I was delighted to be asked this question at the exhibition in which this piece was a popular work. The woman continued:

"I mean, I’m a biologist. A chickadee is a chickadee. In what way is one cosmic?"

I don't remember how I answered exactly, but here is my rationale for the painting as it emerged. Like others in the series, it began as a collage for which one animal or another would emerge as the one to include, in this case the chickadee. This piece, Young Whale, Heron Music, and Through the Storm all began with watercolour paper soaked in beet juice. The resultant rich wine hues are most evident in this collage.

The co-emergent nature of phenomena is the theme of many of my works and this is no exception. Whatever exists, exists only in dependence on everything else. This is a view in Buddhist philosophy. It has also become apparent in science which has shown us incontrovertibly that while we live in the universe, the universe also lives in us. It is a cliché to say we are stardust, but we are. And this chickadee, like everything else, is cosmic. It began after all with beet juice. What more earthy root vegetable is there than a beet? And the beet grew from the minerals in the soil — the earth made the beets, the universe made the earth. This collage contains all of those things. Cosmic.

All the beings on earth just happen to live in some Goldilocks conditions protected from the harsh elements of the universe by the earth’s atmosphere and a fortuitous proximity to the sun. If we thought about these facts in every moment, we would walk around in a daze of gratitude.

The cosmic chickadee is meant to remind us of this.