Aspiring journalist Serena Renner put the plight of a day-job artist in pretty succinct terms earlier this week. Below is an excerpt from that blog entry.

In the past few months, I’ve thought a lot about work — working to live as we all do to sustain ourselves but also the concept of working to work. By this I mean the creative pursuit so many artists undergo: to work just enough to meet one’s basic needs but also reserving enough free time to realize one’s true ambitions. In a perfect world, we’d all get paid a living to do what we love, but in case you haven’t noticed, this is not a perfect world and many fields — especially those artistic in nature — require talent and notoriety, which fruit from years of practice and climbing the ranks.

Journalism is not unique in this regard, although we like to victimize ourselves, particularly amid the current economic climate and media transformation. But actors, fine artists, designers, musicians, as well as creative writers and the like all have to start at the bottom, working random jobs or unpaid internships — living on couches or in closet-sized apartments — until they build up their skills and portfolio enough to get noticed . . .

The bottom line is working just enough to pay the rent but not too much to lose sight of what you really want to do. Maybe that means working a pretty well paying part time job and writing on the side, or working full time for a while to save money for an upcoming hiatus . . . Whatever the case, produce, produce, produce and have faith in yourself that your passion will eventually pay off some day, some how.

This isn’t news, to me or to most readers of this blog, but it’s worth restating because I know a lot of people do not understand (in the remotest sense) the tension many of us creative types feel in the context of our culture. And because Renner did a good job presenting it in her article.

I can’t really speak to the inherent aspirations of accountants or CEOs, but I know first hand the hard-wired nature of an artist. Most of us are not lazy — far from it despite the stereotypes. We just don’t fit into the more common and socially accepted workplace model, and for that we are judged.

Friends and family and even casual bystanders find it strange when we forgo the pursuit of a [supposedly] comfortable life — reliable, better paying jobs, the suburbs etc — in favor of a lifestyle less familiar to them. Creativity, for us, is more than just a hobby.

It has to be more than just a hobby, or we go stir crazy.

And, more than that, our local and national cultures would be in sad shape without artists earnestly pursuing their crafts. As Kathleen Norris rightly pointed out in her book Dakota, broad swaths of a culture are lost to history without writers and painters and sculptors working out of that culture.

MSN hosts an interesting article from Business Week calculating the ten best places to relocate to in this sour economy. This doesn’t seem to easily fit any of The Aesthetic Elevator’s established categories, but the story caught my eye since my wife and I are in the throes of relocation (even though it’s not directly related to the economy).

No state is totally buffered from the downturn, but several have gotten a boost from the energy, military and agricultural sectors. The healthiest states include Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming. In the Washington, D.C., area, federal government and defense jobs have given the economy a boost. And Iowa, which has seen its economy somewhat deteriorate, has also benefited from agricultural and alternative-energy jobs.

The top ten list is as follows:

1. Anchorage, Alaska
2. Provo-Orem, Utah
3. Kennewick-Richland-Pasco, Wash.
4. Yakima, Wash.
5. Omaha, Neb.,-Council Bluffs, Iowa
6. Richmond, Va.
7. Winston-Salem, N.C.
8. Colorado Springs, Colo.
9. Amarillo, Texas
10. Washington, D.C., Arlington-Alexandria, Va., plus areas in Maryland and West Virginia

The article on Business Week actually lists the top twenty if you’re interested. To a degree lists like this are usually pretty subjective, but still interesting.

Downtown Omaha, Nebraska. Image from Wikipedia.

The wife and I talked last night about real estate, newer homes versus older homes, realtors and so forth. And it got me wondering:

Has the glut of poorly designed spec homes thrown up in the U.S. from, roughly, 1960 on created a cultural deficit in that Americans look for the wrong things when choosing a place to live?

Since we’ve started looking for houses, actually since our friends began buying [mortgages for] houses five-plus years back, it’s been interesting to observe their choices and listen to their reasoning for said choices. There are some who, like my wife and I, crave the character (details), craftsmanship and environs found in many older homes in established parts of a city, but many people seem to be exclusively interested in newer homes.

From what I’ve been able to deduce, this usually stems from a desire for a maintenance free home (which, by the way, does not exist). Buyers want newer appliances and utilities and roofs. What they often fail to realize is that you’ll end up in the same boat as if you’d bought an older place that’s been cared for after just a few years. Appliances and utilities aren’t built as well as they used to be and, unless you plan on living in a house for only five years (give or take) you will probably end up needing to repair and/or replace the heating element in an oven, install a new water heater or buy a new air conditioner. I finally replaced the shiny stainless steel fan/light/heater in our bathroom last year which was likely original to our 1955 bungalow; the new one will probably die in less than ten years and is hideous in comparison to its predecessor.

Some men don’t want anything to do with painting the outside of a house as the sun and snow take their tole on soffits and siding . . . which reminds me that I need to post this picture,

a stunning example of why vinyl siding is not really better than wood. This was on the garage of one of the houses we looked at in Nebraska. It was shaded, as I recall, and on the East side of a house — not exposed to hot afternoon sun. I’ve also seen the stuff pop, warp, fade and crack and it’s just beyond me why it gets used so much. Painting every ten or fifteen years (assuming you use good paint, not the Walmart brand) is a lot easier than replacing siding every twenty-five years in my opinion. Further, slapping vinyl over existing finishes seems likely to encourage mold.

Does cultural wealth factor into this equation, where newer homes in the suburbs are representative of a certain affluence that some older neighborhoods don’t allow an owner to brag about? Perhaps young mothers are under the impression that the ‘burbs are safer for the kiddos. Maybe the entitlement some of us feel after growing up surrounded by such an affluent culture leads us to believe we deserve shiny new houses.

Regardless, I have to wonder if the suburban architecture perpetuated over the past five plus decades has resulted in a more ignorant culture. Is it possible that we don’t know what good design looks like anymore? We don’t realize what wasted space or good traffic flow is? And that we’re (somewhat intentionally) losing the ability to care for our own property under the guise of the “maintenance free?”

Older homes, by contrast, often excel in design and craftsmanship over new ones. Lumber used to build them was straighter and drier, and sometimes above and beyond what was required for the job. The 830 square foot house I was drawn to on our recent house-hunting trip employed 2 x 10s for floor joists. No wonder the place was so marvelously square after 75 years! Less space is wasted in homes of that age, generally, and built-in storage was more abundant. Sure, closets might be smaller, but are walk-in closets really all that great? Luxurious, yes, but they also encourage clutter in our consumerist culture.

Seasoned homes are normally, subjective as this may seem, more pleasing to the eye. It doesn’t take an inordinate number of complexities to make a house or community pleasing to the eye. Apparently a book titled A Pattern Language talks about how a house can be successful yet appear to be a fairly simple design (from the outside). I’ve been told many times by different people I need to read this book. It is on my Amazon wish list!

None of this is meant to imply that we should cease new home construction. Obviously, as populations increase and older homes that were not cared for (or weren’t built so well, or that highways or big-box stores are paving over etc etc) are torn down new dwellings will need to replace them. Why, though, should new homes perpetuate a bland, cheap, and unenduring suburban aesthetic? They shouldn’t, and they don’t have to. A friend of mine here in Siloam Springs hopes to found a residential construction company that will bring back the details and craftsmanship of the early 20th century. He started with his own home which includes such details as a breakfast nook and drawers built into the risers of the staircase.

