Canyon Clarity: A Cinematographer Creates Her Dream Home in New Mexico

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

“It’s a great perch up here,” Geer says. “This sweet little cabin feels like being in a cave with windows, surrounded with solid earth and organic materials. Nothing else feels quite like it.”  --NH

Does the soul need wilderness?

Before her death in 1965 Dorothea Lange was working on a series of photographs using her Northern California cabin, Steep Ravine, as a metaphor for freedom. Dyanna’s life and work continue this love affair with the freedom nature offers. Several of her films ask the question: Does the soul need wilderness? Her remarkable and disconcerting film Vanished!! is a journey into nature’s sweet seduction and strange comfort.

“Nature is honest and always itself,” Dyanna says, begging the question of whether we ask too much of life in our obsession with work and relationships. “Nature is not just the blossoms, the bees and the birds, but a real knife edge of life and death and the universe and the spiral of things. To live on this earth we have to be respectful and hyperaware of the web, the connectedness of it. We have to go beyond ourselves.” Consistent with this idea, she is creating, with the help of friend Kevin Cassidy and surrounding like-minded neighbors, a conservation land trust to keep the river canyon permanently saved from further development.

In meditative moments she quotes the cabin creed of Steep Ravine, part of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem Inversnaid, which her father tacked on the wall there:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print