Jo’iinn

Title: A Day’s Light

Yosemite may just be my favorite place on earth, and I miss it! So here I am 20+ hours later and 7 new brushes bought with a painting I feel proud of <3

1) That time when I was kayaking on rifle river and a Bald Eagle nearly lifted my youngest cousin and then followed the procession of my family’s kayaks for a full hour afterward and then I never saw another eagle there again  

2) When I was invited to my girlfriend’s family’s cabin and I was nearly trampled  on my way to the outhouse by a deer, not an elk or a moose, the size of a large horse so I just kinda did my business and then went back and asked my girlfriend’s mom If they had spooky animals wandering around. She replied that earlier the day we arrived she had seen a bear walking on the side of the road that was considerably bigger than her suv  

3) On my way to get water from the creek (same cabin trip) I almost tripped over a fish swimming in the grass at the hill between the cabin and the creek so I apologized and went on my way

4) When I was a small child I looked out my window one night to see three coyotes marching down my street in a way that was far too mechanical to be natural and I slowly ducked down because I had the overwhelming feeling that if I was seen watching them something terrible would happen. I had never seen coyotes in my neighborhood before or after that instance 

5) When I was 8 my sisters kitten when insane one night and started tearing chucks out of the floor and banging into walls and screaming so my father took him to the vet and after he died they tested him for rabies and the first test came back inconclusive and the second test was negative and to this day vets have not figured out what happened to our cat, but the government took the body away and we didn't get ashes or even acknowledgement that it had ever happened (we still had to get rabies shots as a precaution and THEY WERE THE WORST)

6) I was walking home from work the other night and I have to walk down into a ravine and up the other side to get to my house, which entails me crossing a bridge. as I was walking over It I realized I couldn't hear the water below the bridge, which is odd because I knew for a fact that there was water there this afternoon on my trip TO work. And then I noticed there wasn't any noise anywhere and my danger senses were telling me bad shit was going to happen but that was the only way home so I kept going. When I got over the bridge I was wondering If I should say hello to the tree that lives just off the path but as I started to turn around I felt something watching me and the overwhelming feeling of wrongness was the strongest I have ever felt so I walked slowly up the hill and refused to look back because I could feel it still following me 

7) Under that same overpass is where I made my first shrine and I used to leave flowers there until I noticed 1) that they weren't rotting, and 2) that something or someone else was leaving flowers that I had never seen before so I stopped leaving them and the next day the shrine was destroyed 

8) Back at rifle river before the weird eagle thing I was camping with my family on the riverbank and my cousins and I would often swim across the river to throw clay at each other and try to use the rope swing that no one is sure who put there because its far to high and tall for anyone to reach, normal kid stuff. Early one of the mornings when most of the family had left to use the showers I went down to the river to find sticks to burn in the fire and I looked up to see a huge mountain lion watching me, a small child, from across the water. Mountain lions have been extinct in Michigan for as long as I’d been alive but my sister also confirms that she saw it as well

9) At the park down the street from where I grew up they had a nature center that had a weird schedule and I went one day on my way home from school only to find it closed. I decided that I wasn't going to just go home because no one was there and weird shit always happened at that house when I was alone, so I decided to go on a walk. I knew the park really well and I wasn’t afraid of getting lost but when i started down the path and lost sight of the nature center it went dead silent and I felt what I can only describe as doom so i turned around and sprinted back to my bike and rode home as fast as I could. To this day I am confident that if I had continued on something horrible would have happened

Landscape of a vista from Arches National Park