Category: On The Road

New Orleans, the Mystery birthed in the bedrock, the land is haunted. Then brought in chains, the Magic of desert and hot sun enslaved and consumed, woven dark and deep. A port town, Magic imported from around the world, soaked in the cracks of the infrastructure, that infrastructure that feels so unstable is actually born on the supernatural. And that Magic once grabbed me by the throat and when I was able, I ran away from that city as fast as I could.

I don’t know who I am anymore to be brutally honest. I used to know, so fiercely. I held on to my identity as Sara Brown, invincible, self reliant badass extraordinaire, so tight. So tight that the Mystery with great helpings of external and internal Pressure caused my ego to explode in an overwhelming metaphysical rewiring one fine morning in dirty old New Orleans. Magic City epicenter.

I experienced it as a complete cold water plunge into the endless depth of my primal fear through an electric firestorm being set off in my nervous system. I never resurfaced, not really. Someone else did wearing my face. The face I came into this world with, the first face before all the conditioning, she came back for me and I still don’t know her very well three years later. I like her though. I didn’t at first, but through the trauma of losing my constructed adult identity, I found this First Self and grew to love her. She is now me and I can do Magic. I have visions, I heal with my hands and trees speak to me through the language of energetic pressure in my palms. Crows follow me and throw down gifts of feathers and chunks of bark frantically pulled from the branches on which they perch. I meditate with red dogs, our chakras breath together through their fur and my bare skin. My ancestors are a chorus of angelic cheerleaders joyfully cheering me on as I uncover yet another layer of supernatural connection.

Sometimes you have to be hit on the head to talk to angels.

The voter suppression thats happening recently right before the mid term 2018 elections in North Dakota  made me think of these photos that I captured a couple months ago on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota and a little town right on its border called Mobridge. A recently passed North Dakota bill that states that anyone with a PO box as an address cannot vote. This effectively wipes out the voting rights of a majority of Native Americans who live on reservations and predominately have PO boxes for mailing addresses The Sitting Bull Memorial is located on beautiful isolated hill behind the casino overlooking the lake and feels wild quiet. Nearby Mobridge is a sanitized whitewash of Americana and the town boasts a statue of a cowboy riding a fish. Sitting Bull has his self created mythology and so does the wild west cowboy culture, but this is the First People’s land and we stole it and continue to disrespect and steal and undermine Native Americans in this country. its their country and we took it. let the people vote.

 

 

Moments after taking this photo, a huge, beautiful, behemoth of a male buffalo ambled across my path in front of my truck. I was lucky to witness such old landscape magic.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BlD3IHEF5cX/?taken-by=imsarabrownphotography

 

This is Ludlow, Colorado. In 1914 there was what is still considered the “deadliest conflict” between labor and corporate power in US history. 1200 striking coal miners and their families were attacked by the National Guard and privately hired enforcers on behalf of the coal mine companies that were being protested. Up to 200 dead were the result of that attack and the miners retaliation and this ghost town is all that is left of Ludlow, CO.

I came here in mid July on my way up to the Denver area. Coal mining is in my family’s blood. My Grandpa Fullerton was working in the coal mines by the time he was 13 and died of lung cancer when he was 54. My Great-Grandma Walker grew up in a coal mine camp and her stories of that particularly hard environment to grow up in, are lost with her to time.

Early morning hot and quiet except for the cicadas and the multitude of grasshoppers. Mournful still, this monument to death due to power warfare. I closed my eyes and opened myself to my grandfather, I asked him to speak to me in this place of remembering, his coal miner brothers. I was immediately hit with such a wave of deep sadness, grief old and strong. It filled me like a song, it got louder, I felt dizzy and the edges of panic wanted to creep in. I breathed and breathed and opened my eyes. I had gotten my answer.

The moon was rising and it was 100 degrees, the night was full and hot and just so beautiful.

There are the moments when the light just wraps you up and takes you somewhere beyond the color spectrum, or drops you deep into the middle of it.

This is one of those moments, one of those magic nights.

When light makes the mundane magic, its then revealed that what we take for granted, has been shining this bright all along.

 

 

This.. a couple weeks ago and a world away… somewhere on the way to Taos, NM this tree and relation to this mailbox in this landscape, stopped me in my truck-tracks. These moments when cruising down an unknown highway and a certain view just commands me to stop. so i do.