Owl Woman and Her Owl Angel

my owl angel

It was on Friday that I decided it was time to sew my owl angel onto my fabric painting.  But I had the idea that the owl should have a yellow aura.  So I mixed some yellow fabric paint and painted it on the old quilt backing.

But once it was done, it looked to me like just a blotch of yellow.  It didn’t have the feeling I wanted.

It had to dry anyway, so I just left it for the day.  I knew that this mistake (as often happens with mistakes) would take me to a place that I wasn’t thinking of going to.

In the past, I would have tried to fix it right away. I would have been anxious that I had ruined the whole piece and I would need to prove to myself that I could “fix’ it.

But I’ve come to trust my mistakes.

Although not enough to put it up on my blog on Friday.   I wasn’t ready for that.

I did talk to Emily about it in our Zoom studio chat on Monday.  She wasn’t as bothered by it as I was.  But when I explained the idea of an angel being kind and encouraging words, she suggested stitching words over the paint.

And as soon as she said it I knew it was the right thing to do.

I wasn’t sure of what the words would be until early on Tuesday morning.  I was still in bed, going in and out of sleep when I thought of the beginning of Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese. It begins…

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
     love what it loves.”

I wrote about how I realized I was creating my own version of an idea I read in Megan Watterson’s book Mary Magdalene Revealed in my blog post, Owl Woman and Eye of The Heart.

I chose the words from Mary Oliver’s poem  because Watterson wrote  that the most important message to take from Mary Magdalene’s gospel  is that “we are inherently good.

I think Owl Woman is complete.  But I’m going to sleep on it and look at her again in the morning to be sure.

 

8 thoughts on “Owl Woman and Her Owl Angel

  1. Maria, two things come to mind. And they are about poetry. I am not familiar with Mary Oliver ‘s poetry, but I wrote a poem about Mother Mary in ’82 and also one on Philip Framed The Mystery about that time and the last line of that was ‘who first told us we were no good?’ Your quote which I must further study of Oliver’s and led to the eruption of memory for me was the line, you do not have to be good. But we were sold a bill of goods that told us we were not good. My quest has always been ‘why did we believe that?’ Lucky thing I was born doing research? Thank you Maria . . .

    1. I’m going to look for the poems in your books Veronica. Thanks for mentioning them. I think you’ll like Mary Olivers work very much. Why do we believe that is the perfect question for so much of life.

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