Before And Beyond Memory, Take 5, 5 – 16 – 15. Stan Shawnee Boyd by Stan Shawnee Boyd on #SoundCloud

Ancestry, in my blood, down to my bones, “It Is Out Of The Earth That I Am” is an oratorio in progress.

From the script…

All Alone On The Wilderness Road

That fleeting season, locusts in bloom, I, the journeyman, the hero I am making out

Of myself in a mythology of my winter dreams, wake to a pale moon setting full.

I am in a line between her and the sun rising on the old Bright Farm on the

Wilderness Road, far from home.

I squint into the blaze of a new day and back a hundred seventy-two years, scan

The rolling hills for Great Grandfather Robert on horseback, slouched in the saddle

Near the end of the long ride over from the Ozarks, months, many moons behind

him from where he set out from home in the bayou country, a journeyman.

I ready myself, too comfortable with my tea and biscuit, to go a-carpentering, a

Journeyman in a line from the man I am peering at the hills for.

I know him in the continuance of the journeyman carpenters’ Way.

Soon I will be sending money home from my labors.

The Adagio

https://www.icloud.com/notes/07aAyP68OfhNuj3fQmoNxNL2g#Adagio,_Before_And_Beyond_Memory



This song goes back twenty-three years, true to heart.

Lovers Become Friends, New Take, 9 – 29 – 15, Stan Shawnee Boyd by Stan Shawnee Boyd on #SoundCloud

Wedding Day, June 23, 1978

TSaved Photo


I sculpted the Yin, feminine walking stick, from a fallen piece of Honey, or maybe Black Locust that was salvaged by an old friend, Gordon Seasley in the state park on the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana. Only a suggestion of a human vulva was apparent in the salvaged piece as found. The piece appeared to be rotted through. As I began working, the beauty of the Honey Locust grain became apparent.

Honey and Black Locust and other species are susceptible to attack by a canker fungus,”Thyronectria canker is a common fungal disease of honeylocust (Gleditsia triacanthos), occurring wherever this tree is grown. Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) and Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus) have also been reported to be susceptible to the disease.” This disease figures the wood, sometimes in dramatic ways.

These sculptures are in an ancient tradition of fertility and sexual wood carving, Ghana, Asante.