This portfolio is an effort to convey my experience in the year from August 2014 to August 2015, when my mother, always healthy, became ill and died. Through these pictures of the places and natural processes I witnessed that year, arranged in chronological order, I try to understand our mortality and life cycle.

The central metaphor is that of the medicine wheel.  In August 2014 my wife,, my mother, my stepfather, and I visited the Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, where they spent the summers.  It is a Native American sacred site, perched on the edge of the escarpment of the Bighorn Basin, a ring of stones 80 feet across with 28 stone spokes radiating from a central cairn.  Outside this ring are several stone cairns and a rope fence strung between wooden posts.  Visitors had left colored cloths holding small pouches, feathers, baby moccasins, and photographs of children tied to the rope.  We walked clockwise around the wheel.  We started back. The sun grew lower.  It was dark when we arrived back at the parking lot. There was just enough light to read the plaque:

“Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round. The earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round.  Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so is everything where power moves.”

The circle is the essence of Native American life. The Medicine Wheel structure embodies this. It is a place where many have experienced their vision quest, a place of ritual, a place of prayer, a place of lasting vision.” 
Black Elk – Lakota Sioux