Dear Daughter, this Mother’s Day I invite you to paint my face. You have not yet encountered the sophistry that you are separate from Nature. Indeed, you know that the core of Nature resides within your innermost being. Your wild mark-making reveals an implicit state of continuity with the wondrous pulse of life.
Each unbridled brushstroke you create declares the underlying cadence of the whole. Allow me to learn from you this profound belonging. I observe you in the world this sunny day: at one with it, at peace with what is, erudite in the fundamental things.
For you, there is no real or imagined world, no completeness or incompleteness of being, no purity or defilement, no prophecy or ignorance.
With your first words, you were hasty to tell me that the tree is as much of a person as the cloud is; that the bluejay, the man crossing the street, and the ocean are bound together by a barefaced consecration, just as you and I are. To each decomposing leaf and imperfect stone that you gift me with your dainty hands you assign incalculable value; you draw my attention to their unrepeatability and gather these forgotten things back into the circle of kinship and protection.
Your native tongue is the cosmic turning. May you retain this skillful mastery of being as you journey into the murky vocation of realizing your full humanity — to love and to heal. And to your soulful spinning through this great unveiling of things not previously known I say: revolutionize. May the knowledge of that which could not be known apart from this present tempest inspire your free and precious flame to light the world.
Words: Lia Chavez
Photographs by: David Shing
Makeup (using all Kjaer Weis) by: Ocean Shing
Wardrobe provided by Elanur Erdogan