Juliet Rylance

Juliet Rylance Instagram – 2020.
California’s high desert has long been a home, a place of refuge for me. quite by chance, I was fortunate to spend the first lockdown at home here with my family. As studios and theaters went dark, we arrived in hats and scarves, the land still barren with winter, and watched the pandemic unfold with the spring, and later, the harsh heat of summer.
The Mojave is a primordial landscape of browns and blues, all rock and sand. Creosote scatter vast swathes of prairie to the feet of craggy ridges, that rise toward mountains capped in white. Yuccas stretch their arms toward the immense sky. It can feel like the beginning of time or the end of it.
Desolation in one moment, reveals itself in the next to be teeming with life; Ant colonies abound, bees hum in the wild sage. Black widows weave their webs under the eaves as Jack rabbits leap across the emergent spring bloom. Burrowing owls dart and dive as brave shoots push through rock and burst into florescent pinks and greens. And when the air becomes too hot to breath, the flash floods arrive drenching the parched earth, and fields of green appear and vanish just as quickly.
Basic acts of survival are part of daily life here, community essential. We look for what’s alive and pay attention to it when it comes.
If this hard land has taught me anything, it’s this: Change and loss come hand in hand. What’s emergent is always enfolding before us.
Bear witness. It is an essential act.
The world reveals itself to us at every turn and sometimes, all that is asked is that we receive it.
In all its beauty and desolation. | Posted on 01/Nov/2021 10:19:58