In February of 2016, my world began to crumble. The man I had been with for ten years was drinking heavily. He was a Jekyll/Hyde drunk. He laid hands on me, injuring me, and I took off. After a couple of days of trying to catch my breath, I decided that wallowing in self-pity wasn't the way to go. Instead I would take the time to travel around the country and visit some places I'd always wanted to see, especially the Mound Builder sites. With the help of friends, I had enough money for a tent and sleeping bag, pencils, crayons, paper, and other necessities of vagabonding. My son gave me his old cell phone to use- I mostly used it as a camera. So I went around to different places, sketched and drew my impressions, and took reference photos. At every place that I stopped, I also prayed to the ancestors [I am of mixed descent] and begged them to wake up, because my personal emergency felt somehow interwoven with the planetary one. It felt like my life falling apart was only a reflection of what was going on with the chaos on the planet in general, and that something had to be done to put that in check. After I prayed at the Crystal River site in Florida I was sitting at the top of the mound checking in on FB [great reception on top of the mound] and received a beautiful video from a Lakota friend of a tiny tot dancing at a powwow. I was looking out over the river, the video was playing, and suddenly I "felt" a gigantic "cat" coming awake deep down under my feet, and a huge jolt of energy flowed up from my feet and out the top of my head. I have only had a few of these giant "vibe" moments in my life. This was an incredible moment. It felt like Something Big was awakening. Other "signs and wonders" came along after that. A few months later I was camping on the banks of the Cannonball River, helping the Lakota face down the DAPL gang. The "Walkabout Series" is the result of my camping/couch surfing over the course of the three months that I was on the road*. There are more studies for other pieces floating around, just sketches and digital studies. Maybe I'll go back and work on them someday, but these are the ones that I finished, back then. *I went back to the ex- in late spring. I had told him that if he cleaned up his act and went to AA I would come back, and a friend told me that I should follow through if I told him that, so I did. He did pretty well at staying sober for a few years but in the end he slid back into it, and things went very dark. He left me in May of 2019, after 14 years together, and disappeared. I'm still picking up all my shattered pieces. I've come to the understanding that I have terrible taste in partners, and so I will remain celibate for the rest of my life. SO much easier.