“Express, express, express, lead on up through the picture. God is trying to get through, trying to speak. Swing the thought through the whole, no abrupt disharmonies, transitions. A bird flies straight with ever flapping wings till it has reached its goal. Then it is finished and rests till the next idea of action comes to it and away again to fresh goal, forgetting its last flight. Only its wings are kept strong and ready by every flight.” ~ Emily Carr (December 31st, 1933)
Have I come to this place too late in life? There is a part of me that believes so. I know better. For everything, there is a time and purpose under heaven. Here I am like a bird that has darted and winged across a continent, resting here and there only to take flight again for reasons of employment. Now I find myself perched in a transformative, inspiring place of awe and wonder—Mayne Island.
Mayne is a rustic 21 square-kilometer island in the southern Gulf Islands chain of British Columbia. Here I have a sense of belonging unfelt in any place I have lived or visited. I would be content to spend the remainder of my days here. The islanders I have met express similar thoughts. Others have told me how the beauty of the island came to possess them and not them possessing the land. This is not a place that can be possessed. But it is something much deeper that they felt and I have come to feel. This is a sacred place, a haven in a hectic world, to borrow, with a slight twist, from the author Star Weiss’ book titled Havens In A Hectic World: Finding Sacred Places.
On my first morning here, I awoke to find myself gazing at the Big Dipper through a skylight. The clarity of the stars, like diamonds around an ebony neck, was startling. My breath was stolen. Now today, in the early hours, around three in morning, I was woken by the sound of the wind through the fir trees, pines and cedars. I heard an ancient chant. Rather than think of it as the wind giving the trees a whispery voice, I found myself feeling the wind as he carried the song the trees sang, and 
continued to sing, though a different song, hours later. Lying in bed, gazing out the window, I began to think about Emily Carr’s landscapes, those strong forms of nature, the swirling movement of light and darkness that dance, performing above the foliage. Following that light, Carr’s animated brush strokes capture the luminosity of light bursting through branches of old-growth trees to shine on trunks of new growth and the graying logs of fallen trees branches, the green of wild grass and moss. In these moments, listening to song, watching a distant cloud and the subtle play of light, I felt the spirit life of earth—Mother Earth—as understood by Carr and articulated in her paintings of the Pacific Northwest and its indigenous peoples. She understood the connectedness of and spiritual reality that exist in nature. She allowed herself to enter into and become part of the nature—the natural environment—as she experienced it instinctively. Carr did not attempt to possess what she witnessed. Instead, she wanted to be possessed. She writes:
“Instead of trying to force our personality on to our subject, we should be quiet quiet and unassertive and let the subject swallow us and absorb us into it and not be so darn smart about our importance. The woods are marvelous after the sun has dipped and quit tickling them. Then they get down to sober realities, the cake without the icing. They are themselves, then, like people alone and thinking instead of persons in a throng trying to sparkle and taking on reflection from others. Dear trees, we don’t stop half enough to love and admire them.” In the next paragraph she writes, “It is as I said: go with nature and she’s easy and delicious.” (May 22, 1934).
Carr embraced nature with all her senses. Lying down in a stream, her head resting on a rock, she embraced and was embraced by the cool water coursing over her body. Another time she rolled naked in saturated grass to bathe. On other occasions, after some “fuss over wet feet” she allowed mud to kiss her feet and walked “on naked feet” through puddles and felt the tickles of daises and June grass.
In the early hours, gazing at the stars and nights later listening to the song of trees in the “quiet quiet” I was reminded of the simple truth that I can possess nothing but the illusion of possessing. When I think I possess something, the reality is it has come to possess me—it has come to own me. The object of my possession clips my wings and cages me. I can only embrace and be embraced.
“We are so heavily cluttered,” Carr wrote in her journal Hundreds And Thousands, “with our bodily wants and necessities, our possessions, that we lose sight of the forest in the trees. I felt my life was small and greedy, grasping for the little and overlooking the big. What can we do? I suppose the answer is fill our own niches as full and comprehensively as we know how, fill our own place. When it’s full to bursting maybe our limits will be pushed back further and we will have more space to fill.” (June 4, 1934).
Here Carr is summoning our spirits to be nearer to spiritual things. To fill our niches by feeling nature with all our senses, not to possess but rather to experience and hear the voice of God in moments of wonder in those sacred places in a hectic world, then express this experience through paintings we paint with our lives.
Photo Credits:
© Charles van Heck. All rights reserved.
Recent Charles van Heck Articles:
- The Importance of Color and the Composition of Light: An Interview With Janet Vanderhoof
- Dispatches From Mayne Island: Lessons on Life, Death and Leadership
- Dispatches From Mayne Island, Part Two: Conversing with Stevens, Einstein and Carr
- Dispatches From Mayne Island: Meditations on the Writings and Paintings of Emily Carr - Part One, Possession
- Intimate Stories from a Two-chambered Heart: An Interview with Roberta Murray
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