My late husband, Sterling, was a brilliant horticulturalist. Before we met in Tennessee he was the head gardener at Lockerly Arboretum in Milledgeville, Georgia. When he left there to move to Tennessee they gifted him with this gorgeous hand crafted shovel in honor of all of his thoughtful work helping to craft their botanical oasis. He would use the hell out of it and at the end of every day he would clean it off, sharpen the blade, and oil the wood. He died from AIDS less than a year after I photographed it. I’m sure it misses his touch almost as much as I do.

Initially, I wasn’t going to write about this specific experience. It was so close to my heart, and I was hesitant about it being out in the world. It’s still something I’m unpacking. I’ve also been seeing a psychiatrist for the last couple of years, and I’m now acutely aware of how these experiences can be perceived from a clinical perspective. But fuck it. I feel like I’ve signed a pact in making artwork about this loss and the grief that surrounds it, and it only works if there’s 100% transparency. It was 7 months into the pandemic and I had been wildly isolated (imagine a silent meditation that lasted 200 days). Thankfully I was also being protected by a very caring circle of chosen family. Sterling had started coming back around and being present again for the last couple of months. There were so many changes happening around our place, and I think he was excited about it all. He’d taken up space one day at sunset while I was sitting on the newly built deck for the greenhouse. He had some thoughts on the gardens. Not this year’s gardens or next year’s gardens, but the gardens in 10 years. I asked him to draw me a map and he laughed. That fall and winter we fell back in love in a very present way. I hadn’t even considered this type of love with him an option anymore, much less the concept of making plans for the future together. Being widowed at such a young age curses you with an emotional intelligence you’re not meant to have for another 40 years. Coupled with new life experiences, you’re forced to grow alongside the pain instead of growing independently of it. The emotional equivalent of pressing the gas and the brakes at the same time. I made this particular piece the day after a hike on Sterling’s birthday. Every November 8th that I’m home in Tennessee, we go for a hike for his birthday. The season of Scorpio. It’s always when the fall foliage is at it’s most brilliant, and there’s not a bug or snake to be found. I packed us a picnic and a bottle of wine and then set out on the trails behind the cabin that lead to the ridgetop. It was warm and cloudy which called for one of the last “tits out” days of the year. I’ve hiked so many hollers and ridgetops in this area, and the top of the trail behind our cabin is always one of the most spectacular autumnal displays. Maples, Sassafras, and Walnut trees line a thin trail that drops off dramatically on either side, revealing beyond the leaves rolling hills layered over rolling hills below you for miles. This year was probably the most sensational show I had seen up there. My brain immediately reached for my phone to take photos of it, but it wasn’t anywhere in the backpack. I hadn’t been apart from my phone in ages. I wondered if Sterling had hidden it while I was packing so I’d be more present for our date. I unpacked and spread out under the canopy of reds and yellows. I was hiking around and taking in this absolutely decadent treat. At some point had closed my eyes, and I was talking to him in my head. Asking questions about a myriad of things. Everything from plant hardiness in our microclimate to if our emotions are connected to our bodies or our consciousness. Do you get to take your memories with you? Then I felt the warm beam of light hit my face. It was hot and intense and welcomed on this overcast day, so I kept my eyes closed and bathed in it. Then it shifted and I felt the light hitting deeper... before it became a tidal wave of answers and emotions. I didn’t move because I was afraid it would end. I tried to stay open and receptive like a satellite. It lasted so long that I finally opened my eyes, and I traced the beam of light through the leaves and to the source. I could physically see these ideas and thoughts riding the light down, pulsating all around it like inter-dimensional hitchhikers. I looked around and it totally was overcast for miles in either direction. Nothing was sunlit except for my damn head, so I rode it out until it was done. He’s been present and “vocal” in the past but this was something I hadn’t experienced. This was, what felt like, a transfer or a download using the wavelengths around the light? Fucking hell. And for the record, I don’t hear voices when Sterling and I talk (esp if my psychiatrist is reading this). It’s older than that. It feels like emotions being expressed on a cellular level. So I came home after that, and set out my camera and sculpture materials to go up the next day to document it. That’s where all of the images and videos in this post came from. I really had only planned on showing the final piece, but the title for the work and the experience preceding it became such a succinct summary of what led up to the show. I felt it disingenuous not to say it out loud. *I have a personal theory that a home acts a giant altar. The architecture is stuffed with totems and memories. The pathways and walls are charged with some of your most intense life experiences. I think being alone in our home really put through the long distance phone call to Sterling that bought us a hot and horny season together again.

