From my breasts I am fierce. I am wild.
I walk the mountain trail topless–just like the men sun tanning their bare chests–my bare feet step solid, pads on my paws built by clay earth bake into my soles.
I am tender and private. Solitary in the landscape of my mind. Travelers pass on the trail. “Right on” the woman says as the man averts his eyes. I go home, nurse my child, and paint a woman whose breasts cry a milky river.
It was a commissioned piece, for a book the client has only envisoned.
My breasts cried those milky tears. They cried a sour flood all over the bed sheets in pools that stained dozens of new futon mattresses.
I cried the war of man vs. nature. I cried the earth adjusting to the comfort under the human.
I held it crying uphill tears. I breathed it down to a calm so my baby wouldn’t drink it. My body and breath soft as the breast of earth while my mind battled in adjustment to my mans world.
Heuristic biases. The words stick out of something I read yesterday about design influences on culture running alongside our human inability to shift out of our comfort to see solutions from a different new old or timeless perspective.
My body, lying uncomfortably still, controlling my calm for one hour, two hours, so my baby would rest, wouldn’t stir, wouldn’t cry at my leaving her alone. I breathed and quieted and listened to the ancestors who saw more, sending wisdom.
From my breasts I am fierce, I am wild. I walk the landscape of my motherhood. I walk the ridge after dinner where the sun sets across the valley–where giant oil machines crane their steel necks, pecking at the land like stinging mechanical mosquitoes.
I cry a river of milk. It becomes a stream where the white wolves drink. It flows like a waterfall over the ridge cliff.
I was commissioned to paint her. In a red sari dress with her breasts spurting milk like wild faucets. Soaking the silk fabric like broken fire hydrants soak the street. Spouting more ferociously than any waterfall. Like geysers I cried for the war of man vs. Earth.