Will my friend find enough of us who appreciate the details in a craftsman home to float his business? Americans seem to be dangerously content with lousy dwelling design. We’ve become afflicted as a culture with the Texas Syndrome, where as long as something is big or impressive it’s credible (Yes, I know that link isn’t precisely backing up my assertion, but it’s related and a good article.). We’d rather have a poorly designed 2,500 square foot house than a thought-through 1,200 square foot bungalow that functions just as well as it’s bigger brother. Shoeboxes with holes cut out for doors and windows litter new subdivisions and we eat them up. McMansions (and their smaller cousins in more modest subdivisions) flaunt ludicrously steep and wasteful rooflines, which wouldn’t be all that wasteful if the attic was actually used as living space. But it’s generally not.

My concern is that suburban design of the past fifty years has infiltrated our psyche, and that our aesthetic expectations have subsequently been wounded without our being aware of it. Some of this sentiment, thankfully, might be changing as Downtown, U.S.A., is revivified and younger generations move back into the heart of cities. But from where I sit, we have a long ways to go in many parts of the country, and a lot of people in the younger generations still aspire to a questionable suburban aesthetic.

Thoughts?

(As always, there are exceptions to the generalizations I’ve made in this post. Keep that in mind when commenting.)

Quoted from my friend Tony’s blog, Rockstanding:

I read a book on stress a few years back, and the author made a side comment that I thought was so insightful. He said that the highest value of materialistic western culture is not possessing. It’s actually acquiring.

If you’re a go-getter you never stop. And so the guy who is lavishly successful doesn’t quit, because there are greater levels of success. “My house could be bigger, I could drive better cars, I could have more power, I could have more money.”

So our materialism, consumerism, affluenza is a result of our workaholism? New thought to me, definitely worth pondering. Personally I tend towards the go-getter end of the spectrum, which is talked about in the above quote. I am not — thankfully — of the mind that “My house could be bigger, I could drive better cars, I could have more power, I could have more money.” My goals and dreams in life, the way I measure success in life is not relative to status or material possessions. Regardless, the idea that busyness hinders community resonates with me.

Rebecca Tirrell Talbot wrote an article titled Of Public Transit and Human Nature for today’s issue of The Curator Magazine. Fascinated as I am by transit (and in some ways the city of Chicago) I read the whole article, not too long and not too short for an internet publication.

Talbot makes some interesting observations concerning the trains in Chicago and their riders, how different lines possess different personalities, how riders in general react (or don’t react) to certain behaviors. I’ll let you read the article (linked to in the first paragraph) for the details after saying one thing: People in the city really wear iPod earbuds like they’re implants. I noticed this on the trains in New York back in February. It’s something we — and by we I mean American culture — made fun of a few years back. Here in our tiny midwestern town you don’t see it very often, hardly at all actually.

Photo from Wikipedia by Daniel Schwen.

These might be things I’ve already said, or at least alluded to, on the blog before, but since we’re in the throes of the selling-moving-buying game I thought I’d share some recent observations.

No good place to find rentals online
On our break yesterday afternoon — playing bocce ball on the office lawn — my boss quizzed me on the direction my wife and I are going. He was under the impression the search for a house was driving our plans, and wondered why we weren’t looking at rentals given some of the details surrounding our circumstance.

Without getting into the boring details, I’ll just say that renting for any length of time doesn’t seem feasible to us. Part of this may be the difficulty in finding quality rentals, with garages for my studio, using the internet. Finding houses to buy online is easy. Websites touting decent results for rental properties, nil.

Dealing with realtors is tricky business
So far my wife and I have dealt with three different realtors while looking at real estate in the same city. Last night she astutely noted that there’s no training to be had in realtor etiquette. How right she is. I like going to the listing agent to get more and more accurate information more quickly. She likes the idea of a neutral party showing us a house, as an advocate for us the buyer. We have good reason for the communication we’ve had with each of these women, and each has given some of their time. Inevitably, at this point, two of the three — and possibly all three — will not get paid for their time.

From where we sit, that’s just part of their business. Compare it to a trade where, for instance, a carpenter bids on a project but doesn’t get it. He took the time to survey the situation and submit a proposal, but in the end won’t get paid for that effort. That’s just part of the business. Real estate seems to be more competitive in nature than carpentry though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we make one of the three aforementioned realtors a tad mad.

Listing the qualities of a place you desire to live
“Why buy if you don’t plan on being in a place for more than two years?” the boss wondered over bocce yesterday. As I mentioned, a garage — or some kind of studio space such as a basement or outbuilding — is one of a few things on our list of what we want in a place we live. Unless there’s a decent co-op in a city, apartments and condos just won’t cut it. And by decent, I mean a place with inexpensive enough dues, a soda kiln and space for carving on wood. Painters, it seems to me, have it easy in comparison to us three-dimensional types as far as what qualifies as useful studio space.

A few other things on our list include living on the plains (we both like the wide open spaces), a decent church in town, somewhere further north than Arkansas and a nearby selection of gluten free groceries to accommodate my wife’s diet. We’d really like to be in a place with a liberal arts college and — as consumerist as this may sound — nearness to a Kohl’s and Old Navy is on the list. This latter point is practical for us, after living in a town of 14,000 for six years without a decent clothier. Walmart doesn’t count, and we just don’t want to drive 40 minutes one way to gander at the sales every other month.

On putting down roots in a particular place
I met Rebecca Horton in the bookstore at the IAM Encounter conference back in February. She was pointing out The Architecture of Happiness to some people, and I couldn’t help but chime in to affirm the book. Our all too brief conversation took off on that note, since it’s a somewhat obscure title that not very many people have read, in general.

We exchanged business cards and since then I’ve followed her blog, Passionately Alive, and found today’s entry quite captivating. She talks about her life in Washington D.C., after growing up in a small town, and concluded the post by asking some good questions:

What impact does place/community have upon the way we choose to live our lives? What impact does our location have upon the things that we value/esteem? These are questions that I’ve been pondering significantly over the last several months . . .

“A community, unlike a public, has to do first of all with belonging; it is a group of people who belong to one another and to their place.” (Wendell Berry, Sex Economy Freedom and Community, 147-148)

Undeniably, where we grew up and where we live presently shapes how we think and act. Kathleen Norris speaks to this in her book Dakota: A spiritual geography, comparing her life in New York to life on the northern plains in a community of 1,300 people.

The house that’s too good to be true in a place that’s, well, ugh
So yesterday we received a flurry of information about a house we thought had potential, based on the online listing. Turns out it could be just about perfect for us and our present needs; the only catch is that it’s in a flood zone and we’d have to pay for flood insurance, the bank owning the house and all, us paying the mortgage.

We have good reason for moving to Enid, Oklahoma, where this house is situated, in the short term. Neither of us want to live there for the long-term though. Per our above list there’s no liberal arts college — although there is a two-year college where I kind of hope to be able to teach a class or two in their art department — and it’s too far south. In a recent email conversation with a friend about our present pickle he said this:

It is hard to picture you feeling settled in Enid, but I think to some extent that is due to the question of what the proper habitat of an artist is: creativity in collaboration? (the usual answer) or creativity as a a gift of beauty and perspective in a place where both are lacking? If the former, Enid sounds like the desert. If the latter, an un-tapped mine.

Well put, and things my wife and I have not left unconsidered. He did well to use the word “gift,” and also touches on my growing interest in how to get the arts to thrive in smaller communities, those “untapped mines.”

