...love your mother (earth)

"Mother earth, Giver of Life, Earth Mother...or simply "nature" call her what you will....but she is our physical body's life force"

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. ~Kahlil Gibran

Last night I started this new painting (this is the "sketch"... we will see where it goes tonight & tomorrow!). It will be part of a series I am calling "Earth mother"... I will paint at least two more of these...possibly a total of 10. These are in the same format as my "Soulkeeper" series. I may also play with "night" and "day" for these as I did for that series. I am so happy to be working on a series...thinking of a subject/theme for my work is always one of the most difficult parts of the process!

Mother Earth provides

I wanted to share with you a few things around our space which actually go with the theme of mother earth:...this year we built a little garden...photos which I shared here-they were tiny little plants only two months ago! It is now growing well, and I have already been able to eat three heads of lettuce out of my own backyard ~woo hoo!
I also planted cauliflower, eggplant, cilantro, parsley, cucumbers and of course: lots of tomatoes! A few corn and others are also in there. The squirrels always get to the strawberries before I do..and if you look closely you can see the caterpillars went to town on my Kale-- but that is about it. Now we have pesticide free vegetables! I feed them the pulp from the juice I prepare each day to act as compost, and there are lots of happy worms helping the process along in the box.

Speaking of compost, I also asked Sergio to "build" a compost "bin" out of chicken wire. It is working out great, and it is wonderful not to have to throw out all the peels etc. from all of our vegetables, but rather to form it into feed for our garden!

Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity. ~E. Knight

We do have a large yard although we are urban dwellers--three blocks from the DC metro, only 5 minutes from the national Mall...and situated right behind I-66--one of the two largest highways in the area. As you can see here-on the horizon line you can see the highway-although thankfully in the summer it is mostly covered by trees---still, when friends come over to visit-we can tell them whether to avoid the highway or not depending on the traffic we observe~ :)

So although we live in a place where there is much exhaust, noise pollution and the like...we have surrounded ourselves with nature as much as we can. This last few weeks, we have again had Fox puppies prancing through our backyard. Bats have finally inhabited the bathouse we hung three years ago (and we are hoping they will do us the favor of eating all those pesky mosquitoes!)....

What do you do in your life to get close to "mother earth/nature"?

The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. ~Chief Luther Standing Bear