Art As Life Organ

In 2018, I dreamt that the floor of my childhood home was trembling.

I was sitting on the living room floor beneath my grandmother’s embroidery when a stampede of buffalo came charging toward me. There was nowhere to run. I knew instinctively that to stand would be to disappear, so I stayed seated, breathing, still.

As they reached me, the herd began to part. One by one, their bodies curved around mine, powerful and precise. Not a single one touched me, though I could feel their breath and hear the weight of their hooves like drums against the land. They ran beside me, around me, through me.

I understood then that they were not there to harm me, but to initiate me.

A great white buffalo stepped forward and, in the unmistakable voice of my maternal grandmother Slava, spoke a single word: Dreams.

The next morning, I enrolled in a dream school in Berkeley and booked a flight back to Bosnia. I wanted to reconnect with my mother and linger in the places where my grandmothers once sang, swam, and sewed before my studies began.

A week after returning from Europe, I traveled to California for the first time to begin my dream training. I knew the buffalo dream was an initiation. Into what, I didn’t yet know.

What followed came from that dream:

• Uterus surgery

• Let go of my home and studio, releasing nearly all my belongings except my journals and artworks

• Began formal dream studies

• Signed the biggest client of my career

• Shared a bond with a child not my own

• Began and ended a relationship

• COVID

• Lived alone in Wildcat Canyons for eight months during lockdown

• Moved to Mexico for a year

• Became pregnant in Oaxaca

• Drove from Oaxaca to Joshua Tree at seven months pregnant

• Moved to the Mojave Desert

• Became a mother in the desert

• Let go of Merakilabbe, the artist name I had grown into and out of

• Over thirty road trips across Mexico, California, and Oregon

• Lived in three countries

• Returned to Canada

• Weaned my son at three and a half

• Got married

• Ended a marriage

• Entered single motherhood

• My son began kindergarten

• Entered a new medium and body of work through watercolor

• For the first time in thirty years, my childhood memories began to return

I crossed borders while the world was closing. I walked through fire without being told it was ceremony.

Giving birth in the desert is not gentle medicine. I understand now that my spirit agreed to something long before my body understood it. A compressed timeline. Seven years carrying the density of twenty.

I see now that I wasn’t meant to stay rooted in one soil during that time. My medicine required movement. Borders, deserts, jungles, thermal lands, highways, forests, beaches, temporary homes. What needed loosening could not be loosened in stillness. The road shook the identities that were too tight, too inherited, too small.

Movement once meant safety. I grew up in war. Running from one village to the next to escape death taught my body how to survive. Walking became instinct. Over time, I learned the difference between walking away and walking toward.

I became a mother so that I would finally stay.

The desert birth was a womb initiation, not only childbirth. It stripped away illusion and left only what was essential. I met myself without adornment, without witnesses, without rescue.

And this December felt like long exhale after immense depth. A white stag began arriving in my dreams again and again over the past weeks, like a full circle. It showed me how creation carried me through it all. How something kept the channel open.

I know now that my art is a life organ. It breathes when I breathe. It circulates what would otherwise remain stagnant in my body. It keeps me in relationship with the world. It allowed me to change mediums when my body needed a new language after so many thresholds crossed. It helped me stay porous without breaking. It helped me mother myself while mothering my child. It helped me remember who I am when names, roles, relationships, and homes kept shifting.

And I want to say this to you who have walked alongside me:

While we moved through our own personal changes, we also lived through immense collective grief. We witnessed genocides. We watched fascism rise again. And continue to do so.

If we’re still creating, still choosing tenderness, still placing our bare feet on the earth, it’s because of nature and our more-than-human kin. Because we return to what’s alive beyond us. Because the wild reminds us how to stay human.

It’s this relationship that made my initiations possible as acts of staying. Staying in the body. Staying in care. Staying sober through it all. Staying in devotion to creation, even as the world fractures.

I wish you a 2026 shaped by earth and care, by attention to what is living around you and within you. A year guided by reciprocity, by creation, by liberation rooted in love. One that remembers the body’s need for ground. One where protecting the earth and protecting one another are understood as the same work, and where making, in whatever form it takes, keeps you in honest contact with the world.

Our art exists because the earth does.

Love,

Vanja