20th Anniversary of “A Journey of Healing & Hope”

“The future belongs to those who believe in beauty of their dreams.”
–Eleanor Roosevelt

From my August newsletter:
Today (August 11) is the 20th Anniversary of my first art installation “A Journey of Healing & Hope: Honoring Loss and Celebrating Life” which was the culmination of a decades worth of paintings and sculptures that began in the wake of my brother’s death from AIDS in 1989 and the sudden death of my mother nine months later. Art saved my life as I have shared many times over the years. It’s why I believe so deeply in the power of art to heal our hearts and our world. It was a powerful evening for all who attended and being witnessed in my grief was profoundly healing. (See photos below.)

To celebrate this anniversary, I’m offering 20% off
everything at my online boutique. Use Coupon “ART20” at
checkout through August 31.

This event was also the launch for my working professionally as a visual artist and healer. Though I had been drawing and painting since my teens, completed undergraduate studies in Fine Art, discovered sculpture in my 30s, and had a wildly successful design business, I was 41 when I answered the call of my soul. It’s been an amazing 20 years and feel so blessed for this creative life journey. As a healer, I began offering “Healing HeARTS” circles for women in grief (based on the Dougy Center peer-support model where I’d been a volunteer working with grieving children for eight years) but those quickly morphed into ecological grief/art circles after a 10-day intensive in the Work That Reconnects with environmentalist Joanna Macy a year later.

It’s been a meaningful two decades and continue to follow the thread of my calling, completing graduate studies in Religion and Ethics in 2007, exhibiting my work, completing commissioned works, creating ecologically-based installations, writing, facilitating workshops, leading ceremonies, and presenting at conferences including the Parliament of the World’s Religions. All in service to the healing of Mother Earth, Pachamama, though as I write this, I am feeling the weight of the new data coming out about the climate crisis. Breathing into that and may we each continue to hold the light in these dark times with the gifts that are ours.

Though deeply loved I was not encouraged as a child to pursue a creative life, so it was against all odds that I have moved beyond the limitations of my ancestral heritage to follow my creative dreams. Don’t ever give up on your dream, friends! We all have a creative gift and the world needs it now more than ever.

Deep gratitude to all my friends, family, and supporters!
We need each other.

In solidarity and love,
Amy

Grief art show invitation

The invitation to the opening.

 

Donnella Wood Movement

A stunning movement piece from Donnella Wood that honored my journey of transformation.

Lighting candles at show

Attendees were invited to plant seeds for my journey going forward.

“Rape of the Spirit,” 2001, (Bronze). One of the sculptures from the exhibit.

 

 

Alchemy of Change

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Alchemy of Change, 12×12″ 2020, ©Amy Livingstone

From my June Newsletter

Greetings Earth Lovers

What a difference a few weeks makes. We are living in extraordinary times indeed. I know many of us are feeling the sorrow (and outrage) of our collective history and the racial injustice towards people of color in this country. We are a nation founded on genocide and slavery and it now feels there is reckoning for those of us who have had the luxury to turn away. But the time is now. Change is here. I pray that like the lotus that grows out of the watery muck and the butterfly that emerges from the darkness of its chrysalis, that the beauty of unity, justice, healing, and reconciliation will blossom.

The arts are playing a significant role at this time. Numerous books, films, and documentaries offer us an opportunity to learn and understand. I don’t know how to have the difficult conversations but as a white woman, right now I am educating myself and ready to listen.

Arts & Activism Symposium
If you missed the “Arts & Activism Symposium” recently, you can view it at this link. I start my presentation “Sacred Art and Spiritual Ecology” at 50 minutes but the other speakers are so inspiring and moving. Learn about the “Under Sea Garden: An interwoven collaboration utilizing reclaimed marine rope and ghost netting” from Emily Miller and Shelby Silver and also “Meeting Trauma With Laughter” from David Lichtenstein (Clowns Without Borders).
Arts and Activism
Arts & Activism Symposium with
Greater Portland Sustainability Education Network, GPSEN.org
In solidarity and love,
Amy

Co-Create a Communal Painting for Hope

Would you like to contribute to the vision for a communally-inspired painting as an offering of hope and healing for our world? If you have been following along on my journey, you probably are familiar with and share my deep concerns for our beloved Mother Earth. But I want to hear from you!

What being(s) in the more-than-human world do you love? Who would you grieve if that being is lost due to the ecological crisis including climate change, deforestation, habitat loss, ocean acidification, plastics? Perhaps a special place? Or a bird? A creature? Trees? Coffee beans? Bees? Salmon? Coral reefs? Respond to this email as soon as possible!

Let’s co-create this offering of beauty for the earth. I can see showing this when it is complete and having others contribute as well. More to come as this project evolves.  

“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” -Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

I look forward to hearing from you! Namasté.

 

Unveiling Prayer for the Birds

©Prayer_FB
From my July Newsletter

Greetings Earth Lovers
I am excited to share the completed “Lauds: Prayer for the Birds” from the “Where I Stand is Holy” series with you. If you have been following along, you know this has been quite a journey. The original vision emerged after my return from an Animas Institute quest last summer. I connected deeply to that landscape and was reminded of this commandment to Moses from the Torah: “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” (Exodus 3:5). When we are standing on Mother Earth, we are standing on holy ground. On our last evening together, I walked out in front of our group, removed my sandals, and chanted a song that we often sing during our community sweat lodge (changing sit to stand).

