The Child's Nature

Two years ago I was the mama of one awesome toddler, a woman in her early 30s, and a cancer patient. I said I wanted to talk about making a love that cares for living things the center of our lives and using it to change the system. Somewhere along the line from wife, worker, and cancer patient to divorcee, writer and 'survivor,' the script got flipped. I find myself now dwelling not on my job as a mother, or my relationship to my son as his mama, but myself as a child of the cosmos, and our relationships to this world, which my son and I now shape for each other in ways I could not have imagined two years ago. I find myself compelled toward a conversation no longer about the mother, but about the child's nature.

Seen in Bed-Stuy

We are the children, all of us. We are nature's progeny. She created this world, she creates us and recreates us every day. Nature is my source. Nature is my god. Nature is from whence I come, and to which I will return.

Do you know the story of the ravine above your upper lip?

Before we were born angels took us all over the world telling us all the secrets,

showing us all the mysteries. Before the angels returned us

to our mothers' wombs to be born into this world,

they sealed our lips to keep us from telling all the secrets.

When you are working hard, and I now as I am writing this,

we find that ravine in a search to remember.

Maria Lassnig, PS1

Mother Nature's nature gives us everything we do, feeds us everything we create, and it is in that creation of our own that we return to the source - of everything. The art, the literature, raising children, it's all just us trying to live out, to make manifest, everything we can't quite remember but somehow know from before birth so we can hold it, be it, and return to it. We are all always trying to get to the source, to get home.

There is another system - a system of creation, of love, of magic, that I know in looking at art, in wandering certain spaces, in reading, in writing. That system is the one that emanates from source. It is nature's system, and we disconnect from it at our peril. We all return to that source system in our own way, know different gods, feel different colors and flavors of the home to which I refer. But I believe the mother's nature offers us the way back, because she has put the desire and urge to create in us. When we create, we make manifest source, we are no longer separate, we float in the flow of source.

It is the Mother's Nature that becomes the child's nature. For me that is word and image - art - that returns us to the system we come from.

Let this space, The Mother's Nature, now become a place to talk about that system of love, creation, and source that we touch when we read, write, make art, dwell in art - the child's representation of soul.

Maria Lassnig, PS1
(the creation recreates the creator)

REBIRTH

The darkest hour
Is before dawn. I'm a
Glowing piece of you.


There is a love that
Knows your name, walking next
To you, counting sand.

seen in Chicago

seen in Bed-Stuy

Lee Friedlander, Yale Art Gallery