Apifera Farm - where art, story, animals & woman merge. Home to artist Katherine Dunn

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Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Fatherly, motherly energies...and The Other

I worry that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference. Pelicans pass by and we hardly know who they are, we don't know their stories. Again, at what price? I think it's leading us to a place of inconsolable loneliness. That's what I mean by "An Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by the constant denial. I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies. 
{From an interview with 
Terry Tempest Williams}


I went for my morning walk today with Muddy, and at some point, I stopped...and just stared at the many trees in the roadside forest. I looked and looked...and realized, I did not know them, yet, any of them. And they are just waiting for me, patiently, to notice them more closely. So I did, I breathed them in, as many as I could, and walked on.

My friend who has lived on both the west and east coasts was explaining how she always thought of the Pacific Ocean as a mothering energy, and the Atlantic ocean as a Fathering energy. It came up because I was trying to verbalize how and why if felt different here, the energy. I liked what she said, it made sense to me. The coastline is rockier and the waves are different. We are a state of granite and ledge stone. There is ice and snow. The culture here harkens back to ancestral ways-patriotic type ways-that are not in the midwest or west. There is a wild renegade quality to the fisherman and many lifers here, just as there is a real renegade climate out west, but it is different, and until my friend mentioned this, I had no words to explain it. A male energy, versus female. Interesting. Just the other day this 20 something called me 'dear'...

It is something I will explore within me as the months go by.

So I am out in the land with Other, as I was in my old home. I have always resonated with her, even as a child in the city, even as a young woman in New York City. Other is my consolation during upheaval, and a sip of hot tea in calm times. I am where I should be , need to be at this time in my life. I just don't know why...such a mystery to let unfold.