Poet Leah Sullivan crosses the room on little cat-feet to greet me, stepping in soft socks over the deep pomegranate tones of a treasured Armenian rug.
Her name, LEAH in upper case, guarded by ancient, thorned symbols which once protected hillside flocks from wolves, and their shepherds from scorpions, is woven into the weft. Three house cats stretch and drowse in their usual spots around the gracious Pasadena home built in 1929.
She extends her slim arms in greeting, wrapped in a crane-patterned robe. “I’m a crane-crone!” she chuckles as we make our way to the dining table where we are joined by her husband John, a fine art photographer disguised in a Triumph tee shirt (he has two motorcycles).
He recently retired from a long-term post as a photographer for The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, so his new business card reads “Unknown Artist.”
On the winter solstice of December 21st, 2024, the Sullivans celebrated 37 years of advanced love. Leah recalls:
“We got married on the winter solstice, 1988, in Pasadena’s traffic court, after-hours, by a wonderfully accommodating and duly solemn Judge Argento, following a long, chilling, frustrating wait — with John’s elderly parents, who’d driven down from Yuba City, his teenaged son, Ben, our Best Man, and our Matron of Honor, in City Hall’s stately courtyard, where our service was supposed to have taken place. Our hired minister stood us up.
A Good Samaritan in the traffic ticket office called over to the Pasadena courthouse next door. We rushed over, a chilled and disheveled wedding party, and through those halls of justice into the designated courtroom, where we breathlessly repeated our written vows before the bench, struggling to regain the dignity of the moment. I laughed a lot, anyway. We both did. We celebrated later at a dinner with friends and family, and, thanks to yet another mishap of the day, only got to enjoy our undelivered wedding cake a year later, on our first anniversary. We’d been tested, and after that Murphy’s Law start, we were pretty sure we could survive anything!”
Earlier last December, the Sullivans committed the ashes of their daughter Danielle, remembered as “Dandi,” who had died in December 2023, to the earth. Leah said, “We mixed Danielle’s ashes with rose petals from our garden and transferred them from the crematory box to her purple urn and then scattered a few handfuls with rose petals over the little memorial plot beside our house where our dear four-legged and winged family are remembered. It feels good to commit remains into the arms of Mother Earth, an ancient human ritual. I feel peace. Pain comes and goes as it will. I stay open. I’m not afraid and I’m no longer overwhelmed.”
A framed print of Demeter, mother of Persephone, embracing her daughter, is on the wall near the urn that’s set among flourishing plants. Leah explains that her artist friend Leslie Reed created the piece “…dedicated to one of her own precious daughters, and an homage to the fierce challenges and power of mother-daughter relationships.”
Leah’s from the Bronx, John’s from Yuba City in California’s Central Valley, a match that she describes as “City girl. Country boy.”
She’s a Dragon, he’s a Tiger, a formidable combination in any cosmic coupling. A conservative astrologer’s reading of this pairing might be “combustible.” The glue that maintains the vessel of the relationship, in Eastern zodiac terms, is an essential humanity. While Dragons may be showy and Tigers may be controlling, both of these powerhouse signs are guided by a sharp ethical sense, which lays the bedrock for a partnership based upon mutual respect.
Leah admits, “I’m not easy.” John smiles at her across the dining table set with nodding tulips and colorful pottery. He says that he can be passive-aggressive, while Leah is a confronter.
John loves to cook, and Leah says that his black-bean soup is what first slipped past her defenses and opened her heart.
On the dining room table is a page torn from The Little Zen Calendar, a quote by Rumi which Leah reads aloud:
Out beyond fields of
wrongdoing and
rightdoing, there is a field.
I will meet you there.
She ponders her tea mug, then adds, “John says there’s a golden thread between us that can’t be broken. I feel it, too. And we take things one day at a time.”
The Sullivans are a third-act marriage. They fell in love after meeting at Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) in San Marino. Leah’s daughter, Danielle, was a young adult deeply ensnared by addiction when the two said “I do.” They met the pain and meet the loss in differing ways, together.
Of Danielle, John says, “She could be impossible to deal with. But when I went to clear out her place after she’d died, I realized that she had a childlike delight and beauty that lit the inside of her life, the place where she truly lived. It transformed my view of her.”
Looking at one of his images, “Water Flower,” John says the bright pink petals remind him now of Danielle.
Leah’s experience is perhaps most powerfully conveyed in her poetry.
In “Memorial Day 2024,” she asks this of the distant stars, but privately, refers to her daughter:
By what trick of time and distance
do they shine --
their violence turned to beauty,
their substance, gone?
And in her recent poem, “Every Day,” she’s moved to practice dying, experiencing the meaning of death, of what dies and what remains:
Earth will take her in her brown arms.
and in time, grow green.
