Why were Animals all over Street Art in 2019?
2019 street art saw animals everywhere. And it was not just the usual suspects like Sonny Sundancer, Marthalicia and Mr Prvrt anymore. No, it’s everywhere.
And I think there are some very good reasons why…
I’ve had cancer twice. The first time, I knew my life was messed up (there’s a book about it; you can get it on Amazon: Just South of the Solar Plexus). I even kinda knew I needed cancer… that without it, I might not have had the courage to make the changes I knew I needed to make.
At the second diagnosis, I was facing circumstances in my life far too much like round one: fighting myself on multiple fronts. I couldn’t believe it. It had only been six years… that’s not long. Certainly not long enough to forget the lessons I am still paying for on a daily basis. The similarities were all too much alike.
The first time I was faced with cancer, a healer came into my life and became my friend. She gave me her gifts to help me see myself more clearly. To help me understand how blocks and disease had come into my body.
I called on her again. “Help me see what I’m doing, what’s going on in my life.” Over the next six months—cancer round two—I called on her three times. From diagnosis, to surgery, to the weeks before my birthday when we did follow-up blood tests to see if there were trace cancer cells still swimming around somewhere in my body. Again.
She called on the animals for me. She asked them what I needed. One by one, they showed up in my path—with their stories, their medicine, their wisdom. Their nature. One by one they brought me back to myself in the havoc and heartbreak that cancer brought all over again.
First came prairie dog.
She told me it’s ok to hibernate. She told me it was ok to sleep deep in the dark earth in the weeks before surgery. That it was ok to let the world take care of me in hospital. She told me it was ok to go live inside my cool dark mother for a while… until I was ready to come out again. Ready to be in the world again. And I did. I healed in the cold, dark winter.
Then came snake.
She told me to take poison and make it medicine. To take the pain of my past, the bad patterns, the old ideas that used to protect me but had now become barriers, toxins, blocks, cancer—and make them medicine. Turn them inside out—find the venom that would reverse the trauma and let me stand up and hike out of my own wilderness… And I did. I learned how to ask for what I need. I learned how to trust. I let myself be vulnerable again. And when I did, people close to me were there. They walked with me out of the wilderness.
Then came mountain lion and squirrel.
Find the ideas, said squirrel—find your life. Gather the food that the world spreads at your feet—not for now, but to find your way later—to make your new trail. Gather all that life offers you, for it will give you your path forward, your life, your ideas, your words, when the time comes. And I did. I gathered ideas, I played with them, wrote about them, met with others and shared the ideas to see what they thought. I explored where the ideas lead and whether I wanted to go to those places. Here I am, writing from what I gathered in the Samhain autumn.
Mountain lion said: lead yourself. Find your own path, be the leader of your soul. Your soul knows her purpose, let intuition find the trail. Trust your own wisdom, your own voice… it will lead you to your mountaintop. And I did. I wandered through my mountain all summer, finding the possible paths, sniffing out mine. And here I am now, looking out from my safe cave at la cima—the top—watching over the world, seeing all the places I’ve been, and making a life from my journey.
From December to July, the animals walked me back to my path. They watched out for me. Sometimes, they walked before me to show me my road. I think sometimes they carried me. Prairie dog, snake, squirrel and mountain lion.
Then came August. They set fire to the Amazon. They set fires in Africa. They set fires and watched people’s homes, animals’ homes, our home be consumed, wiped out—thousands of years of intimate ecosystems that are families of plants and animals and insects. They are not just spaces of coexistence, either—they’re spaces of co-creation. They’re life in harmony, in symbiosis. They were. Before we came and set fires.
Now we are faced with causing the greatest mass extinction this Earth may yet have known in all her millions of years of life. And, I think, we know… it is ourselves we are burning.
We do need the animals’ individual medicine… prairie dog, snake, squirrel and mountain lion. But we also need the great lesson: animals survive and thrive and help other life to thrive not only by living out their own individual purposes—but because it is their very purpose to support life. And we are no different. We are not different.
We, too, are animals, and it is part of our purpose, also, to live in balance, to help keep the balance, to steward harmony—just as they do. They are coming to show us what we need to be doing, showing us the paths we have lost.
I think we want to see animals, I think we want to paint animals, I think we want to bring back animals because we want them show to us ourselves in a million ways. We want them to call us back to our lives of purpose in harmony with them.
The animals are our medicine. We need them to get back on our path. We need them to reclaim our humanity.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
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Post script. I wrote this post in October 2019, as I was preparing the re-launch of my site. A million small things got in the way of my proper launch, slowing me down. Preventing me from posting this. Now I know why. Australia is burning too, and that’s just as much our fault as Africa and the Amazon. 500,000,000 animals. 500,000,000 of our brothers and sisters. Burning. Stand in the fire, and know its heat. We must bring the rain. We must dance for the rain. Pray for reconciliation, then stand up—and reconcile ourselves. As one family in life. Mitakuye Oyasin, brothers and sisters.
Credits: I do my best to capture artist names in my photos, however, if you don’t see want and want to know the artist, hit me up and I’ll do my best to get it to you. IG: missmariah73
Massive ups to the artists I share here. We’re gallery-style to inundate the reader-viewer, but that detracts nothing from our recognition of these masterworks.