Where I stand is holy, holy is this ground.
Forest, mountain, river, listen to the sound.
Great Spirit circles all around me.
(Repeat several times)

This mantra guided the creation of this piece inspired by illuminated manuscripts that included ornate borders with flowers, bugs, and creatures of all sizes and imagined monks in ancient times as I painted each tiny leaf. The 11 varieties of birds that I chose through my research are just a small sample of the 314 North American birds threatened by climate change. According to the Audubon Society, 314 of the 588 species will lose more than 50 percent of their current climatic range by 2080. (Learn more here). With temperature changes, acidification of our oceans, and loss of habitat and food sources, their survival is precarious.

Arctic Tern
Magpie
Cerulean Warbler
American Three-toed Woodpecker
Eastern Bluebird
Allen’s Hummingbird
Varied Thrush
Bobolink
Whooping Crane
Golden Eagle
Brown Pelican

How do we be with this beauty and our sorrow? As I learned from my own transformative journey through grief 25 years ago, it is important and necessary to allow the feelings and to allow our hearts to break open, as painful as it can be. It is natural to grieve what we love(d) and who among us doesn’t love our birds? “Beauty is what opens our eyes to love. Love ignites passion and passion is what propels us toward the future wrought with risk and uncertainty.” -Terry Tempest Williams

With the Pope’s recent encyclical on the environment and urgent call for creation care, my work (and many others) over the past decade feels affirming and am grateful for his vision and leadership on the most critical issue of our time.

In the Catholic tradition, Lauds is the morning prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, so I chose morning glories and songbirds to symbolize this time of the day as the sun rises in the background. Three other panels for Sext (noon), Vespers (evening), and Compline (night) are all part of this vision and will also give expression to our endangered species. Follow along on Facebook and Twitter, too.

For love of the birds.

Communing with the Creation

Summer Greetings from my July Newsletter:  
Summer has finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest. While the rest of the country has been living under crushing heat waves, here in Oregon our rainy season lasted well into June. Given the level of drought not only in the U.S. but around the world, I bow with gratitude for the life-giving rain. But today, on this gorgeous Sunday morning, I’m thrilled to be sitting in my garden, sipping coffee and listening to the birdsong as I write this note to you. Jays, juncos, and spotted towhees make haste to the freshly-filled feeder while others splash about in the bath hanging from a Ponderosa Pine, waiting their turn.

In last months newsletter (see previous post), I shared how “art saves lives,” and indeed saved my life twenty years ago. I also believe like many of us that the natural world can also heal our hearts and bring us peace during these challenging times–personally and collectively. All too often though with the advent of technology, demands of family, and the fast pace of our modern world, we don’t take enough time to nurture our souls by communing with the earth. There is a common belief that one need be “out in nature,” camping or hiking, etc. However, if we can remember that we are always “in the Creation” at any given moment even in the city, we have the opportunity throughout each day to connect to the beauty that is around us. We need only stop what we are doing and be present to that which is before us. To the air we’re breathing. The trees we pass on the road. The food we eat. The water we drink. The bird in that tree…right over there.

From naturalist Terry Tempest Williams: “How to create time, how to create buffers around us so that we are doing nothing. I think that may be our biggest disease right now–the disease of busyness. With all these modern conveniences that are supposed to be time-savers, I think we’ve never had less time. So I think creating open space, time to do nothing, time to love, time to be, time to dream, to think, to walk, is its own act of civil disobedience.”

For me, at this time of year, I take my contemplative practices outside. For example, I practice what I call “bird meditation.” Here I use the word meditation loosely. Like one of my spiritual teachers, Adyashanti, I consider this practice a form of silent sitting. Most often the notion of meditation is tied to a rigorous practice utilizing breath and body with a desired outcome in mind. Typically “enlightenment” or freedom from some sort of emotional or mental anguish, or suffering, etc. For Adya this is another form of striving much like anything we undertake in our lives which only adds to our suffering. Here, the ego strives for control which ultimately leads to more feelings of failure and self-criticism. Instead, this silent sitting, or bird meditation in my example, allows for simply letting everything be as it is with no striving. You cannot “fail” with this practice. You are simply present to all that is around you, within and without including the Creation, the earth, which is holy and worthy of our reverence.   

In the morning, I spend forty-five minutes to an hour silently sitting which often begins with reading a sacred text such as poetry. In silence and stillness, being with what is in this present moment, grounds me before I begin my work day. You may not have an hour, but even fifteen minutes a day before you turn on your computer or phone, can make a difference and bring some inner peace into your world. Try it and let me know what you discover. 
 
For love of the EARTH!  
 Amy    
  
A Beauty Blessing
-John O’Donohue
 
As stillness in stone to silence is wed
May your heart be somewhere a God might dwell.
 
As a river flows in ideal sequence
May your soul discover time in presence.
 
As the moon absolves the dark of resistance
May thought-light console your mind with brightness.
 
As the breath of light awakens colour
May the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder.
 
As spring rain softens the earth with surprise
May your winter places be kissed by light.
 
As the ocean dreams to the joy of dance
May the grace of change bring you elegance.
 
As clay anchors a tree in light and wind
May your outer life grow from peace within.
 
As twilight fills night with bright horizons
May beauty await you at home beyond.