EarthHealer — Mandala For The Tortoise – 12/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 12, March 26th, 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Medium: Drawn by hand with a black Staedtler archival pigment ink Fineliner on Canson Mix Media XL Series 98lb drawing paper. Colored with Faber Castell 6 PITT Artist Brush Pens, DecoColor Glossy Oil Base Paint Markers, Portfolio Water Soluble Oil Pastels, Caran D’Ache NeoColor II Water Soluble Wax Crayons, Sharpie Medium Point Oil-Based Opaque Paint Markers. Photograph taken with a BlackBerry Tour.
EarthHealer is a tribute to Turtle and her grounding and healing place in the world-wide celebration of Earth Hour on March 26th (here’s my photograph from Earth Hour 2010). It is also my contribution to the collective healing energy of Earth Day coming up on April 22nd, 2011. The mandala was inspired by Hope Among The Rubble, the Week 12 BlackBerry 52 Jump-Off from Lotus, and Tortoise Highway from Seattle poet Teresa Williams. The Tortoise has long been a symbol of the Earth across many cultures, from Ancient times through current day. She is strongly related to the New Moon, the direction North, and the element Earth in Mandala For The 5th Element — The Role Of Ritual In Our Lives.
I researched the differences between turtles, tortoises, and terrapins and found a detailed article on the San Diego Zoo website: Reptiles: Turtle & Tortoise. All three are reptiles. However, turtles spend most of their lives in water and have webbed feet. Tortoises are land-dwellers with short, stumpy legs. Terrapins live on land and in water and are most often found in the brackish, swampy areas near rivers, lakes, and ponds. Some cultures use the words interchangeably. For the purposes of this piece, I consider the Turtle, the Tortoise, and the Terrapin keepers of the Earth, representative of:
- Slowing Down: standing still, slow walking, staring out the window; nurturing ideas, holding creative seeds in the belly until the time is right to share them; all good things come in time
- Home as Water & Earth: learning to connect to both, to be fluid, yet grounded. Turtles spend most of their lives in water; tortoises are land dwellers; terrapins live on land and in water.
- Protecting with Turtle’s Shell: learning how to use protection; teaches good boundaries. Turtles and tortoises have hard, protective shells (part of their skeleton) that are made up of 59 to 61 bones covered by plates called scutes.
- Motherly Compassion: the Mother Goddess, the cycle of give & take, empathy for others
- Giving Back to the Earth: as she has given to us. Expressing gratitude for what we have.
Every day I am moved and energized by the comments, deep conversations, and collective energy of our contributors and readers from all over the world. I feel so much gratitude for community and those who give of themselves in service to help tip the world a little more upright on its positive axis. You give me hope. Deep bow.
Hope Among The Rubble by Lotus, 12/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 12, March 24th 2011, photo © 2011 by A~Lotus. All rights reserved. Medium: Word Cloud created on Wordle using 3 different articles. Text manipulated by adding HOPE. Final touch up in Adobe Photoshop CS2.
-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 27th, 2011. Read about ybonesy’s adventures with turtles over the years at In Praise Of Nature & Garage Sales and Novelty Pets.
-related to posts: Best Of BlackBerry 365 — First Quarter SlideShow, BlackBerry 365 Project — White Winter Squirrel, Flying Solo — Dragonfly In Yellow Rain, Searching For Stillness, icicle tumbleweed (haiga) — 2/52, The Mirado Black Warrior, Waning Moon (Haiga), The Void — January Mandalas, haiku 4 (one-a-day) Meets renga 52, Alter-Ego Mandala: Dreaming Of The Albatross (For Bukowski), WRITING TOPIC — SLOW OR FAST?
Lotus and I will continue our call and response by posting a BlackBerry photo for the 52 weeks of 2011. Feel free to join us if you wish (learn about the project’s beginnings at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration).
My favorite is is Slowing Down. For weeks, I’ve been practicing repeating over and over, “Slow Down. Slower. Slower.” It really begins to help over time. Constant vigilance is needed in this faster-faster world.
