You feel warm sunrays kissing your lips and a light breeze tickling your skin. As your thoughts wander and form a question, you’ll speak it out loud: “Dear mother, how are you feeling today?”
“My dear child, my dear and lovely child”, she says with a trembling voice. “I’m tired. Every breath I take feels heavier. With every step I make, I wonder how much longer I can be there for you.” As she turns around and looks towards the sky, her silver hair dances in the wind. The sun gently lights up her face, it reveals long lines painting her skin. They pave their way like canyons through the desert. It’s impossible to guess her age. Although she’s marked by time, her eyes express strength, even a youthful defiance as if they would say “Against all odds, I’ll fight!”
She reaches out to hold your hand. You feel the golden light of the sun flowing through your body. “I want to lay my protecting arms around you and your sisters and brothers. But they are not long enough. I feel the dirt sucking the oxygen out of my lungs. My capillaries are slowly dying, burning. The blanket of protection, which I used to sway you in when you were a child, is shrinking. ”
With mournful eyes she looks at you, saying: “How much I wish, things were different. How much I wish, I’d be stronger for you. How much I wish, we’d have more time… but we don’t. You are dying. Don’t you see the fires scaring my skin, destroying your habitual surroundings? It won’t be long until everything will be gone. Until you’ll be gone forever. And I can’t save you without your help.”
*** This is the first post of a series I’ll call “Mother, how are you feeling?”, which will be a narrative between us and mother nature – fictional, but also real. My art has always been and will always be about starting a dialogue. With climate change progressing rapidly, I think we truly need to enter in a dialogue with mother nature not only for her sake, but also for ours. I’ll invite you to listen to her with me – and would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.
xx Avielle
It is great that the post expresses human and Nature as if they are not separate things, as if you mention the same notion with different names. Even though mother refers to mother Nature, I immediately came up with the idea throughout the post that how much life is continously being transmitted from parent to child, from generation to generation, and among the trees in a forest anytime. Maybe we, are the ones imprisoning meanings into the existences (objects &bodies); we ‘see’ them as separate since a single one always disappear; but a union of souls never, and time is the witness of all memories..
Thank you so much Samet for your comment – and yes, I agree that everything is connected. After all time and space don’t run linear as we know – and matter never fully disappears. So I would say the past travels through time and space as ancient melodies and is also the present, is also the future and vice versa. We can learn so much by listening to these ancient melodies, to mother nature, to our own history – and carry the wisdom into the future. If we just listened.