I have a new self portrait for you along with a new post, though I am sadly overdue to tell you about the best, most wonderful recent development in my life: Lissar. She deserves her own post, so I’ll save most of her story for that, but she is our new Silken Windhound, and she has done WONDERS to help heal my poor broken heart. I can, it turns out, love again. No one will ever replace Calantha, but I love Lissar wholeheartedly for who she is. She is, as are all Silkens, absolutely stunning, and her coloring is almost the exact opposite of Calantha’s. Cal was mostly white with some brown brindle patches and Lissar is red brindle with a white blaze and patches. I’ll post just one picture of her for now.
I also feel that it would be weird if I didn’t address the current Covid 19 pandemic, but I’d also like to keep that a separate post. So for now I’ll just say that I hope you are all safe, your families are safe, we’re all washing our hands a lot, practicing social distancing and protecting each other. I know that having your life suddenly taken from you is shocking and takes a lot of adjustment, but you can get through this. We will get through this.
As for my self portrait, some of you might remember another self portrait I shot quite a few years ago (and two homes ago) inspired by the same character, the great white hunting merrel from Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, but with active female characters. He is a smaller, but very important character, in a well-populated world equally full of animals and people. Several of the main characters, including Rosie, the Sleeping Beauty, can talk to animals, making for delightful conversations that sound exactly like you’d imagine chatting with these animals would.
I’m going to let Robin McKinely tell us about the merrel in her own words, because I certainly can’t improve upon them!
“[Rosie] thought of the merrel stretching its wings, silently, in the dark peak of Lord Prendergast’s Great Hall; she thought of how carefully it moved among its cage of the rafters, so that the chain around its angle did not clink; so carefully that any of Lord Prendergast’s guests who did not know it was there would never look up to find it… She thought of the story of the huntsman told her, of how it had been wounded – they guessed – by a dagger of falling ice in the mountains… and how Lord Prendergast’s hunting party had found it, but that he had stopped them killing it. Even with a broken wing and half dead of starvation no one liked to approach it. The huntsman threw a net to tangle its feet, and Lord Pren himself had hooded it… and then had it bound and brought home, and its wing set. But the wing had not healed as it should, and so it was was given the vaulted height of the Great Hall to live in, where no one dared trouble it, and it was fed by a falconer with a very long pole.
The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I shall eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight.
I have often felt a kinship to the merrel. I can sympathize with an outside force coming along and stripping away your freedom, your dreams, your desires, your ability to move freely. The forced isolation he’s put into, the seemingly pointless, yet unending life. I suspect we all can to some degree more now than usual. For most though, this time of quarantine and social distancing will end. Outside of a miracle happening, for those of us with chronic illnesses, that is to be expected for the rest of our lives. Remember us when life returns to normal. There is a surprising amount I have in common with fictional, chained, broken-winged birds thanks to the chronic illness of ME.
I shot this, oh, a few years ago now, in an empty field in Kansas. I had a crowd of cows watching from across the small road we were on, who seemed quite interested in observing my process! Geoff helped be my human shutter release and the Kansas winds did lovely things to my wig and dress all on its own. It was a cold, but easy shoot! It only took me several years to get around to editing it. 🙂
That’s about the end of my energy for now, but I’ll leave you with some detailed shots along with the main one. Enjoy! I hope you’re all staying safe and keeping sane!
Dreams Of The Last Flight, © Sarah Allegra, a self portrait.
Dreams Of The Last Flight, © Sarah Allegra, detail.
Dreams Of The Last Flight, © Sarah Allegra, detail.
Dreams Of The Last Flight, © Sarah Allegra, detail.
And just for funsies, here’s the original image I used as the “base” to build everything on top of. Ignore the mid-blink expression on my face, I swapped out my torso and head from another shot XD Also ignore my bra strap which, as it likes to do, had fallen down without me noticing!
Mythic Pictures 