Praise Ice

The third in my Arctic series, completed in February, is Praise Ice, watercolor, 11 x 8.3". I set a rather pretty scene of ice drifting in a warming sea in a mandala of stars and snowflakes. Since Mount Saint Helens erupted in in 1980, I've painted passages of night sky to remind us of the vast mystery beyond our tiny world. The snowflakes are reverse painted in red, implying the heat that endangers them. I want the piece to hold a balance between alarm and love, tragedy and beauty. I want it to be bold enough to awake resolve and peaceful enough to support our strength to act.

Painted in light blue below the mandala is a poem written in the traditional lanterne form: 5 lines of 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 syllables, resembling a lantern shape on the page.

arctic

methane threatens

quietly beauty melts

becoming deadly, so deadly

praise ice

In the poem too, I seek the balance between loving the world and calling action to protect it. These are challenging times, and I hope my images and poems contribute to finding solutions together.

I'm currently reading Hot by journalist Mark Hertsgaard. It contains much bad news about climate chaos, but the birth of Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara in 2005 spurred his commitment to a livable future. I'm inspired by all the collaborative and far-sighted measures he cites—such as those in Seattle, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. As I read, I'm gathering a sense of guidelines for how we can come together, globally in principle and locally in practice. He says, "I make a conscious effort to avoid despair, for despair only warps thought and paralyzes action."

I look forward to smoothing thought and energizing action. Meanwhile: Praise Ice.

Arctic Prayer

My second exploratory image in the Arctic series began almost as a doodle in my sketchbook: light, free, humorous. I liked it so well, though far from "serious," that I repeated and refined it on a sheet of Fabriano watercolor paper.

The result, Arctic Prayer, is 11 x 16". Yesterday I cut mat board for it, and will mat and frame it tomorrow. I begin to imagine a showing of these images at Sebastopol Gallery during our July or September rotation. They're adding up, along with my feelings about them. My dread of our climate situation is gradually tempered by excitement from events like the Greenpeace occupation of Shell's drilling rig, followed by Seattle's official and popular response to their presence in their harbor.

Meanwhile, I begin to find my way into dialog with other players. I received an encouraging email from Dahr Jamail. I discovered a photographer friend, Don Jackson, actually printed the banners Greenpeace used in their Shell action. Another photographer friend, Brian Cluer, is a fluvial geomorphologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And a third photographer, Mike Shoys, fellow member of Sebastopol Gallery, is increasingly interested in using his camera for ecological good. All of us are interested in creating an art-science collaboration.

In the whimsy of Arctic Prayer I see animal hope. We are not separate from the rhythm of caribou as they dance, feed, and migrate in harmony with currents of air, water, soil, and ice. Their longing for health and duration touches us across the great mystery. May they guide our thought and effort.

Another Dark Love

This is the second study in The Warning Song of the Arctic set loose by Dahr Jamail's article, "The Methane Monster Roars." It's a small watercolor, 4.5 x 7", called Methane Boils. It shows one of the places in the arctic where methane pools are bubbling through the melting permafrost.

One aspect of climate challenge that I feel strongly and haven't learned to navigate, is avoiding so much darkness that we seal a bad fate, while facing the darkness that must be brought to light and love if we're to transform ourselves and our habits. There must be light, there must be love, and there must be unwavering truth. 

Weeks earlier I attended a lecture by Naomi Klein, which inspired a lot of beautiful energy, hope, and the following poem:

another dark love

the climate is changing. seasons

rearranging. the specter of venus haunts

hydrocarbon dreams. no one believes

the disaster of 4-6 ° centigrade, the apocalypse

of a few drowned cities.

we all know how much worse.

the savviest liberal is hardly more realistic 

than the bible capitalist.

we scurry like denial ants, each with our

destined grain of sand.