Part of the larger pickle is, though, that we don’t know exactly where we’d like to settle. I know that I would like to put down some roots, become a part of a place for ten years give or take and see what God does with me there. I want to be part of a community, which takes time.

Putting down roots seems to be a lost art in the United States. I’m not suggesting that the flexibility afforded by modern transport which Americans so often take advantage of is a bad thing in and of itself, but we seem to have forgotten the value of time and place.

My wife and I are, in essence, being forced again to think about moving. We’d like to believe we have a variety of options, that we can go anywhere we want to put down new roots on a whim. That’s part of our American culture, isn’t it, the freedom to be transient?

We considered cities and small prairie towns. We talked specifically about moving to a community known for the arts, and thought about moving north to be in a colder climate more conducive to my wife’s knitting and crocheting.

So when the best we can come up with after wrangling with ideas for six months or more is moving back to the nondescript midwestern town in which I graduated from high school, the whole scenario feels regressive. The American dream entails either moving to the city or to an estate in the suburbs (not that I’ve necessarily ever aspired to these). Plains communities of 50,000 people just don’t qualify.

Why this would bother me to begin with I don’t know. I’ve never really been a fan of the progressive ideal — which seems more like an excuse to embrace any and every new philosophy that comes along than an ideal. But last night, in a half-asleep and slightly irrational 5 a.m. moment, it did bother me. It kept me awake for more than an hour. I tossed and turned and tried to get it out of my head altogether. I just wanted to go back to sleep, knowing the paranoia would dissipate at an hour proper for humans to think about serious matters.

And it did.

We’ve rehashed the thought of moving again and again. Real estate in Grand Island, Nebraska, the Plains city in question, is very inexpensive, particularly the building we have in mind which would serve as our apartment and my studio — a large studio — with 1,000+ square feet of retail besides. It is further north, which is good for my wife’s craft and for my allergies. It’s on the prairie which is great for storm chasing. Point being, it’s not just the easy way out, moving back to where the family lives.

Further, I’ve become more interested in the past year at how the arts can really thrive in smaller communities. In some ways, ways that aren’t as immediately accessible to me here in Siloam Springs, moving back to Nebraska will allow me to play a more integral role in that city’s artistic nexus.

I suppose I’ll just have to live with being a regressive person. Drat, and blast. Of course, in the scheme of things, isn’t part of the progressive ideal being counter-cultural? And if I’m bucking the American dream and know it, isn’t that counter cultural and thus progressive?

Such wonderful logic.

Photo of the 1980 Grand Island, Nebraska, tornado outbreak. From Wikipedia.

I’ve wanted this blog to be about the holy ordinary.  I blog about the ordinary.  But how often do I endeavor to find the Holy there?  I want to work harder at that.

I can tell you today that I am blah.  I am in the greyest of blahs.  The sun is out.  It’s a beautiful day.  I’m planning on taking the girls out for a walk and to the park, but I am blah.  I want to escape some more.  Watch movies.  Putter on the Internet, eat cookies.  Stay in pajamas.   Burrow away.  Hide until all I don’t want to do or face goes away.

I made cookies yesterday as an activity to do with C, but also as a way to escape the every day crazies of yesterday.  I tried to make them healthier by substituting applesauce.  They don’t have that snap.  Or richness.  They are very unsatisfying.  I gorged on them yesterday trying to find the satisfying taste I craved.  I came up short at every bite.

My day today feels like those cookies taste.  It lacks snap.  It lacks richness.  My house is a disaster and there is a pile of laundry up to the ceiling.  My kids are energetic, but exhausting, and despite the extra sleep I got this morning I am tired.  I am just tired.

I feel  like shades of grey.

I want to seek out the richness and the snap.  I want a full-bodied taste to my day.  But I have to give a little, put out a little effort.  I just don’t want to engage.

I want to mentally transform the blah into beautiful.  Ann at Holy Experience again convicted me.  Convicted me about gratitude, about seeing with God’s eyes and not my own.  And truly, the spirit has been speaking to me about that.  About seeing with new eyes.  About living in the empowerment of the spirit.  About my spiritual life being about experience.

So today I want to see the miracle of pudgy hands on my thigh, instead of the drudgery of another request to be picked up by Mama with a tired back. 

I want to see the beauty of sisters sitting on a makeshift, very soft bench, made of one of those piles of laundry. 

I want to engage…  To be enveloped and inside of, and tasting the full-bodied richness of my children’s giggles…  And I want to see more than my annoyance and fatigue when those giggles turn into shrieks and screams.

I want to find the Holy in the Ordinary and see the blahs of today transformed into beauty. 

I will have to engage with the present and stop running away.  I’ll have to wade into the mess in front of me instead of trying to hide.  

I’ll have to see with new eyes.

For Christmas, I gave my wife the first four seasons of Gilmore Girls.

We’ve already seen all of the episodes on DVD, but the wife has talked for a couple years about buying the series for background candy while she’s knitting or crocheting. And, as emasculating as it may be to admit this, I’m O.K. with owning the show too. Really, it’s darn good television.

Over the past week we’ve watched quite a few of the episodes already, as part of a regimen to recuperate from our trip (I’m still not completely over that evil mega-cold). Seeing the shows again reminds me of the incredible sense of community portrayed in Stars Hollow.

Stars Hollow, the small fictional town of 10,000 people 30 minutes outside of Hartford, Connecticut, was loosely based on the community of Washington, Connecticut. The Hollow is a tight little ville centered around a square with a gazebo. Most — if not all — of the businesses in the show are on the town square, and pedestrianism seems to be a way of life for the program’s characters. Lorelai and Rory, the two main characters, are rarely seen driving around town. They walk to Doose’s Market. They walk to the Luke’s diner. They walk to the bookstore to watch old films in the evening.

What an enviable lifestyle in so many ways.

It’s difficult for me to imagine a modern town of 10,000 (roughly the population of Siloam Springs when I moved here almost six years ago) actually functioning like this. Particularly, it’s hard to believe that there would be such a variety of useful businesses on the town square. Wouldn’t there be a Walmart along a highway that runs through town? (There is a Walmart in Stars Hollow per a third season show.) How could Doose’s Market, a tiny little corner grocer, compete with that? (There are ways, I know, for small businesses to survive in the midst of grossly large chains. I’m speaking in stereotypes here, as well as from my own experience.)

However, Stars Hollow apparently depicts a fairly typical small New England community, at least according to a Hartford Courant writer in 2002 (quote from Wikipedia):

Unlike the Hartford depicted on Judging Amy, the Stars Hollow of The Gilmore Girls rings true. The town’s antiques shops, small businesses, schools, government and infrastructure look the part. But where Sherman-Palladino has truly excelled, despite her Clueless origins, is in her drawing of colorful Connecticut characters. The populace of Stars Hollow, from the town busybody to the town troubadour, is familiar to any Nutmegger who ever attended a town meeting.

From an All Things Considered story on Tyson’s Corner, just outside of Washington D.C.:

“About 17,000 live here and about 117,000 — give or take — come to work here every day,” Lecos says. “So that incredible imbalance is why you have the absolute commuter nightmare of trying to get 117,000 people in, in one period of time in the morning, and out again at 5 o’clock.”

Commuter nightmare I’d say. The interview also calls Tyson’s Corner, which offers a whopping 167,000 parking spaces, a traffic engineer’s worst nightmare. The All Things Considered story focuses on a potential remodel for the community, trying to raise it’s population to 100,000 and cut down on the number of commuters. The key to that, it appears, is building up instead of out. This is a piece of advice my grandfather has suggested for years, long before the term New Urbanism was coined.

