luizart
Price
negotiable
22"
x 26" - oil on canvas
(oil thinned with turpentine)
We emphasize our masculine sides over our feminine. I think we do this because we fear Nature. Lying awake some nights I hear the eerie, banshee-like, screeching and wailing of foxes in a London suburban garden and I understand why. These sounds evoke a primordial fear in me and I understand why we do everything we can to block them out. To compound our fear of Nature's unpredictable power, fear of scarcity seems to drive us to greedily grab as much from her as we can. And fear of death drives us to attempt to control our environments by getting rid of bacteria or attempting to create the genetically engineered 'perfect life' in sterilised laboratories, avoiding Nature's mulch.
It seems that when mankind first emerged from the instinctual stage and learnt to think, an early impulse was to gain security by getting out of our painful dependence on Nature. Today we continue to do everything we can to sanitise Nature, whether it's regulating women's lives with The Pill, or living in concreted suburbs with neat little gardens; only male trees are allowed to pop up on our sidewalks because female trees spread too many 'messy' seeds.
But increasingly the consequences of this drive to allay our fears multiplies and stares us in the face as our environment creaks and groans under its weight. It seems to me that in attempting to sanitise Nature we have lost almost all respect for the Earth. We no longer know how to be in dialogue with her. It now seems possible that our mistakes are compounding and that one day we might lose our footing on this planet altogether. On the other hand, over time and through our mistakes, the Earth may teach us to become better stewards of her. In some areas this is already apparent as the old ways begin to crumble and a new consciousness emerges.
Because we emphasize our masculine sides over our feminine our tendency is to push any unpleasant feelings aside. This makes it difficult to know how we feel about many things. But perhaps one of the many ways back to rebalancing the feminine with the masculine again is to learn to feel again.
Even if this means feeling our primordial fears as we listen to the foxes in the night.
In one form or another the warrior has to constantly battle fear
