JULY 2022 | CREATIVITY BLOG | ARTIST JOURNAL | SUNFLOWERS & SUNSETS

A Conversation with My Mother and My Creator

By Mighty.Beautiful Art Studio

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. A lot of internal conversations. A lot of alone time. A lot of beautiful peaceful moments in nature that I was lead to by an intuition, a force, an inspiration and a drive that is both obvious and difficult to describe. I call that force God for lack of a better term or word or description for it, and I do believe it is God.

More specifically, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about God lately.

I’ve always been a spiritual person, but somewhat quietly; I was raised Catholic and in Catholicism, even though you’re told to pray, you’re also told that pastors are necessary mediators between you and God, that God doesn’t talk to everyone directly, just to a select chosen few. I don’t know, maybe that’s true, maybe she, they, it, he — whatever pronoun you want to give to the Creator, the Force, the Higher Power, Mother Nature — doesn’t talk to everyone, and when I actually went to church when I was younger, I thought the idea of actually talking to God was absurd. There was just no way God could hear all our prayers, respond to them, pick and choose which of his 7 billion people (at the time) to care about. But then, nothing about the Catholic God seemed to make any sense to me back then (10X that statement now). It was all just sheer hope and faith that there was an afterlife.

I left the church and organized religion when I was 18 after a Baptist coworker told me the Bible said all gays would burn in Hell. I realized then how dangerous interpretations of the Bible and the power of organized religion can be and never, ever looked back — but I never turned my back on the idea of God, on that inner instinct or feeling or inspiration that it wasn’t just me hanging out in my mind, that I have a soul made of Dark Matter or Anti Matter or something else that only people much smarter than me are actually capable of studying on a scientific level, that’s separate from my body and connected to something greater than me.

I just didn’t know what that something was.

The possibilities were and are endless.

Is God a kind of hyper complicated singularity that encompasses everyone and everything in the entire Universe?

Is God the Universe? Or are all the stars in the Universe Gods?

Stars are certainly the Creators of everything. There are trillions of them, and they are all Creators. So what if we aren’t all actually created by the same God? What if all our Gods want different things, have different motivations, different desires?

Maybe there’s a Creation pottery class in Godsville and they are all just high and hanging out together making things without any rhyme or reason, or maybe we’re some kind of group college thesis paper about the consequences of mortality or the study of fear. Would Gods have fear if they are immortal?

What if there’s a whole race of Gods and we really are just avatars for our soul, stuck in a Sims game, doing our thing while our Souls or Creators do all the other things Souls and Creators must do? I’m a Creator; I make new art every single day, so much that I just can’t keep track of it all.

I call the Universe God. All the stars in the sky that shine for the James Webb Space Telescope like the sunflowers in this field shined for me are all God, as are the sunflowers. They are all both God and God’s creation, and any creative person understands that there is no difference between the two - one is just pieces of the other but each piece can outshine all the rest in its own time.

So it was inspired by that force that I spent an afternoon wandering around amazed at the Schwirian Farm sunflower festival about 30 minutes away in Monongahela. I do absolutely love flower festivals of all types - a celebration of beauty and nature and strength and spirit.

Sunflowers were my mom’s favorite flower, and they’ve become mine, too (if one must have a favorite flower). I feel her spirit whenever they are around, whenever I see them, whenever I imagine them. In the depths of my mind, my mom is a sunflower (and a cloud, and the sunshine and all the ways the wind speaks).

Sunflowers are a universal symbol of love and devotion, and have been ever since it was first cultivated for food and medicine in 1000 B.C. They are mighty and they are beautiful. I’m growing a few different varieties in my yard (I need to write a post about watching my garden grow), one of which is at least 13 feet tall and is as strong as a tree. The Aztecs crowned their princesses in sunflowers and used gold to sculpt sunflowers throughout their temples. Sunflowers even have their place amongst the Gods in Greek mythology, when a nymph (nature diety) named Clytie fell in love with the Sun God Apollo, who, sadly, did not return her affections (according to the legend). But Clytie held out hope and turned herself into a sunflower so that she could always face the sun and show the God she loved her unwavering devotion.

And in the midst of thousands of sunflowers, my mom’s spirit, and God’s, was more present than it had ever been. It was like she was putting on a display just to grab my attention. It was just such a beautifully divine hello. The clouds danced across the sky, shapeshifting in throughout the afternoon but as the sun went down, the negative space turned into this perfect heart-shaped burst of light that was breathtaking to witness and impossible to capture because you have to be able to breathe to take a proper photograph. It was like she was really putting on a performance, showing me what she can do now, showing me how close to God she is. Proving to me from the Great Beyond that even when I feel so dejected, rejected, abandoned, alone, scared - I’m not. I have my Creator to guide me and give me purpose, and I have Mother Nature to care for and to care for me.

The message in that sunset was just so powerful. Not to sound overly grandiose, but it was like the God version of writing life advice on the stalls of bar bathroom walls only in the language of clouds and sunsets. And God was telling me they were happy to see me, that I was in exactly the right place, doing exactly what I was meant to be doing, that what I’m working on isn’t all in vain. And my mom was there, telling me that she is proud of me, and that she is happy. And together They told me that I do have a purpose, that I do have a voice, that I do have a job here to do, and that, as hard as things get some times, as dark as the days can be, as rough as the world is, and as much trouble as the planet and humanity is in, I am meant to be here.

I have to keep going.

I have to keep speaking with my Creator, I have to keep creating, I have to keep trying to be vulnerable with my thoughts and feelings because one day people will be listening and I need to be ready. I need to have it all together. Because the future is what we make it. Every possibility exists. Every decision any of us makes is a new timeline in a pandora’s knot of timelines that we’re all jumping through every single day that we’ve got to navigate and unravel so that we can wind up in one that continues on. But there are a lot of forces at play and creating the future, unknotting that knot, doesn’t come automatically. You don’t create through the power of positive thinking alone. You create through actions. You create through failures. You create by learning and adjusting and evolving and growing and through the sheer will and determination and basic fundamental human need to create. You create the future like you breathe the air, and the air in this knot we’ve gotten ourselves into is poison.

Much of Humanity is mentally ill, spiritually unwell and creatively sedated. We control our emotions and fears with chemicals. We call texts edited and controlled by. the Patriarchy “sacred” and follow false idol “religious” leaders and cultists and conmen that have turned the actions of Jesus upside down and worked to destroy the planet instead of studying and taking care of Mother Nature — perhaps Their greatest creation, our closest connection.

And we work more and more and more just to survive, not to really live. The pressures we all face from our dystopian corporate capitalist society leave many people to exhausted to connect with the creators, too busy to meditate through their hands, and we’ve prioritized creativity so low on our survival totem pole that we call it an “extracurricular.” We preach about eating well but we eat too much, we remind each other to work out and exercise but we sit far too often. I rarely see those same kinds of reminders out in the world to create rather than consume. But everything I’ve ever been through has shown me that creativity is just as important to our health as food, as water, as air, as exercise. It is that fundamental. It’s my firm belief that not exercising our creative muscles more, deprioritizing that aspect of life in favor of jobs and generating profits for the wealth class, has led us to this place of mass mental illness, mass depression, mass addiction, mass suffering, mass spiritual disconnection, mass miscommunication and mass violence in a world that should know better and has the tools to do better.

And that’s the conversation that was being had that day, as the clouds in the sky transformed to open up for a powerful and colorful ray of love shining down from above. I told my mom I was glad to see her so happy, and I told Them both that I’d keep trying.