We Play, We Dance, We Listen, Oil, 33x45, 2024We Play, We Dance, We Listen
I painted this piece in reflection of a camping trip I took to Echo Park last fall, where the Yampa River flows to meet the Green and continue her journey as one within the great waters of the West. Magnificent walls of sandstone rise up around you, mystical and powerful in their steady and grounded devotion.
In moments like these, I feel so utterly small, but I never feel separate, different, or apart from the Earth — rather, I am reminded of my place within these grand workings. When I think of how we must address the ways we’ve harmed our environments and confront the ecological crisis, it is this image that I return to. We are called as humans to reposition ourselves within the much grander systems of the earth and to reconsider the roles we wish to maintain in nature and societies.
I see it in the way the trees and wind interact with each other, the way a pollinator finds a flower and a flower attracts a pollinator, or how the Yampa continues to find her way to the Green. It is always and it is constant, on and on and on. Sometimes this is playful, often it is a dance, but it is always what must be done in the way it has to be. We can do the same, by reassessing our relationships with our ecosystems and by listening to know instinctively what we must do. I honor Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Dr. Kyle Powys White, and Gloria Bird, among many others, in whose words I have learned more deeply the reciprocity of the give and take in life, the reciprocity that we have neglected our role in. And, my father, who taught me that the more you learn about the natural world, the more you become in awe of it. The world asks us all to listen to this reciprocity and awe and to answer that with our own deep care given back. This care begs us to question the longevity of the worlds and systems we have created, to consume less, to settle in, and rediscover our way of being that works with the gifts the world has given instead of against them.
I painted this piece in reflection of a camping trip I took to Echo Park last fall, where the Yampa River flows to meet the Green and continue her journey as one within the great waters of the West. Magnificent walls of sandstone rise up around you, mystical and powerful in their steady and grounded devotion.
In moments like these, I feel so utterly small, but I never feel separate, different, or apart from the Earth — rather, I am reminded of my place within these grand workings. When I think of how we must address the ways we’ve harmed our environments and confront the ecological crisis, it is this image that I return to. We are called as humans to reposition ourselves within the much grander systems of the earth and to reconsider the roles we wish to maintain in nature and societies.
I see it in the way the trees and wind interact with each other, the way a pollinator finds a flower and a flower attracts a pollinator, or how the Yampa continues to find her way to the Green. It is always and it is constant, on and on and on. Sometimes this is playful, often it is a dance, but it is always what must be done in the way it has to be. We can do the same, by reassessing our relationships with our ecosystems and by listening to know instinctively what we must do. I honor Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Dr. Kyle Powys White, and Gloria Bird, among many others, in whose words I have learned more deeply the reciprocity of the give and take in life, the reciprocity that we have neglected our role in. And, my father, who taught me that the more you learn about the natural world, the more you become in awe of it. The world asks us all to listen to this reciprocity and awe and to answer that with our own deep care given back. This care begs us to question the longevity of the worlds and systems we have created, to consume less, to settle in, and rediscover our way of being that works with the gifts the world has given instead of against them.