Seeing into one's nature

 I took a walk with my 6 year-old daughter, Adina, yesterday with the purpose of collecting items to draw. She was happy to oblige, putting dried grass, a rock, and scraps of fallen bark in the bag. I collected images with my phone, grateful for the burst of sunshine amidst so many gray rainy days. When we got home I notice even our cat Mr. Mochi seemed more optimistic about the world with sun on his face.

Last year I wrote the text for a children’s book I hope to start illustrating at some point. It’s about a mouse with seasonal depression who finally finds refuge through art making. The concept is obviously a thinly veiled version of myself. Like the mouse in the story, I take nature home to create a better self.

So I sat at my desk looking at this slightly damp pile of stuff. My family at home is used to my behavior, but I couldn’t help but think how my brothers and sisters would make fun of me for being “so weird”. But I go ahead anyway. I sorted through the items, laid out the ones I like the most in a design that makes sense to me, and start drawing.

It’s hard to slow down and look. Drawing organic objects with their irregular lines faithfully is a long meander. My daughter, Amalya, who is in 6^th grade, sat across from me, working on labeling an Ancient Egyptian map as part of her remote learning. As I drew the odd circumference of the bark, I thought of myself as a cartographer, mapping another kind of ancient territory. I was looking at a world of living continents. There are so many organisms on one strip of tree bark. So much can go unnoticed.

My attraction to moss, lichen, and fungi may seem odd to some, but I think they’re beautiful. I love flowers for their beauty also, but a rose or ranunculus is beautiful in a romantic, cultivated sort of way for me, with it’s spiraling pattern unfolding. Little wild sprouting organisms are mysteriously beautiful- surviving and thriving in unlikely places.  In Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire, he writes, “The Greeks believed that true beauty . . . was the offspring of these two opposing tendencies . . .when our dreams of order and abandon come together.”

I think it’s the asymmetry and irregularity of pattern and that draws me to nature uncultivated by people. There’s pleasure and a strange comfort in getting lost drawing natural debris- being with an unknown, discovering commonalities and accepting limitations. In The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin states, “All art is an attempt to evoke by symbols the inexpressible vision of the unceasing activity which is life.”

So, if I can see, through making art, that growth is possible amidst rot- then maybe I can feel some hope during pandemic that life goes on.