Brenda Richardson

ARTIST STATEMENT

I have wondered at the world since an early morning encounter with a flower I hadn’t seen in all my six long years on Earth. Beside an uphill path through woods drenched with fog shifting in rays from the rising sun, a wild orchid stopped me in my tracks.

It wasn’t that wonder was new to me. Questions about the world filled my head. How many of these tall trees, stacked root to treetop, would it take to reach the sky? Where does the sky end? What was there before the beginning?

But that morning, I stood awe-struck as the light-filled, fog-filled air enfolded a flower, old trees, damp leaves, and me. To say I was enchanted by the world I had entered would not be wrong; kinship was the portal opening into this new world.

For me, working with words, then a camera, became ways of staying close to that world. They still are.

My Youngest Heart

MY STORY

Once, when I was very young, a flower stopped me in my tracks.

I couldn't move.

I couldn't say a word.

All I could do was wonder at a flower I had no name for.

All the flowers I knew had wonderful names.  Petunia.  Marigold.  Rose.  Hi-bisss-cus.

I liked drawing flowers, but I didn't draw those with names I loved to say.

I loved the simple outline of a daisy--slender loops around a circle.  Daydreams drifted like hot-air balloons through the hours I spent filling circles with tiny loops, like the ones I saw in a real daisy center.  

What I really loved were flying flowers.  Skies full of curved-wing petals floated over worlds open to my imagination.

But I never imagined a Lady's Slipper orchid.

The flower that changed my life stood in light flowing from a sun just topping the hill.

For days, rain had dripped from pine needles and tiny leaves. 

Now mist rose from the damp forest floor, and shimmered in rays of light. 

Dark tree-trunks glistened. 

The flower glowed.

Suddenly, the world was not itself.  

The forest I walked through, played in, retreated to—that I knew--became a place where I'd never been

 and I knew where I was for the first time.

Home had come to meet me.  

I had been gathered in.

Iteration I: My Youngest Heart

I could tell my story inside out.

I could say,

 Once,

 all the time that ever was,

 and all the space that ever could be,

               took the shape of a wild pink orchid glowing in a foggy sun-rays,

and stood beside my path under tall, old trees 

darkened by mists from the damp forest floor.

 That flower stopped the world as I’d learned it to be.

It moved me to my youngest heart.

Now, when pain confines my attention to itself, I ask “Is this all there is now?  

Is this all that ever will be?”  

My youngest heart answers, “See how fog is lifting with the sun?

The world is bigger than pain.”

Violations go on and on.  Hate seems to prevail so easily.  Will warring among us never end?

I fear for the children born into this world.

My youngest heart whispers,

“hearts can give and receive love, even when hope has gone underground.”

The wisdom of my youngest heart holds me together

when clashing worlds break apart.

I think of my friend who has died. I remember I that have grown old.

Leave gifts, I hear my youngest heart say. Make pearls of your life and give them away.

Be the kin that you are.

The sun my youngest heart carries is shining for more than one.

Iteration II: WHAT DO PEOPLE DO?

One spring, a wild orchid bloomed in the woods,

where I spent all my time that wasn’t taken up with necessary things.

like sleeping, or going to school.

The woods were my place to explore,

and ponder the beautiful and awful things I knew.

I was a little unsure of my place in it all.

I didn't quite know what I was to do.

The morning my flower bloomed—

I call it my flower, even though I didn't raise it—

began like any other day

if waking up early and trying to not be late.

I'd gone to sleep listening to whippoorwills,  

a peeper frog chorus 

and water-songs from the branch near my grandmother’s house.

I needed those sounds like I needed her soft voice calling me

to hot biscuits for breakfast, melted butter and blackberry jam.

On my way up the hill through the woods,

Fog drifted apart in sun-rays 

streaming past dark tree trunks

like clear, white fire.

That light made everything glow.

The air danced and shimmered.

A pink lady's slipper beside the path glowed

in the same light that was touching me.

Its leaves and my lungs breathed the same shimmering air.

Some door opened in the universe then,

and the streaming light and the shining flower pulled me through.

I stood wondering at a world that, 

just a moment before,

had felt so familiar.

Now, everything was beyond the reach of words, even me!

I loved the light. I loved the strange flower, the glowing trees.

I loved that I could see.

My mind flies back to that morning now like some light bird, 

to rest again and again on its treasure.

I love what it taught me about the questions in my heart.

On any ordinary day, 

any ordinary thing,

like trees 

or sunlight,

a flower  

or a gentle voice,

can align a heart with its most necessary truth.  

People are for caring.

Caring is what people do.

                                                                      --dedicated to Wendell Berry