"Maine's long and cold winters may help keep our State's population low, but our harsh climate also accounts for what is unique and valuable about our land and our people."
-Tom Allen
There was nothing harsh about this morning on Little John Island, nor can I claim to be a Mainer. For anyone who has visited, though, the state has a way of grabbing you and today was a good example. Cooper explored why the holes he was digging in the sand continued to fill with water, while i came about as close to a perched Bald Eagle as one can get. What does this have to do with graduate school? Nothing really. But it is still week 18.
Both my wife's mother and her partner are artists, a painter and furniture builder, and Robert Newton helped me to construct some large masonite slump forms to drive back to Nebraska for work in the studio. What these large arcs will produce is a bit of a question but i like the scale. Dare to dream a little bigger.
The weather today is all snow, quiet a change in just one day, but has put me in the mind of all the contradictions there are in life and art, relationships and living spaces, our emotional and physical lives, in nature and the animal world. Is this time of year about redemption? The winter's slow end as the days get longer, three minutes at a time? The Writer's Almanac today had a quote by Robert Bly, who has seem miles of snow fall to the ground and i'll end with his thoughts:
"I was very surprised to find out, as my poems pick up more and more of the past of human beings, the ancient culture, more and more of the grief and the suffering of human beings -- the poems become funnier! I don't understand that, but I love it. I feel that there's some way that as the mind gets more mature, in the midst of a lot of grief, it's able to dance a little!"
Let's Dance.
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