Opportunities Emerging

Meeting Your Ersions
Here's a piece that's a breezy repackaging of some of the more wordy, weighty stuff I've been working on. Maybe working though a mask for these weeks has restricted oxygen to my brain and helped make things lighter and less didactic. 

Drawing by Cora

Thomas Merton, again

"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activity neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."     ~ Thomas Merton

A Map

From Liana Finck's Instagram
Thank you

Objects made since Mid-March 2020

I've learned that Objects have their own ways; We makers do have our role in the Life of Objects, but it is much more modest that we like to think.   Since I am no longer in the Marketplace of Objects, I have the time and interest to experiment and learn more.   Since the slowdown or isolating, I have made several dozen objects, using what's in the Studio, lots of re-working of pieces done years ago. Several "series" seem to be getting made: There are swirly carved beach bricks,  Tool Kits of imaginal Objects and these:  In recent weeks, I have been mating (gluing) a bark carving from the last 20 years with a bone or stick or tool and bundling them with some gold thread.... Over and Over.
I have NOT asked what there ARE or what they mean. Here are several:

 

 

More Shifts. Help from Lin Yutang

Thresholds are moving, reconforming. Interest wanes in some areas as a sorting is taking place, mostly out of our consciousness.

In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him. [Lin Yutang]

Thin Places Column in Dirt Magazine Addiction Issue

Visiting Harmed Places      Thin Places      May/June 2020  

Places get wounded. Vandalism, neglect, insensitivity, overuse and the forces of nature all have their way with places held special.  When I visit a wounded place, several feelings present, often at once. Anger is the loudest with its judging, blaming, vengeful tones. Quietly, on the sidelines, is the sadness and the maybe identifying with the Place    (Am I wounded?)   There’s nostalgia for what the place used to be and maybe a flicker of caretaking, how to help the place.

That ice and snow storm of this winter was the most dramatic natural wounding event in a long time. The evidence is still so clear and graphic: all those snapped leaders and branches, those hanging, dangling limbs.

After the shock of it all, I began deliberately going out to see more, to learn about human nature from nature. Somehow surprise encounters with damaged or misshapen nature was soothing. There was information about pain and repair.

Sunsets, glistening lakes, eagles in trees, budding bushes are OK, but only a small, distracting, part of the story. The relentless search for beauty often keeps us safe from the distress and pain, needed for renewal, repair and another beginning. Walks in damaged nature can help us learn to just be with the hurt, to see the larger forces and rhythms at work: that things change over The Seasons and each day and night. The creeks and rivers keep flowing, the earth sprouts, the rain falls. There is a vitality in destruction, offering the possibility of awe and even joy, seeing evidence of that big, quiet, slow, sacred rhythm of death, dormancy, budding, fruiting and decay.  If the time is right, we may even feel a welcomed and comforted part of it all.  At work here on the margins of nature are the lesser, fleeting, small gods. They can be encountered.  But first, no planned “hikes”, no guidebooks.  Trust your animal mind, your intuition, your hunches.  Risk getting lost, and feeling “lost”.  Then trust you can find your way back.

Start at railroad tracks, abandoned lots, swales, even curbs. See what’s washed up from the Hudson at Plum Point, those tires on the shore of Wickham Lake or what the beavers did to this tree at Cascade Lake.  Let me know what you find.  rustic@warwick.net

Daniel Mack