Being an artist is something you don’t decide to become, but rather discover you are one. Creativity only comes alive when it lives in us and we live it out in life. What is an artist? Someone who tries to save the world and themselves with no superpowers other than their stories.
– KWABENA FELI
I will count myself privileged to have seen that beautiful wild birthday fox for which I have so much affection. But more importantly, the fox sighting was about the fox, not me or this birthday.
As we all prepare to meet this next season, let us be the fire that burns bright for each other and those who may need a compassionate heart or a helping hand.
What does Living Out of Time mean for us? Our time in the high desert and mountains of Wyoming gave us time to reflect on what draws us together as a human community rather than what divides us. Creativity birthed from deep within our relationship with Earth can give new expression to the light that is deep in all things and draw us back into true relationship with the heart of life.
Not that art replaces the need for food, shelter, or medical care, but that creativity and its expression in the world is a foundational pillar. Creativity is embedded in all of us and when we share that together, we form community.
Art enables us to move past our perceptions of soundless beauty to find a language that might allow you to move and to shake out in the real world. Even if it makes us feel like a traveler in a strange and distant world.
There was lots of sun, and in April, no flies. I was warm in my winter coat, and I had a steaming cup of good coffee in my hands on the deck overlooking the Apostle Islands. There was a spellbinding full Pink Moon that Nokomis would have loved as much as I did.
Recently, we were on a pilgrimage to visit friends in Santa Rosa, California. While exploring the beauty of the coast we were reminded of the words from John Muir.
We find ourselves listening to the stars in the night sky and the sun and the moon, to the rivers and the valleys, to the forests and creeks and lakes that surround us, to the meadows and the wildflowers, to the rich conversations, to the newly born fawns, songbirds, and hummingbirds and to their exotic music especially while sitting on our porch in the St. Croix River Valley.
At the heart of opposition or the tension being held, there is something else or new birthing. The notion of balance is really powerful, because balance is a providential thing that allows something new to emerge from the depths of the tension of crisis and contradiction.
If we can bring ourselves into the present from the past and take notice, our collective voices can bear witness to the Earth’s changing image and respond more truthfully to her evolving song of life.
Our series of paintings titled, Seeds of Time, explore how we fit into the Earth’s history. We wonder if our conception of time affects the way we think and behave as we process the mysterious flexibility of time.
We are unable to summarize this crazy year into a paragraph you can stand to read. Instead we’d like to send a big ol’ thank you note.
We have found that our art can amplify the sacred and challenge the status quo. The arts help us to hear above the cacophony amid our noisy and chaotic world.
November is the time of the year in the northern hemisphere when we begin to think about the coming of winter, of the dark.
We recognize that creativity also can be used in radically dangerous ways, but when we imagine healing between us, and between nations, we see art as a visual language that helps transform divergence into dialogue.
I now stand at a threshold I would not have chosen, but it is indeed a boundary that I will need to cross and will move into uncharted territory. The boundary I’m crossing is the river of cancer, a rare cancer called neuroendocrine tumors.
We are held together by love. It would be good for our spirit to be especially vigilant when it comes to showing love and respect for one another.
The traditional Japanese calendar is split into 72 different seasons a year.
Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt. – JOHN MUIR
On our recent saunter, exploring The Lost Forty, we discovered trees that tower a hundred feet above the forest floor – a ceiling as high as in prehistory and a rare site in today’s world.
May this tree be a symbol of our hope and a remembrance of the sacredness of all life.
10th Wang Center Symposium — Healing: Pathways for Restoration and Renewal. This event explores the concept of healing in the broadest sense.
We are in the beginning stages of a new project that chronicles the seasonal changes from snowy days to the rebirth of the earth in spring and into the color palette of autumn.
We might even learn that along other paths, literal and analogous, across other parts of the world, where our discordant imprint on the earth is entirely intentional, the consequences of our presence are also entirely ours to amend, even if only one step at a time.
My trip to the county landfill that day was not my first. This experience made me think about my consumption and waste.
As we embark on our next phase in the St. Croix River Valley, we are grateful for all of you who have been our travel companions and have offered the support we have felt this past year.
Like the wild plum tree, I feel the pull of both the light and darkness of the fall equinox. My patience wears thin, like the bark on that tree. My words can be sharp, like those thorns. I’m scarred and weathered. Sour and sweet.
I think it fair to say that we humans have a special gift for dreaming about what’s over the edge of our known world. I explore new things, creatively adapt to different circumstances, let new discoveries rise, and continue from there by telling stories about what I found.
I have had the joy and privilege to experience silence so deep I could hear snowflakes falling, which can be pretty loud if they are the only things making noise.
What could be better than eating a cantaloupe in August picked first thing in the morning from the Hoffman Farm and consumed less than 24 hours after being plucked from the vine.
