NATURE WHISPERS
- Meiun Caroline MABY
- May 20
- 6 min read
Updated: May 21
« We need the tonic of wildness.
At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
We can never have enough of nature. »
[ ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden ]
This article emerges from my relationship with Nature and Animals. I hope it will convey how crucial this connection is to my studio work and my approach to the creative process.
Are the children of the moon and the sun rocks, humans, animals, grasses, streams…? How can we recognize and include the cosmos as a parent?
I haven't read Darwin, I barely know the chronology of the creation of the world, Genesis. And I have no desire to support my cosmological vision with certainties, to draw my own relationship between the worlds of life in subsets and mind mappings because it seems to me that the elements of Nature and all sentient beings interact beyond species, kingdoms and orders.
Although I was offered the opportunity to confirm this potential very gradually, I was amazed by it from the very beginning of my journey.
When I was little, my father read me Ovid, Saint Exupéry, La Fontaine, and Kipling. He solemnly offered me " Jonathan Livingston the Seagull " as a manifesto at the door of adolescence. These authors certainly encouraged my fascination with the mystery of animal consciousness.
LISTEN TO NATURE
Despite a secular upbringing, I developed a deep admiration for Saint Francis of Assisi early on — in various ways: Giotto, his destitution, simplicity, and pure Joy, his compassion for the poorest, his poetry, and his sacred regard for Nature. However, it was his ability to commune with the animal world that was at the heart of my intimate connection. I realized a painting about him years ago.
Painted at the same time, Vis Vitalis bears witness to the life force that animates elements, plants and sentient beings.
VIS VITALIS | Original creation signed (on the back) on linen canvas, made using a mixed technique: acrylic, vinyl and pigments on canvas. Format 60 Landscape: 130 x 89 cm | © Maby
“CARO, SHE’S WEIRD, she does weird things.”
[ ~ my brother ]
Dedicating myself to silent listening and contemplation to hear the ineffable language of the heart, recognizing animal emotional and thought intelligence, observing a spiritual or at least instinctive interconnection beyond species… this is where I was in my understanding of animal communication until a veil was lifted more radically, in 2023.
I have always been affected by information received spontaneously, without requesting it. So I tried to orient this "radio channel" that I don't know how to name (hypersensitivity, empathy, mediumship?) on the "creative flow" station and became an artist. Having always had a field of attention turned to the other side of the visible and the audible, the study of the plays of the mind thanks to the practice of meditation, discipline and the reading of Buddhist texts allowed me to anchor myself on this side of reality.
Take a step with me here: let's assume that telepathy is an accessible mode of communication. Let's then imagine that every animal is endowed with an individual and sensitive consciousness. Based on this postulate, how can we definitively reject the possibility of being able to communicate with them?
Despite my ultra-sensitivity with synesthetic accents, this extraordinary understanding was only a hypothesis until Smoky, a little wonder of feline delicacy, initiated me, like a guide.
For eleven years, Smoky took over the studio every day, like her wonderful little Deva. She guided my gaze toward lights I had missed, and reawakened my attention to the quality of my presence in my body, in the canvas, in space, in the urgency of the gesture as well as that of being, being in the World, being still. She invited me to slow down to look and hear the order of shapes and colors to be manifested, while she protected the studio with her silver aura. And then...
INITIATION
In January 2023, Smoky was diagnosed with fatal lung cancer. The days leading up to her passing, as difficult as they were, literally changed my life by upsetting my relationship with Nature and the Living. In the passing of time that separated us from her announced departure, our already fusional relationship was enriched by immediate and simple communication.
While my time, my attention, my prayers were dedicated to her day and night, she spoke to me, litteraly. She taught me about death, animal consciousness, non-duality, interdependence… She also explicitly showed me a field of exploration to include in my work as a painter such as the use of floral essences and a spiritual path of co-creation with Nature which I now use on a daily basis.
Mystical delirium under the influence of a hard drug: despair ? I don't think so. Like some solitary journeys and meditation retreats, this transmission at the threshold of her transition was a decisive initiatory experience.
Since then, I have been deepening my exploration of these little-known fields of consciousness. I have just returned from Paris where I completed a new level of training with Caroline Leroux, a pioneering Quebec teacher in Animal Communication. Caroline has been training me since Smoky's departure. I have also completed cycles on flower essences (Bach ®, Perelandra ®).
The power of flowers and animal spirits are now as necessary resources in the studio as my paint tubes and linen canvas. What now shows up in every piece I manifest is the result of conscious co-creative work with Nature. I mean... beyond intuition or inspiration, I summon its creative forces with the same contemplation that I prepare my pastes with pigments — and the ways to do this are numerous.
WORKSHOPS
John Cage, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keefe, Gustav Klimt, Frank Stella and their cat.
I'm not a pioneer. Many animals have accompanied artists in their creative process, like Hermann Hesse's cat Löwe, Frank Stella's cat Marisol, Vaska and Kandinsky... to the point of inspiring their works: Dürer, Franz Marc, the cats and dogs of the Bonnard house or the haunting psychopomp horse, Colette's Mitsou...
Two little felines are taking over the home-studio today: Tsuki 月 and Zenji 禅師.
Tsuki is its self-appointed guardian. She enters before me at dawn and leaves well after dark. She demands access if I have to spend the day at the Elovution office: she has some stuff to do there.
Zenji, the little chartreux cat, has another life mission and sometimes joins her to play or meditate.
On studio days, it is not uncommon for Tsuki to insistently show me a medium I hadn't thought of while I'm going around in circles, for her to be "hellish" until I change the medium, for her to demand to clean the place (sage, mantras...) if too many visits have changed its energy... We can't resist her wild meows.
I lam amused to note, looking back on my work, that there are "periods per cat."
Like the direction of our own thoughts and intentions, the quality of our relationships, the film we saw yesterday... the unconscious interactions — and now conscious ones, in the case of animals — of the painter's psyche with those of all the beings around him influence his creative process.
