Jill’s Moon
I knew Jill Zwicky as a neighbor, collaborator, and friend.
Her photography was a force — she could take the rarest, most fragile moment and return it as something everyone revered.
About six months before she passed, I told her the full moon would rise perfectly between the Two Rock pinnacles the next evening. I couldn’t be there, but I hoped she might. Those rocks have long been a waypoint — for the Miwok, for explorers, for settlers — and still a timeless frame for sun, moon, fog, birds, and passing weather.
I wasn’t sure she’d go, but the next day her image appeared: powerful, exact, transcendent. She had nailed the shot. When she passed less than a year later, I felt that photograph was a parting gift — a portal caught in alignment just before she stepped through her own.
In the years since, I tried to capture my own version to honor her but weather, timing, and gear never cooperated. Two years ago, I arrived early, tripod ready, heart set, yet another attempt! I felt this was truly the year I would get the shot. Yet when the time for the moonrise came, no glow appeared between the rocks. A glance north revealed my mistake — the lunar ascent would begin a quarter mile off. Crestfallen, I began packing up.
Then I felt Jill’s smile — that warm, enveloping laugh that moved through you.
“Take the ridge shot anyway,” I told myself. “Jill would.”
I hustled up the roadside for a new angle. Just as I dialed in the focus, a lone cow walked into the moon’s path. The beauty of it stopped me. I nearly forgot to shoot. Then a car approached, forcing me to lift the tripod before I could capture it. By the time the road cleared, the cow had wandered on.
Again disappointed. Again hearing Jill’s laugh in my chest. I reset for a simple moonrise shot — and like clockwork, a second cow stepped into the moon. This time I caught it.
But the most extraordinary part of the evening wasn’t the photograph. It was what happened through the lens:
I could feel the Earth turning — the landscape sliding away from the moon instead of the moon rising. For that moment, her spirit felt like it was ascending while I dropped gently beneath it.
So here is my testament to Jill.
This is Jill’s Moon. This shot was a major piece in my show this Fall titled Milking Light at Usher Gallery Petaluma (www.milkinglight.com) .
Jill Zwicky — July 31, 1948 — October 9, 2020
I knew Jill as a neighbor and friend. My family moved next door to her in the early ’90s, during a magical stretch of time in a magical place. Open space was our backyard — a yard where every creature, trail, and adventure waited just beyond the fence. Running through those hills, gardening, and diving off the coast were my joys, too, so I often stood in the very places Jill later captured with her lens. When we met, we instantly shared that same love of landscape and light.
One of my favorite sights in this world is the morning light that follows a fierce winter storm. A few times each year, atmospheric rivers roar through our coastal hills like freight trains. And if they break just before dawn, a rapt stillness settles over everything — a stillness so profound it feels as if all the energy pulled from the air overnight hasn’t yet drifted back. The memory of trees bending and branches snapping in the dark is brushed aside, and the first light of day arrives hesitantly, wrapped in an ethereal glow that fills ridge, sky, and canopy.
This spirit light is good medicine. It lasts only a moment, then vanishes forever, yet in that moment it warms the entire horizon with such perfect grace that time itself pauses. Light flows everywhere at once. Nothing moves, yet everything is washed clean and grateful to be alive. Clouds, trees, fields, creeks, birds, and blades of grass — all of them radiant.
To witness this, you have to be out before dawn, or stay up after the storm’s last breath. I love it, but on a cold, wet morning it takes resolve to leave a warm bed. Jill, though — she seemed immune to such mortal considerations.
From years of running and diving, I knew most of the best places to catch moments like these. Jill knew them too — and more. She had a way of arriving at the exact instant a narrow ribbon of sky would part, an event that might happen only once a season. It was as if she had an app for such things, when really it was simply woven into her life-force. On mornings when I slept in and later scolded myself for missing the magic, I would see Jill had been there — standing almost exactly where I would have gone — and she had captured the perfect shot, technically flawless and gift-wrapped for the rest of us. I’d sip my coffee and smile. Thank you, Jill.
I don’t think she chased magic for herself; she carried it already. She offered it to us — a present, freely given. And through that gift, the spirit-of-all-things that moved through her remains with us still.
For this, and for her life, we are truly blessed.
