MoM has acquired the Mother Tree for our permanent collection! Thanks to each of your who donated through our GoFundMe, our website, or by private contribution. Thanks too, artist Helen Hiebert, artist and creator for trusting us and for her additional support. Thanks to all of you we have succeeded in achieving this wonderful milestone.
Tag Archives: Polly Wood
MAMA Issue 50: Mothers and trees. Roots and families. Art and love.
Mother of the Forest is one of the tallest trees in Santa Cruz Park. A symbolic womb at her core forms an 8 x 13 foot room, or a hobbit hole, or a sacred space — depending on your perspective. Trees are a testimony to patience and resilience. They offer shelter, contribute to healthy ecosystems, and fight climate change. Redwoods protect and support each other as well as other sapling growth by creating family circles sprouted from the roots of a parent tree. These families may or may not be genetically related. These lessons in cooperation can be a metaphor for humanity in its current fragmented state.
Re-encouters ; How are we connected?
In this online exhibit with the museum, Polly articulates the significance of trees within her own vision of the sacred feminine.She writes: “Trees are symbolic, metaphoric providing relationship, meaning and inspiration. Cross-culturally, trees are associated with the feminine principle, as well as with knowledge, life, cycles, time, and the connecting matrix between earth, water and sky.”
She explains, the relationship between trees and the ways in which “trees are deeply embedded in human consciousness and, physiologically, embodied within the womb of pregnant mothers.”
Her descriptions of the manner in which the placenta is “the only organ a human grows when needed – in order to support, nourish and sustain a human life.” Images of the “umbilical cord representing the trunk, and the exposed blood vessels acting as branches,” are included in these early presentations.