Through my tears I heard a message. I was crying out for my mother in a way I hadn’t done since she passed into the next life nearly eight years ago. Maybe in a way I never had. Even after all this time, the pain of her loss was as fresh as it ever was. And I heard the words, “I’m still here”. As I wept, she answered. My longing was the returned message, as Rumi described in his poem, Love Dogs. In the poem’s next line, he writes, the grief you cry out from draws you toward union. The union I was drawn toward that day wasn’t only a reunion with my mother. It was the certainty of a connection between the living and the dead, between all things– human, animal, plant, water, earth. Connection to my mother is connection to the earth. How could it not be? She was my first home, my first experience of life on this earth, my first country, as poet Nayyirah Waheed writes. She is now literally a part of that earth. As she returned to dust, so will I someday return. In that way, we are always here, never gone. These emotionally expressive landscape paintings recall not a specific place on this earth, but moments, however brief, in which I felt myself at the center of a confluence of connectivity. In which I felt the energy of the world around me flowing through me, the world that included and will always include my mother. The landscape moving toward me yet floating away into infinity. Drips and runs are reminiscent of the tears that continue, always, just under the surface. But also a gift, a reminder. The connection, forever existing, unseen yet heard, felt.