Painting the Ecological Self

All month the painting speaks to me, teaches me what it is to surrender. Surrender to what the body wants, needs, craves, demands. You cannot rush the body. Surrender.

First there was a spark of rainbow colors for the sky and the joy of yellow dawn rising, blue mountains in the background, like the Blue Mountains that circled the city where I was born,

‘Earth Shakti Rising’ by Kathy Stanley 24 x 36 inches acrylic painting

Then a line of red hills, like the Red Hills district on the other side of the city where I grew up atop a mountain overlooking sugar cane fields and rolling green and white limestone hills.

Then a line of yellow and orange and purple, maroon lower hills, like those far away desert canyons that drew me to them from the desert southwest, Santa Fe and Sedona. 

Those near yellow hills keep drawing me back to revisit, revarnish, recolor, redo, reflect, revise, return.  Return, they say, you are not done, return, they say you can always revise, return they say, this is your body, your journey, like those grand earth sentinels in the Grand Canyon with billions of years exposed in the layers of rocks. Like in Sedona, how 80 million years of earth history revealed in the carved strata of sandstone. Yes, the painting says, this is your body and its layer cakes flavored with hematite, iron and limestone.  So keep going, layer upon layer upon layer. This is your body, your ecological self, because we are one. This is Earth Shakti Rising. 

© Kathy Stanley

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