mother nature | Dare Boldly

Acrylic on canvas
24 x 40″
A Song for Mother Earth
2020 Louise Gallagher

Listen. Can you hear her? Mother Earth.

She is calling. Calling and imploring us to stop what we are doing to make life on earth so difficult, dangerous and deadly. To change our ways so that we don’t keep harming this planet earth which is our home, our refuge, our sanctuary.

She calls out from the depths of her oceans, her tears moving like sludge through the darkness of murky polluted waters.

She calls out from high up in skies cloudy with city smog and factory offal. Her voice is faint and distant. Her calls for clarity vanishing with every emission streaming out into the great blue yonder.

She calls from deep within the forests burning where animals are forced to flee their homes and trees lose their ground.

She calls to us in whirling winds and torrential rains that pour down mountainsides in floods of mud and drown out villages and roadways, pushing us further and further away from home.

She is calling out to each of us. Calling, from us in our homes here on this planet that is her home and the home to the animals and fish, the birds and bees, the tiny ant crawling in the grass beneath tall trees towering above, she is calling out to each of us.

Let us all listen.
Let us all heed her call.

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#EarthDay2020 is also the 50th anniversary of this day that began in 1970. It is not a day to celebrate but to stake stock. It is not a day to congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come, fifty years after it began we’ve strayed further away from the ideals and needs of the planet than anyone could have imagined back in April 1970.

#EarthDayNetwork

For more info – Earth Day Network

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This painting was inspired by a woman’s art I saw somewhere else on the Internet awhile ago. At the time, I saw the painting, thought, ‘cool’ and moved on without saving the link. When I decided to paint something specifically for #EarthDay2020 I was inspired by a memory of something I’d seen…

That’s how the muse works.

She remembers beauty and sprinkles it like confetti in my mind, awakening memories of beauty, joy, peace, calm, Love no matter where I am or what Im doing.

I am sorry I do not remember the artist’s name who inspired me. I am grateful for her inspiration.

Break Free
Mixed media on canvas
30″ x 30″
©2015 Louise Gallagher

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,”

BY MOTHER GOOSE

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Source: The Dorling Kindersley Book of Nursery Rhymes (2000) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176327

A bird will never learn to fly if it stays in the nest and never risks falling. A mother bird knows her offspring must fly free of her sheltering wings. It is the call of nature.

A child will never learn it has the capacity to fly freely if the mother holds on too tightly. We must teach them they can fly, even when we fear they will fall. It is the call of love.

The same is true for ‘the inner child’. The child who feared thunderstorms, snakes and the boogeyman, must learn as an adult that it is free of childhood fears by testing the boundaries of how far it can go today, free of the calling of the past.

We will never learn to break free of our comfort zones if we stay inside the boundary of our fear.

Breaking free is scary. The known fills our vision, luring us back into the comfort of what we are familiar with, those things we tell ourselves that keep us safe from falling.

The unknown looms large upon the horizon, calling us to test the boundaries, to break through the walls of what we believe keeps us safe from falling, just so we can see how far we can go.

It can be terrifying to step outside the walls of our secure and predictable lives to travel the unknown territory of our dreams. Even though we have a sense that the possibility of great reward lies out there, beyond what we know as our life today, we hesitate, make excuses, procrastinate for fear, out there, in that strange and unknown land of living our dreams, we might fall, get hurt, face failure, lose our way.

Frightened of what we cannot know until we attempt it, we negative fortune-tell our way into holding back from stepping forward. To make sense of our fear, we rhyme off our long list of predictions of all that can go, might go, will most definitely go wrong if we risk stepping out from beneath the shelter of our tried and true.

A baby bird will never fly free if it stays trapped within its shell.

We will never know how much we’re capable of if we stay trapped within the limiting beliefs we tell ourselves to keep us safe from falling.

Imagine if Humpty Dumpty never fell. Or, imagine if the all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had been able to put him back together again. He wouldn’t have been the same anyway. He’d have been all cracked up!

Go ahead. Crack the egg. Let Humpty have a great fall. He might like being all cracked up. Or better yet, he may discover he didn’t need the king’s men and horses anyway because the freedom of breaking free of his shell is worth the risk of breaking open and living life off the wall.