Category: Inspiration

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The Saman Tree Speaks

There’s a Saman Tree at Sky Garden Retreat that has been calling out quietly for years.

Its wide, sheltering canopy hums with memory. Its roots grip the land like knuckles holding on to something sacred. When the wind moves through its branches, it feels like a whisper, like someone long gone is trying to tell me something important.

This tree is not just a tree. It is a witness. A keeper of stories. A sentinel for the land and the lives that have passed through it.

I’ve invited the team from the Black Heritage Tree Project to visit Sky Garden and meet the Saman Tree for themselves. They are here on St. Croix mapping and honoring the trees that have borne witness to Crucian history, especially the brutal and beautiful legacy of Black freedom, survival, and spirit.

There’s also an old gravity-fed well tucked into the ghut below, mostly hidden now by vines and time. But it’s there. Like the tree, it’s part of a story that refuses to be forgotten.

I don’t know everything this tree has seen, but I know how it makes me feel: grounded, protected, watched over. I know that when I stand beneath its limbs, I feel connected to something much older than myself, something enduring.

This visit isn’t about documentation alone. It’s about reverence. Listening. Remembering. And sharing space with something ancient that still lives and breathes beside us.

If you’ve ever loved a tree, you know what I mean.

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Listening Like a Plant in St. Croix

Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World reframes how we see the green world around us—not as passive, cultivated objects, but as active participants in shaping our desires. It’s a perspective that lingers long after the last page, especially here in St. Croix, where the land hums with quiet intelligence.

Pollan’s invitation to view plants as co-creators made me reconsider the medicinal herbs growing wild across my property. Guinea hen weed curling through the underbrush. Lemongrass swaying in the trade winds. Turmeric pushing up in my raised planters. These plants aren’t just there. They arrive, they signal, they speak—if we’re willing to listen.

What if these plants are already in conversation with us, guiding us to notice where balance is needed, where healing is overdue?

Since reading the book, I’ve begun to move more slowly through the land, letting my hands hover before touching, asking inwardly before harvesting. I’m starting to feel that these plants are not just medicine for the body, but memory-keepers, storytellers, and perhaps, old friends with lessons still unfolding.

In St. Croix, where ecological wisdom is hiding in plain sight, The Botany of Desire offers a gentle challenge: to listen more deeply, to be in relationship, not just use.

What might change if we all listened like the plants do—rooted, attentive, and open to what the land is trying to say?

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Bucket List Dreams: Visiting the World’s Oldest Leather Tannery

As I begin mapping out my multi-month inspiration and learning journey through Ghana, Kenya, and Morocco next year, one vivid dream has found its way onto my bucket list: visiting the ancient Chouara Tannery in Fez, Morocco—the oldest leather tannery in the world.

This centuries-old site, with its maze of honeycomb stone vats filled with natural dyes and tanning solutions, is not just a feast for the senses—it’s a living link to craft traditions that have stood the test of time.

I hope to witness the rhythms of the tanners at work, learn about the traditional techniques passed down through generations, and explore how this knowledge can inform my own material practice. Here’s to weaving new experiences into the journey—one tannery, one thread, one story at a time.

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Inspired By: A Flipbook Machine

Each morning at Sky Garden STX, I step out onto the deck of my studio and let the sounds of the island caress me. The pearly-eyed thrashers call first—raspy, relentless, full of attitude. They dart through the trees like mischief in motion. Then the doves join in, their coos low and mournful, like lullabies passed down from long ago.

I listen.

Their chorus is not just background noise. It’s an invocation. The rhythm of wings, the hush between calls, the way the birds stake hold of space with sound. It’s music. It’s memory.

The birds are teaching me to pause, to trust the silences between gestures. To let motion emerge from stillness.

I’ve started wondering: What does it look like to be guided by birds? Not as subject matter, but in process, in tempo, in spirit? I’m not sure yet. But recently I came across a flipbook machine by J.C. Fontanive, the way it cycles through images of birds in flight—over and over, rhythmic, hypnotic, alive—it mirrors what I feel on the deck each morning: movement as meditation. Repetition as revelation.

I don’t know exactly where this is going. But I do know that before I pick up any materials, I always listen first. To the wind. To the wings. To the wild logic of song.

Let’s see what unfolds.

J.C. Fontanive

Ornithology L, 2018

four-color screen print on Bristol paper, stainless steel, motor and electronics

5.25 x 4.25 x 4 inches

Edition of 20, plus 2AP

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Krishna Reddy Viscosity Printing Demo

As I am setting up the new studio with a printmaking area, this video is providing food for thought for upcoming studio experiments.

Mark Johnson, former graduate student of Krishna Reddy’s and long-time collaborator, as he explains the viscosity printing process while printing from Reddy’s Clown Dissolving plate.