I completed the painting the night before Helene arrived in Southern Appalachia, flooding our valley floors.  I'd been studying flood responses in New Orleans for two years prior, trying to learn from the denizens of the delta about how to become resilient in the face of changing planetary norms.  Here's what I learned:
 
Rivers move.  Not only from their origin to their destination (the ocean.)  The COURSE of a river moves.  When left to its own natural process.  A river, unimpeded by levees, dams, and other human-built containers, over time, writhes across a delta or floodplain like a snake across flat ground.  It floods with tidal surges and springtime snow melt and heavy rains, overtops its banks, cuts new paths through its banks, and chooses a new course to the sea.  When it is in a well-traveled course and not in flood, it moves quickly, hanging on to its silts until it reaches the sea and drops them on or off the continental shelf.  When its in flood, or charting new territory, it spreads out, slows, and drops its sediment load on land, in floodplain, where animals walk and plants grow.  This is how new land is made in a delta.  Locking water into place locks ecology into place and begins a cycle of land impoverishment.
 
Flood tolerance is what creates resilience and diversity in riparian forests.  They bring fertility to the land, build landmass, and because composting leaves carry important minerals down fresh waterways into the gulf, they also bring fish. 
 
We cannot be resilient without exposure to change or adversity.
 
Giclée reproduction of original painting made in grief and joy and prayer for the aliveness of earth.  Reproduction is backed with repurposed cardboard; SHIPS FLAT in either plastic or GMO corn-based non-plastic sleeve. [Please send me a message with your order if you would like the option of buying a print shipped without a protective sleeve.] Printed on recycled paper, which was made by a multi-generation family company, with energy from one of the 190 dams on the St. Joseph River on unceded Miami land, present-day Michigan. The dam that powered the machines that made this paper currently has a fish ladder, which allows some, but certainly not all, native (including threatened and endangered) fish species to pass a little closer to their ancestral spawning grounds. Ships via USPS ground service, using fossil fuels made from the astoundingly giant plants of the Carboniferous period. 
 
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