The Great Kosmic Mother
Further Down the Spiral
Last week not only was a week of travel but also was a week of having a cold - remember those? And then traveling again this week back from Midwest home to California home - coming back solo with baby Hawk on two flights and a layover is a full-contact Olympic sport - and being utterly exhausted from jet lag and attempting to catch up on life, and here we are. <internal dialogue> Grace. It’s just a newsletter. <sigh> Thank you for your understanding. At least this post has a bunch of pretty images to look at. Yay!
One of the places I was visiting was my family home and this life-sized piece resides there. I always love seeing her in person and I thought it would be a good opportunity to dive a little deeper into the references I have used to create this piece. I did a post about her over the summer. You can read it HERE so I won’t go back over the same material. Instead, I thought it would be fun to look at some of the details more closely.
The Mother Goddess really is my mother. That’s a photo of her above and is probably right around the time of the photo I used as a reference for the painting. The baby is me! I am probably just shy of two years old there so not much older than Baby Hawk now.
You can see in the close-up that the ocean is her hair and the land itself is in her eyes. One of the most amazing things I realized when I was pregnant and watching an ultrasound of my 11 week old baby floating around in my uterus was that the incredible feeling of space, love, being nourished and cared for while simultaneously feeling vast and endless was possibly a body memory of being inside the womb. I am not reducing spiritual experience to a visceral experience of being a tiny gummy bear in the ocean of our mother’s insides, but I am also not not saying that. We call the Earth our Mother and cultures have always venerated Mother goddesses. Perhaps our actual cells remember the experience of unity from the time when we were one with another greater than ourselves, that literally provided everything for us and held us in a warm, nourishing cosmic ocean. Watching my baby waving his tiny gummy bear arms (yes, he was already moving around at that age) brought tears to my eyes and I *felt* what he must have been feeling at that moment and I remembered feeling it myself. It was utterly profound.
The animals surrounding the baby are the Speckled African Pigeon and the Charaxes smaragdalis African Butterfly. There’s something sweet and innocent about pigeons/doves and butterflies. They represent childhood, newness, vibrance and vulnerability in stories and fables. And yet, both creatures are also incredibly resilient as species in real life. Arguably, so are children. Butterflies often make incredible migrations throughout their lifetimes and though pigeons and doves are some of the most disliked birds for some reason, they have often carved out niches in the most inhospitable of places. They have made a home where they are not only not wanted but are utterly disregarded. They are true survivors. I wanted to bring more than just the innocence of new life into the Green Child archetype of the Triple Goddess. I wanted there to be the resilience and intensity that comes with new growth and life. Like the Water Lily that rises from the depths of the murky muddy waters, being born into the world is not easy and takes strength and resilience to survive.
The vulture that represents the Crone aspect of the Great Mother is a Eurasian Griffon Vulture. The Griffon Vulture is an Old World type vulture which is a co-evolved lineage to the New World vultures. Old World (Eurasia and Africa) vultures don’t have the crazy good sense of smell that typifies the New World (The Americas) vultures and condors. It’s kinda crazy to me that they aren’t in the same family. Like pelicans look very similar to Pterasaurs but Pterasaurs did not evolve into birds, T-Rexes did. Vultures are Nature’s immune system. They are the ultimate clean-up and recycling crew. They are a creature that thrives on death and decay and could not be a more perfect metaphor for the later stage of life. Death’s inevitability is its power and the superpower of the vulture is that she finds that power nourishing. May we all be nourished by the things we cannot change and find the power in the inevitable to live. And in living, we are renewed.
And that’s where the snake comes in…..
I chose a Rainbow Boa to be the symbol of the eternal return. The constant cycle of life, death, life, death, on and on and on is the eternal return. It is also what the double black and white spiral represents in the background of the painting. Snakes shed their skin so very early on in humankind’s meaning-making journey, they were assigned the task of carrying the symbol of death and renewal. Have you ever seen a snake shedding its skin? Look it up on YouTube. It’s not pretty. It actually looks a bit grueling. A snake really has to work for that renewal and the ebb and flow of life is nothing if it isn’t defined by the struggles and ecstasies that punctuate it.
My Art Out in the World….
I had the pleasure of exhibiting the original Thoth Tarot High Priestess painting at the Art of a Community show at Arts Benicia in Benicia, CA. Arts Benecia is a wonderful local community arts center.
I took a holiday with Youtube videos and I am pleased to say it was a nice break. I am back with an appropriate short video on How to Start a Mische Technique painting.
Thank you so much for reading.