Chickadee – black and white gouache on Bristol board – by Jane Valencia
Greetings to you, at the New Moon – we are well into spring!
It seems strange to me to be posting black-and-white art when the world has become so bright and colorful. Each day seems to bring a new breath of color into the world. Last week was the yellow-green of Big Leaf Maple in flower, and the bright sunshine face of Dandelion. This week Wild Cherry is in full white puffy blossom attire, and the Italian Plums are beginning to wake into white blossom as well.
My Illustration class resumes next week. I’ve been working in black-and-white since September, my watercolors and colored-pencils — favored medium for more than a decade — set aside so I can just focus on the kind of work we’re doing in the class (no color until you really can handle pen & ink, and black-and-white gouache). With all the color of spring, I’m starting to yearn to return to my style of art. But, as with spring, so much is in flower. I don’t really have time to do much beyond the parade of commitments I have in motion, tending to the outcry of new leaves and flowers, and the harvest that’s demanded — now.
What’s full on for you this spring? What are you having to set aside, to come into right timing in some other season? Drop me a note about it — or them — below.
Last month I wrote about participating in a remarkable performance reading, Heart of Vashon: Telling our Story. The performance reading was one part of a community project exploring what matters to islanders about living on Vashon-Maury. Why do we choose to make our home here? What is it that makes living here special?
Spring is awakening … in the tiny reddish buds on the Silver Birch, the bright faces of Daffodil and Dandelion, in the return of the Rufous Hummingbird with the first pink blossoms of Salmonberry, in the mysterious and murky spathes of the Skunk Cabbage in the wetlands.
Spring suffuses the air — lengthening the days, and invoking the renewal of exuberant and anguished egg-laying by our hens. It infuses our vital force, and we too may feel a budding and greening, the surge of sap rising — pulled upward by way, as with the trees, of the crown of ourselves. — drawing forth the minerals and waters from our saturated winter-fed subconscious, and nourishing our fancies and wishes, plans and motions with the sweet and potent brew of life.
Here in the Pacific Northwest the persistent rains, and soaked fields, forest, and pathways remind me that we humans are of the waters and the earth. Fluids move through us, a constant interchange of absorption and release of various aspects of earth and air. We are sparked and fueled by the fire of life, and awash with the streams, rivers, tides, and tranquil ponds that communicate within us our ocean nature. We possess greening, leafing selves, pulled upward even as we root downward and and outward in our daily quest for essential nourishment to sustain our spirit and selves.
Bright stars of thought and imagination, the deep inner mystery of our own genetic coding, and the unending, surrounding, and inner flowering breath of the Divine urge us to reach in ways that enliven the deepest threads of our being. The successive layers of our own wood nature — our progression and story through the years — sculpt our resilience and strengthen our resolve as we respond to the changes, stresses, and wonders that is life on our blue-green world and with one another.
If you are alive, you are always listening and responding. Your trillion cells listen and respond, as does your very soul. The earth song that shapes and shifts the world around and within us is a music that every aspect of us knows, and an improvisation and composition within which each of us has a voice.
Who are you when nature and you know no boundaries, when one flows into the other and you recognize yourself in the garden, and the forest within your heart? When the Divine is soil and the soil is music? What is the earth song you express into being just by being yourself rooting and growing, leafing and flowering nourished by the very soul of your nature?
