This Earth and I a closer look at our kinship

Rory MahonyWes Fine Day

bySafira Lachapelle

in Collaboration with

The simpler we can see our world,

the more truth we will find in our being.

First Nations traditional understanding teaches us

to respect, love, and nurture all others before self.

Creator

Mother Earth / Sun / Moon / Stars

Plant Life

Insect Life

Water / Sky Life

Land Life

Humanity

This earth and I are one and the same

The spade pierced the tangled crust;penetrating deeper;revealing a soft, inviting womb; moist and warm;refreshing and cool.

I laid back; my limbs outstretched, allowing the earth in.

A swell of energy aggregated in my body,travelling through my nerves; tide water through shore sand.

The flesh of my bones ceased to exist;replaced by ethereal gauzefrom stars in the sky. Each twinkle married to loins that began to quake deep within,magnifying sensation, titillating intuition;the slightest breath,a phantom aphid crawling down my spine.

The spade is removed;the skin replaced.This earth buries my fallacy;the broken mouse whose life gave light to blind eyes.

This earth and I are one and the same;wings letting go in the sky,allowing breeze to carry her to new heights.

“We say, we were borne from the stars, from the dust of the stars, when they came together to form worlds.

The spirit of Creator moved through all these things and from the dust, the water, the air, the earth, the fire, life sprang forth.

This is where we came from and we say that when we complete our earth walk, this physical journey that we are on, we will return to the stars, we will return as the spirits that we arrived here as.”

- Wes Fine Day

Plant LifeThe Pin Cherry

Silk Spider;Subtle Venom.

Simultaneous attack;weaving wires;one to survive;one to trap.

This sinuous womanskirting tight rope;plucking the chords;of her memorized map.

A connection at last,the blind operatorfeels the fine line fall in her lap.

The grasshoppers have come infesting;swarming;

Heavy green drops smearing thump

green bloodthump

mirroringthump

a stream thump

lackingthwack

oxygen.

The resilience of survival;baked in the scorching summer heat.

A Lady bugs no one; she is humble and kind.

A Lady bugs no one; she is easy to find.

A Lady bugs no one; she is a fortunate sign.

A Lady bugs no one;a beetle, they mind.

Skin of the water;will of the world.

Permeable and loose;simple and sweet.

Inside a child sings of life.

“We are created this way for a reasonour paths cross for a reason. There are no coincidences. Sometimes things happen that we do not understand and it simply means we do not understand what is happening. It does not mean that this is simply coincidence, to be brushed aside and left behind without being examined, reflected upon,remembered, meditated about, dreamed.”

- Wes Fine Day

Land LifeThe Wild and the Tame

“When a hunter or a trapper kills a beaver, he always leaves a piece of the tail that is closest to the body, the beaver tail he puts back in the water. When a hunter takes a moose, he takes the shoulder blade and ties it back in the tree.We are taught that we have to do this because in the morning when Creator travels throughout the earthhe sees all of these things, what has been put back in the water, what is hanging in the trees, what has been left from what the people have taken and that they have prayed, given thanks.”

- Wes Fine Day