Honoring my creative lineage: Babushka Valia.

This month, I will write a series of vignettes honoring my creative lineage, which includes the people and forces that have shaped me, prayed for me and dreamed me into being, so that I may walk my own empowered path guided by them and the gifts they shared with me.

Babushka Valia

Before I speak about my lineage, I would like to acknowledge the creative and expressive nature of the Ukrainian land, the culture that was born from its soil and abundance, and to my ancestors, whose DNA and memory runs through me and guides me everyday.

I am born from people who have lived on the land for hundreds of years and also people who had settled in a safety of the Ukrainian Steppe, far from being persecuted for their Jewish identity.

All sang songs in celebration and in honor of the joys and hardships of life, played musical instruments, worked with their hands, made medicine with the plants that spoke to them and tried to live their lives in honorable ways.

Which brings me to Babushka Valia, my father’s mother’s sister and one of my closest elderly relations, now an Ancestor.

I remember paying her a visit on an autumn day in high school and seeing the entire floor of her living room covered with dry leaves. Except they weren’t just random leaves, they were separated by specific shade and color.

What will you be doing with these leaves, I asked her to which she replied that she would be painting with them.

I was confused. But how can you paint with leaves? She began to take her supplies out and showed me. She would use the colors of the leaves as if they were the pigment in paint and glue them delicately on the page. Months later, she showed me her latest work, titled “Autumn”. I was blown away.

She had paint and brushes and could’ve painted an autumn scenery but she chose to use leaves instead. The delicacy and patience of her work astounds me to this day. She breathed color, felt it in her body as if it was part of her.

I am grateful how she embodied the kind of possibility that comes from thinking outside the box. The way her eyes sparkled when she talked about trees and flowers and their seasonal, colorful expressions.

She had a kind of lightheartedness that only saints or children have, even to her last day. I am so honored to have had the time to learn from her and now be able to continue her work in my own unique way.

Her gifts are my inheritance.