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We are Stardust

My painting, "We are Stardust" is based on a line from Joni Mitchell’s beautiful song, “Woodstock”, in which she sings, “We are stardust, we are golden and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

Her song speaks of a search to heal our souls by finding our collective and shared humanity. We all have this elevated cosmic origin as stardust and if we could only find our way back to our essential selves, this golden dust of stars, to the Garden of Eden before the fall, back to the land, back to our better angels, perhaps we could be “a cog in something good”, and dreams of “bombers turning into butterflies” could come true.

This is the tune that I hummed to myself as I sought to imagine how civility could be portrayed visually. For me, this vision of a paradise is a necessarily inclusive one, where people of all ages, genders, races, and creeds come together with empathy and care and love and labour to participate in a sustainable, healthy, diverse and beautiful world. This inclusivity extends to more that just the human carbon life based forms though, as we are no more important a cog in our biosphere than every plant and animal with which we share this world. We are all dependent on one another and are stronger in our diversity and ability to respectfully co-exist, seeking a balance in the interconnected nature of all things.  A garden seems like a perfect metaphor for such a place where we live in harmony with nature, sharing knowledge, and labor, reaping what we sow and sharing the rewards, the rewards of a better life, a better world, built from being our better selves.