Building, making, assembling, repairing -- all the things that go into having something come to be.
When I first learned about Desert Christ Park in Weird California, I put it on my bucket list because it seemed like good fodder for a snarky blog post. But instead, I found the experience strangely moving. Just about two hours outside of Los Angeles and half an hour before you reach Joshua Tree National…
In order to make something that feels truly “alive” at the deepest level it can help to imagine that you are “making a gift to God.” At each step of the making process you evaluate which option is the most authentic or “true” by evaluating how well it brings out the spirit of the thing…
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with gold. The repair doesn’t hide the damage – it accentuates the fractures and makes them a focal point, creating a more interesting and potentially more valuable object than the original. Part of the aesthetic of kintsugi is to acknowledge the damage and…
An act of creation is not just about making something new, something that never existed before. It’s also about the impact that the created object has on its surroundings. Think about public sculpture that is placed on a highway median simply because the space is available and the city council believes that art will “class…
To me maintenance feels like a chore. It’s something you have to do, but it detracts from all the things you could be doing. But there’s another way of looking at maintenance. You are keeping something alive. In this sense you aren’t simply maintaining. You are gardening. The Garden and Desire A garden is a…
There seems to be something in the human heart that longs for a garden. Perhaps a garden is an analogy for wholeness. Maybe it’s something more. We are stardustBillion year old carbonWe are goldenCaught in the devil’s bargainAnd we’ve got to get ourselvesback to the garden Joni Mitchell – Woodstock This devil’s bargain, at least…
In Zen Buddhsim there is an idea of “just sitting”. One is not trying to attain enlightenment or achieve any goal other than sitting. One aspires to sit completely. Robert Pirsig makes an connection with motorcycle repair, that it can be “just fixing.” One is completely absorbed in the work of repair, to the point…
When our desire moves us to make something, we begin to naturally start assembling bits and pieces into a kind of order. It doesn’t matter what we are working on, a piece of writing, a painting, a piece of furniture. There is an ordering process that is common to all creative works. The easiest place…
Good news for lazy bloggers like me! Now the Wikimedia Commons is not the only source for FREE PHOTOGRAPHY you can put on your blog! Thanks to the U.S. Federal government you can have access to almost 7,000 high quality pictures that you already paid for with your tax dollars. These photos, with a…
If you’re looking for royalty-free public domain photos for your blog or other project, you’re in luck. The Library of Congress just uploaded 3,000 vintage photos to Flickr, like the photo above, free for the taking. These pics are all first-class in terms of composition, lighting, balance and they look like a huge boon to…
