Apprentice to a Mountain: Chapter 5, Section 1
Granitic
Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed. - Jeanette Winterson
What if I parent in order to write?
What if I write in order to paint?
What if I paint in order to breathe?
What if I simply breathe?
When are we partaking in our earthly endeavors for the sake of itself? How do we know? I suppose everything is connected by a thread of some kind.
September 2020, when a rhythm returns and the light is golden; plum colored asters, fire-orange maple leaves. The field is filled with goldenrod, milkweed and tall blooming mint.
The colors that a plant presents to our human eye are glorious but often not the color they will produce as inks. There lies the mystery.
It is only in the last 150 years or so that we have stopped using natural dyes on a large scale, especially in textiles. A similar trajectory is true of herbal medicine. Our intimate, entangled dance with nature has been present for most of human existence. It provided necessities, inter-dependence, and a spiritual ground to walk on. I do not reject modern practices across the board by any means but I do question their deep ramifications to our feelings of being cast out of the garden.
We yearn for belonging, for feeling our wild selves.
Talk to the land, I tell myself, it is our body, our atoms. We are inside the land, not separate peering in. In this time of pandemic and climate crisis, I return to my land mother. She is calling so loudly, “We must go through this together. We are not separate. Lean into me, my child.” The answer does not lie in leaving this planet for another, the cycle of abuse will continue.
I don’t remember the exact day that the mountain became the symbol I would paint but at some point, as I explored making inks from nature, they wanted to be a mountain. I wanted to be in conversation with the mountain. I was so taken with the idea of creating a mountain painting out of mountain materials. The symbol of the mountain was a welcome anchor in this time of shifting ground. I live on a mountain, I see mountains every day, and I was ready to learn from the mountain.
I build my mountain paintings from the ground up, starting with the base. The inks are watery and full of movement. Curving and climbing. Sometimes they look like bodily organs with smooth, solid colors. Sometimes they are rocky outcroppings, craggy and precarious. Sometimes the mountain looks like it will topple. Sometimes it sits nestled in gravity.
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