meetthemob

2: Hearing your own leaves rustling.

MEETING YOUR WAYWARD ARTIST and The Mob

The central point is that we are already well acquainted with the world of the imagination; we are already creative; we are already makers. What this book and the many portals it offers can do is bring you into a greater awareness of your creative powers. To do that, you have to get to know yourself a little better.

To start, let me quote a character in an H.G. Wells novel The Secret Places of the Heart (1922). Sir Richmond Hardy is at a doctor’s office seeking drugs for what he calls a “lack of unity”. Hardy is alarmed that he has lost focus and direction. He says: “I am not a man, I am a mob!”

It’s likely we have all experienced ourselves as, perhaps not quite a “mob”, but at least a collection of different characters or characteristics, waltzing to the fore in their own times and ways. Getting to know these characteristics better is a great way to start the process of creative fitness, that twisting, turning exploration of the imagination. They are your tendencies, your “familiars”. Recognizing them and revisiting them helps you better see them for what they are: the adjectives and influences in our lives-- but not who we actually are. Encountering and reencountering these details, memories, souvenirs both energizes us and shakes them loose from a place they, or we, may be stuck. This is the healing use of the imagination. Getting to know yourself better should not be mistaken for some endorsement of ego or affirmation of narcissism. Your ego is just the veil you have convinced your self your look the best in. There are ways, and very important reasons, to examine parts of the individual s’elf. It’s a matter of perspective or attitude.

Leaves on the Tree

We are all like leaves on the tree; we each contribute to the life and health of the tree and the environment. Is one leaf the most important? Is one leaf even more important than another? No and no. Yet each leaf has its purpose and integrity. Our culture exalts hierarchy and we have a deep rooted tendency to compare and contrast. There are other ways. “Heterarchy” is a word which might help. overlap, multiplicity, mixed ascendancy, and/or divergent-but-coexistent patterns of relation.

Pot-luck

Pot-Luck is a powerfully simple practice. Yes, yes, you make your fabled Mac and Cheese with three kinds of cheese or that Killer Chili with mango. But really pot-luck is about all people having the right and pleasure to participate. It’s close to the term, heterarchy. It’s a way for everybody to participate, cooperate and individuate at the same time. That creates quite a different atmosphere than the Restaurant Model, where there are servers and tips and inevitable judgments about goodness and value. Potluck short circuits most of that.

It’s real opposite is the Medical Model. That’s where you come to believe that you’ve become so infirmed or disabled and you are incapable of doing things for your self and certainly not for others. This Medical Model is insidious. Although we may actually be injured in some physical or spiritual way, it so envelops us that we buy into a more profound and thoroughly handicapping state of mind. This switch from the Medical Model to the Potluck Model has been at the root of my teaching for many years. So many people are so ready to forget to remember who they are, what they know and what they can share. This medical model induces a kind of pathetic amnesia in otherwise capable people. By invoking the powers of Potluck, people get returned to a world where they continue to feel engaged, competent and eager to learn and participate. Potluck is quite simply the practice of sharing.

Researchers

Another image to help shift perspective is to consider yourself a researcher, or explorer. This image was sparked by a conversation several years ago with an artist friend of mine. We were at a party and I was teasing him a bit and saying “How, when the world has gotten so bad, with so much suffering, how can he justify going to a studio and painting?”

Without a pause, and without knowing, I think, that I was just teasing, he looked right at me and said:

“In my studio, I do research on the emotional impact and effect of form, color, texture and size. How they create meaning and how they can be important in people’s lives. Dan, if I didn’t do this, who would?”

It was an ennobling moment. The notion that I was more than just a guy driven to put sticks together; that I might be on the forward edge of how spirit matters itself, was inspiring. Probably, this book sprang from that moment.

I am reminded of a children’s story I mentioned in my second book, The Rustic Furniture Companion (Lark, 1996). It is a story, Tenrec’s Twigs by Bert Kitchen. (Philomel Press, 1990), about a groundhog, Tenrec, who is mocked by the other animals for his interest in building with sticks and considers giving it up. He speaks about this with his friend The Milky Eagle Owl, who thinks for a moment then says:
”Hmmm, I find your twig building very interesting, Tenrec. You seem very happy when you are building and you do not bother me, hmmmm, or anyone else. In fact, you may inspire others to build. My advice is to continue building.”

Getting Started: Update your profile as a life long maker

There are many ways into this dance with our many s’elves: You can begin to make notes and lists or just see what you remember and forget. At some point, you may want to record and represent some of what you are remembering and discovering. I suggest three simple ways: small card collages, accordion books and simple tools. Details

Here are four different, related exercises to begin this wondrous process of re-membering:

1. LOOK AROUND

What kind of world have you made for yourself right here, right now?

Imagine that you are meeting yourself for the first time.

