Chaac, stone birds, and Earth sites

The beginning of January found me in Mérida, México, a place I had never visited. I was surprised to learn that the city was founded by Spanish colonizers more than 200 years prior to the establishment of my home country. Of course, they chose to build on the site of an existing Maya town, making it an even older place of human habitation, but I digress.

One of the things we do lately when traveling to smaller cities in MX is rent a car and day-trip it out to surrounding towns and sites of interest. I say smaller not because Mérida is actually diminutive; but as a point of contrast with México City, where we love to spend time, whose gargantuan scale makes renting a car pure madness.

The day after the friend’s wedding (the event that took us to Yucatán), which was also the last full day of our trip, we decided to go see Uxmal, an archaeological site about an hour from where we stayed. Driving out of the city, we saw dense, scrubby jungle on all sides; a land full of rocks and stones that was also plainly fertile. I could feel thorns and relentless insects in the vegetation just off the side of the road. The sun was white hot on the remote two-lane highway.

A conversation wove itself as we traveled towards the ancient ruins. We take lot of road trips in general, and some of our richest discussions take place not facing one another, but side by side in the car while navigating.

This particular day, much of what came up was distress. How do we live now? and what can we possibly do? I know many of you are feeling these things too, as the place we call home becomes ever more hostile. Like a painful purple-green bruise, we had been avoiding the topic. But passing through a glaring landscape that looked like it could swallow us, we finally sat with it.

The trip as a whole came at an inconvenient time for me. Just returning from holidays, sandwiched between work on an important project with a very short timeline, I had no mental space for vacation. My focus was on my artwork installation. While I had a general idea of how I’d approach the project, and had begun its foundation, I was unclear on the essence of the piece, its ethos. I knew physically what I would build, but not what its heart should contain.

A friend recently mentioned a meditation practice for travels, a way of energetically preparing to enter a new field. I don’t know the details of her technique, but as we approached our arrival in the Yucatán I asked the land for two things: please receive me, and please show me the way for this work.

That hot day, by the time we arrived at the ruins, Uxmal, my heart was heavy and pressured. We had surfaced burdensome things we’d been holding, unable to say out loud: fear, uncertainty, anger, apathy. It settled over me like a leaden quilt, and I found myself wondering why on earth I was sightseeing, when all I wanted was to disappear myself to a different plane of reality.

And then…without warning, the palpable presence in these ancient stones overcame everything. Quietly, subtly, the concerns of my life slipped away, and I was situated in a space / time configuration that was both unknown, and deeply familiar.

It is a large complex—the city once housed more than 25,000 people, and the buildings and pathways just kept going and going. The farther we got from the entrance, the structures were less preserved, and encroaching nature was wilder.

There was a particular section noted as a temple, built over a place considered by the society’s priests and shamans to be a location of unique power within the earth. This structure was adorned with many stone birds, harbingers of spirit and other worlds.

As we wandered I felt a certain snapping-to of awareness. Time passes. Civilizations grow, flourish, and come to their end. The people who lived here likely also experienced what we are feeling now—a recognition that everything is changing, that we are facing the end of many things.

With that awareness, suddenly came clarity. My task is not the fierceness of fighting back, meeting fire with fire. Rather, the calling before me is subtler, quieter: presence. The artwork taking form at home, on another once-wild land, is a space to be present to the society-wide grief that comes with loss of this magnitude; and then, for communion with the earth herself. The temporary site I am building, much like the ancient one at Uxmal, offers a technology for plugging into that which is higher, older, deeper, truer.

I was at once awed at the communication from those gathered ancient stones, quietly grateful, and not very surprised. I don’t know a word for this combination of feelings, but it happens with frequency. Thank you.

This feels like the point at which to invite you to visit the installation. I’m honored to have been selected to participate in Deering Contemporary 2026: Here We Gather... What We Need We Already Have.

The show prompts artists to create works using materials, both physical and intangible, found and gathered at the Deering Estate. The exhibition explores resourcefulness, preservation, and ecological mindfulness, encouraging creative use of what the site already provides. Curator Dainy Tapia invited me to produce a large-scale installation work similar to the temporary public art project Garden of Essence I created last fall.

The exhibition opens Sunday, January 25th from 12-5pm. I would love it if you could drop by! As before, the work is participatory, and the opening will include an opportunity for the public to engage in collaboratively shaping the artwork. More information and RSVP here.

Laying the foundation for the installation at Deering Estate.