The floral sculpture in this piece was designed by the brilliant and gifted Maurice Harris of bloom and plume in LA. Taking the form of a human heart made of flowers, I photographed it to appear as if it’s hovering over one of the seven energy vortexes embedded in the landscape of Sedona, AZ. Maurice created it in the shape of a human heart complete with valves and aortas . The heartbeat is one of the final acts of a dying body; once it ceases to function the vessel is done. An impossibility in form and place. These flowers would never be able to survive in this landscape, but it floats above the desert emboldened by its own impossibility. This is one of my favorite pieces and one of the most difficult to talk about. When Sterling and I were diagnosed with full blown AIDS he became very sick almost immediately. He had so many opportunistic infections attacking his body that it shut down almost immediately after we were diagnosed. Little things that any healthy person wouldn’t ever think about had piled on one after the other and we had know idea. A bacterial infection from the soil that he loved to tend, an infection from his sweet cats, internal bleeding, and a few other ailments. He was admitted to the ICU at Vanderbilt for an unheard of three month stay. The medication he had to have for each of these infections was so hard on his body that they could only be treated one at a time. The doctors put me on anti-retrovirals immediately, but they feared his body wouldn’t be able to handle them until his other issues were taken care of. He was released in the fall but was taken back in less than a month. He didn’t come out of the hospital after that. I’m so grateful for the work and advancements that have been made in medicine and especially on the HIV/AIDS front. But there’s something that happens to you when you’re both taken to the same brink of death and only one of you comes back. They call it survivor’s guilt and that’s such a short name for something so large.

The third alter is an orb of light and its mirrored twin just on the other side of the watery portal. Together they create an infinity symbol out of light. The creation of life in our universe is such a delicate balance of so many variables. We're born on a planet (that just happens to have water on it) that is the perfect distance from a sun. Without either of these variables (amongst others) life here would never have evolved. I photographed this 4' orb on Center Hill Lake in Tennessee. I had my light stands in the water behind it so that it would become the source of light. The more my strobes fired, the more bugs and insects were drawn to it. Creating an anomaly of an ecosystem, from the interjection of light and water within space.

I built this Altar at the greenhouse that my late husband, Sterling, worked at. It was always such an amazing place to visit, and given the sizes and scale of the place, the people that work there genuinely care about the plants that they cultivate. It shows too. Everything growing there looks so healthy and loved. Now, every time I visit the greenhouses, at some point I'll get so overwhelmed with his memory that I'll start crying uncontrollably. Sometimes it's in the Iris house, sometimes near the ferns, but usually in whichever house is in full bloom and busting with color. These breakdowns rarely happen anymore, and when it does, I don't mind it. I kind of miss crying in inappropriate places and the fuck all armor that goes up when it happens. This place is special though. Nobody cared for plants the way Sterling did. He loved them and cared for their well-being as much as any living creature. I built this Altar as a means to mend the relationship between people and plants; to bridge the dissociation that's occurred over the last hundred years. If only we could all begin to feel a fraction as deeply and intelligently as Sterling did, that would be an amazing first step.

Suspended above a circular base that used to be a machine gun turret on a defunct military base in San Pedro (perched atop the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean), this magical object is bathed in the light of a full moon, with Catalina Island floating in the distance like a planet all of its own." This altar was built by Rya Kleinpeter and myself. War is without a doubt, where man's most violent tendencies are their most unchecked. It's also a symptom of most historically patriarchal societies. We photographed this altar at 2 AM beneath the light of the full moon and its feminine energy (working under the same theory as charging a crystal). This architectural structure isn't just a monument to man's atrocities, but also a conduit for healing and transference.

The gold ring that sits on the top of the clear pyramid is one that Sterling had found. He and his sister were hiking through the desert in California to visit a hot spring. Somewhere along the several mile hike of endless gold sand, he spotted this ring half buried. I know how that ring feels, to be plucked up by him out of obscurity, so I wanted to honor it properly.

