Eggs and Spring Things

As spring tickles our landscape here back into life, it brings hope. Seeds stir from their sleep, buds burst from their branches...and our own sap is rising. We are more motivated and we dare to dream again. After an especially soggy winter and with a world still in disarray, we need that now.

In these early weeks of spring, the dawn chorus around my little place is already louder and longer as local birds return to build nests to nurture their eggs. Eggs epitomize the promise of spring. They symbolize new life and unhatched potential, and in several creation myths they are the origin of all of life.

 

 

The Silver Egg 

On a personal level, eggs played a storybook role in a real chapter of my life. I lived further north in a harbour-side house called the Silver Egg Cottage. It was named after the silver dragon-sized egg that sat on the roadside in front of the cottage. It was laid there by a long-ago neighbour who had found an egg-shaped rock which he painted silver to serve as a night road-marker indicating the best place to cross the gravel-bottom stream in the days before the current small bridge was built.

 The black tape cracks on the silver egg were a one-off for the 'hatching' party when I moved into the cottage.

 

The Golden Egg Painting 

The years I lived at the Silver Egg Cottage happened to coincide with years of my own soul incubation and growth, so inevitably the symbol of the egg featured in several subsequent paintings. One of these was The Golden Egg. At the time, I was discovering my energetic sensitivities and I was playing a lot of music including hand drums. The drum's beat has been described as "the dialogue between matter and spirit" and I literally felt that.

The higher frequencies of the subtle energies are where transparent matter lives. They are where the patterns preceding matter hold their foundational invisible forms. And if our own frequencies resonant there, they reveal themselves to us. Oddly, while I don't see these higher frequency forms, I paint them in a very visual out-picturing. The invisible becomes the visible because I physically feel their forms and their movement.  

This painting reminds us of our own enriching energetic egg that is connected to the greater creative cosmic egg. Or maybe it simply symbolizes the birth of something primal and precious. Or both. 

 

Then there was The Stone Egg. Then.....The Stone Boat carrying the stone egg. And there were more.

 

 

The Call of the Wild

And years later, after I had been separated from the more soulful parts of myself for too long, came The Call of the Wild. This painting was a call to return to what matters. To return to the primal nutrition that comes from the natural wild world, from movement and music, from sitting by fires, swimming in the surf and getting-down-dirty in the garden. It was time to share stories that matter, time for deep listening to friends and to the inner knowing that lives in the still silent places. It was time to be playful and to get curious about what wanted to be born.    

Spring is the season that urges us on to do that. It calls us up to be more alive.