I don’t use color in my drawings much anymore, except in Photoshop (which part of me feels like it’s cheating. I don’t know why.). This picture is a scene from a small Rainbow Gathering in the Wayne National Forest, March of 1989. I used colored pencils for the color.

     I remember that the people here were folks I barely knew, but who shared food and music and stories with me. I remember we were all surprised to wake up and crawl out of our tents to find several inches of snow on the ground. We gathered and huddled under a tarp (the Kitchen)  with campfire coffee.

     I decided to post this picture in particular tonight because of an encounter with one of the people in this picture, I’ll call Jim. (He’s the guy on the left with the green hat.) His wife (at the time) is pictured sitting next to him on the far left (her back to us). I’ll call her Susan. Susan taught me some of my first guitar chords and a few songs at this gathering. She and Jim lived only a few houses down from me when I lived at the Franklin House. Those were my activist days in college, when I protested the bombing of Iraq and the sending of troops overseas. (We all lost someone in that war.)  Susan and Jim were regulars at our demonstrations and protests.

     I hadn’t  seen Jim in well over two decades until just tonight, when I went into town to participate in a demonstration of American Solidarity, an occupation in Athens, that attracted several dozen students and community members. I had to take a second look before I was sure, but there he was: Jim, the activist who will never disappear. I felt a sudden kinship towards Jim, and hoped he might remember me from years ago. I reintroduced myself to him, and we shared a few stories before the camera crews slipped in for interviews, and people were jostled around. My encounter with Jim lasted less than five or six minutes, but I felt that the old activist inside me had been reignited by my chance meeting with him.

     Anyway, this is a drawing of Jim and Susan (and others) from a Rainbow Gathering in March 1989 in the Wayne National Forest. I haven’t drawn anything with colored pencils in years. Maybe I’ll do some more color drawings. Who knows?

     Peace.