Sounds like a plan. Illustration from the Tyson’s Tomorrow website.

I’m presently reading Kathleen Norris’ Dakota: A spiritual geography. In the book, Norris relays her rural experiences on the western plains of South Dakota. She moved back to the state of her birth after growing up in Hawaii and living in New York City. Her city friends thought she was crazy for moving to an isolated community of 1,600 people, giving up the network of artists surrounding her in The Big Apple.

The book talks often about the struggles of life on the Great American Desert, for artists and for everyone else under that big sky. For instance, she wasn’t able to get grants as a writer living in Lemmon, South Dakota, like she had been able to in the city. But the isolation brings advantages over city life too. From the book:

Like all those who choose life in the slow lane — sailors, monks, farmers — I partake of a contemplative reality. Living close to such an expanse of land I find I have little incentive to move fast, little need of instant information. I have learned to trust the processes that take time, to value change that is not sudden or ill-considered but grows out of the ground of experience.

Living life more slowly gives us the opportunity for intentional observation. This is key for artists, who take in, digest and interpret the world around them. It can be done in the city, but Norris is correct when she says that it’s easier to do in more rural environs.

Would it be ideal for artists to live in a small town outside of a city — preferably a small town with a liberal arts university? This would gain them access to both the networks in a larger metropolitan area and the slower pace of country life that lends itself to more careful observation (and patience in creation, perhaps). Siloam Springs fits this scenario, being about 40 minutes from The Strip, a collection of cities along I-540 250,000 people call home. Seward, Nebraska, is another possibility — and is situated on the wide open prairie. Seward is a nice little community of 6,000 about 30 minutes outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, and is home to Concordia University. What about Grove City, Pennsylvania, 50 miles north of Pittsburgh? Its residents number around 8,000 and it also houses a private Christian college.

I have a hard time, personally, believing that I’d fair well in a small town without the cultural anchor of a liberal arts college, even if it’s only half an hour from a cultural mecca such as New York City. Norris points out more than once in Dakota that the only people in Lemmon to have concerted intellectual discussion with are the clergy and teachers. She also points to a quote from a Dakota professor lamenting the lack of arts in their states. Without art, the professor points out, the states will lose their culture.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

The year after Mom died, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” became my holiday theme.  Not surprisingly, as the Holidays draw near again, it’s resurfacing for me.

Husband and I watched The Family Stone last week during a cheap-skate date (dinner and a movie in, free babysitter–gotta love that!).  I’d kind of forgotten that it had the whole ‘terminally ill woman spends Christmas with her family’ theme going on with it.  I’d never seen it before.

I would have been fine with the whole thing if “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” hadn’t been prominently featured in the film.  I really would have.  But there was Judy Garland singing her heart out, crying those beautiful vintage tears and bringing me back to reflect on the Muddling of it all.

“Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow….  Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow….”  (I’ve quoted that line here before….  It’s a recurring theme, what can I say?)

I laid there that night, after we watched the movie, after I heard the song that packs such an emotional punch for me and all I could think was how prominent the concept of “muddling” has been to us.  And I cried and bawled and wailed, and poor Husband didn’t know what to do with me.

Muddling.  I feel like my whole marriage with Husband has been muddling.  Not because of Husband of course.  Our marriage has played out against the backdrop of a Navy lifestyle, the death of my mother, five grandparents, and several other significant friends and family members.  We’ve experienced the stress of raisingn two young children while enduring the yo-yoing of separating and coming together again with deployments and detachments.    Maybe it’s because I’m codependent and I like to create my own chaos, or maybe it’s because life has really been bits and pieces of chaos.  I just always feel like we’re muddling.  Just doing what we can to make the best of it.  Trying to embrace the beauty and the mess of it all. 

This year, the mess is me.  It’s us.  The mess is our healing.  The mess is Husband and I trying to reconnect as Husband and wife in the wake of all the previous mudding.  It’s the exhaustion and the frustration and the stress and the joy and the exquisite tenderness and the pure amazement of raising our two beautiful children. 

Muddling feels something akin to just surviving.  And my ideal is to do more than survive, but to really live.

But it occurs to me that maybe muddling IS living.  It is part of living life abundant.  Of feeling the heights of the joy and the depths of the pain.  Of facing the messiness that is you. 

It’s not that all has been joyless.  There has been much joy–exquisite joy.  Discovery, and abundant love, and wonder and amazement.  It’s not that the difficulties we’ve faced have been so extraordinary.  We have a very ordinary set of troubles.  We do.

This Christmas song that I love so much isn’t about muddling.  It’s a song about looking forward with hope despite less than ideal circumstances…  and living fully in the joy of the present in the meantime.   It’s not about having joy because of an absence of muddling, but about holding onto the light of now in the midst of it.

I want to learn to, or remember to, or continue to joyfully embrace my muddling.  I want to continue to look forward with hope…  to days of being together with people that I love, both on this side of Heaven and beyond…  to days of feeling together and not like an unraveling mess…  Days of sinking in solidly to the feel of my husband’s arms around me without a burden of cares and worries and disconnections between us.  In the mess and the muddling in the meantime, I want to grasp the reality of the joy of right now with both hands and hold on tight.

My wife was expecting a package from her sister a couple of weeks ago. When it didn’t come and didn’t come — even though UPS claimed it had been delivered — we learned that her sister had the wrong house number for us in her address book.

The package, thus, had been delivered to our neighbors. They had kept it, unopened, not knowing who it was actually intended for. When I knocked on their door after my wife figured out what happened to the box, they were expecting me.

I’ve written before about wanting to know my neighbors, to live incarnationally where I’m planted. I know some of them. I know Joe, Caleb and Jay (who happens to pastor my church). Kevin used to live across the street but is renting his house now, and the house across from his is also a rental. A Salvadorian family lives in the house that our box was delivered to. I’ve had one short conversation with the brother of the owner, who seems to be much more fluent in English than the owner herself.

She didn’t know enough to realize that the name on the package lived right next door.

I’ve had intentions every year of taking Christmas cookies or May Day baskets to my neighbors, but for one reason or another it never gets done. For the last two years I’ve hoped to have a summer grill-fest for the neighborhood. I’ve mentioned it to Jay and Caleb for the past two years, and they’ve been game but it’s never come together. We even have a new neighbor that Jay’s befriended with an incredible patio and one of these uber-ultra-mega stainless steel grill setups (that house has been undergoing a two year long renovation).

I don’t necessarily expect to be friends with all of my neighbors. Joe and I actually worked together remodeling houses before my wife and I moved into our bungalow. I’ve tried to keep the relationship up, but we just don’t have much in common at all. We still wave at each other as we leave for work or come home for lunch; we still chat over the fence a few times a year. Caleb actually knows my wife from college, but we’ve never had he and his wife over for dinner.

In this age of the automobile, Americans seem to pick their friends solely based on mutual interests. I can understand the desire for this as much as anyone. I’ve gone years without someone I could really talk to about the things I’m passionate about, and it’s not very fun. But I don’t think we should limit ourselves to those kinds of relationships just because we can, thanks to cars and the internet.

I’m feeling a bit hypocritical for having written here in the past about proactive neighborliness when I haven’t followed up my intent with action. There might be some legitimate reasons — five of the nearest houses have seen new occupants in the last two years, for instance — but they don’t quell my desire to see communities act more like communities on a geographic level.