What are the objects that mark your life?

What is on your walls, shelves, bookcases?

What’s in the drawers?

What do you make?

These are your “familiars”, your daily companions. Actually the early Latin meaning of the word family, familias, meant not just the people in your life but all your objects, the animals about you, your physical space.

What have you inherited and kept?

Do you find yourself buying extras of something you already have enough of?

What’s your history with animals?

See where I’m going? I’m trying to create snapshots, not a portrait, of who you are. There’s a rawness to a snapshot that sometimes offends or unsettles. “I don’t look like that!” Well, you do or did for that moment.

This is a hard thing to do. Sometimes somebody else can do it more easily. I had that experience after my mother died. As we were cleaning out her home, I noticed that in every room of the house, every room, she had stored candles: tapers in all colors, tea candles, birthday candles, squat aromatic ones and special festive ones that never had been lit, only displayed. At the church, I gave a short eulogy and mentioned the candles in every room as perhaps a way she … Then I invited people to take one of them home as a reminder of my mother.

So, what seems to be collecting around you?

2. LOOK BACK

Soul loves the past and doesn't merely learn from history, it feeds on the stories and vestiges of what was. Thos Moore

Sometimes it’s easier to remember than see the present. Memories keep things alive, whether you want them to or not .

What objects can you remember from early in your life? (toys, furniture, tools)

Are there feelings connected to these objects?

Were any lost or stolen or broken?

What objects can you remember making from early in your life?

What did you build or collect?

Have you had lifelong interests in certain objects?

MORE
How to Bury Your Father poem by Laraine Herring

Collecting the Ballast for Life’s Storms Daniel Mack in New York Times

Family

Go find some family photos.

Here’s a picture of my father, me and my grandfather in probably 1952.

This is where I came from:

What have you inherited? tendencies, ways of seeing, “symptoms’’, physical traits:

Where did you get your nose, your “walk”, your build?

Are there family voices? A family curse or family luck?

Are there family stories that get told again and again?

Are there sayings or bits of advice that have passed the generations?

What are you memories of foods, clothes, tools, special smells?

Now try a family poem.

Just pick any one, two or three newly remembered details. See where you imagination takes you. It’s very likely some new shoot or bud will appear on what seemed like a withered old story. Here’s one I wrote several years ago after learning that my great great grandfather married my great great grandmother when she was 15. My daughter was 15 at the time.

From the clan.

What have you gotten from your clan, your “people”? It has always surprised and delighted me how much we share with others from the same old soil. Above my desk, I have that Yeat’s quote:

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

3. LOOK IN ... starting some personal archeology

"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a

well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just

where he is and pass some time in his own company." - Seneca

List a few words to describe your s’elf

Do you have a sound? A smell? Favorite words?

Are there stories, jokes about you? personal mythology, iconography

From time to time, I'll address my illnesses and body conditions with poetry.

Many years ago, a friend did impressionistic portraits of people he knew.

Here’s the one he did of me. In many ways I am still that slightly aloof “watcher” he noticed in the mid 1980s

A challenging part of looking in is recognizing your gift.

Your gifts are paired with your wounds; they finish each other

list the wounds as parts of the gifts

Attachments: what do you/would you grieve the loss of

What elements attract you? Air, earth, water, fire, ether materials…

Memories of Forest, Trees, Woods, wood, making, building?Forest loss of future, direction order, father

4. LOOK NOW!

What is different or special about this moment?

Can you notice the weather, the season, the temperature, the light, smells, shadows

Pay attention to coincidence, frustration, anxieties, and discomforts: what is your body saying? The title of this work comes from Looking Now as I was in the shower one day after my wife had left a few hairs on the wall. In the dampness, they could be moved and swirled and shaped.

Sometimes this can be done with snow, leaves, fallen branches. On many beaches Cairns, sand castles and driftwood huts stand witness to the delight of people looking now!

Haiku poetry uis the expression of Looking Now

Looking Now is really what's it's all about. Portals open and close; sould rhythms change. This moment is not exactly like any other:
There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures.

There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding.

And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are. -Chogyam Tungpa

Think Like a Tree Karen I. Shragg

Stand Still David Wagoner

Shower Wall Master Hair Sculptor

These profiles make up your unique fingerprint as a maker. They have shaped your sense of design and beauty. You have a rich deep history in texture, form, pattern and meaning. Certain things just look better to you than others. But most importantly we have feelings and associations with objects. Certain objects make us feel better. Certain objects make us feel safe. Other objects make us feel uneasy. The joy of making is away to become more aware of the rich language, the expressive nature hidden in objects and object making. Things can and do speak for us, speak to us, and speak through us.

This process of profiling your self as a maker takes a long time. You can understand the idea and the purpose in the process very quickly but each time you revisit your history your family history your clan history with objects you find something new.