Small satisfactions
July 29, 2012 § 2 Comments
This weekend my sister came and we had a marvelous girls’ time. The weather cooled and we cleared our schedules for whatever we wanted to do, instead of what we ought to do.
So, we started our two days of good food and good fun with a night of arts & crafts. Elena made a yarn-covered letter “B” (the first letter of her last name), and I dug out my paints to replicate the photograph of a butterfly.
We talked as the sunset turned into dark, took a break for pie, and finished our projects with J.J. Heller and King Charles and Fun in the background. Then we admired our works with satisfaction and surprise: Look what we made!
Each of us created something new, something that would add beauty to our spaces, something that had not previously existed. This sort of activity was not uncommon for us as little girls. It occurred almost daily, and lived on our family’s refrigerator, or on our bedroom walls, or on the sidewalk outside, or perched on our dressers. We had little fear of imperfection or inadequacy, little sense of obligation to be accomplishing or completing another, more important task. We created because we liked to.
It is good to bring back these small satisfactions, to insist upon times set aside for the making of things. That thrill of creating beauty is unique unto itself. We remember that we have capable hands and important imaginations. We remember that we are artists.
Where we live
May 2, 2012 § Leave a comment
It is late, and I ought to be sleeping. I am tired from a day of organizing ideas and information, checking out bee colonies, and working on flower beds. This is the good kind of tired, where you feel like, Yes. I got something important done today.
Still, I am not asleep. Sometimes the creative mind gets all ramped up at the end of the day and I hate to stifle it. Tonight I have been thinking about two things, in particular: (1) which color I would like to paint my room, and (2) what sort of small house I’d like to create, find, remodel to live in someday.
These ponderings took me all over the web. The dangerous, dastardly, extremely useful web. Before the internet mushroomed into our lives, I used to take an idea and start drawing. Writing. Diagramming. Coloring. Now I hop online and away we go! Is this better or worse? Sometimes the result is helpful. Other times I just get off course.
The good news is that this time, (1) I settled on a color and am super excited to get down to painting, and (2) I found some fascinating small house links, including Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. Could I live in one of these little spaces? I think so. I might want to try it. Though I’m slightly more enchanted with building a Shelter-Kit sort of custom-designed to be at once a home, a studio, a workshop, and a barn. Either that or go about remodeling something divinely old and full of interesting corners and cracks (and probably problems, but I don’t mind a challenge, especially if there’s good history attached to it).
As we’ve been putting together bee hives, creating living spaces for ducklings, and considering the housing for soon-to-come livestock, I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of home – space – what we live within and how we choose to make it. I have always liked home. I want to create serene, strong, happy places for myself and others to dwell in. Even the animals. And it occurs to me that a good farmer makes good homes. Conscientious farmers give their animals appropriate shelter, according to the various animals’ needs. (For beef cattle a shelter belt of trees might actually be the best thing for them, as opposed to a barn. We can talk about this in more detail another time, perhaps). This does not include CAFOs, though I have toured them and been told about their many hygienic qualities (pressing my lips tightly together to keep from getting snarky). It does include space, ventilation, strong roofing, comfortable places to lie or stand, and area that allows for instinctive behavior and even, yes, even comfort.
This human is comfortable now in her bed in the white house with her favorite new-old red stallion lamp and a quilt her sister gave to her. Another rant for another day.
More thoughts on dirt: art from the soil
January 27, 2012 § Leave a comment
Masaccio: The Tribute Money
The fresco painters of the Italian Renaissance found themselves in a peculiar position with respect to color. They had available to them a large number of vegetable- and mineral-derived pigments, but the technique of fresco (that is, working on wet plaster) limited them largely to the earth’s palette, because the alkali in the plaster tended to decompose and disperse the vegetable-based dyes. The very rich colors of Masaccio’s frescoes are almost all derived directly from the soil. The reds, browns, and yellows are from ochre. The green is from a reduced clay called terre verte. The umber came straight from the earth of Sienna. The whole Christian drama is expressed in the colors of the earth.
– William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth
Kinds of Honey 