RAINBOWS AND DARK CLOUDS: I will be posting drawings from our Shelter in Place order here. These are drawn from photographs that I take of people whom I run into at Warnecke Ranch. I maintain a safe distance from them, especially with my kids, who are prime vector suspects. Some are photos that I’ve asked friends to take of themselves and to send to me to draw. Making these drawings late at night helps me recharge. During the day Eliot and I are all about the kids, and taking turns giving each other space and silence to try and work, he for architecture and I for the ranch and our wine business Sutro Wine Co. It is a mind boggling situation that challenges my capacity to perform an adult trick that I’ve always cherished, and that I think I learned in motherhood: the ability to hold open two sentiments at once. Love and hate, repulsion and attraction, fear and confidence, pride and humility. Now we are all asked to flex that capacity to the brink of snapping, all at once, all over the world, to be simultaneously brave and afraid, stable and unmoored, assured and worried, blessed and despondent … to see the rainbow and feel the dark clouds. All of our minds are split at once, together and it is a world trauma. We have endured community trauma here before with wildfires and it stitched us together deeply. Varying personal traumas also tie us together. With COVID-19, I’m blown away by how radical an invisible foe can be, especially when it drives 6 foot wedges between us. It is a trauma so uniquely oppressive, I find it hard to remain joyful, but then I do! I laugh and poke fun with my friends and family! It’s dizzying and paralyzing how efficiently we can cope, it makes me dumbstruck. I need to draw through it, and try and really see people, to remain grounded, to not get lost in media, to remember the earth and the people who fill it with love. - March 18, 2020