Let me know my smallness. Not an isolated smallness, not an insignificant smallness, but the smallness of a thread in a great and intricate tapestry, the smallness of one spider in a great lineage of spiders, the smallness of the blue-eyed grass, gazing into the Sun, eye to Great Eye, meadow of grasses and buzzing grasshoppers to meadow of Cosmic Galaxies.
That’s what I think, looking out over this valley where I make my home. It’s the middle of May, and the view’s great expanse swallows up everything dearest to me; holds it, like a great blue basket, turning green, dappled with light and cloud-shadow, the greatest basket of trillium and oaks and rivers and my home, and in my home another basket, of my own life. Baskets and meadows and the living world, folding and unfolding, miraculously, so miraculously that we can’t really hold it in our minds as we check our email and walk to our cars, but there, along that path, the Sun resides in the eye of the blue-eyed grass, and for a moment we glimpse the incomprehensible beauty that holds us.
In April I went to visit the museum of Walter Inglis Anderson in Ocean Springs, MS. If ever I could say to you, let me introduce to you my teacher, than it is this man, this feral and tumultuous artist, dead some seven years before I was born.
It had been decades since I’d been to his museum, since I’d moved away from Mississippi at the tender age of twenty-one. It was a pilgrimage then, you see, to return to Ocean Springs, and paired with another pilgrimage, because I was also traveling to Texas to be in the line of totality for the solar eclipse. But that is another story.
Here is the thing I keep thinking about, from that visit: that Walter Anderson painted ocelots, native cats to his area then, but now long since departed. It’s easy to see why—the area is scarred now with highways and shopping malls, the scourge of our times that threatens to overtake every meadow and glade and makes traveling a challenge to the soul, if you are inclined, as I am, to converse with the living world. An impossible place, I would think, for something as elusive and wild as a family of ocelots.
But something about the ocelots and their disappearance—or rather, that they were there only sixty years ago, marvels me, in the way that a babushka doll might. This babushka doll, with her highways and tired shopping malls—holds inside herself another babushka that held World War II and Walter Anderson and ocelots. He too marveled at the different temporal realities of his home, painting murals in the Oceans Springs Community Center that depicted, among many other glorious celebrations of that coastal ecosystem, the arrival of D’Iberville to the Gulf Coast in 1699—another babushka— and the nearly lost legacy of the Biloxi people, who held the heart of the land for eons. They are the first babushka, at the center of these nested realities.
We can’t help but wonder how much tragedy we can enact upon the Earth, removed as we are, layer by layer, from that central heart, that babushka where we lived enmeshed in the livingness of the world, and when the human world was not so distinct from the non-human world.
But sometimes, staring into the great basket that holds us, I am reminded of that illusion of separation, the illusion of a human-only world.
I see my smallness, that I am a thread—only—in a world that extends both in time and place far beyond what my mind can know, and that, however strayed or errant our threads may be, we are a part of her, of Earth. We did not come from anywhere else, but arose from her.
The mind loves to assert its dominance, to tell us what it knows. It demands the linear experience, and confirms only the reality that is mapped and recorded and tested. But the body holds the mind, and even as it ages, holds too the paradox of temporality and presence—great mysteries, even when they are mapped and spread out before us: how the DNA in our cells is marked for ages by the experiences of our ancestors. We are a nesting of paradox, of impossibilities, of miracles and destruction.
Standing on the lip of an ancient ridge, looking down at where my home is, I let myself be held by the greater reality, the body of Earth. Overwhelmed with beauty, I ease into trust—trust in this multi-dimensional tapestry, and my woven-ness in it, trust in the basket that holds us, trust like that of the blue-eyed grass, staring up at the Sun, fed by light, as small as nothing, but entirely not that, alive, miraculous, and participating in the livingness of the world.
One of the curious experiences that I have— when sketching, and later developing a pastel— is the sense of communion that arises with the subject. This is most pronounced when my attention is focus upon a single flower, or tree.
The experience of taking in a landscape, and in particular a landscape with a sweeping view, such as this one, requires something a little more challenging to foster that thrilling sense of communion. A shift, or perhaps, a repositioning of oneself, to make room for the vastness before you.
For a landscape, or any representational art, to really convey the livingness of its subject, this ephemeral thing has to happen. I’ve put the word communion to it, but its more like an exchange of consciousness, a spiritual movement.
People sometimes ask me if I teach art, and to that end I could talk about how layered this pastel is, in a near pointillistic fashion. This piece is a vast collection of pastel dots, and it happened that way because the sky was so luminous and rich that I could not reduce it to broad strokes of singular color—I wanted it to dance with light, to play with the eye. I could say this was a logical, artistic decision, and I’m certain there was some logic to it, but truthfully the decision was made from the intent to reflect the spiritual experience of the sky, to relish the blue depths of a light-filled sky as both a wonder and an entity unto itself.
This is why I believe creativity is not about craft, or technical prowess, but is at its core a spiritual path, where, regardless of skill, we can deepen our experience of life, and become more than just ourselves, expansive as the sky.