Crafting thanks

Three years (1095 days) ago today the first posting appeared on this blog. Since then, 1084 additional postings have appeared, today being #1086. I'm grateful to the readers and commenters that have helped make My Minnesota worth doing. Thank you for reading, commenting and following.

Something that's concerned me as I've done my best daily to post thoughts, feelings, rants, raves, plus related photos and poems, is that there's rarely opportunity to write a first draft, let it sit for awhile, and then do a rewrite. Future posts may be less frequent in the interest of being better crafted. It's entirely too easy to fall into the trap of focusing on quantity over quality. I've found my photography more satisfying as my craftsmanship improves. I want to follow a similar path with my writing and, on a good day, my thinking. If you're a frequent reader, you may have noticed that the relationship among craftsmanship, local foods, economies and sustainable living (bioregionalism) has become of increasing interest to me. I've just started reading the current issue of Trim Tab magazine and am really heartened to note that its theme is crafts and crafts(wo)men. If you're not careful, this is interest in historic preservation, local foods, baking your own bread and such can do to you. I highly recommend it.

inherited wooden bowl, ~100 years old

Photo by J. Harrington

I'm grateful to still have in my possession a wooden bowl that, as I recall, I inherited from my mother. I think she may even have inherited it from her mother. (Or, maybe it came through my Better Half's mother and grandmother.) In any case, every so often, I contemplate the pleasures of using something even older than I am. Unlike smart phones, vehicles, computers and many of the other accoutrements of modern life, newer isn't always better. (There's a reason to never be among the first to try a dot zero version of software.) I still treasure a hand-knitted wool hat my friend and landlady at the time made for me as a Christmas present almost 50 years ago. If you're interested in preservation and craftsmanship and restoration and such, and haven't yet read it, I suggest you see if your local library system or independent book store can get you a copy of The Same Ax Twice. Here's a sampling from the New York Times. As I look about and note what our corporate and political leaders have sold us as "progress," I see restoration as a growth craft.

Monet Refuses the Operation

By Lisel Mueller 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

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