What Are You

Lisa Rawlinson

What Are You?

What Are You? 2017 | watercolor and gouache on paper | 41" x 29.5"

May 29, 2017

It seems like an honest enough question, especially when you've just been mistaken for a very large flower.

I was making my semi-regular pilgrimage to the Big Bend area of Texas, just me and my new 4WD Jeep that unlocked a vast amount of unexplored territory. I was in a remote area of a remote park and had made a short hike out to a spot overlooking a canyon, complete with a little desert oasis and waterfall seeping out of the cliff walls. Perfect temps. Blue skies. Puffy clouds. A gorgeous view in all directions. The whole nine yards. And not a soul around, save me.

I found a rocky out-cropping sprinkled with fragments of milky quartz—close to the edge, but not too close—and had pulled out my sketchpad. In front of me was a deep gorge, its craggy edges delineated by harsh midday shadows. On the other side a lone mesa jutted up from the otherwise stark expanse. Pencil in hand, I was absorbed in its details, listening to the trickle of the waterfall amplified by the canyon walls when I felt the tickle of my hair against my check and a loud buzz as something made a very close fly-by to my head. I looked up, startled, and about five feet before me a hummingbird hovered, watching me. Its wings were a blur but I could make out individual feathers on its breast and neck, iridescent and vibrantly hued. It continued to hover, long enough that I considered reaching for my camera and then thought better of it, instead just falling into the black depths of its eye. I realized I was wearing a bright red shirt and had probably seemed like a refreshing hummingbird oasis from a distance. It stayed there, raising slightly, then lowering, a little to the left, all with indiscernible wings that made it seem as though it were just magically floating in midair and wondering, "What are you?"

It was an honest enough question, but layered with meaning.

At a surface level, there was simply the fact that I wasn't a flower, clearly. So what was I? But the timing of the question opened up other neural pathways. A mere few weeks after the election of Donald Trump ripped open the Pandora's Box where so many -isms had been tucked away, festering, so much about so many had been revealed in such a short amount of time. Relationships, some deep, deeply altered. The timing of the question came when we were making choices that defined who and what we are. The question was a probe into character and our free will, not only about how our behavior in challenging times defines us, but how we live our lives day in and day out. Are you the kind of person who remains silent when witness to the uglier sides of humanity? Are you the kind of person who sets out alone into the desert with a not-quite-yet-healed broken ankle? What are you?

Deeper still, it was a question of our essence, the fundamental nature of our being. There was not a soul around, save two, the hummingbird and me. Such different creatures but both aware and locked inside our own individual conscious experience of the exchange, separate but connected. At a fundamental level that hummingbird and I were made of the same stuff, a dance of particles that pop in and out of existence in nebulous areas defined by probability and a constant exchange of energy. There is uncertainty in the question is this regard. We don't currently have an answer to what exactly is going on in our reality at the level of those dancing particles, nor do we have an answer as to the mechanism that makes my consciousness or the consciousness of a hummingbird possible. At that level, the question "What are you?" may strike fear and unease into some. But don't mistake what I felt that day as an Existential crisis. It was quite the opposite. It was a shared curiosity. And it was a momentary connection between two like but unlike living things that despite a keen awareness of all the atrocities that living things are capable of, triggered only one feeling: love. Joyful, light, floating, dancing, blue skies, puffy clouds, love.

. . .