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I love the colors on this, so explosively fully of life and hope. I am enjoying this theme of the turtles. In fact, focusing intensely on one animal has also had the effect of increasing my awareness of other animals and my relationship to them, along with helping me to see their shapes and images in my imagination. Today, as I was watching the sky it looked to me like a large great whale, swimming across, pushing the clouds away, making the way for tropical fish to rise up from the east in the form of a sunrise.
Keep doing the mandalas!
Teresa
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Another beautiful mandala, QM. The colors are wonderful.
Our turtles were beginning to stir a couple of weeks ago, sunning themselves on warm days. Then we got hit with this cold snap. I still see them out there, but they seem to have slowed and are spending more time in the mud and less on the shoreline of the pond. I’m more likely to see their little heads poking up through the water, watching as I go by, then out on land.
I hope winter releases us from its grip soon so the turtles can once again go back to sunning themselves, the trees can continue budding and leafing, and the flowers can blossom and grow.
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Teri, I agree. I have to keep reminding myself to slow down, too. I’m happier when I am moving slower, and still getting a lot done. It’s been helping me lately to compartmentalize my time and stick to it. Yesterday I posted this and cleaned the house. It was a good balance!
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Teresa, thank you. I’m with you. I like the idea of focusing on one animal at a time and really getting to know it. I used to be a fanatic about raptors — birds of prey like hawks, eagles, falcons, owls, vultures, kites, osprey. I traveled to Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania (made my family go with me on one visit home!), Hawk Ridge in Duluth, read tons of books on their migratory patterns, and watched for their feathers. I carry what I learned with me. It keeps me awake. And it changed me to learn about raptors as a whole. What amazing birds they are.
I’m having fun with the mandalas and the collaboration with Lotus keeps me wanting to take the time to create something new each week. Really enjoying it.
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Robin, thank you so much. It must be so refreshing to be that close to the turtles every day, to watch them wake up from this long hard Winter. Last week in particular, I noticed how much the sun is streaming in our picture window. The cats are sleeping there when I return home. And then I take a cat nap just to feel the warmth on my face.
I heard on the news that last year was the first year in a long while that we didn’t get any snow in March and people were out golfing. This year, the ground is still covered in snow and it’s almost April! Hasn’t gotten above the mid-30’s the last few days. Long Winter! It makes me wonder if the turtles notice that Winter’s been long this year. Or if they just go about their business like every other year.
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QM,
Another great mandala! Your drawings and paintings remind me so much of aboriginal art – is this your style of choice?
It’s great observing the interactions between you and Lotus. ‘Earthealer’ is a fitting response to Lotus’ brilliant ‘Hope Among The Rubble’ – what a great book it would make!
You know, I’ve never met Turtle before. Not symbolically or physically. I can’t even remember seeing her at the zoo – isn’t that sad. I do remember my husband’s granny having a tortoise shell cat called Kitty. She was the sweetest little cat I’ve ever known. It was granny who first told me that all tortoise shell cats are female and all ginger cats are male. And, of course, I remember the little melancholy ‘mock turtle’ in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He tells Alice that his teacher was an old Sea Turtle called Tortoise. When Alice asks why he was called Tortoise if he was a turtle he replies, “We call him Tortoise because he taught us!” I love Lewis Caroll 🙂
Thank you for introducing her 🙂
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Here is a strange one…
BBC afternoon news just announced that low levels of radioactive iodine believed to be from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have been detected in Glasgow, Scotland (that’s near where I live). Thankfully, the reading is very low, but it makes you wonder what will happen if the Fukushima plant deteriorates further. Apparently, Iceland has also recorded the same readings.