I’m resurrecting this draft in light of a Telegraph article that laments the commercial nature of the art market in 2008. In the article, Australian critic Robert Hughes claims that the price of a work of art is, unfortunately, more significant than its meaning. He’s speaking specifically of Damien Hirst, whose auction at Sotheby’s this week exceeded all expectations by garnering something like $222,000,000.00. That’s two-hundred twenty-two million clams.

“The idea that there is some special magic attached to Hirst’s work that shoves it into the multimillion [dollar] realm is ludicrous,” Hughes says. “[The price] has to do with promotion and publicity and not with the quality of the works themselves.”

Amen to that. Hughes traces this Mona Lisa Curse, as he calls it, to the 1960s when da Vinci’s Mona Lisa visited the U.S. People came to see the painting not to see the painting, Hughes claims, but in order to say that they’d seen the painting. From then on collectors began to buy art as an investment, not because they necessarily liked the sculpture or canvas.

Collectors these days are driven by the almighty dollar, and way too much emphasis is placed on trendiness and novelty in art. Can I get another amen. I haven’t liked everything I’ve read from Hughes, but he’s pretty much spot on as portrayed in the Telegraph’s article. These same investor-collectors bid up new works by artists whose works they already own in order to drive up prices. A fine business tactic, I suppose, but one that rightly creates a foul odor among art critics. Further, such practices put the price of new art out of the reach of public museums.

It seems all too easy to fall into the mentality described above, even for those of us who are merely artists or connoisseurs.

Art junky #1: “Sure, I’ve seen that Monet.”
Art junky #2: “Yeah, well I’ve licked that monet.”
Art junky #3: “Ha! My uncle’s cousin’s brother’s niece bought that Monet at Christie’s for more money than the GDP of your stupid little country.”

Apparently this super-riche portion of the art market is quite the juggernaut. Investors seem, Hughes suggests, to possess an eternally optimistic outlook on their purchases. They believe the art they buy will only increase in value. Golly-gee, sounds a little bit like how people thought of real estate two years ago, dunnit? The Australian critic doesn’t fail to point out one Guido Reni, an Italian renaissance painter. Reni was considered by the late 18th century to be near or equal in greatness to Michelangelo. By the 1950s, however, you could buy a ten-foot Reni canvas for a scant $600.

How can we get back into enjoying art? Can we? Or is art just another commodity in our capitalist cultures? Writer and philosopher Francis Schaeffer, in his powerful little treatise Art and the Bible, said plainly that art should be enjoyed.

This is, as I already eluded to, difficult for us. We move too fast. We don’t stop and smell the roses; in fact we mock such platitudes, despite the truth in them. We’re afraid the world is going to pass us by. We need more beer gardens in America, with sculpture in the midst of them.

While there’s certainly something to be said for the industriousness and work ethic of our culture, we lack balance. Regardless of the silly art market and it’s millions of dollars, those of us clinging to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder are equally as guilty as those at the top — those taking part in the Sotheby’s auctions and trading paintings like stock certificates of yore. We’re caught up in our digital technology, making money, advancing our careers or social status etc.

How do we manage to take back the skill of intentional observation? How do we get out of the technology zone in order to slow life down?

There are, of course, multiple answers to those questions. Simply, thus, I end here with a solemn and earnest plea to myself and anyone who ever happens to read this post: Stop and smell the roses. Stop in the park and run your fingers over the stone on the fountain or the bronze sculpture. Maybe you don’t even like the sculpture. Take a break and give it a once-over anyway. Take the time to look at the brushstrokes on the painting in your living room.

And if the painting in your living room doesn’t have tactile brushstrokes, go out and buy one that does.

The newly formed Curator magazine — an International Arts Movement project — posted a good read today by Brian Watkins called An American Beer Garden.

Watkins starts by talking about his impression of a beer garden while recently in Munich:

They have beer gardens in Munich. Outside. In parks. Where children play, and moms walk with a stroller in one hand and a beer stein in the other. They drink, communally, outside. In the middle of a weekday afternoon. Some even actually wear lederhosen. They share giant picnic tables with complete strangers and awestruck tourists like me. They guzzle liter after liter of ridiculously good beer out of massive glass beer steins in public. And the most remarkable thing: generally speaking, they do this with extreme civility, without the slightest whiff of debauchery.

He then goes on to lampoon the idea of a beer garden in America. A beer garden in America, Watkins suggests, would first be a curiosity, second a commercial hot spot (“McBeerstein” anyone?), thirdly a local police nightmare and — just before the trees walk away from the disaster — is lastly paved over by suburbia.

The question the article raises, though, is a good one. Can Americans duplicate the community found in a German beer garden? Would the availability of such outdoor spaces “force us to experience nature with strangers, start new traditions, get out of our cars and malls, encourage family interaction, and create relationships and spirited conversation?” Watkins lays out what he thinks it will take for something like this to succeed in the states. For example, more pies cooling on window sills, more enormous squash featured in local vegetable competitions and the Cubs winning the World Series. He sums up the opportunity with this equation:

And if you’re not into beer, why not wine. Or tea. Or coffee. How about a nice mango lassi on a hot afternoon. No Kool-Aid or other lo-fi beverages, please; surely there’s a correlation between the quality of what’s consumed and the quality of the adjacent conversation. The point is that there’s something in the nature of a German beer garden that Americans need to pay attention to. We lack this kind of forum and community in our culture, mostly. Our culture would benefit from such a space. We as people will benefit from relaxed, open-air conversation and new friends.

Maybe we take baby steps, Watkins posits, starting with informal gatherings in the park. Later we can add the drink, when “the awkwardness subsides.”

Photo from Wikipedia by Fritz Geller-Grimm.

Slate has a brief and interesting spot on why architects don’t retire. The article’s timing is appropriate in light of the whole Brett Favre (pronounced fah-VRUH) fiasco and Lance Armstrong’s reentry into professional cycling this week. Don’t athletes realize their time is limited and they better have something else to fall back on when the joints just don’t agree with certain punishment any longer?

Moving on though. I’m not sure — nor is my generation from what I understand of it — about the whole idea of retirement anyway; it wasn’t even a possibility for most people until the 20th century. Sure, as we age we’ll have to adjust and slow down some depending on our health and trade, but the idea of retirement as posited and practiced by my parent’s and grandparent’s generations just isn’t something that interests me. This probably relates back to my active personality and my relative youth (which is quickly fading, as it’s wont to do).

And of course, the fact that I’m an aspiring artist. The Slate article makes a distinction between the unretirement of artists and architects, but since the spot is about architects I’ll start there.

Architecture is a wonderfully complex profession. I’ve stated a number of times on this blog that this multi-faceted nature is a significant part of why I’m so enamored with the practice of designing buildings. To do it well, one must learn and utilize a wide range of skills including psychology, sociology, drawing, planning, color theory, engineering, building design and so on. Thus the thrust of the article points out how long it takes a person to master all of these skills and put them into a work. It talks about how Gehry, the Corb, Kahn and Mies van der Rohe were all in their 60’s before they hit their stride. Why retire when you’re just getting good at what you love?

The piece doesn’t fail to point out that creating a building is a team effort, and these big names are surrounded by deft assistance in their studios, which makes working into your more fragile years more realistic than in some other careers.

But what about artists? The following is from the article, the distinction I mentioned earlier:

In old age, painters have the choice of retreating to their studios and picking the subject that interests them. Architects don’t have that luxury; they depend on clients for their work. All architects have experienced periods when the clients stopped coming, for one reason or another — when there was no work in the office and staff had to be let go, oblivion beckoning. So when clients continue to knock at the door with large, interesting commissions, it’s very hard to say no.

