Mother

Giver of Life and Death

I had the incredible joy of spending this Mother’s Day with Hawk and my own mother as well. We were in Michigan for my husband’s mother’s funeral and I came down to Ohio afterwards to spend some time in the woods with Hawk and my family.

Becoming a mother has been a wellspring of inspiration for me. I can’t paint or draw my little one enough. But I also am inspired to be the best me I can be. As you all know, I left my corporate job to become a full time artist a little over a year ago and it was because of him that I finally pulled the trigger. Life is too short to not be your authentic self and how could I try and raise a child expecting him to be that if I wasn't being that either. The job had to go.

A selection of paintings I have done of the little guy

We were outside in the early evening after a lovely day at the zoo and out to dinner when the bunny that lives in my parent’s yard dashed in front of us. I looked down and saw a tiny baby bunny laying on the ground. He was obviously injured and was bleeding from a wound on his head. Mama bunny was so close to her little one but of course incapable of helping her.

We brought the little one inside and cleaned her wound. It was a rather large puncture wound right behind her eyes. I was pretty sure it was lethal but it doesn’t hurt to try. It stopped bleeding when we cleaned it and Buns seemed to be stable. But as we all know, baby bunnies are incredibly fragile. We kept her warm and comfortable but soon she passed away.

As a mother, we both bring life into this world as well as death. What is alive must inevitably die. Being born means that death is something we inescapably move towards every moment of our lives. There is a weight to this knowledge that lingers softly like a far off mist for every mother, whether they acknowledge it or not. We hope that our baby, against so many odds, will live a long, fulfilling, and healthy life. But the truth is, we just don’t know.

Mama bunny, in her own bunny way, wants the same thing for her babies. But then a crow finds her nest and she is forced to try and defend herself and her babies the best she can. This little baby wasn’t going to make it, having received a crow beak in the head, and we inadvertently took the crow’s dinner. Life was cut very short. Death came very soon after birth.

Many years ago when I was first learning the Mische technique, painted this painting, Kosmic Mother. Behind her is the double spiral, the eternal return. This double spiral symbolizes this return to the source, which is an ancient way of relaxing into the idea that death awaits us all. Because it doesn’t end there. We buried the little rabbit with some flowers in our pet cemetery area this morning. She will return back to the earth, back to where we all really come from. And from the decomposition of her little body, she will nourish the soil, feed the mycelium that will in turn nourish the surrounding trees. Death begets life begets death begets life and forever an ever the double spiral continues to turn.

While this may seem like a morbid Mother’s Day post, I think a good memento mori is always a welcome lesson. Life, no matter how long we are actually around on this Earth, is short. We are not Tolkien Elves, graced with eternal life, hundreds of years passing by like wees, no matter how much we would like to be. We are Illuvatar’s last children, destined to brevity on this blue Earth. Every moment I look at my son, even when he is hanging off of something he shouldn’t be roaring at me like a dragon, I feel the tinge of this sublime brevity flow through me like an instantaneous electric spark, like a fiery sword piercing my heart with an aftershock felt down to my toes.

Holding this cosmic ephemerality from moment to moment is what being a mother is. Its weight can be crushing at times and at others, expand me out to a limitless awareness that melts my physical boundaries and encompasses the whole universe. Because I am also a child, like we literally all are, I hold this impermanence for my own mother, whether she would phrase it in these words or not. It makes me, as it makes us all who are born, part of an infinite continuum that literally can be traced back to the beginning of life itself and will continue on until life, if it ever does, ceases to exist. The sheer immensity of this terribly cosmic beauty humble me and simultaneously cracks me open like an egg, spilling my liquid contents out of myself allowing me to spread into the fabric of the universe.

May we all celebrate that we are beings that are born. May we all celebrate that we have achieved the sparkling glimmer of life. May we all give honor to all of those that participate in this cosmic brevity, the gift of Illuvatar to his last children.