This piece flowed through me with the accompaning word "Elderberry". Not having ever seen an elderberry tree and knowing nothing about the subject, I was really stumped as to why I got that word in connection with this piece. It had a feeling of surrender and abandonment. It's as if I can feel the constant winds blowing across the plains and the hollow sound of silence.

A few days later I was telling a friend about the word Elderberry coming though and showed her the drawing. She asked if I knew that Native Americans used elderberry for healing. I had never heard a thing about it. She mentioned that there was a section at the Arboretuem at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco that had Native American plants and suggested I go and find an elderberry tree.

I was wandering through the gardens, searching for the right section, stopped momentarily and thought "Wouldn't it be great if I just walked up and found it without any effort?", but it was nowhere to be found. I finally found a gardener and asked him to point me in the right direction. He took me over to the Native American plant section and where the little sign said "Elderberry Tree" there was nothing. The marker said these plants were used for medicinal and musical purposes.

He asked another gardener where it had gone and she took me over to another area, saying "here it is - we moved it". I was standing at the very place I had stopped earlier.

The tree was leafy, and green with dark brown limbs, nothing like what I had drawn. I was really wondering why I had gotten this image, when I looked under the tree and found shoots sprouting up off the trunk. Light, sinuous, hollow shoots. Exactly what I had drawn.

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