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QM and all,
I just signed out of hotmail which takes me straight to MSN uk – their main news picture – a two headed tortoise, just born, from Slovakia. They named them, Magda (the left head) and Lenka… it made me smile 🙂
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That’s so wild, annie. Reminds me of the two-headed calf that’s on display in the small cowboy museum that also honors my grandfather. 🙂
(Of course, the irony of the two-headed tortoise is also that the conversation was about radiation and the earth’s deterioration, which could have accounted for this birth deformity.)
I’ve been wanting to chime in, QM, and say how much I love your earthealer mandala. The colors and texture are wonderful.
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Roma,
Yikes! I never thought of that; was too busy thinking how cute it was… there are some atoms I certainly don’t want to dance with! God only knows how the people of Japan must feel when we Scots are getting jittery over the teeniest rise.
What really made me smile was that I’d written to QM a few weeks ago about conjoined twins Faith and Hope Williams – with regard to the little bears, Hope and Faith. When I saw the little tortoise, I had a very strong ‘feeling’ that there really was ‘Hope Among the Rubble’ – we just needed to have ‘Faith’.
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Annie, thank you. I’ve been closely watching and listening to the deterioration process of the nuclear plant in Japan. It’s scary to think that they are finding radiation in your water in Scotland. I cringe when I hear the talking heads tell us all that we shouldn’t worry, that something like this would never happen in the U.S., that everything is safe. Though it’s important not to get too far ahead of ourselves, it takes a lot of guts for people to get in front of the world and tell them not to worry. Will keep following the progress as days go on.
There is a collective sadness in the world this Spring. Everything seems to be exploding on so many levels. I have to try to keep focused on the positive and whatever I can do at the Spiritual level. BTW, when I do these mandalas, I don’t have any particular style of art in mind. It’s just what comes out when I sit down to draw and paint them. A grounded connection to the Earth that permeates all cultures.
I heard something striking on a noon hour NPR yesterday. I can’t remember if it was a talk by David Brooks from his book The Social Animal. Or from Science Friday. Maybe Science Friday now that I think about it. What the person said was that he doesn’t think very many people even look up at the Moon during their day to day activities, or during the week. I can’t imagine not looking up at the Moon. We are all moving so fast these days. Slowing down takes great effort.
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Roma, thank you. I’m enjoying the mandalas. Good to get back to them. It’s a good observation about the two-headed tortoise, too. The very thing that makes it unique may be from radiation or some kind of abnormality in the environment. They have found abnormal looking frogs in Minnesota the last few years and are trying to keep a close watch on them.
Annie, I wanted to mention one other thing. I grew up part of my life only a few miles from Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. I lived in Montana when the Three Mile Island incident happened, but my family was still in Pennsylvania. It was before the days of cell phones and I couldn’t get through to my family. It was so strange. Most of my siblings still lived at home and I think they evacuated until they got it under control. Very scary. I can’t imagine combining that with an earthquake and a tsunami. Just so hard to imagine what the people there are going through.
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QM,
I know what you mean. The world appears to have gone a bit haywire at the minute. Sometimes I think it’s just my age and my attention is focussed on stuff I might otherwise overlook. However, the spring has finally arrived here and I’ll be back at work soon, helping my husband with the landscaping – if that doesn’t ground me, nothing will! I’ll still be looking at the moon though 🙂
I remember the Three Mile Island incident. It must have been totally awful for you and your family. I’ve heard them comparing it to the Fukushima incident, some days saying it’s worse, other days saying that it’s not so bad. You just have to trust that they know what they’re doing. I think that’s the worst horror of it all, you can’t see, hear, smell or touch it. In the 1980’s, many parts of the UK received a huge fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. I remember it being a particularly wet season and my two eldest were out all week splashing in the puddles – we hadn’t yet been told of the fallout. I knew it was serious when SEPA (environment agency) turned up to take samples of the soil (we had a nursery at that time). Luckily, the soil was fine, but I made my husband drive 18 miles to the doctor’s surgery and demanded that he check over my babies for radiation! The poor man must have thought I was nuts! It was only last july, after 24 years, that Scotland’s sheep farmers were told that the land was finally free of the radioactive material. I think that’s why we’re getting a bit jittery over here, knowing that it’s back in the air.
