The water you wash your mushrooms with

As to what I would like to be. It is difficult to say. An Artist of some kind.

- Jackson Pollock in a letter to his brother.

A wall along Heron Street. April 2025.

OMG! These days as the earth rotates toward and the sun begins to shine through the saddle in the Boise hills there’s a place along the river where the light reflects off the water and through these vertical concrete vents under a bridge and onto a concrete wall like flames of inspiration and so I’ve gotten out on the bike with the Mamiya RB67 every morning this week to capture something that excites me and I think this is what Alfred Stieglitz was talking about with his idea in art photography he called “Equivalents.”

I come across something that excites me emotionally, spiritually, aesthetically….I give you the print as the equivalent of what I saw and felt.

In the book “Landscape Within,” David Ward summarizes Stieglitz:

The underlying concept, borrowed from Symbolism, was that the emotion conveyed by an image was not dependent upon the subject matter but transmitted at some deeper level by the pattern of forms and the play of light and shade.

So there’s that but this doesn’t have anything to do with—outside of the fact that it was also really inspiring—the morels that popped up in one of our garden beds this week! You can read a lot of books and never cultivate a mushroom because they have an intelligence much older than what we can understand but if you bury the paper bag you used to store your foraged morels in the refrigerator with (whoa, crappy sentence), you may end up running morel mycelium and if you have a particularly long cool spring, you may witness “puhpowee” which Robin Wall Kimmerer translates to “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the Earth overnight.” Also, soak your morels in water to encourage all the little critters to exit the shroom before cooking. Then pour this water in your wood chips over where you buried your paper bag.

I also want to express my humble gratitude to the Alexa Rose Foundation and The Common Well Boise for inviting me to join the second wave of “Show and Tell” residents on a gallery tour in Sun Valley last week. The work of Alex, Amber, and Katherine has been transformative for me as an artist. Thank you and thank you. Poems and photos coming soon.

These things too inspired me recently:

Journal, These ThingsJeffery Oliverphotography, mushrooms