Some Miracles

I’ve been blessed often in my life but seldom as fully as in this past week when I fell on my face, split a crack in my knee, then received the best medical treatment, enormous help from friends, and the promise of two months when I can cancel all obligations and focus on what matters most to me.

As I was adjusting to these large but temporary changes, a miracle arrived unannounced. It was the photograph you see above, of my son Will, dead eight years this coming March, at one of his happiest moments—fishing. I don’t know where he caught this beautiful specimen but expect it was in the pond below my cabin at Wolf Pen Mill Farm in Kentucky before the prolonged drought shrunk it to a weed-filled slough.

I first took Will fishing when he was probably about eight years old, at a “pay lake” outside of Louisville where for a modest fee he could spend an hour casting and recasting. I don’t remember that he ever caught anything—the pay lake had probably been fished out—but the escape to a green space of country and water suited both of us.

After that he fished in many places, state parks (one memorable time in Montana), private lakes and streams, learning to catch and return as he learned the precious nature of the few fish he caught. He bought lots of rods, reels, lures and baits, which eventually became a thick tangled mass in the garage. One day maybe his son will sort it all out.

Meantime all of us who love him remember how focused, how peaceful he was when he’d caught a fish or even in the process of casting. The world and its many cares fell away.

His photograph turned up mysteriously on his daughter’s computer Friday when she was working on something else. I don’t remember ever seeing it, or taking it, nor does she. A friend explained that screen saver shots, long forgotten, sometimes appear, one at a time, on a computer screen. Perhaps that is the explanation, but even so, it is a miracle, reminding us yet once again that Will’s life had many bright moments.

The other miracle is the recognition given, after many years, to the Native American artist Caro Romero. One of her photographs, seen below, hangs in my house, astonishing—even scandalizing—some friends.

I first saw this photograph hanging on a booth in Santa Fe’s annual Indian Market. The booth was in an obscure corner of the Plaza and did not seem to be well attended. Taken with the photograph, I asked the woman in the booth about it and she introduced herself as Cara Romero, adding that some market-goers had objected to the photo. In that regard, I’ve often found that objections to a piece of art as supposed “pornography” are really expressions of anxiety and even fear when confronted with raw power. 

I’m reminded of my terror as a child when I saw one of El Greco’s crucifixions in an art book in my grandfather’s library. I tried to memorize the placement of the page so I could be sure to skip over it the next time I was studying those plates. The El Greco is hardly pornographic but it is powerful in its depiction of suffering.

Now Cara Romero. She is a woman of many talents, trained in film, photography, fine art, journalism, professional and commercial photography. “She always aims to portray Native women in the context of the Chemehuevi belief that women have an innate strength as all-powerful, supernatural life-givers who are equals in society.”

It’s another miracle that many people now accept the potent reality of this statement.

[Cara Romero’s first major solo exhibition, Panûpünüwügai (Living Light), is up now at the Hood Museum of Art in Dartmouth, NH and runs through August 10. Her work is also being featured in many exhibitions across the country this year.]

NIKKI by Cara Romero

In Writing Cara Romero William Bingham Iovenko