Blanca Peak and the Great Sand Dunes provide background for Orisons Flying Rain Sandhill Crane sculptures.
I wanted to collaborate with all the living beings who were living there or passing through. The land is the artwork, and I wanted to celebrate it and every being on it, as well as reconnect it and all its inhabitants with their presents, pasts, and futures. Marguerite Humeau, Artist, Orisons (www.orisons.art)
Imagine for a moment (or linger longer) the possibilities that would emerge if each of us took such a reverential approach to co-creating our life experiences. How might we be informed and even inspired if we held each of our multiple environs reverently and collaborated with them? Our homes and the lands they occupy. Our places of work, of worship, of play. What if we celebrated all that is, all that has been, and all that is to be?
In the wake of attending the opening of the vast earthworks installation, Orisons, and hearing the artist and curator speak about their three-year collaboration to opening day, such questions have risen in me from a deeper place than I’ve experienced before. The questions feel both informed and inspired by the artist, Marguerite Humeau, and her deep reverence for the land – its present, its past, its future. I witnessed that reverence in the care and thoughtfulness of the 160-acre installation itself and in Humeau’s presentation to the opening day audience along with curator, Cortney Stell.
Humeau is a French artist who lives and has her studio in London. Her understanding of and reverence for land 4,700 miles from home is inspiring. Cortney Stell, Executive Director of the Denver-based Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum which commissioned the work, curated the installation.
My own reverence for the land, for the vast San Luis Valley, for Gaia and her beings continues to be fed by my Orisons experience, by possibilities rising, by questions that continue to emerge, by the very nature of reverence itself. Reverence, Muse gently reminds me, kindles curiosity.
There is a quieting, slowing that I experience when reverence rises. Noise and speed do not blend well with reverence. I wonder about the nature of reverence itself. I so want to say ‘herself’ as reverence feels very soft, feminine, much like Humeau and the strategically placed Orisons sculptures. This is in contrast to the outward, ruggedness of the land which the sculptures occupy.
Sandhill Crane Songs - One of 84 Orisons sculptures
I wonder how reverence can help us navigate life in this chaotic time when so much seems out of balance, out of sync with the wholeness that is life. What can I learn from visiting and contemplating this art? Might cultivating reverence inform us of how to live in greater alignment with one another and with our planetary home? How might reverence call forth the wholeness that is life?
What if we asked, as artist Humeau does, “How would it feel for us as humans to truly merge into the biosphere?” I taste, I sense a morsel of the answer when I saunter in the woods out back. I felt the possibility as I navigated prairie dog and kangaroo mouse burrows in the Orisons landscape on opening day. The land and its beings – present, past, future – have much to share. Will I learn to listen deeply enough to hear?
All too often we reserve reverence for that and those with whom we agree, those we love, things important to us – hardly reverence for ALL life. But what if we cultivated our capacity to feel reverence as deeply for the land we occupy, for Gaia herself, for ALL beings, ALL life as I experienced that Marguerite Humeau expresses in Orisons?
Indeed, what if …?
Horseweed Pendulum