Mary Baures

Losing and finding what matters is a life-long process. After spending most of my life as a psychologist, I took up wildlife photography. In the jungles of Africa, Brazil and Borneo, my relationships with animals changed me in profound ways.

Being in third world countries, gave me a perspective on the values in America. We are turning life into objects. As we sandbag stuff to shore up a sense of self, we destroy delicate ecologies. We gut what is irreplaceable for profit and consume 61% more resources than nature can regenerate.

My first job out of undergraduate school was as a writer in an advertising agency where I brainwashed consumers to buy stuff they didn’t need. At the time, I believed it was good for the economy but now I see how our system demands increasing extraction from dying resources.

As a trauma psychologist, I was drawn to the plight of baby elephants who watched their families massacred for ivory trinkets. I adopted one through an orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. Through updates about my adopted daughter, I was drawn into adopting more orphans and saving elephants from extinction.

To turn my campfire into the light of the sky, I wrote Love Heals Baby Elephants – Rebirthing Ivory Orphans about the elephant babies I adopted. Losing their mothers had left them without milk, safety, and a sense of belonging. They had an innocence not yet of this world. Some almost drowned in the pool of their suffering but kicked against the bottom of despair and found the will to live. The other orphans sensed their struggle and caressed them with trunks with heart-shaped lips.

Love pulled them into the world where cries of their dying families were replaced by playful voices calling their name. They came back from devastation with a song in their step, a trumpet in their wiggly trunk, and the resilience to help others.

In Undaunted Spirits- Portraits of Recovery from Trauma I showed how truth and beauty can be salvaged from suffering. I interviewed Elie Wiesel, concentration camp survivor who became a novelist and Noble Peace Prize winner, Max Cleland, a Vietnam Veteran and triple amputee who went on become a US Senator, Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People, after losing his young son to a genetic disease. Strengths they developed to overcome darkness brought light. New priorities emerged, and, with them, the turning of their very existence. Many of these Undaunted Spirits used creativity to give the dead a voice and to teach their terrors to sing.

I use painting to create a world of magical transformations where vivid and connecting things emerge from dark backgrounds.

The forces that comfort are animals guides and winged spirits. Bulls and lions are tenderly entwinded with people lending them strength while angels play banjos and dogs guard the moonlit landscape from rooftops.

Before I became a psychologist, I was a writer and earned an masters in creative writing at Boston University where I studied with poet Anne Sexton. This was in 1973 when Sexton was careening toward suicide. An account of this training is in Creativity and Madness, Vol 2. It is also on my web page www.marybaures.com.