Sometimes you’ve just gotta

go to your Happy Place.

Pink and Green
Ode to a Tree
Sally Swain art

Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
Get out of the house, your worrybrain, your care duties and connect with nature.

Once there, you don’t know what you might do.

Turns out, Late Middle-Aged to Early-Old Crazy Art Lady lurks in a small soft corner of your soul. Out she comes! No shame, that one. No self-consciousness. She will direct you.

So you

gather leaves, sticks and bark.

Today – pink things. Pink and green, a longtime favourite colour combination, is on the menu. Anything pink; anything in the vicinity of where you are, which is near a big beautiful tree you never before noticed.

This scrapey, rough-barked tree lives close to the ones that normally seize your attention –

the showy bearded figs, parading along an avenue.

Pink and Green
Ode to a Tree
Sally Swain art

You break your natural object-only rule and place a fabulously gaudy pink plastic toy at the centre of the mandala. Luckily, there’s very little plastic rubbish strewn today. You will cycle what you find into the art or bin it.

Pink and Green
Ode to a Tree
Sally Swain art

You don’t break your other rule, though.

Nothing picked or plucked from its living plant-ness. Only what you find on the ground. Today that includes lots of camellias. Pink, of course.

Pink and Green
Ode to a Tree
Sally Swain art

You are utterly absorbed.

You remember your self-care homework (homeplay) from one of your wondrous art therapy support groups, which is to take a selfie lying on the grass.

This is the kind of homework you could get used to.

Pink and Green
Ode to a Tree
with Purple Hair Selfie

You forge a new relationship

with the previously overlooked tree.

It will never be the same again, simply standing and minding its own quiet business. You will love it forever. Or at least you will notice it forever.

Pink and Green
Ode to a Tree
Sally Swain art

Is that a way forward

with saving our planet, perhaps?,

you modestly yet grandly ask.

Make an art relationship with a tree. Or a rock. Or natural site. Make an offering. Connect creatively with country. It lives in your embodied enheartened self thereafter. You are now in a love relationship. You want the best for it. You want to protect and nurture it.