Green Tara
The Mother of Compassion
Green Tara is the Goddess of Compassion. I was helping my husband on one of his meditation retreats that he was teaching a few years back when I had a particularly powerful experience with the center's Green Tara thangka. In meditation, I became her. Her energy flowed through my limbs and beat my heart. I knew I had to capture the vision of her in my own way.
The multi-bird heads symbolize the Great Mother in a variety of moods and aspects: vultures for death, parrots for life, and a Harpy eagle for the clear light of inspiration. The angelic eye in the center is the sight that penetrates all of the realms.
She has a caplet of mushrooms to emphasize her generative powers of life and death. These are Chicken of the Woods mushrooms, which are immune-boosting and may even help fight tumors. It’s also a funny choice since it’s a Chicken reference and we call Mr. Sam Mr. Chicken all of the time and he is the top portrait on Tara’s bird heads. Here he is below in all of his majesty posing for this illustrious spot.
Green Tara has a full pregnant belly made of the sweet honeycomb of bees. Within her belly is the lotus springing up from the eternal waters with a rainbow serpent making a lemniscate as well as devouring its tail harkening to the ouroboros. Behind the snake is the deepest space, images just released by the James R. Webb telescope that came online just as I was painting this part.
Her body is a traditional thangka pose and is the exact same as the Tara I had my experience with. This Tara thangka is at Vajrapani in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
She sits atop a lotus pedestal made of travertine. Travertine is a form of terrestrial limestone found around hot springs and other bodies of water. My inspiration for this mainly came from a family trip to Yellowstone National Park where the magic of Mammoth Hot Springs utterly floored me.
As a Mother Goddess, Tara is also a symbol of the primordial waters and here, the waters themselves have created her throne. Behind her is the Andromeda galaxy. This with the deep space within her belly shows that she is both near and far, inside and outside, as above, so below.
You may notice that she has an unusual sitting posture which is unique to her and her alone in the pantheon of deities that grace Thangkas. Her one foot is off of her lotus seat.
This means that she is Mother of Compassion to ALL. You may be a criminal, a pious Buddhist, a cheating spouse, a Wiccan housewife, a rebellious teenager, a devout Catholic, a practicing Satanist, whoever and whatever you may be, she is accessible and available to YOU. I would extend this out to all of the animals and plants of course but even to all other matter in our universe. Her foot is one step off of her holy throne because she is a part of this world more than any other deity. I find that really beautiful and it reminds me of the idea of the Whore of Babylon as interpreted into the Goddess Babalon by Aleister Crowley. She is a “whore” in the way that she is receptive to ALL, giving herself lovingly to Life itself. It makes these goddesses very real in my opinion and I find them somehow more of this world because of it.
That’s why I chose to paint Green Tara and I have painted Babalon before as well. It’s hard to express in words, but I find so much I relate to in the deepest part of my being in this deified quality of humanity and thinking of this feeling cracks my heart open again and again every time.
I have prints of Green Tara in my Etsy shop and I will be working on a Thangka print of her as well in the coming weeks.
Exquisite!!
Such an incredible piece filled with symbolism and deep meaning. I imagine in one of your past incarnations you were a Goddess and that is why you feel such a kinship, and as women we all have the divine goddess within us 🙏🎨💖🌌🌌🌌🦸🏾♀️🦹🧛♀️🧝♀️.