Four sketches

Drawing the natural world the only way I know how

Sea lions sunning themselves on the rocks in La Jolla Cove, San Diego, California. Would make for a wonderful oil painting, no? The slick, creamy blacks of their skins almost look like paint already. (Photo by moi)

I’ve never been able to draw or paint worth a damn. It’s a sore spot as someone who delights in the visual arts, who feels most grounded among nature’s marvels, and who spends a lot of time thinking about how to express the resplendence of this vast and miraculous planet. Because, holy shit, we are lucky to witness this place. A rock with a thousand climates spinning in space around a dying star. I mean, wow.

When I’m struck by a sunset, or a cliffside vista, or even the midday light catching the golden veins of a leaf burgeoning into bloom just so—I wish in my marrow that I could paint or draw the scene, to capture the beauty through my own unique lens, to process a moment in time through my nervous system and transmute it into something new, and fantastic, and specific, and universal all at once. If I could only pick up a paintbrush and—voila—bring it to life.

But, again, alas: I can’t draw or paint worth a damn.

So I’m learning to make do with the next best thing.

This year, I gifted myself enrollment in

Summer Brennan

’s A Year of Writing Dangerously course. She encourages us writers to engage in “sketching,”—careful written observation of our surroundings—in the same way a visual artist might study the world carefully in their sketchbook. I’ve been loving the challenge.

As I’ve written here before, “Paying attention is a practice,” and “writing can be that practice.” Using writing as a way to “sketch” God’s splendor has been such an empowering way to stay alert and present—and has helped me scratch the itch to bear witness to the Earth more vividly.

Here are four sketches that have come out of the course so far. They may find their way into other things or work their way into essays etc. (and I may edit them a thousand times), but I’m sharing them here as-is for now.

Tell me: Have you sketched the world with your words? What have you noticed? What would you like to share? Say things in the comments, pretty por favor.

San Diego I

The surf breaks against the cliffs—violent and magnificent, white foam spewing the rocks with iridescent furor. The edge is slick with saltwater, mint-colored algae, and white-and-grey barnacle clusters clinging to the surfaces.

Black cormorants with turquoise gullets sun themselves on the embankments, preening and peacocking for their peers.

Pelicans with curved necks like plumbing pipes smooth their feathers and scan for fish, their beaks as long as their legs—maybe longer.

The hillsides are flecked with greenery and bright yellow buds; succulents shaped like artichokes erupt into stout bushels; a shock of coral leaves shoots forth from slender, spiny stalks.

Everything is abloom, alive, grasping towards the sky, striving to reach the sun.

San Diego II (Can you tell I went to San Diego lol)

The sky can’t make up its mind. It’s a sunlit periwinkle in parts, a greyish gloom in others, and then the whisps of white clouds puff across the blue expanse, filling in the blanks. Peach and cream apartments line the street facing down the hill to the water’s edge. Three plump cacti erupt from the landscaped mulch in a straight line, their tall green fingers reaching past the first story, each tendril punctuated by petite yellow blooms. The flowers don’t know it’s only Tuesday—they blaze and stun all the same. Every day the sun rises is a special occasion, worthy of a spectacle.

The House in the Woods (Sketch from Memory)

In deep July, cicadas abuzz in the reeds. We were teens. Visiting a friend working in nature conservation over summer break.

I remember trying to sleep in a modest house at the woods’ edge.

The sky was an oilwell of black, its deep ink muting every speck of moonlight. Real nighttime. The kind you don’t ever see in civilization.

And stars: The elongated fingers and joints of their constellations, stretched like paint splatter across the summer sky, the pulsars gleaming like knuckles. Skeletal, the anatomy of the universe, splayed there to see.

And I remember how loud the forest was. Not loud like the city, or even the suburbs. I’m used to those sounds. I can sleep through the bus announcing its stops, snore through sirens, and drunken yelling, and the vrooming engines of souped-up cars. But this was a different kind of loud: A teeming orchestra of life. The grand botany of existence crescendoing into a thousand whispers just outside the window.

And I was afraid. Awed—lulled even by the majesty of it—but scared of how foreign it was. And how humble the room, the lack of air conditioning, the remoteness, the darkness. An animal fear.

I stayed awake too long, grasping at a shiver of light from a moonbeam, holding my breath, listening to the spectacular, ancient drama unfurling mere feet away.

Vieques, Puerto Rico (Sketch from Memory)

In the dark water, the bioluminescent organisms glow neon green, their pulsing lights flitting across the surface like fireflies. We are somewhere in the jungle.

There’s an embankment, not exactly a beach, but a large clearing where the bay splays out before us like spilled gasoline. If not for the swarm of underwater fluorescence, and the heavy lead balloon of the silver moon, we would be submerged in pre-natal, amniotic darkness.

Some of the braver boys in our group have brought a boat—a long, aquiline canoe—and they hoist it on their shoulders as they run towards the water. How will they steer it in this blackness, how will they find their way, I think.

Usually more adventurous, tonight I decide to hang back on the shore where I feel self-assured: I can find my footing; I can feel my toes in the soil and sand. In this otherworldly place, I need to stay tethered to the material of the terra.

There are others gathered here too, at the water’s edge. Strangers. I cannot make out their features but as my eyes adjust to the night, I can trace their shadows, the black and grey outlines of their figures, like charcoal sketches lining the space between me and the trees and the stars.

And the stars are bright, as incandescent as I’ve ever seen them, radiating like planets across the horizon.

I’m in an alien place, surrounded by strangers but also by friends.

A tingle in my hair follicles: Joy and discomfort puddling together. Awe and trepidation. I’m both: At home here on Earth and an outlander to these shores. Straddling the space between the familiar and the foreign, the entire scene is like a dream. Was I really there or was it just described to me? Is it a false memory or is it true?

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