Through the collective I am a part of, I met a really wonderful person and artist, Melissa Penley Cormier who also loves nests of all types and things and being from the natural world. Earlier this year she came to my opening reception of my show and brought me a gift- a box of hornet nest paper. The best gift ever. I finally started using it on one of my house pieces.
The top part went through various iterations. At one point there was a drawing that I inscribed into the surface using a pintool of roots and vines. It was actually pretty interesting, but it didn’t feel right. I turned to my images and then I thought about my images I have made to point towards reciprocity. “In Lak’ech”- you are my other me.
The reciprocal image fit what I was trying to communicate perfectly and felt more like me.
This morning I was listening to the Green Dreamer podcast interview of Norma Kawelokū Wong when the title came to me. I highly recommend listening to this and in fact I am going to listen to it again.
I looked up the making of a hornet’s nest and it is started when one surviving queen emerges from hibernation in the spring. She builds the cells out of chewed wood and saliva and lays her eggs. Once the eggs hatch, the new hornets takeover the building of the rest of the nest.
When I feel despair over the onslaught that is happening daily in this country, and I read about this collective transformation that everyone seems to be talking about with abated breath, I think, but that feels so nebulous to me. It’s hopeful, but is enough to create change? Are we waiting for that one person or group to tell us what to do? Or do we start with ourselves, and what we can do, and then go from there? I don’t have any answers. Maybe all of it.
“So I think of the human quotient as being one of the most important ingredients of where we will go or where we will not go. As communities, as peoples, as countries, as global communities. Those are the characteristics of who it is that we are, not our beliefs, but our characteristics. The characteristics like our courage, whether we will choose humanity when we make our decisions? Will we choose not only that which may be expedient in this moment, but that which our descendants, descendants, descendants may require, may need?” – Norma Wong, episode 479, Green Dreamer podcast