Source of Life

Photography by Kathleen Sara Shattuck

"Everything comes from everything, and everything is made out of everything, and everything returns into everything."

~ Leonardo da Vinci ~

I first came to this realization when I learned what the word "ecosystem" meant...it was during a summer school Bible class where I was assigned to speak before our congregation on the meaning of this word and how it related to life as we know it, life given to us by God. How it was to be and remain in perfect balance with us.  

Years later I came upon an even further realization during the study of ceramics and glazes; our body, when broken down into particles, becomes all the elements we find in nature; natural or refined, we belong to the earth. But without a healthy balance of each mineral, vitamins from vegetation or genetic inheritance, we can develop into a disaster waiting to happen by not taking care of ourselves, and sometimes our health can become irreversible; just as the natural world around us becomes unhealthy when we start to change its balance through greed and ignorance, the two main pariahs in the world today. 

Changing the land, from the mountains to the seas - the land, a once healthy living entity, now being extracted of its life giving habitation within its soil, from the air, out of its forests, and from the oceans around the world. We take and take and take, but how much do we, or can we, replace? If we destroy the earth by upsetting this delicate ecosystem, we will destroy ourselves.