A Country Rag
Rivers Side
"Cherokee"
| For my best and most steadfast friend over forty years of metamorphoses -- through tragedies and triumphs, riches and poverty, illness and health, entertaining, celebrating, protecting, defending, putting me back together again and again, encouraging artistic expression of every kind, providing my only intermittent experience of "mothering" for my goddaughter, a soul sister to me and many others, and a true Gift of God -- blessings, honor, and eternal life. |
She's a warrior princess, a gathering of tribes from the cutting path of courage and endless desire, staring unmoved into the fire, transforming heat to logic and laughter, refining, redesigning an archive of our memory's lore. The teller of loss who torches each wound to bind its lightning edge on mountain steppes and gnarled wood, she's a free-running stream, the recombinant carbon of stone-cleansed dreams. |
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About the author: Jeannette Harris holds a high honors Bachelor of Science degree in cognitive psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Raised in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, as a professional performance dancer, singer, pianist and acrobat, she has lived and worked cross-country, including as a programmer/analyst (Cobol, Pascal, DEC and IBM OS) and project manager for state, local, and federal accounting systems, and received a state security clearance for wiretapping "drug kingpins" while working for the Criminal Division of Virginia's Attorney General's Office. Her family is of German, English, French and Welch origin, imparting an eclectic mix of religious paths including, most particularly, Christian Science, evangelical Christianity, Judaism, and mysticism. She has lived in Appalachia for thirty years, including twenty in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley where she owned a riverfront mini-farm, ran contractor painting and rental businesses, created a web design venture including this site (O Shenandoah! Country Rag/A Country Rag), and still co-owns real estate. She has three out-of-print chapbooks of poetry, a novel entitled Tapestry and a slim volume called Jeannie, both unpublished. Works in progress are Adanta (revised), an exhaustive, chronological anthology of poetry written between 1974 and 2004; Flesh and Blood, a chronological compilation of Appalachian short stories written between 1996 and 2004; Gifts, a collection of computer graphics and digitized paintings created between 1996 and 2007; Chrysos, a breakdown of cartoons and other artwork created during three months in 2003; and Chameleon, creative non-fiction, a chronological autobiography, arranged by geography (eleven chapters, each comprised of prose interspersed with literary, musical and cinema references; interviews; and letters to Josh), with a target completion date of fall 2008. Her writing has been widely published on the internet and to a lesser extent in hardcopy. She has been a volunteer off and on for ten years for the Jonesborough Museum, music festival, Library, and environmental action group, and was the first Co-Chair of the Green Party of Tennessee, concentrating on issues of women's rights. In her spare time, she visits area galleries, attends concerts, ballets and festivals, reads regional literature, paints abstract and representational acrylics, and frequents services at Jonesborough's Presbyterian Church. |
O Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds, and
whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me. I am
small and weak. I need Your strength and wisdom.
Let me walk in beauty and make my eyes
ever behold the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things You have made.
Make my ears sharp to hear Your voice.
Make me wise so that I may understand
the things you have taught Your people.
Let me learn the lessons you have hidden
in every leaf and rock.
I seek strength, not to be greater than another,
but to fight my greatest enemy -- myself.
Make me always ready to come to You
with clean hands and straight eyes.
So when life fades, as the fading sunset,
my spirit may come to You without shame.
-- Native American prayer,
quoted in Mayo Clinic Women's HealthSource
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"Cherokee," graphics and midi © Jeannette Harris, April, 1996. All rights reserved.