I'm not who I was

One simple and yet, profound realization which journaling daily for decades has taught me, is that I am not who I was yesterday.  I am not the same as I will be tomorrow. And yet, I am.  Like rope, my fibers change texture, and color. I disintegrate in some parts, in others, I string with another fiber to form a new extension. An extension with a new identity, a new form which will disintegrate, or reveal yet another fiber. Like tree roots.

Underground, 2021, soft pastels on 19.5 by 75 Indian (shizen) paper. Three sheets of 19.5 x 25.

In my triptych, Underground, I explore what German philosopher, Martin Heidegger referred to as resisted time-space, "under-the-ground" an "ecstatic" primordial past.  A time-space which is also an accessible present. In this piece, I am exploring a horizon, one which divides "as above, so below", and am asking if it is a break into desecration or birth, concealment or record keeping? Is it part and particle, like cells under my skin, resisting to be seen, yet keeping track of time and space.  A space which I cannot see, yet supports life above it and within it and is alive and in constant transformation.

In his lyrical classic, The Spell of the Sensuous, cultural ecologist and philosopher, David Abram references Dreamtime, which plays a prominent part in the mythology of Aboriginal Australia.  He summarizes Dreamtime as "...a kind of time out of time, a time hidden beyond or even within the evident, manifest presence of the land, a magical temporality wherein the powers of the surrounding world first took up their current orientation with regard to one another, and hence acquired the evident shapes and forms by which we now know them. It is that time before the world itself was entirely awake....that dawn when the totem Ancestors first emerged from their slumber beneath the ground and began to sing their way across the land in search of food, shelter and companionship."  He also references how for some native tribes of the American Southwest... "the people believe that they came into the world from under the ground... in the fourth dark underworld within..... According to the Zuñi Emergence story, all the people (humans and all other animals) originally lived in the fourth dark underworld within the earth".   

The earth asked me to inquire, and interpret these ideas, contemplate on these myths and sense it, the earth, under me. And so, what sprouted forth from within me, was this triptych of tree roots. It encompasses the animate "below" and "within", dividing from the "above".

​The earth left me under its sensuous spell, animate, musical,  vibrant, and mysterious.  It left me with a continuum of questions and answered one- it is alive.

​AMO

RSS Feed

Ana Martinez Orizondo

My initials, AMO, stand for "I love" in my native Spanish. I am  am a Cuban American pastel artist, writer, photographer, community builder and artpreneur. ​