I will become wind
and sky,
part star, part feathered and soaring wing.
The Sullivans are cat people, but they have an ornate birdcage near the large window in their dining room. It’s filled with dried flowers and photographs, not empty, as Leah corrects, but home to the memory of their cockatiel, Mad Max.
Botanical references and floral elements float through Leah’s poems and comprise many of John’s photographs. Given the context of their shared experiences, these are not the darling buds of May. Remembering that John devoted years to visualizing and capturing the thorny souls of cacti in the Huntington’s Desert Garden, the Sullivan’s chthonic blossoms remind us of the subterranean origins of all plant life, phytic sparks that smolder out of sight deep beneath the earth’s surface long before the first green breaks the surface. John’s arrangements seem otherworldly, including his hand-framed image he calls “Voyager.” Both partners are night-travelers in this sense, traversing the underworld for a glimpse of open sky.
John’s photographs are made doubly compelling by the artist’s daring use of art papers as frames for his images which are often shot with a Fuji GFX100, offering five times the resolution of a more standard camera. “This camera offers a huge amount of detail and tonal abilities,” says John. He adds further dimension by setting each image like a jewel in a hand-made frame covered by sensuously textured stock, including jute papers from Nepal and Bangladesh, swirling with organic patterns which support without competing.
If the crucible is pain, then creation, Leah with poetry, John with images, is the transformative alchemy that not only sustains the conversation that is any marriage but appears to open new pathways for this couple. John will turn 75 in February, and Leah turns 85 in July. She says, “We are challenged to recreate ourselves in the world at a late stage of life, and we are, in our quiet ways, meeting that challenge.” She and John are considering creating a collaborative publication that they hope to bring about in 2025.
The Prophet Isaiah, ever the killjoy, warned that “All flesh is grass.” Neither John nor Leah seems convinced, however, that the falling of the flower is the absolute end of the love-story.
John’s latest book glows with images of indigenous Muhly grass, known as sweetgrass in Florida and the low country of South Carolina where enslaved people from West Africa applied resourceful crafting techniques to the feathery but durable stalks to weave baskets.
Rather than plaiting or twisting, Gullah Geechee artisans descended from African ancestors coil the dried blades of sweetgrass in circles and bind the bundles with thin strands of palmetto fronds. Bulrush and pine needles are often added for decoration and strength as well. For crafting tools, the makers typically use a sharpened metal spoon known as a “sewing bone” or small, whittled picks called “nailbones.” Several decades ago, the Gullah Geechee artisans shared their skills with Seminole and other First Nations communities in the region, making the sweetgrass basket an utterly unique illustration of America’s polyglot history. These works of art defy the notion of grass as fleeting, and now are prized in museum collections around the world.
Of the enduring bond between them, Leah recalls that she’s always felt and been drawn to the way John seeks the light in his photographs, especially those that have darker themes. And John responds, “I always get magic from your poems.”
As if on cue, a centerpiece tulip releases one petal, curved and translucent as a fragment of seashell that has traversed the ocean waves to find its resting place on the dining room table.
DEETS
- John Sullivan Photography
- Artist Guild Benefit for fire-affected
- Copies of GRASS for sale
- Sunday, February 16
- All Saints Episcopal Church, 132 North Euclid Avenue, Pasadena 91101
- Call for times: 626-796-1172
- https://allsaints-pas.org
- John Sullivan Photography
- One-man show
- The MorYork Gallery, 4959 York Boulevard, Highland Park, 90042
- Opening Friday, March 14, 11:00 AM
- www.moryork.com
I loved this stunningly precise portrayal of Leah and John, two extraordinary, intelligent, compassionate people I’ve had the privilege of knowing intimately for a long while, whom I also deeply admire for their exceptional artistic talents and refined taste. ♥️♥️
What a beautifully written article! I especially liked the poem selections. Just knowing that Leah and John are there, still loving, learning, and living is inspirational and comforting. It is easy to feel dread when considering older age; Leah and John are such rich examples of the fact that there is always so much look forward to. 🧡
I met Leah in high school. Even then she was a prolific poet whose powerful words and irreverent wit simply blew .me away.
I don’t know what magic allows Victoria Thomas to channel Leah even as they share the same time and space, but she has written a well-deserved paean that uncannily mirrors her Artistic Spirit.
Not for nothing, as we say in New York, Ms. Thomas bears a more than passing resemblance to the Leah I knew at Hunter College H.S.
Super cool Cats!
I’ve known Leah and John for decades.
They are a beautiful, compassionate and artistic dyad that complement each other
and the community with grace and style.
Victoria Thomas has captured their essence masterfully.
What an absolute inspiration is the golden thread that connects these two creatives. Thank you for sharing the lives, the art of these two talented, loving people.