What grows wild

We live in a really beautiful place. North Guilford, Connecticut still has woods and farms, and lots of things that grow wild. Today while biking to work I saw a deer with a full set of antlers.


Wild snapdragons make me very happy. When I was a child, my mother grew hybrid (cultivated? tame?) snapdragons, and I would pinch a flower with fingers on each side of the "hinge" and make the snapdragon open and close its mouth. You can do the same thing with the wild flowers, they're just littler.


But my favorite thing that grows wild is the berries. We are usually away when the wonderful wild blackberries ripen, but this year our timing has been perfect. I spend 45 minutes or an hour getting scratches all over my arms and legs to get a pint of delicious, seedy blackberries. My mother used to make jars and jars of blackberry jam; we three boys would be sheathed in lined bluejeans and rubberized raincoats to pick the berries, so we wouldn't get scratched or be exposed to poison ivy. As an adult I still love the berries but am willing to be more scratched up and not quite so boiled.


We also have wineberries growing wild. They're a slightly sticky, sweet berry with a mild flavor. The have the great virtues of growing in abundance, being far less prickly, and providing wonderful color contrast in our berry bowls!

Artisans

Last week we went to the Guilford Handcrafts Fair. I use the title "Artisans" for this post because "Handcrafts" does not do justice to the beauty and originality of the work we saw. The work above was created by an artist who has invented wall hangings that combine beautiful woodworking with fabric creations. She saw me taking pictures, and let me know that while she did not mind, I had better ask people before taking photographs of their original work.


Some of the artists said, "Sure, go ahead." The man who made these glass globes said, "Good luck -- they're pretty hard to capture in a photo because of the depth of the optical illusion!"


The shades on these lamps are made of wood veneer panels in a process invented by the artist.


The woman who made these pens asked what I was going to do with the photos. She gave her permission after I told her that I post my photos to a blog that circulates among my friends. She liked this picture of her pens, and told me that people making these unique handcrafts have good reason to be careful and suspicious. She said that more than one artist has seen their unique designs appear by the thousands, only slightly modified, on the shelves of Target or other big-box stores.


Throughout the crafts fair I was delighted and impressed not only by the quality and beauty of the work, but also by the sense of humor at play in so much of it.


I strongly urge you to see these creative fun collections for yourself. The Guilford Handcrafts Fair won't be held again until next July, but many of the same artists will be at the New Hampshire Craftsmen's Fair August 7 - 15 in Newbury, New Hampshire.

Morning Mist

The weather has been very hot and humid. As I ride my bike around North Guilford in the early morning, the air is heavy and thick. Everything looks a little less distinct; the shapes at the back end of my field of vision look a little more magical.


We do generally adjust to the scope of vision that we have. We never notice the physiological "blind spot" (scotoma) that is in the center of each eye's field of vision (it's a result of the fact that we have no rods or cones at the place in the back of the eye where the optic nerve attaches). And when we went to the movies to see Toy Story 3 in 3D earlier this week, our weird glasses made the screen look eye-popping for awhile, although by the end of the film we had grown used to the 3D effect and it seemed "normal." Sometimes during my misty bike ride, it's almost as if the mist isn't there any more; it has become the new normal.

And then the view draws my attention again. Sometimes I am trying to see through the mist, sometimes trying to see the sheep or trees that are transformed by partial obscurity. And sometimes I just see the mist itself. Maybe its not that any one point of view is most pleasurable, but rather the opportunity to have different points of view as I move along.

Art

Michelangelo's powerful statue of Moses, frustrated by the people's refusal to attend to the word of God, sits in a church a few hundred yards from the Roman Coliseum. (If you missed last week'a blog post, Sarah and I were on her choir's trip to Italy.) A few miles away from the Moses statue, people are lined up to stand for hours to get a ticket allowing them to wind hours more through the Vatican Museum, to get 15 minutes sardined with other tourists craning up to see the Sistine chapel. Because of the constraints of our trip, we did not have the opportunity to see the Sistine Chapel. No one was lined up to see the statute of Moses, which was one of the more beautiful pieces of art we saw.


On the other hand, as famous sites go, the tower of Pisa (and the church complex around it) fell into the category of "things I'd seen pictures of but until you get there, you have no idea." I had a visceral reaction to the tower of Pisa that reminded me of seeing the Grand Canyon. It is bigger and more beautiful than I could have imagined, and it is leaning further than seems possible.

But the strongest reaction I had to any art was hearing Confirma Hoc, a song in Latin, performed by Sarah's girls' choir in a 16th century church in Rome. The music was written with overlapping parts, and the perfect harmonies echoed and swirled in the cavernous marble space. I was not the only person with tears streaming down my face.

Some years ago, in a monologue performance, Lily Tomlin held up an (imaginary) can of Campbell's soup; then an (imaginary) Andy Warhol painting of a can of Campbell's soup. "Soup, Art," she said. "Art? Soup?"

I am prepared to live without knowing exactly what art is, or even what "great" art is. But certainly our lives are enriched by experiencing the work that moves us deeply.