& yet the breath of earth stirs us.

the winds of trees penetrate the gossamer

of unending connection. engineer to grub

to crab grass to salmon to bread mold to 

melting icicle to water rounded stone.

there is a voice singing inside every.

there is a hearing within the vast deafness.

aberrant cells in the sweet earth body,

we bend & shudder to some collective immune

response that calls us back, calls us.

greed is not the inner nature of any human being,

nor any kind of being. shark & wolverine

& kudzu vine are more complex, ambiguous.

even the corporate ceo fracking us to hell

is a patchwork story with unpredictable twists.

the sun doesn’t feel so warm now as threatening.

what happened to double hung windows & a thousand

clever passive devices lost to witless technology?

screw the supply side. whittle the demand to

so little even a chickadee is cradled.

she is calling, she is calling. maple winds &

supersized hurricane waves become symphonic. 

someday the dance teacher will no longer strike

the iridescent wings of a wandering fly. the oil magnate

will protect tars sands flora with his life.

all the things we have to have

become a joke, obscene but easily forgotten.

to touch lichen growing on bark brings us to our knees,

worshipping & awed. glaciers can grow again,

only one venus circling our sun.

The Warning Song of the Arctic

In January, Dahr Jamail published an article in Truthout: "The Methane Monster Roars." Over decades of creating art to benefit our relationship with nature, I've become quite alarmed about climate disintegration, and was aware of the threat of methane being released as the Arctic sea bed and permafrost are melting. Nonetheless, the way he wrote this article grabbed me by the soul.

He began by observing ferns in Olympic National Park: "the delicate geometry of frost-covered ferns. White crystalline structures seemed to grow from the green leaves, encasing them in a frozen frame of temporary beauty." From there he moves into grave concerns and a terrifying array of scientific data. I vigorously recommend this article.

Immediately I turned my pencils and brushes northward. What can I paint to keep this pivotal land and water frozen? There is no immediate answer. There is the beginning of a journey of exploration. Pictured is the small watercolor, "Frosted Ferns," 7.8 x 5.3", that was my first step. Many others have followed, and I intend to post them here regularly.

I'm looking for allies: artists, scientists, grievers, healers. I see no ordinary way to prevent the disaster that's hurtling toward us. So please, let's invent an extraordinary way.

Earth-centered Amazing Grace

I visited Susa Silvermarie's website recently, and found these beautiful lyrics to Amazing Grace:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the earth,
the dirt between my toes,
the sun pours down upon my crown,
the mighty river flows.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
of bird song in the trees,
the air is dense with fragrant scents
soft floating on the breeze.

Amazing Grace the ocean swells,
the waves break on the shore,
the moonlight rides upon the tides,
oh, who could ask for more.

Now we’ve been here four million years
sustained at her sweet breast,
let’s sing her praise for all our days,
then in her womb we’ll rest.

© 1995 by ElIzabeth Cunningham. Reprinted by permission. For more information or permission to reprint: www.elizabethcunninghamwrites.com

                      

Wouldn't it be wonderful to hear these lyrics sung, often and everywhere?

An Artist's Spiritual Inquiry (Part 4)

I’m not particularly deliberate in the way I paint. Not too much, “I’m going to paint such and such.” It’s more, “Great mother, show me what you want me to paint,” or “Salmon spirit, move my hands to create what you need to be seen.”

I think more about smaller spirits and spirit guides than I do about God. St. Francis had it right, seeing God’s face everywhere, in birds, in tea cups, in daisies on the hillside, in the hill itself. Theories about God don’t move me very much, intimacy moves me. My paintings are about intimacy. So are my poems, just another medium for the same family photos.

Loving God is inseparable from loving earthworms, clean creeks, unpolluted clouds. Being loved by God is inseparable from receiving, feeling, the love willows, jays, thunder give us. 

Ecological restoration isn’t just about the material changes we need to make to protect life and health. It’s also about emotional relationship with other beings as equals, as guides, as benefactors. This is the ancient way humans interacted with land and its inhabitants in every culture that has endured sustainably for centuries. It is the new way that will save us. It is also the way of spiritual intimacy with god, however we name, imagine, or worship  timeless being.

An Artist's Spiritual Inquiry (Part 3)

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.