Susan Hertel + a few musings

Babes and bots, 

Ever heard of the painter, Susan Hertel? 

As you can see, she painted cats, horses, and women in earth tones, and lived in New Mexico. My dad appears to have liked her work quite a bit. 

My dad was born in New Mexico in 1949, 19 years after Susan Hertel. Hertel spent many years in the Southwest and opened up a ranch where she and her husband, Carl, raised five children in addition to a number of farm animals. Her work from this period is marked by images from their farm, as well as a number of self-portraits. After divorcing her husband, Hertel dedicated her life to writing poetry and painting, and found family everywhere she went. Some of her poetry is collected and published posthumously in All This Change two years after her death in 1994. 

There are a number of lines that strike me...

Riding on a mesa

I put my mouth a certain way

and my face feels like it 

looks like yours.

When I was eight or nine we went to Taos, New Mexico for a week. We stayed in an adobe-style house that was situated in what I thought to be a barren landscape. Nothing tall or bushy surrounded the house. Life lived as close to the ground as one could imagine. It would get windy and hot in town where we ate ice cream every night from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Every store smelled like leather. And each day, we went downtown and perused the shops and art galleries. This was how we spent many of our vacations. I wore the same thing every day; a black tank, blue jeans, a pink bandana, tennis shoes. I remember walking out of a gallery on the top floor of some building. The stairs were outside, a dusty breeze pushed someone's face onto mine like a mask or a bad foundation. I remember my mother's lilting skirt. 

If I didn't have a horse, I don't think 
I would want to live.

My friend does horse therapy. He says the horses are much better at reflecting emotion than we are, and he says there is too much stimulation with human interactions. Maybe we would all be better as horses, or we would all be better if we had no written/spoken language with which to communicate. If we could only rely on the hormones, vibes, electrical impulses, auras of our bodies, hoping they extend beyond ourselves to connect on a deeper level to a universe that defies logic. 

Today I feel both
born and birthing, slippery
as mud, a wobbly foal, 
raw and joyful in the midst
of all this weather.

What do you call the person you are in the shower? What do you call the person you are when your mother is watching, or your sibling, or a stranger? What do you call yourself when you are the only one around, how do you talk to yourself, what do you say? 

My dad spent much of my infant life holding me. I fit in his hands, on his chest, under his chin, I was patted and protected, hand the size of his nose. I wonder what he would say about Susan Hertel, or this book of poems I snagged from his shelves. Had I asked him what he was reading, and why he liked it, he might have told me something I no longer have the luxury of knowing. 

Thanks for taking a bit out of the sandwich with me. 

xoxo BLT