Deer Mother-Day 5
On this day, I let my hands do the making. I gave my brain a rest and just allowed my soul free rein.
This woman came into being before my eyes, her gray hair swept back in glossy wings, deer antlers sprouted from her forehead and in her hands a germinating seed being blessed by the rain. She’s just about my age and I recognized in her an ancestral Deer Mother, one who seemed to belong to my Germanic mother’s line.
The Deer Mother of old Europe usually shows up around the winter solstice and we are well past that time now. At the time I made this little painting, I was living far from the desert then, but my body still remembered Sonoran warmth, so those Ohio springs felt colder than any winter I had ever known. So I welcomed this spirit of winter without question.
Deer Mother sustains life and brings the promise of spring and fertility when the sun shines the least. Perhaps I need her life affirming touch, her promise of fecundity and hope, as I stumble my way through these early days of my practice when my creativity is just beginning to come back to life. Again.
Perhaps the block I was experiencing before I began this daily practice had something to do with not trusting myself to navigate the unknown. There’s a moment before every act of creation where we really have no idea how something may turn out. And I desperately want everything to turn out well. So, I would try to control my experience, control my pen, control my images. All of my training and education has been in service of knowing more; I was brought up to know exactly where I was heading. You know this one, I’m certain you do. We have our maps and our GPS and our weather predictions. I needed to remember to empty myself out, still my mind, and listen.
Listen to what the divine was trying to tell me.
Looking back, I can see that this daily project was never really about self-discipline; I wasn’t honing my ability to restrain or guide or control myself. I had already experienced plenty of discipline in my life by then. As a younger person I was a long-distance swimmer who showed up to swim practice twice a day. In later life I worked as a caterer and a restauranteur, pushing all exhaustion aside to complete my long, long days. The etymology of the word discipline has an odor of chastisement, a whiff of suffering, and perhaps a slight smell of martyrdom. However, invited or not, I find myself sitting and breathing in a cloud of my own suffering over my lack of mastery. Every day. It’s not simply a matter of struggling with my technique. It’s the struggle to believe that my thing that gives me life, that making art and telling stories about the divine wild, is worth the time, worth my attention, worthy of its own life.
Searching for inspiration, I discover the art of the Adivasi women of northeast India. In their forest villages, the walls of their homes, inside and out, are filled with fantastic designs as birds, deities, trees, and animals dance and swirl in creations that profoundly express the essence of each woman’s being. I imagine that she never worries that she isn’t good enough or fast enough or disciplined enough. I imagine that the instinct to be in contact with her traditions and her landscape and her lineage gives her art a potency, a deep magic, and a direct connection with life.
This image arose when I imagined myself letting go of discipline as a guiding force. And hanging on to magic as my sacred resource. I come from a lineage of settlers who separated themselves from their ancestral landscapes. When I reach toward the old stories and the living presences of the land, I have learned that I cannot claim them. I can only approach with humility, listening for relationship. Reweaving our connections.
Daily, I remind myself.
Listen to the wind.
Dance with the rain.
Cradle fertile seeds in my hands.
And believe.
Who has been waiting patiently for you to listen? An ancestor, a tree, a dream, a rainstorm, a Deer Mother?
Or perhaps even a part of yourself you have not yet met.
Or is simply waiting to be remembered.
I'm sharing these paintings and reflections much as they were first written when I participated in the 100 Day Project a few years ago. Occasionally I've added a sentence or two to orient us in time, but I have resisted rewriting them. I'm interested in listening to the woman I was becoming. To the artist that was germinating.
Nowadays, I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico and it is monsoon season. And yet the rains have not yet blessed us with their full force and glory. Some places in the Southwestern United States celebrate the new year with the coming of the monsoons because it is the natural beginning of a growing season. May this transplanted deer mother bless us.