The Digger: An Ephemera Story
Emotional Habitat: Desert landscape of cacti, a single tree, red rocks, eroded monument-like mountainous horizon, oncoming starry night
Spirit Creature: Ephemera/Earthly
Color Archetypes: Rainbow = All possible emotions; Purples = Despair/Anxiety; Orange/Red = Security; Yellow/Brown/Green = Life/Hope; Black+White = Good/Bad; Black/Blue = Peace/Comfort; Gray = Artificial/Fake
Background: I have spent most of my life looking outward for something: purpose, happiness, peace, anything that contrasts with the hardships and challenges I've endured for decades. As I've gotten older, I feel like I have become more efficient at finding things that bring me closer to those desires but the search never seems to end. I did this painting in December 2025 at a tumultuous period in my life when I was in conflict with feeling more at home in Arizona, in awe by the resilience of The People and the landscapes that have endured real hardship and struggles to survive, but also feeling like I was still looking for that inner purpose and peace.
Interpretation: This portrait depicts a badger-like creature with a steel glove carefully and strategically crafted for digging. Badgers are at home here in Arizona, super survivors of these desert landscapes, and very good diggers to find what they need. The gorgeous and spiritual landscape of Monument Valley is blanketed by a growing starry night which brings peace and relief from the scorching heat of the sun, when searching and survival are most difficult. The badger sits, secure and grounded, among the red rocks, a rainbow organ pipe cactus, a blooming barrel cactus, and an old living Juniper whose twisted bark has endured and adapted to a lifetime struggle to thrive and grow, just like my own aging process and lived experience.
The badger's mechanical glove symbolizes how adaptive I have become for digging and searching for purpose, but also, this mechanical apparatus suggests that this glove is more than I need, unnatural and fabricated. Perhaps my putting so much effort and concentration into enhancing my ability to dig and look for something more in life has become too much of an obsession, a distraction even, to simply accept that I may have already found what I am looking for. The badger's black and white coat serves as a metaphor for this conflict caused by my restricted binary thinking that my life needs to feel all good or all bad.
Yet, the vibrant rainbow colors of the Juniper and organ pipe cactus and the beautiful flowers of the blooming barrel cactus reveal that life is made of a diversity of experiences that give beauty to our existence. As “The Digger” sits and contemplates their present situation, there is a chance that the peace and relief they are seeking inherent to the coming night will draw this unnecessary search to an end. Then, maybe, the badger can take off their mechanical glove that is serving more as a self-created shackle than a beneficial tool to self discovery and inner peace.