These are a few drawings and some notes from a sketchbook long unopened that I frequented during my studies at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, the Auroville Community in Tamil Nadu, India, and later the Schumacher College in Devon, England. The first is a drawing of the Love Tree, with open-eyed radiance and hearts above and below. Next, my attempt unentered in a challenge to design a logo for the Auroville Earth Day, and then a drawing that was made at some point I can’t recall along with the words “Following a Movement More Implicit”. And last, one of the many pages of notes that I took during my study of Holistic Science with Dr. Stephan Harding (please forgive the typos).
So the key concept within these writings is that we are a much larger being – Gaia – having a human experience. Because our internal worlds are so interconnected and interdependent with our external worlds, changes within one world correspond with changes within the other. Thus, the loss of biodiversity in our surroundings has corresponded with a loss of internal biodiversity. It is a well known fact now that by number there are more bacteria inside of our bodies than our own cells. As we have homogenized and drastically reduced the wealth and vast array of plants and animals on this planet, surely so too we have lost an internal biodiversity through the ingestion of fewer and fewer plant and animal foods and decimated internal bacterial populations through the heavy usage of antibiotics on a daily basis in medicine and regular doses fed to farm animals.
The population of certain humans has swelled in our exterior world, while the numbers of certain other peoples, animals and plants have dwindled and in all too many cases been completely exterminated. What could this correspond to within? Perhaps it is a loss of a wealth of all sorts of qualities and perspectives that we once possessed and had access to on some level. Perhaps it is a mining of health from our various organs for the sole benefit of the analytical brain. Perhaps it is a weakening of the internal beneficial flora and with that a prior held immunity and strength that has led to the current levels of sickness, disease and cancer that humanity is experiencing. Perhaps it is a hole being dug into a space where only the human voice can be heard; no longer the roar of lion, the flutter of hummingbird, the melodies of birdsong or the croaking of frog.
Let us look to a factory feedlot cattle operation. Fenced-in partitions stretch to the horizon, packed with no life save the fattened cattle with numbered plastic earrings. Soon they are headed for their sure demise, dismemberment and polite packaging on the fluorescent lit shelves of super markets. At an early age they horns are cut, and they are made to grow in the way that seems fitting for their human masters. If they have been granted the honor above others they have a tiny space to move in, and I imagine grow terribly bored with their situation. If they lie down, they choose to do so in the accumulated shit of their peers which can be smelled for miles in every direction. They live in fear of their masters until the day they die.
These beings turned to meat are then fed to and consumed by people as some of the cheapest, and in the cases of public schools, subsidized meals in the USA.1 We can certainly find the internal parallels in a great deal of the youth today. At an early age children are circumcised in one way or another, cut down so as to grow in a way that seems fitting for their masters. They too are packed into boxes where they are the only things living, are immunized and fed mixtures of antibiotics. Many become obese just like the cattle, grow terribly “bored” with their situations, and sadly live in fear until the day they die. To see those contributing to and laying in the accumulated shit of their peers one need only look at a modern day comment board on a popular video website or in response to a polarized article.
Could you imagine that this act of eating feedlot cattle is one of the major factors that will determine the future of humanity and life on Earth? “According to a 1996 report… 72 acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute, mostly by impoverished people working for multinational corporations, who are cutting and burning the forest to create agricultural or pasturelands to grow beef for the export to the United States.”2 Now, nearly 20 years later and with more than a billion people added to the surface of the Earth, do you suspect that the pace has slowed? Around 70% of rainforest deforestation is said to be the result of cattle farming.3 “The United States imports two hundred million pounds of beef every year from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama – while the average citizen in those countries eats less than the average American house cat.”4 The lungs of the planet are being destroyed, and with that the last remaining buffer to runaway climate chaos, to keep the Fugue States of American populace well fed with the confinement, laziness, boredom, obesity, fear and death also known as feedlot beef. Truly, what you are is what you eat. Please come back to life.
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, Three Rivers Press, 2004.
Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General quoted at http://evolvecampaigns.org.uk/evolve/environment.aspx Full quote: “70% of rainforest deforestation is the result of cattle farming. “We have all heard of the web of life. The way we live threatens to trap us all in a web of death.“
Diet for a New America by John Robbins, H.J. Kramer, 1987
We are tasked in this time of great change and transition to learn exactly who we are – interdependent beings that are only as strong and healthy as the life-forms and raw materials are that surround them. As we witness all around us and throughout the world the wholesale destruction and pillaging of the “natural capitol” of the planet – the once thriving and abundant biodiversity in places untouched by modern acts of human exploitation and extraction – we respond in a variety of ways to halt this process of self-immolation and suicide from actually terminally taking place. But at the same time we recognize that fighting against a system gone mad does a great deal to reinforce that madness, and makes the maniacs bent on filling their pockets because they can and have been taught to do so, come up with all sorts of new and innovative ways of wreaking havoc on their surroundings for the shortsighted benefit of “themselves”.
If these madmen, who are really just suffering from a spell of amnesia, were to have an experience of their interconnected nature, perhaps in the depths of a sweat-lodge or around an ayahuasca ingesting circle of initiates, then perhaps they would think twice before ransoming off their “humanity” and “gaianity” for the sake of stoking their bank accounts. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t take much for a human or another being to be happy and fit. All we need is a bit of food in our bellies, and a bit of wilderness to roam in, and the company and community of our friends and families. It really is quite simple… and yet we have been taught to believe that only through an endless grabbing for more and bigger toys can we be happy. This all arises from the initial dilemma from the lie that is taught – that we are irretrievably removed from each other and the natural world.
Just look at the act of breathing to have this lie revoked. The natural world floods into us with every in-breath, becoming us down to the cellular level. Then we exhale, a bit of ourselves and our cells entering into and becoming the natural world once more. We are locked into and forever bound in a dance of interdependence, whether we like it or not. Here and now we are challenged to let go of our infantile rebellion to the connection with everything that is, was and will be, and come back to the circle of life after the tantrum that we have been so extravagantly throwing. Yes please, it is time to come back to life now.
Another piece that I completed on the Uuniversity of Hawaii Manoa Valley Campus. This piece is of one of the many beautiful and stunning trees on the campus there. The trees were probably one of the most attractive parts of the whole schooling and educational experience there. This tree that I painted is a Baobab or “Dead Rat Tree” as they like to call them in parts of the English speaking world.
I completed this painting as a student at University of Hawaii Manoa under the benevolent guidance of a painting teacher of mine there, Mr Jason Willome. During that time I was living up valley and would spend many afternoons sitting in a coffee shop drinking chai, eating homemade manna breads and reading The Heart of The World by Ian Baker. Many sittings I enjoyed with the thick book (just over 400 pages), and with every turned page grew more enthralled in the exploration and adventure as I followed the author on his great pilgrimage deep into the mysteries of Ancient Tibet. His journeys had led him to the foothills of Namcha Barwa, one of the tallest mountains in the world and the termination point of the Far Eastern flank of the Himalayan range.
Underneath that mountain the Tsangpo Gorge, deepest in the world, plunges four times deeper than our beloved Grand Canyon here in the USA. The legend contained in scriptures had it that a great waterfall exists there in the thick of the rhododendrons and mired chasms. Ian Baker set out to find it, and the book encapsulates and recounts his absolutely epic journey over many years in doing so. After I read it, I set out to portray the story in a painted fashion, and this piece was the result of that effort. I used a variety of techniques to achieve something akin to looking through torn scripture at the colossal landscape, and above you can see how I started with selective priming then continued with a series of washes and finally an inkjet transfer of Tibetan Script.
The piece was featured in Lotus Space’s video series entitled Inpo: The Art of Invisibility, which was broadcast on Hawaii public television. It is my sincere hope that I can one day visit the gorge and see the great Namcha Barwa. May all beings be in bliss. Om Mani Padme Hum.
LOVE TREE PRODUCTIONS 