Having said all that, my eldest daughter, Isla, who’s a road engineer, showed me a picture of a road that was destroyed in the Japanese earthquake. She then showed me a picture of the same road taken 6 days later – rebuilt and perfectly constructed. She told me it would have taken 6 months for Scottish engineers to do the same (and we have excellent engineers!). She went on to say that if there was one country in the world you could trust to cope with such a major catastrophe, it would have to be Japan. I’m taking her word for it.
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Oh, QM, I forgot to say…
The traces are not in our water, they’re in the air, and it’s only the tiniest amount. I’m confident that they will have it under control soon.
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annie, your perspective is very hopeful. Cool about the road building in 6 days in Japan. Amazing that it took 24 years for the sheep farmers land to be declared safe again after Chernobyl. I am watching the evening news and they are talking about dumping radioactive seawater into the ocean from the plant in Japan. It’s supposedly not harmful and will break up in a few months. I try to keep a hopeful attitude, too. What else can we do?
To my family’s credit, during the 3 Mile Island incident, they stayed positive and didn’t seem to be as fearful of what was happening as I was for them all that distance away in Montana. They were big proponents of nuclear power back then, and I suppose still are. I have not talked to them about it for some time. Would be interesting to find out how they are feeling about it these days.
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QM,
I saw this and thought you’d like it. Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured how to post links or pictures, but I saw him on MSN UK and he’s the cutest wee beastie I ever did see…
“A tortoise the size of a grape is enjoying life in the slow lane after becoming the newest, and smallest, addition to a zoo.
Tiny Tim, an Egyptian tortoise, tipped the scales at just 6g when he hatched a month ago.
He is just 5cm long, but is expected to grow to 500g over the next 10 years.
The hatchling is part of a small litter of tortoises which were saved from the illegal pet trade after being seized by HM Customs and Excise last year.
Tiny Tim and his five pocket-sized siblings have found a home at Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, where they can be seen taking slow jaunts around their specially designed miniature home.
Zoo keeper Trevor Moxey, who looks after them at the zoo’s Discovery Centre, said: “Tim is one of our smallest, new additions this spring at Whipsnade. We’re very glad to offer him a safe home and he can stay here for the foreseeable future.
“He is part of an important breeding programme.”
The tortoise breeding programme is part of a Europe-wide initiative to help increase the numbers of the critically endangered Egyptian tortoises.”
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annie, wow, that’s one tiny turtle. I had never heard of the Egyptian tortoise. Will have to look it up. Thanks for thinking of me. How was your workshop? I hope it went well!
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I had a great time, QM. Very relaxing. I’m going into to town later to buy paints and brushes – I’m so loving this journey!
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Ah, art supplies! There is nothing better than a journey to the art supply store. Unless it’s a journey to the local record store which is where I was yesterday for Record Store Day. Bought a bunch of albums for $12. I could not be happier! Happy painting, annie!
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It’s the 3rd birthday of Nature Abounds. I met James Wert at the LilyPad Picnic last summer. Hope to see him again this July. Today they have Big Max on Facebook to celebrate their birthday. He’s an Eastern Box Turtle.
You can follow them on Facebook here:
Nature Abounds on Facebook (LINK)
Founded in 2008, Nature Abounds is a 501c3 non-profit organization that brings people together for a healthy planet, educating and empowering citizens to sustain their community through environmental stewardship.
Or visit their website: Nature Abounds (LINK)
There are a couple of cool Earth Day pages that kids can download and color (LINK). Happy Birthday, Nature Abounds. Help keep the turtles alive!
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Two more links for Nature Abounds. A page for their new mascot – Max the Eastern Box turtle:
Nature Abounds Marks 3rd Anniversary, Announces New Mascot (LINK)
Max on Nature Abounds website – Maximillian Terrepene (LINK)
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