian iron occurs as irregular blebs in a rock that is made mostly of altered olivine.

Yesterday we went cranewatching and fernhunting, two activities that have special significance in southeastern Arizona.  Thousands of sandhill cranes spend part of the winter here, drawn to the warm weather, cornfields, and small artificial ponds.  A thousand years ago, they would have come for the natural cienegas (marshes) and grasslands that have now vanished.  Their wild, primitive cries and whistling feathers swirl over us now - voice of the High Plains wind, ice on the Platte River, and that older Ice that never reached the desert, but still colors the feathers of the wildest of birds.

We watched several barn owls fluttering in a willow thicket - pale soft wings flickering among tangled twigs - and found a sleeping long-eared owl nearly invisible beside a willow trunk.  A small flock of snow geese gathered on the pond and a ferruginous hawk - another Plains visitor - hunted in a field.  Then it was time to follow the gravel road over the hills and admire the view of distant mountain ranges while we hunted for two rare ferns among the limestone outcrops.  They are Mexican plants that enter the U.S. only in extreme southeastern Arizona and the Big Bend region of Texas.  I found them and a couple of other ferns, and added all four to my online fern guide.

http://www.mineralarts.com/ferns/DesertFernsGuide.html 

A couple of days ago I made these simple earrings as a demonstration for a friend, showing two different sizes of copper wire:  14 gauge spirals and 16 gauge loops for the African cast glass beads.

Today’s New Moon is the Ice Lamp Moon in my personal moon calendar.  I named it when I was 13, in reference to the Winter Orchid or Puttyroot (Aplectrum hyemale) that grew in the woods near my house.  The plant has a single leaf that sprouts in September and persists through the winter, dying back in May as the flowerstalk appears.  I made this painting several years ago to celebrate the plant, and it also appears on the Apprentice of Blades in my tarot deck.

This morning’s Dark Moon meditation produced two images that work together, which seems appropriate for the month of Janus, the double-faced Roman guardian of beginnings and doorways.  These are 3″ drawings in Yarka Sauce, which are naturally pigmented, kaolin-based drawing chalks from Russia.  Though messy, they are very inexpensive and nice if you want to work with earth pigments (or just earthy colors) and don’t want to grind your own.  The “Sauce” is an assortment of ten colors (white, black, several shades of gray, and an earthy green, yellow, and blue).  The “Sanguine and Sepia” is 20 sticks in four shades of natural red ochre (not true sepia, which is brown and derived from squid ink).  It’s a beautiful and easy way to use red ochre.  The sticks can be used like pastels or powdered and applied with a brush.  They can be smoothed and blended with water to create many layers, though they don’t work well in egg tempera because of the high clay content and the presence of a binder.

On recent hikes in the Madrean evergreen oak/pine forest in nearby mountains, we have encountered one of the few absolutes among the natural nourishing and limiting factors that determine our local flora.  When most people think of “desert”, they think of intense summer heat and low rainfall.  But in U.S. deserts, another natural element plays an equally important role:  ice.  Many of our drought-tolerant southern Arizona desert plants - cacti, agaves and yuccas, evergreen oaks and pines, thorny shrubs, and others - have relatives in warmer climates in Mexico, or in California where there is more winter rain, or in Texas where there is more summer rain.  Our species are adapted to frost (several nights a year that are below freezing), high temperatures (several days a year that are over 105), and bi-seasonal rainfall (summer monsoons and winter rain and snow).  I’m reminded of this each year when we experience the various extremes.  Below is ice on weathered granite, with tiny leaves of the evergreen oak Quercus toumeyana.

WINTER SOLSTICE SUNRISE (Lorena B. Moore, 1990)

In some hollow hall behind the dawn

Silent copper horns are blackening

In the tarnished penumbra of the year.

In that last hour before the old brittle sun

Freezes to shards in a dark burst of metal,

A deep, molten hum breaks out of the ground.

The winds take it up, ringing a frost-blown swell

Of overtones, sending it spiralling

Into the black throats of the long horns

That shudder and drone to life.

A chorus as unerring and multiple

As tree sap streaming through its vessel pipes

Shatters wall after wall of blue ice like glass,

Each layer brighter than the one before,

From indigo to palest cerulean,

A cascade of sky fragments.

The horns gleam brown, then glow red,

Until the last colorless pane falls, and

The white gold horns melt into a spinning globe

And rise.

To celebrate yesterday’s Full Moon, here’s the Graphis Lichen Oracle, with 28 glyphs for a lunar month. More about it, including free online readings, on this new webpage:

http://www.mineralarts.com/artwork/LichenOracle.html