Tangled

Sometimes, I paint what I’m still looking for the words to describe or what I’m trying to understand or … I don’t know. I titled this painting “Tangled” when I made it in 2021. Yet just as these can be tangled threads, they can be paths crossing.

There have been times I stayed because I had nowhere to run. But that’s not really staying, is it? That’s being controlled, trapped, caged.

I’m learning the difference. I’m learning that my worry about getting stuck is based in the pain I feel about the reality of my past. I was stuck. I was trapped. But I’m not anymore. I’m free now. I could spend my whole life running, sprinting, seeing everything there is to see, roaming, scattering. I could say that that’s the life I’ve always wanted - to be free to go. But it’s not true for me, really. I want to feel free and safe enough to stay, truly stay. Because I like it here. Because I’m okay. Because I’m loved here and I like the way it feels to not be so alone anymore.

Sometimes, freedom means being able to leave and follow my own path. And sometimes, it means making my own choice to commit, connect, be a part of something bigger right here.

About the Love Letters to Mother Earth collection

What moves us toward protection and care if not love? In honoring and loving my natural self, my soul, I learn how to safeguard my tenderness and the magic that is mine to wield. And this love guides me toward the people and spaces where I feel free and valued as my true self.

My hope is that in honoring and loving wild lands, tender artists, our authentic selves, this mysterious and beautiful universe, and this magical and messy planet of ours, we will learn to safeguard what is precious and sacred in each other and this world. Standing under a canopy of towering trees is humbling, freeing, incomparably special. It’s precious. So are you and so am I and so is each river and forest and so is this planet.