Nature’s Daughter

This young person is a member of the Surma tribes found in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley. Her people live a nomadic life, following the ebb and flow of natural elements—water, temperature, sunlight—as they care for livestock and fashion their lives. Their villages are impermanent; their housing is made from the materials at hand, such as sticks, mud, bark, grasses, and plant fronds.

Similarly, they use these materials to express artistry and identity. They pay homage to cultural traditions and ancient practices not in paintings displayed on the walls of museums but on their bodies. Like a moving canvas, this girl’s adornments declare her connection to the universe. The branches cascading from her head cause me to think of them as ethereal antennas. The delicate tendrils reach out into the universe, and I feel she is alive in this moment. There is no hint of ostentatiousness in her beauty.

From this marvelous vessel that is her body, her identity reaches out to us, expanding beyond you and me to perhaps connect with other energies; embraced in that web, transfixed by her porous relationship to the earth and her surroundings, I am drawn into her realm and float on the journey of life; hers, mine, ours.