Moroko/Saludos!

When I was a young child, I had a really close relationship with nature. Especially with animals. I would sit at my picnic table under the pecan tree in my backyard and share my pecan pieces with the squirrels. I was able to hold birds in my tiny hands and carry them around. I was very friendly with the spiders (I'll spare you the stories!).

We had a rescue dog that was hypervigilant and wouldn't let anyone into it's yard to feed it… except for me. And my favorite summer evening ritual was to find just one of the many fireflies in the yard, put it in a bowl (not a jar, so that it wasn't confined), fall asleep to its glow, and release it the next morning.

I made this animation based in part on my childhood firefly ritual.

I was never scratched, bit, or harmed in any of my encounters, but this behavior was discouraged (bringing a bird I found stuck in the mud into the house to clean it off was not met with happy excitement!). More than that though, the relationship was not viewed as valuable. And eventually, being raised in an environment that didn't understand the value and encouraged no relationship rather than safer ways of interacting with the nourishing nature around me, I lost that connection.

Throughout my entire adult life, I've pursued reconnection. Reconnecting with nature, being attuned to her songs and experiencing her sensations as an auditory-tactile synesthete (meaning sounds cause physical sensations in my body). Observing her cycles, appreciating her rhythms, making art to process it, eventually coming to understand how our Taino ancestors did the same. Even living with a painful undiagnosed musculoskeletal/connective tissue disorder in early adulthood, I pushed myself to experience as much nature as I could.

The challenge then arose:
How can one continue to reclaim this bond when physically venturing into nature becomes limited due to disability? When one becomes mostly housebound and often bed-tethered, practically overnight?

My dear illustrator friend Haley Brown and I were discussing this one day, and she commented that in her experience, disabled people tend to have an intimacy with nature that is really special. That when your world grows smaller, when time becomes blurred, when your movement becomes slowed, you become really conscious and attuned to your surroundings. And the small things you see become larger and more important as does your appreciation of them. Like the daily glimpses of the life cycle of the moss growing on the brick outside your door, something that someone swiftly passing by on their way to work maybe wouldn't notice. I agreed, this has been my experience too.

Over the years, small, meaningful ways to reclaim my bond with nature emerged to bridge the gap I was experiencing. And when I moved to Puerto Rico knowing I wouldn't be able to venture into nature the way I would have 10 years ago- I can't go rappelling down into the caves or hike to the highest elevations of Cordillera Central or El Yunque- I did know moving here would increase the amount of small, meaningful ways I could experience reconnection and that it would have a major influence on my art.

Living in a space where permeable walls blur the line between my self and the natural world, the rain I'm listening to right now as I write this isn't the sound of rain hitting the glass windows, as I don't have any. The rain I'm hearing is hitting the grass, the fronds of the palm trees, the broad leaves of the bananas trees, dripping from the little pools caught in the large hand-shaped yagrumo leaves. And that feels differently in my body than rain on glass windows. I can even sense the river swelling in the distance, because I can find it in the soundscape when the rain calms down.

Some nights, the fragrance of the moonflowers across the street suddenly waltz through my home, dancing to the song of the coquís, asking me to join in (I always oblige).

Every time I look out of the window, the mountains around me shapeshift under the always changing sunlight and clouds.

I quickly formed a relationship with the ever-present mountain fog, and I always know what the moon is up to.

All these tiny moments contribute to a deeper reconnection than I could have imagined several years ago sitting in my nearly soundproofed bedroom in Dallas with one little leaning tree outside my window in my tiny backyard, aching for some quality time in nature. And that deepening reconnection is not only with nature, but with that tiny, young me growing up in Louisiana that carried her little rollie pollie friends in her pretty Sunday dress pockets.

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Here is some behind the scenes for the KOKUYO animation I linked earlier. Some scenes are more detailed, some are still. During this phase, I was mainly mapping out placing keyframes, preliminary timing of scene changes, see if directions I planned would work, etc. Enjoy!

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