pandacustard

[pandacustard]

I wanted to do a Colorado landscape in vivid, almost abstract colors. A few months (and a couple of hiatuses) later, here's the result.

[pandacustard]

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. Edgy, I know. This particular existential crisis hits me every 5 years or so, with the one in my mid-20s probably being the most nihilistic. This one is maybe... less so?

It hit me when my partner and I were binging Blue Eye Samurai the other say (great show, by the way). There's a lot of death in it. Lots of lives, though fictional, so easily snuffed out with the slash of steel. But then again, death is everywhere. Not just from TV shows and movies, not just from the heartwrenching coverage in Palestine or Ukraine or Sudan. Not just these huge, despair-inducing displays of doom all over every reach of media.

Right now, the sun is setting over the Front Range Rocky Mountains in Colorado where I currently live. The prairie grass below is dead for winter. The bones of a rabbit are scattered in the grassland near my backyard. A coyote yips somewhere over the foothills, searching for scarce winter food.

It is not permanent. The sun will rise again, the dead grass will make way for the spring growth, plenty of rabbits will be born and die and be born, and either the coyote or its prey will triumph.

Someday, I will also die. My partner will. My cat. My mom. My friends. My coworkers. Everyone. It's the great equalizer, the one inevitability. Are we really done then? Is it really the end, the blackness and cold of a winter night? Or will we, after stepping past the threshold, find the break of the sun or the stirring of the seedling that is us, our consciousness, our soul?

Death is all around us. But so is life. The cycle must move forward.

[pandacustard]

Feeling lonely because online communities aren't the solace they used to be. No where to share art or non-contentious thoughts anymore, it seems. So I'm going to try Tumblr and hope I'm not too old for it at 35. Here's a piece I finished yesterday that no one cared about, not even family. (I swear I'm not normally this gloomy... OK, maybe sometimes, but goddess, do I miss connecting with others over art or books or spirituality without capitalism). Painted in Procreate, generated the background with HotPot.