We charged the space with a memorial service....with all of his friends and family. We never had a wedding ceremony, so I planned the memorial like I had always wanted our wedding to be. A big white tent, in the field next to our cabin, nestled in the hills and mountains of our little holler in Tennessee. All of our friends and neighbors brought their most beautiful flowers from their garden. The tent was absolutely beautiful, with tons of photos at the front, and our dear friends choir singing a song that was written in our home. We were finally having the wedding I had always wanted. Once the field was charged with all of the love and intentions, my neighbor plowed a strip down the middle of it measuring close to 200’ long and 10’ wide. I had ordered bulk annual, wildflower seeds from a company that sold their seeds according to color. I planted them so that they would fade in a gradient of red flowers in the East, to blue flowers in the west. Following the suns trajectory; bright crimson red in the east to a cool blue in the west. Our dear friend Matilda came over with me on the day of the planting. We had a ceremony, mixed his ashes with the seeds, stripped down to our bare essentials, and proceeded to plant these wildflower seeds mixed with my baby’s remains. It was hot, and we were crying, and we held him in our hands and in our hearts the entire time. Telling stories, and sharing memories, and kissing him with every seed that we planted. It was beautiful to watch it grow. I would go out there almost every day to look for little bits of green popping up out of the dirt. Wondering what was a weed and what was a wildflower. Then green foliage started to grow and fill in, and then suddenly there was a flower! Red at first. Then a blue flower at the other end. Then came a huge flush of blooms almost overnight. It was such a sight to behold.....this glorious, fiery red strip fading to a blue whisper set against the emerald green mountains of Tennessee. I would go out there to talk to him all of the time. I loved going out at night under the full moon. When it was so surreal and bright; like a dim, blue daylight. I would take some Milwaukee’s Best (his favorite), some weed and smokes and get wasted with him. Just he and I and the moon. I went out on the night of October, 23, 2014 to photograph it. It was to be the night of the killing frost, which is when the temperature gets cold enough to kill off all but the hardiest of the vegetation. It was also beneath the new moon in Scorpio. We had just entered into Scorpio, which was Sterling’s sign. I talked to him, like I usually do. I told him how magnificent he looked in flower form, and that I was there to take his picture. He hated having his picture taken, despite how ridiculously handsome he was. The flowers were especially beautiful that night. Deep in color and bursting with blooms. In less than 8 hours they would all be dead from the freeze. The photograph was taken at their peak, but also right when nature had decided that it was time. I only photographed the red flowers, the part that represented his time on earth. I didn’t think it was my right to try and make any definitive statements about his new form or existence. I also harvested blooms from the marigolds that night to make wine. Marigolds are used in Indian wedding ceremonies, and also during Dia De Los Muertos to attract the spirits of the dead back home. I thought that both of these uses made it the perfect flower to make wine from. Sterling loved to drink, and he used to love when I would make wine. I think he would have loved this incarnation, and this spell wasn’t finished yet. I harvested them at night under the new moon in Scorpio, and the next day I processed the flowers during the solar eclipse. Seeing the new moon in Scorpio pass in front of the sun during sunset, while I was sitting on the back of Sterling’s truck, crying hysterically was so powerful and hallucinogenic. Tears mixing with the flower petals in the most beautiful, surreal setting sun I’d ever seen. Sunsets are a magical moment of transition anyway. This one was especially charged. I made the wine on October 31st. Samhain is the day between the autumn equinox and the Winter Solstice. The day of the year when the veil is thinnest between the worlds. It’s the day when the deceased are most available, and Sterling was very vocal in our conversation that night. I was asking him so many questions, and I was updating him on the local gossip and what the cats had been up to. For every question I had I received a very physical and loud answer. The wind was his laughter and the owls and coyotes where his thoughts. It was nice. I hadn’t had that much response from him in a while. “Who cooks for you? Who?” he asked me. When you rack wine, it’s the process of transferring it from one glass container to another. In the process you leave the sediment that has settled in the bottom of the initial container, so that the final wine is more pure and has a better flavor. I racked the wine on November 8th, his birthday. We also had a small dinner party for him that night, where we all told some our favorite stories and got way to drunk in his honor. It was spring of 2015. I had been in Tennessee for 7 years now. I had just bought our cabin a few months prior to this, and I loved that our little cabin that we shared was going to be our forever home. I had been wondering what I was doing career-wise. There isn’t much opportunity to be had in the mountains of Tennessee. I had been thinking that I should be living in Los Angeles part time. I had lived in LA before moving to Tennessee, and I’m always surround by beautiful friends when I’m out there. That winter I’d had a conversation with Sterling about it, seeking his advice and knowledge. Then one day in the late spring, I looked out, and saw some little dots of crimson red growing in the field where I had planted the flowers. The flowers that I bought were a mix of annuals, and nothing was supposed to be growing out there. Especially considering that we’d had a really brutal, cold winter. I couldn’t believe it. I went out there to discover that there were California poppies coming up all over the place, just starting to wake up. I get it baby. I love you too. And I’ll see you when I get back from LA. And when the season died, a new season took its place. Not quickly or abruptly, but slowly and carefully as if to help with the pain of change. ***This is a story, about how the science of magick works. How a spell, conducted, is a bridge of energy connecting all of the unseen.