That makes some sense, but what I’ve always thought kept painters and sculptors going into their seventies and eighties and nineties — while their paper-pushing counterparts were hitting the links or traveling Europe — was simply a real passion and love of their job. For me, it’s easy to see why someone working in an office or factory would want to retire; that’s not the kind of work most people will love (there are, as in most cases, exceptions). But I’ve been creative since I was in grade school. I’ve drawn, written, sculpted of my own volition and on my own time since I was in junior high. It’s second nature to me. I’ll always do it and enjoy it (so far as I can tell).

I’m curious to hear other opinions on this particular issue. Are you looking forward to retirement? Are you an artist? What will you do if you retire? Are the points in the Slate article and my own personal sentiments something that you can grab hold of or am I way off base?

Photo from Wikipedia.

More from Botton’s Architecture of Happiness. The first chapter establishes the fact that good architecture won’t necessarily make us happier, which was unexpected but is true. Spousal tension, death and destruction happen in beautiful homes as much as in shacks, he points out. But the chapter ends with this:

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch. Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things . . .

But if we accept the legitimacy of the subject nevertheless, then a new and contentious series of questions at once opens up. We have to confront the vexed point on which so much of the history of architecture pivots. We have to ask what exactly a beautiful building might look like.

The book is quite a fun read, well-written so far (with one or two paragraphical exceptions), and I’m very eager to see where it goes. If you couldn’t tell.

Photo from Wikipedia

I didn’t join the blogosphere early enough to say that I remember the good old days, but TechCrunch noted today that historic blogger Robert Scoble is lamenting the superficial nature of the community in 2008. Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch writes, “There was a time when a good idea (like a cheap Web tablet) would be chewed on for a month by the blogosphere, going back and forth between different bloggers, and getting refined along the way.”

Scoble and Schonfeld are speaking in the context of tech blogging, but I get a sense that their complaint can be applied to the blogosphere at large. The Aesthetic Elevator strives to be a forum where such chewing goes on. At this point, most of the chewing is done by me and a handful of regular commenters. My hope is that — especially with the addition of three new contributors — this blog will still one day be a place where significant conversations about art, faith and culture take place.

My wife and I often wonder why and how certain blogs get the traffic and attract the conversation that they do. The Aesthetic Elevator gets quite a bit more traffic than Old World Swine (at least, according to Quantcast), however, the Swine garners quite a few more comments from readers than the Elevator ever experiences. Both of these are quality blogs with, in my opinion, fairly original material and good writing.

Other enigmatic examples abound. Last week I happened upon a lengthy post on why the American church should get out of the marriage business. The post garnered 94 comments before I visited, and it was poorly written. In the first ten comments, half of the respondents expressed confusion. Perhaps — hopefully — the writing is normally better on that particular site. Equally puzzling is the kind of traffic numerous personal weblogs receive, where people go on about their daily life and personal interests in no certain manner.

Maybe personal websites are more of what people need from the internet these days. They are, obviously, more personal, and the more our culture diverges from a community based structure the more we need to replace relationships and face-to-face time past generations experienced. Our built environments, our work environments don’t encourage interaction and conversation like they may have in the past.

And as a sidenote on our modern work environment, yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the dreaded cubicle.

The Aesthetic Elevator is an animal in between the news driven styles of TechCrunch or Engadget and the angst and rambles of personal blogs. All are valid, and all overlap to a degree in their content and tone. I often wonder, though, if there is less of a market for this Aesthetic animal — driven by deeper than average theorizing and covering less than mainstream subject matter — than for news and personal anecdotes. I guess I answered my own question, largely, by noting the “less than mainstream subject matter.”

Regardless, I’m not after traffic or a larger market for this website (though I’d take more traffic, mais oui!). It was pointed out somewhere on line sometime last year that how many visitors a blog boasts of is less important than the kind of visitors regularly visiting. Fifty intense, conversational regulars is far better for a forum like The Aesthetic Elevator than 5,000 random viewers. Will fifty intense, conversational web surfers please raise their hand!

The included photograph is of a piece of foil I use to wrap my small sculptures in before smoking them in the electric kiln. Not all of the foil swatches look like this when the smoking is over, but a few of them do.

This is the kind of thing a lot of people overlook in life. We generally move too fast to observe incidental or natural — and beautiful — occurrences such as this in our environments. The foil is a tool; not even a tool, this is more like a package. It’s something people might discard without paying any attention to.

Next time you sip your coffee, make it a point to observe the finish on the mug. Is it metallic, brushed or polished? Is it glazed, glossy or matte? Is the texture smooth, milky or silky? Are their any imperfections on the surface — heaven forbid, especially if it’s not handmade.

The next email can wait. Facebook will still be there if you linger with your beverage another three minutes. And if you make it a practice to intentionally observe your surroundings, you will likely be better at whatever it is you do, be it programming or the arts.

I’m going to go take my own advice with a morning brew of Ethiopian Yrgacheffe (fair trade, organic, shade grown etc, etc). Good stuff. Cream and raw sugar please.

This is one of my favorite mugs, although (hypocritically?) I don’t use it much. I’ve gotten used to the larger mass-produced mugs we have in the house. The one above is a bit small. Regardless, the one in the photo provides a much better beverage experience. It was done by a grad student at the University of Nebraska when I was earning my undergraduate degree.

The contrast in textures and colors is wonderful. The blue glaze crazed like crazy, and the rim isn’t a perfect circle — which I like. There’s a small crack on the bottom between the foot and vessel; it was on the “seconds” shelf when I bought it. This cup, the appearance in color and form, reminds me of Scandinavian design, which I’ve long been a fan of. And as a guy I love that the space between the handle and vessel is enough to actually be functional. I’ve noticed that a lot of mugs crafted by women bear handles too small to my larger, clumsier man-hands.

Your turn.

A few years back I began reading a compilation edited by Jeremy Begbie titled Beholding the Glory. I haven’t finished all (or even most) of the essays, but one thing from one of them I did read really stuck with me, a most simple point that had yet to be brought to my attentive attention despite growing up in the church.

That point is this: God affirmed the worth of creation, though fallen and out of His favor, by sending Jesus to Earth in human form. How wonderfully plain and straightforward.

Not long after I read that essay I picked up a book by Randy Alcorn titled Heaven. This theologically rich but down to Earth look at what the Bible says about Heaven further affirmed the value of a physical Creation. This may come as a surprise to a lot of Evangelicals. A large part of Alcorn’s Scriptural exploration debunks common and perpetuated myths about the afterlife such as getting your wings, playing harps on clouds and the oft-despised, never-ending high-in-the-sky church service.

Alcorn suggests — based on a myriad of Scripture — that the New Jerusalem will be right here, on the same dirt you and I trip over today. Further, he points to the possibility that art we make in the here and now will be on the “New Earth.” In C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, in The Last Battle, the followers of Aslan step through a door into Aslan’s country. The children see, on the other side of the door, their home, while Narnia behind them — on the other side of the threshold resting on the same ground — is swallowed up in darkness. They see their city, their countryside, their own houses. Alcorn points to Lewis’ illustration as the best way to describe, with such brevity, what he understands about the New Heaven and the New Earth from the Bible. Thus, if we subscribe to Alcorn’s understanding, though this fallen world will be necessarily purified, restored, aspects and objects of our lives here and now will carry over into the new world, the New Jerusalem.

