A Fleeting Presence

Susan Cross lives in northern New Mexico, well-wisher to ravens, bears, bumblebees, rattlesnakes and coyotes. She works from her tiny house on a windy mesa above the Rio Puerco canyon as a craftsperson, ceremonialist, and Jill-of-all-trades. She's a burial shroud maker, rawhide hand drum and rattle builder, a ceremony writer, a gardener, an old mother, a tour driver, a grief-stricken naturalist drowning her sorrows with single malt scotch, and a weary-but-wonder-filled pilgrim. She strives to remain a humble student in the school of hard knocks. Susan has felt called in recent decades by the deep past which has led her on sojourns to many Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in the landscapes of her people, to ancestral healing, and trying to understand the strange impacts of diaspora. She's exploring ways to "preserve the archaic whisper" by seeking strategies to safeguard pieces of our humanity that are at on-going risk of atrophy.