I have studied in the spiritual tradition of the Q'ero people of the Peruvian Andes off and on since 2014 with teacher and healer, Lucinda Brogden. In this tradition, the Ñusta's are the most powerful forces in nature and are considered to be sacred feminine energies.

This painting emerged from a meditation offered as part of a class with Lucinda this past spring on the global Ñust'as of Water, Earth, Fire, and Wind, in which we were guided to connect with the nature beings of the water and earth of the place of our own birth.

I grew up near the Atlantic coast in Connecticut. Through this meditation, I met Mama Qocha, deity of the ocean, who in the painting rises from the water, her arms lifted, bending the currents with her hands as light breaks across the horizon behind her. Around her, whales appear as spirits — her guardians and sacred messengers, keepers of ancestral knowledge carried across generations and across the ocean's depths. Their forms circle her, luminous, woven into the water itself, as if she and they are made of the same substance.

I painted her from behind, facing the horizon rather than the viewer, because this is not a portrait of the divine feminine so much as an invitation into her perspective — to stand where she stands, arms raised toward the light, in relationship with the vast water that shaped my own beginning.