The Forests of the Night

I made a beautiful necklace today featuring a variety of shapes and sizes of Tiger's Eye. I love the mysterious, elusive quality of the bands of gold and brown that shift and shimmer like the eye of a tiger caught by firelight. As is often the case when I work with this stone, the wonderful poem by William Blake plays through my mind like a refrain.

TIGER, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

In a interesting coincidence, while I was working on the necklace, I was listening to a program on a local npr station on the emergence of uncontacted tribes. I say "coincidence" because here I was thinking about the forests of the night, which led me to think about my time in Costa Rica and, while I was thinking about that, the discussion of uncontacted tribes came up.

Whenever we used to drive around Costa Rica, my mind would drift off into the beautiful forested landscapes stretching as far as the eye could see, with no sign of human existence. How can that be, I would ask myself? How can there be all this beautiful land and no indigenous people to live on it? My mind began to dream up tribes that hadn't been contacted by man. Now I know that such people don't exist in Costa Rica, so I decided to invent them on canvas. I painted a series which I called "Lost Tribesmen". Imagining their existence, what resources from the world around them they would wear, made my time in Costa Rica much richer.

The whole issue of previously uncontacted tribes is much less romantic than my imagining such people into existence. To learn more about the plight of these people, check out these links:
http://www.survival-international.org/home
http://nrdc.org/