There’s much too much in this book to go into any further here, suffice it to say that it made sense to me, was backed up by the Bible I believe in and shows the value that God places on His Creation, despite its fallen state. As an artist, this is an incredible point of view. It is a burgeoning hope in the face of political corruption, greed, famine and so much sorrow that we see on a day to day basis. God knows about this tyranny, deception, disregard and pride so symptomatic of man’s fall from grace.

Incarnation: And yet, He still saw fit to tread this dirt.

Restoration: And still, He plans to restore this soil on His return.

As a tactile artist, as someone who is innately driven to create physical objects, palpable environments, these observations mean the world.

Adding: Anglican bishop NT Wright was interviewed by Steven Colbert this week, where the bishop says again what Alcorn wrote in his book. Via ThinkChristian.

**Note–the image above is a painting by Makoto Fujimura.  More information is below.

So seriously, could my last post have been any more whiny?  I don’t think so, Tim.  The planes REALLY WERE loud though.  They were.

And then, the night after I post it, Ann from  Holy Experience, surprisingly and humblingly linked back here in one of her posts after I joined the Gratitude Community.  Yeah, you wanna talk about feeling like a fraud.  *Puts brown paper sack over her face*

Anyway, I’m still fighting off the grumpiness.  We finally got some sunshine yesterday and for most of today and I can’t even tell you how much that helped.  I’m still cagey, I still miss Husband, and for whatever reason–possibly just the time of year–I am feeling the missing of my mother in a raw way once again.  But that’s ok.

That’s not even what I want to write about today.

Every so often, I rediscover Makoto Fujimura.  And it’s always a huge treat when I do.  He’s an artist, but better than that, he is an incarnational artist.  His paintings are acts of worship–vessels which point to the creator.  Husband and I have a particular fondness for Makoto Fujimura.  And I gotta tell you why.

So it was December of our senior year of college.  He who would be Husband was in an art class which he was loving (I  believe art literally saved his life, but that’s another post), and he told me that his class had been given the assignment to go visit the St. Louis Art Museum.  Of course he followed up with, “Want to go with me?”

The St. Louis Art Museum has always been a special place for us.  It was the venue of one of our first non-dates, and the venue of one of our first date-dates.  We knew one another’s favorite pieces and we weren’t afraid of sharing appallingly non-artsy comments with one another like, “OK.  Doesn’t that look like a jenga game?”

Of course, I agreed to go with him.  Upon arriving and after an emergency visit to the facilities, we agreed to begin in the Asian wing.  Now you must know one thing about Husband and I and our art-browsing techniques.  When we find a painting or work that we love, we can’t just stand there and say, “ooooo, ahhhh.”  We have to sit with it.

And so it came to pass that quite unexpectedly, we came to a painting in the Asian wing of SLAM (which had never really been my favorite wing) that made me literally gasp.  It was called “January Hour–Epiphany,” and I remember just wanting to drink it in.  We got closer to the painting and found that there were words painted very subtley in Gold leaf–specifically the passage from John 1 where John the Baptist is asked about his practice of baptizing folks and replies, “I baptize with water.  Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” (John 1:26-27).  I can’t tell you what it was about the painting that captured me so.  But immediately, I knew this was one we needed to sit with.  So we did. 

I continued to drink in the beauty of this painting (which is much bigger and even more stunning in person), when suddenly He who would be Husband was on the floor…  On one knee….  So my mind is racing and at first I’m going, “Why is he on the ground?  Is he ok?  Did he pass out?  No…  He’s upright…  Hmmm…  He seems to have something in his hand…  ACKACKACK!!!!ITSARING!!!!”

I can’t tell you what it is he said–how he asked.  I wonder if he even remembers.  I just remember not being able to breathe, and eventually choking out a yes….  Almost hyperventilating…  Not being able to believe that this was actually happening.  Husband asked if he could kiss me–just once–because we were one of those weird couples who didn’t kiss.   I said yes to that too, and I remember thinking how very soft his lips were.

We sat there a little longer.  When we weren’t staring gooey-eyed into one another’s eyes we continued to drink in the cool, breathtaking beauty of ‘our painting.’  And, ok, yes, occasionally, I stared down at the, also stunningly beautiful, saphire ring on my left hand. 

And that was that.  The rest is history, and five and a half years later, I’m sitting here, wishing that Husband was here with me.  In a couple weeks he will be, and a few weeks after that, he’ll be beside me again to stay, and a new chapter of our lives together will be under way (which is much better than Husband being underway, let me tell you).

So that’s why Makoto Fujimura is special to us.  But even if his painting hadn’t been there to witness the moment of our engagement, he’d still be an incredible artist, with incredible things to say about God, creativity, and community.  The more I learn about him and his take on faith and creativity and art, the more that I hope that being in front of his painting at that moment might be a sort of benediction over our marriage.  I hope so.

On the morning bike ride I noticed new signage on the old Daddio’s building in downtown Siloam Springs. I’ve been told this building was, in its distant past, a bank. More recently it’s housed a coffee shop and pizza parlor if I remember rightly, although in the five years I’ve lived in Siloam it hasn’t functioned for anything more than storage.

The signs read as follows:

This is one of the downtown partnership buildings which I mentioned last month, a collaborative effort between the Houston family and Drake Renovations, as you can tell from the sign in the window of the building.

I also stopped at the farmer’s market for some local produce on my way home this morning. I arrived a little early; some of the vendors were still setting up. The market was recently moved to Bob Henry Park from the corner of University and Mt. Olive. The former location provided better visibility and a more central location in the small downtown area. I’m not sure why it was moved.

The market is a small affair for our small town of 14,000 people, but it seems have grown in the last two years. It bothers me, in the new location, that the vendors are so spread out. You can see in the photo three blue tents, peddling flowers and some produce, about half a block from the couple in the foreground. The spread goes another half block to the left with tables full of plants, pillows and — thankfully — farm fresh eggs.

This morning I purchased flowers, dill and fresh tomatoes. The advantage of local food, among other things, is knowing where it comes from. I was amused earlier this week when some government bureaucrat hollered on the news about needing new laws so that consumers know where there produce comes from, in relationship to the recent salmonella outbreak.

Carfree Tokyo linked back to me and reminded me of this James Kunstler podcast, The Tragedy of Suburbia, which I mentioned in March. I re-watched it today and thought this quote was worth sharing:

This [slide] happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town, and remember, to create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space. So how is that being accomplished here? If you stand on the apron of the Wal-Mart over here, and try to look at the Target store over here, you can’t see it because of the curvature of the Earth. That’s nature’s way of telling you that you’re doing a poor job of defining space.

Emphasis mine. I laughed out loud at the asteroid and Earth curvature commentary. Kunstler lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Despite my last couple of days being a little bit ‘blah,’ I think I’ve turned a corner on the PPD front.  I am so grateful for that.

It seems like a few different things have shaken loose and suddenly I find myself on an upswing instead of a down.

For this cynical, jaded, faithless believer, I was surprised to find that the first breakthrough was spiritual.  (This might begin to sound a little Christianesey.  I’m not typically a Christianesey kind of girl, and I know that not all of my readers appreciate Christianesiness.  Hang in there.)  It occurred to me while I was reading some great stuff by John Eldredge, that there is an enemy of my heart.  There is someone who wishes for me to be taken out…  To be rendered useless and thus incapable of being truly who I am as Val and of doing those things that Val is truly meant to do.  Suddenly I saw so very clearly that I was being beaten up.  I saw myself just being sucker-punched and pummelled over and over and over again by lies:  I’m stupid, I’m a bad Mom, I’m a bad wife, I’ll never get it together, I’m worthless, I’m powerless, I’m incapable, No one cares, I am a burden, I cannot depend on anyone, I am meant to handle life alone, and on and on and on…. 

