Ghosts of the River - Susan Preston
Ghosts of the River
Susan Preston
Ghosts of the River is an ongoing labor and ritual of bearing witness to the pain of a vanishing river. Over three summer seasons, with dust billowing through my hair and mud caked to my boots, my heart carried my body and my camera into the cracking and evaporating spine of a once “Grande” River.
The Tewa people named her P’osógeh ~ Big Water. She must have been astonishing then. A ribbon of glimmering snowmelt from the tip of her head in the San Juan mountains, with shoulders sloping down into a belly that pulses through the verdant heart-valley of New Mexico. Here in the middle Rio Grande Basin, her waist measured over a mile wide before colonized hands set out to tame her. Now scorched, her emaciated legs drop over sixteen hundred feet, gasping along the heartbroken border between Texas and Mexico before surrendering into the Aztec's Goddess of the Sea that we now clinically refer to as the Gulf of Mexico.
Many think a river can't be alive but won't hesitate to proclaim "it" dead. Whether sitting on the banks of a living body flowing with healthy snowmelt or kneeling inside a river’s desiccated belly, the question, "Are you alive?" feels like asking the moon if she rises. Perhaps we could ask ourselves, "Are we alive?" and "How much must we have forgotten to have dammed the eternal force of memory that connects us to earth, and earth to sky?
Ghosts of the River doesn't seek to answer these questions but reveal the felt and lingering presence of a body of water that continues to defy the force of gravity, prematurely surrendering to the sky, but not the sea.
Shall we not pause, listen to her whispers, and weep with her?
What faces, textures, and glimmers of awareness are revealed in the crossings of light into crevices? I have witnessed the way ghostly coyotes slink softly into cavernous cracks as the sun sails over the songless crowns of the mother trees. To assume old-growth cottonwoods are incapable of weeping through their birdless branches is to dam up the river of our shared humanity. The moral injury we inflict upon ourselves, day after day, through the disconnect between our stated values and actions, leaves all of us, including this photographer, increasingly ghosted in our alienating habitats.
The emergent intention alongside these images is to create cracks in our perception that might invite viewers across thresholds of initiation. The rivers of the southwest have cried out for hope decade upon decade while we turned our backs on them. Seek as we might, we will not be able to create mature hope that catalyzes skillful action without pressing our lips into the ground to drink in the lessons of the still-born, eternal listening presence of Sister P’osógeh.
Susan J. Preston is a bird and nature photographer whose work intersects the realms of visual art, mindfulness, and the emergent beauty of Mother Earth. She is the author and designer of the internationally awarded fine art book BOSQUE, Winter Wings, an offering of praise for the tens of thousands of migratory birds who winter over in Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Susan’s photography and writing focuses on the gifts of offering our attention to the extraordinary beauty of the living world and how experiences of wonder in nature can serve as a source of renewal in the midst of compounding grief and moral injury.
In addition to holding a BFA in Communication Arts and Design, Susan is an ordained lay practitioner of Soto Zen (Upaya Zen Center) and holds certifications as a Mindful Photography guide (LookAgain), and as an Earth Altars teacher (Morning Altars with Day Schildkret). Additionally, she is nearing completion of her certification as a trauma-informed Mindfulness & Grief coach (with Heather Strang, MA, C-IAYT). These formal trainings, combined with lifelong creative practices, provide significant ballast to Susan’s work as a contemplative artist who seeks to serve the soft animal bodies and minds of fellow Earthlings who wish to rehydrate their relationship with the living world and remember what it feels like to be truly human.
