This shift was a great spiritual deepening for me. It had come a few years after I woke one morning feeling a great, vast, infinite even, female presence, who whispered to me the the dawn light: It is not wrong to believe in me. This was the goddess insinuating her way into my fairly disciplined Zen practice. But as I wove together Zen, goddess presence, ecology, art, parenting and gardening, I was taken on a journey whose landscape almost eluded me for much of the travel.
By the time I saw my work as serving the earth’s healing of us, I was getting my bearings. I was fully immersed in belief in the consciousness of all beings and even all things. What Zen Buddhists call Emptiness, Christians call God, and pagans call the Great Mother is the totality of consciousness, matter, energy, space—manifested perfectly in everything from saints to grasshoppers.
So earth healing art becomes a matter of celebrating family. All our relations.
My spiritual practice is to pay attention to the movement of spirit in the natural world. I don’t just mean wilderness and magnificent species like salmon and eagles and pronghorn antelope, however important these may be. I’m loyal as well to the wilderness of my small town yard, the spider in my sink.
I heard a Pomo man say to a group that to understand the native view of nature, you would have to feel, when a tree is cut down, the same way you would feel if your brother were killed.
That’s what my art is about. I was raised by trees and went out into the world with that much grief and horror when a tree is cut down. I went out understanding that nothing belongs to humans—not the land, not the water, not consciousness, not playfulness, not invention, and certainly not sacredness.
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