Living Near the Bone:
Dyanna Taylor’s View of Nature
By Linda Mason Hunter

© Linda Mason Hunter, 2008; May not be reprinted without written permission from the author.

Dyanna Taylor is thrice blessed. (1) Her adventurous career as a cinematographer takes her to remote corners of the world, often for weeks at a time; (2) She is the granddaughter of Dorothea Lange, one of America’s most famous women, whose black-and-white still photographs document the angst of the Great Depression, (3) She possesses a deep, almost spiritual connection with the earth, its delicate balance, its mysteries, its rhythms.

In her 30-year career shooting films for PBS, HBO, National Geographic, and all the major television networks, Dyanna has earned a reputation as one of the great women documentarians of our time. She credits her grandmother with a triple legacy: her natural gift for portraying human joy and earthly dignity, her first camera (Dorothea’s two-a-quarter Rolliflex when she was 13), and her critical eye.

“Dorothea taught me to see and look again and to SEE,” Dyanna confirms.

Dyanna's wilderness retreat

Dorothea doted on her grandchildren—all 11 of them--giving them the gift of a Thoreau-like family cabin overlooking the rugged Pacific Coast 25 miles north of San Francisco. In this mythic place Dyanna and her young cousins reveled in a free, unscheduled, simple life attuned to the tides and the moon, the hot springs and the sulfur, the animals and the plants.

Clearly, Dorothea’s greatest bequest was this cliff face experience without modern conveniences (hot water, heating, electricity). She dedicated her last years to her grandchildren, her work, and her simple shelter, called Steep Ravine.

“To watch the natural growth of the children there, and to see them so happy and free there, is the joy of Grandma Dorrie,” she wrote in a 1961 Christmas letter. This childhood freedom gave Dyanna her deep joy in simplicity, her sense of place in the universe, and an awareness of the limitations of her body.

“It was an incredible gift, this freedom to find my body, to be in the grass, to be in the sea, to climb on rocks. To tumble, to run, to make as much noise as I wanted. To build, to create, to hide. To play. To watch the natural world. My grandparents didn’t coddle or inhibit us. So what if we skinned a knee, cut a chin, or even broke an arm? Everything was a lesson in nature and how we fit into it.”

In 1992 Dyanna gave up her New York City loft and moved to the Southwest in order to lead a quieter life. She found ideal refuge, a tiny cabin perched on the edge of a granite cliff overlooking the Pecos River. She bought the 24 acres the cabin sits on, plus an additional 20 acres of rugged canyon land, thus protecting her privacy, an unusual array of wildlife, and her view.

“This is where I hide, where I come for clarity. I love this little river canyon. It feels like an embrace.”

Bed chamber

For Dyanna this remote canyon offers refuge from the overstimulation of work. Here she lives submerged in nature’s time, aware of the energy of the universe, hiking in moonlight, marveling at the nighttime sky; attending to meteor showers, northern lights, and full moons; celebrating the solstice, and relishing "the incredible privilege it is to be alive in this sensory body.”

A few years ago I spent six months on the cliff’s edge near Dyanna. She quickly became a soul-friend and a teacher, awakening me to the spirit of the earth. She taught me, through her love affair with what nature offers—its sweet seduction and strange comforts-- that the soul needs wilderness.

“Nature is honest and always itself, making me think we ask too much of life in our self obsession with work and relationships. Nature is not just the blossoms, the bees and the birds, but a real knife-edge of life and death and the universe and the spiral of things. To live on this earth we have to be respectful and hyper-aware of the web, the connectedness of it. We have to go beyond ourselves.”

Her favorite poem remains the cabin creed of Steep Ravine, part of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Inversnaid” her father tacked on the wall there:

“What would the world be, once bereft of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, oh, let them be left, wildness and wet. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

First published, in part, in Natural Home magazine.

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