Seeing this clicked so many things into place.  First of all, I realized that this truly was a battle.  This wasn’t just something I could sit down and skate through.  I had to stand up and fight.  I suddenly had compassion for myself and my situation for the first time in a long time.  I was being BEATEN.  Brutally BEATEN.  No wonder life felt so awful.  You don’t blame the victim of a beating.  You don’t shake her and say, “Why are you bleeding?  Why can’t you just get it together you dummy?”  You realize that brutality was done to this person and you see her with compassion.  For the first time, I was able to see myself that way.  Not as a Mom and a woman who just couldn’t hack it, but as someone who had sustained a brutality to the soul and to the spirit. 

And if I was being  beaten, there was a reason.  Something or someone wanted to neutralize me.  If something or someone was fighting so hard to take me out, then surely that meant I was WORTH something.  Surely it MEANS there is SOMETHING in me to contribute, to bring forth into this world.  The darkness at work in the world has been working to extinguish the light within me.  Call it good verses evil, call it The Spirit at work in me verses the one at work in the world.  Whatever you call it, something clicked.  Since then, I’ve been soaking deeply in this paradigm shift finally understanding that my heart is good.  And firmly believing in a DEEP way in the goodness of God’s heart toward me, and His desire to be involved in my life.  Pretty heady stuff. 

The other stuff has been simple technical tweakings:  The sun is out more.  How I glory in the sunshine!  I love the colors it brings to the world.  My favorite thing lately has been soaking in the warmness of it.  And then shortly after the crazy God-stuff changes, I had a slight change with my meds–nothing more than my pharmacy changing manufacturers, and suddenly the ‘lightbulb’ that came on earlier in my journey came on again.

So I’m turning a corner.  And I’m experiencing more joy in my life than I have in ages.  Literally.  I feel better in a way that I haven’t since long before Mom died or the whole Navy adventure began.  I feel like a whole different person.  And I love it.

Life is turning a corner too.  This week will mark the beginning of our last longish stretch of Husband being away.  And there is a good chance that it will be THE last stretch of awayness for a very long time.  We’re heading into Shore Duty.  For so long I felt so guilty about that…  That our Sea Duty days were over.  That it wasn’t going to be US doing the deployments.  I felt like *we* hadn’t given enough.  Like our time doing deployments and detachments weren’t worthy enough sacrifices.  I’m beginning to realize, though, that shore duty is a built in part of a Naval career.  And it’s ok for us to experience it too.  We’ve done separations for five years.  We will have spent a full two of them apart.  It’s time for our family to experience stability.  It’s time for us to have some togetherness.  It’s time for Husband and I to learn how to function as a unit without a looming separation changing the dynamics up constantly.  After three more years and this stint of Shore Duty, our plan at this point is to get out.  This is our stepping stone to civilian life.  Things are really changing. 

And it is good.  I pray that it will continue to be good.  I pray that no matter the circumstances, that we are on the cusp of a sweet chapter of our lives:  One full of learning, and growing, and stretching, and one full of this abiding joy that I’m just beginning to rediscover.

James S. Russell, Bloomberg.com’s architecture critic, reviewed a book by former Boston University president John Silber which is titled Architecture of the Absurd: How `genius’ disfigured a practical art. He didn’t like the book, and thus my reply to Russell’s review won’t be about the book. But I would like to take a few of quotes from the piece of writing, beginning with the following.

A great many people seem to take personal umbrage at architecture that fails to speak to them in a language they understand, especially if it is expensive architecture, designed by someone famous.

Doesn’t a diversity of expression make sense in a nation devoted to innovation, aspiration and individualism?

In art or architecture, umbrage is offered aplenty from many corners of the country when the viewer can’t personally connect with a building or sculpture. Depending on how the distaste is presented, I don’t really have a problem with people’s personal aesthetics — as long as they are confident in their own tastes and, hopefully, able to elaborate on them in the course of conversation. The more interesting half of the above quote is the second sentence.

To answer Russell’s question in said sentence, “yes.” A diversity of expression makes sense in America with respect to our innovation, aspiration and our ethnic variety. We are a large country with many heritages and local cultures (although I fear that large enterprising industries such as Wal-Mart and McDonald’s have done damage to local color in the states). I’m not so much on board with the fervent individualism so prevalent in the U.S., but I understand that the author isn’t necessarily making an endorsement of this as much as making an observation. Further, it seems as though communal living is making a bit of a comeback. For instance, friends of mine moving back to their hometown of Chicagoland are looking into a large building being converted into a community-based living situation (I’ve forgotten the word they’re using for the idea). Hopefully this isn’t just a fling like it was in the ’60s and ’70s, but a genuine shift in our country’s culture that leads us to be a less isolated and more interactive society.

Adding to the appearance that we’re embracing a more collaborative and open way of living is this quote from Russell, referring to Frank Gehry’s Stata Center:

Scientists themselves sought a building design that would ease communication and help break down institutional boundaries that impede research. These are crucial research imperatives that are of concern throughout the scientific community . . .

For meeting and sharing ideas, Stata seems to succeed admirably. On several visits, I’ve seen the building bustle, with its main-level internal street full of people working alone and hanging out together. Many universities would love to duplicate Stata’s buzz.

Russell goes on to observe that Silber seems unable to abide risk-taking in new construction for fear of failure. “He’s hardly unusual,” the architecture critic goes on to say. “We’ve become a nation that works, shops and learns in enervating warehouses that often do not even rise to the level of mediocrity.” I remember reading, as a freshman in college, a series of essays about Wal-Mart. Most of the essays talked about the damage the Bentonville behemoth did to local economies, but I remember one addressing the aesthetics of the buildings. It made a comment suggesting most Wal-Mart buildings were little more than gray boxes. Amusingly, an exec in the company replied to this assertion by referring to the retail giant’s stores as “handsome.”

Most, if not all, Wal-Mart buildings are not handsome. They are basically enervating warehouses. Some of the company’s newer retail locations break from the gray shoe-box mold, but I imagine they only do so with much angst. Up in Lincoln, Nebraska, Wal-Mart first wanted to build downtown, asking for two whole city blocks: One for the building, and one for parking. City planners rightfully balked at the idea. A few years later a proposal was made for a store near the mall which fell through as well. The first, snicker, “handsome” Wal-Mart in this city of more than 200,000 finally went up on the northern outskirts of town. The second location was built only a few years ago — at least a decade after the first — and boasts a brick facade with green trim, just like the buildings adjacent to it. Very few Wal-Marts use brick. I can guess, with a lot of certainty, that this was required by the city and or the developer.

The giant is beginning to make some concessions, and local culture should benefit from this if they play their cards right. I love the quote from the ill-reviewed and recent Rocky and Bullwinkle film, when Bullwinkle asks Rocky “Haven’t we been here before?” as they drive across the country. Not every community needs to look strikingly different from all others, but possessing a somewhat unique visual identity in line with surrounding culture and geography is appropriate and desirable.

Read another take on Gehry’s Stata building here. Photo by Andy Ryan from MIT’s website.