26 Helios and Vesta

The yellows in this painting are bright like the sun , though the rain drop shapes are green and blue, water colors.

It’s mid November, yet this painting feels energetically it’s all about birth and newness new possibilities:ascension and rebirth.

Inside one drop of water are worlds we cannot see, whole universes teeming with life.

Some of the raindrops/tears have faces bottled up, like bottled up emotions.

Perhaps a tear is a collection of many emotions that the body has been saving up and storing waiting for a chance to be released.

It’s strange because because I’m the happiest that I’ve been in a long time. I wake up with this sense of celebration, and excitement to see what my life will bring.

Any day I get to paint is a day to celebrate.

Could happiness also be bottled up, like sorrow?

The name of the painting, Helios and Vesta, comes to me.

Helios is a Greek Sun God:

“Helios, (Greek: “Sun”) in Greek religion, the sun god, sometimes called a Titan. He drove a chariot daily from east to west across the sky and sailed around the northerly stream of Ocean each night in a huge cup. … His worship spread as he became increasingly identified with other deities, often under Eastern influence.”

Vesta, is a Greek goddess of the hearth:

 “…identified with the Greek Hestia. The lack of an easy source of fire in the early Roman community placed a special premium on the ever-burning hearth fire, both publicly and privately maintained; thus, from the earliest times Vesta was assured of a prominent place in both family and state worship.” (www.britannica.com)

In Helios and Vesta are two versions of the fire element: the Sun in the cosmos, and fire inside the hearth in the center of the home. Another version of within and without.

Yet the drops in the painting suggest element of water and the hidden worlds within water, that are also within us, for we are made up of water and a microbiome supposedly as large as any cosmos outside of us.

I don’t know what to call this perspective. The perspective of the Multiverse?

“…all cosmologists accept that there are some regions of the universe that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes, but somewhere on the slippery slope between that and the idea that there is an infinite number of universes, credibility reaches a limit. As one slips down that slope, more and more must be accepted on faith, and less and less is open to scientific verification. Extreme multiverse explanations are therefore reminiscent of theological discussions. Indeed, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain the unusual features of the one we do see is just as ad hoc as invoking an unseen Creator. The multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific language, but in essence, it requires the same leap of faith.— Paul Davies, The New York Times, “A Brief History of the Multiverse”

This is one of the many things  I find so fascinating about Hilma’s work: She paints between the seen and unseen worlds, revealing what science tells us is true, and also what cosmologists and spiritual teachers tell us also exists which we do not have the words or the concepts to yet imagine.