Love to You & The Earth As One

“After all these eons together,I am only in more awe of you, Mother Earth. More wonder. More curiosity. More quiet… With less of a need to do and more of a want to listen. To remain calm. To believe in teaching and learning through moments of peace and togetherness.”

— Kali Quinn, Earth Day 2020

Love to You & The Earth as One

The Contagious Compassionate Creativity Included in This Film

These Images Led the Way for a Listening Trip Around the US.

I brought these two images I made long ago with me as I left Rhode Island in March 2020 - setting out for 3+ months to leader along and visit people in rural areas who were feeling isolated and/or were grieving...

A map of the US collaged into an anatomical heart - that I made at a community art gathering in Western Massachusetts.

The image of woman pregnant with new world has been with me since my early twenties. I've drawn it a million times.

And then the world shut down.

So we headed west to hunker down on my cousin’s land off-the-grid in Southeastern Arizona for a few days. A few days turned into a month.
We slowed down. Woke up and cooked to the sun.
What was happening in the world?
Would we be okay?

One day, I woke up with these words:

“We are pregnant with a new earth. All of us…”

This developed into a love letter/poem to the earth:

I have always loved you.

In the same way I was

Connected to my grandmother

Soul to soul since the day I was born…

I saw how sometimes we surround ourselves with walls

While other times we open gates to forgiveness,

Build ramps to compassion,

And somehow even crack a window for our worst enemies…

It is impossible to make sense of your beauty

To understand how I came to be one of your brief inhabitants.

And if, now, we are, perhaps, ready to let one another go?

The Poem Turned into a Musical Collaboration

“Are you wearing dark glasses? Will you labour in the street? Will you raise your child yourself? Will anyone be free?

Wild raging with the sea, the tides they pull the moon and me… Earthquakes, fire and tsunami but still, my baby is born free.

What will we take with us? What will we leave behind? Will we sow the seeds of peace in time?

The earth stands at her grave and weeps I was not there, I do not sleep. The dream will fade, our bodies release…

Open the border of your heart…”

I sent my poem to Erika Kulnys in Nova Scotia. She called me that day and we wrote this song together that she sings on the film. Later Sage Snider added the violin line from Nashville, Tennesee.

For the final footage, my partner and I built a 20-foot pregnant Mother Earth puppet out of found nature & objects.

Century plants bloom once at the end of their life.
Attaching the stalk to an old hiking pack..
We found rotting tent polls in the desert to form the body.
We added arms and a metal circle head that we also found laying in the desert.
My partner walked the Mother Earth puppet through the desert as I films from afar.

And Women Joined in by Singing From Together from Afar.

I sent out to request to “sing the same note”:

I am humbly inviting you to connect with yourself and one another to birth this project with me by sending in a 20 second video out your window or entrance as you improvise some sound behind the camera.
Gaia: The vibration/pitch that I start and end with is connected to the vibration of “the life cycle” and “earth as a whole.” I think of this tone of G as the ground/earth/known/familiar and then the other notes I go to as the unknown/travel/birth/discomfort/play and then a return to re-ground.
Would you like to call our in your own way from your space? You don’t need to be musical... whatever sounds come out will be perfect!

“After all these eons together,I am only in more awe of you, Mother Earth. More wonder. More curiosity. More quiet… With less of a need to do and more of a want to listen. To remain calm. To believe in teaching and learning through moments of peace and togetherness.”