The Voice of Nature

For as long as I can remember, my mother has painted stunning Korean clay pots with colorful flower blossoms bursting out of them. 

At first glance, they may look like simple impressions. For my mother, however, each flower represents a person. And the clay pot represents a vessel for living water. “We, people, need this living water to thrive,” she would say.

As she explored this metaphor further in her 50-year practice, she began applying new techniques to create abstract layers, forming a textural depth in the background of these clay pots. Iterating with the idea that people contain multitudes, the layers came to represent how overcoming one’s experiences of pain and darkness causes one’s light to shine through ever more brightly. 

As she continued, she experimented with painting vast nature backgrounds that would contextualize these clay pots. Slowly the pots became part of a larger narrative, integrating with natural landscapes to form what she would later call The Voice of Nature. 

Through these experiments she was also (re)discovering the vastness of the living water hidden inside the clay pots. As she dove deeper, she slowly began reframing: What if nature is the vessel for the living water? Flowers and trees and people all receiving from that life and expressing it forward?

At the time of these iterations, this language and perspective had not yet been articulated so clearly. It was through free expression and continuous testing that these perspectives began to emerge in a directional, integrative way. 

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A decade of expression later, my mom found a new freedom unleashed from within. For no apparent reason, my mother, who has only ever painted landscapes and flowers, began painting birds.

“Why?” I asked.

“I want to depict movement,” she replied.  

At first the birds looked rather basic in style compared to the nuanced abstraction and depth surrounding them. Even though she felt these birds didn’t quite fit, she kept painting them. She added them to existing motifs – atop birch trees, across islands, even among flowers in clay pots.

As the birds took flight across her paintings, the perspectives of the nature motifs themselves began to shift. It is as if the birds took her to their point of view – bringing out new compositions, color palettes, and innovative painting techniques. 

Instead of judging these “basic” birds or getting stuck in the feeling of incompetence or thinking that the quality of her work was compromised, she kept experimenting. She kept allowing them in.

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A few months ago, I sat with my mom in her studio. I was there to help her choose a set of thirty paintings for her upcoming show. The first show she has had in seven years. 

There we sat, looking at the incredible landscapes and birds and flowers she has painted over the years. And we realized something together: the majority of the newer paintings no longer featured her signature clay pots. The flowers were now blooming freely in nature. 

In those paintings, birds appeared in deliberate frames, adding life and freedom and movement wherever they went. They didn’t feel basic at all.

As we looked at our chosen paintings, all without clay pots, we realized something else. The birds had helped my mom to grasp the vastness of the living water. The vastness of the living experience. 

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Emergence, letting go, letting come… What if it’s not that one must happen before the other? What if letting come can illuminate or stimulate the letting go, and vice versa?

My mother’s experimentation did not begin with the decision to let go of the clay pots. It began with allowing movement to come in. Spending time with the birds, refining them, trusting the freedom they came from and allowing them to take flight: that was the work. 

As their message became more felt, as my mom’s perspective opened, the clay pots that have been in her work for decades suddenly came into new focus: What if those clay pots are no longer needed? What if the living water exists most fully as a part of nature? 

The birds had sparked an evolution. 

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While I have always known that letting go and letting come is an inherently nonlinear process, these conversations with my mom over time have helped me more fully understand the movement between emergence and presencing. 

In this most recent chapter of my life I let go of my attachments to my job, the idea of becoming a mother, and my longstanding fear of being misunderstood. As I learned to let go, I could feel the emerging coming in. 

But, what if, in the practice of letting go, I was already practicing letting come? What if I had been experimenting at the edge of what I thought I knew? 

Somewhere, somehow, in the midst of uncertainty and loss, I leaned more and more into what I felt called to do. And in doing so, I (re)discovered my own capacity for freedom. With this newfound freedom came clarity of purpose. And with that clarity of purpose, the readiness to take flight. 

“Either we struggle to fix and repair the current system, or we create new alternatives. New alternatives can be created either inside or outside the failing system. But if we choose to walk out and walk on, there are two competing roles we’re called upon to play: We have to be thoughtful and compassionate in attending to what’s dying – we have to be good hospice workers. And we have to be experimenters, pioneers, edge-walkers. Playing these dual roles is never easy, of course, but even so, there are enough people brave enough to do so.” 

–Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze