Living by Making | Issue 32
I didnt publish again last week. A crazy week of travel prep and trying to get things done before leaving for five weeks. I didnt realize I would have that much to do. So, this issue is the beginning of a extended trip to Ireland and a what should be a very interesting trip.
At the Workbench
My boots are under the chair. Tall ones, the muck kind, built for wet grass and the sort of mud that will swallow a boot whole if you are not paying attention, and I wore them for one very specific reason. In about thirty hours they are going to meet Irish ground, rural and soft, the kind of place that does not show up on postcards, and right now they are sitting empty under a concourse table in Denver while I eat a protein bar and wait. I had to pull them off going through security this morning because they are too tall for the machine to read through cleanly, which felt like a strange kind of preview, taking off the boots meant for Ireland before I had even left the country.
The little commuter plane out of my hometown was packed solid, so they made everyone with a bag bigger than a purse gate check it, mine included. Somewhere over the last hour it went into the belly of that plane, and I sat in my seat a little longer than I needed to after we landed, listening through the wall to the sound of bags being thrown and the crew swearing at whatever wasn’t cooperating down there.
I picked up my bag at the gate, hauled it across two terminals to the gate I will be leaving from tonight, ate something, opened my notebook, and reached down for the water bottle clipped to the side of my pack. Gone. The whole rig, bottle, holster, and strap, torn clean off somewhere between there and here. It was the cheap plastic bottle, not the good one, so it is an easy loss to shrug at, and I have a solid twelve hours before boarding to go find a new one.
Before any of that, my sweetheart had already caught the one thing I actually would have needed. We got to the airport early, sat on a bench waiting for security to open, and somewhere in the conversation she asked if I had my driver’s license, which the international permit sitting in my bag is worthless without. I did not. She drove the fifteen minutes home and the fifteen back before I had even gone through the line. I noticed the noticing all morning, the boots, the bottle, the license. That is what a long layover does if you let it.
Under the Surface
None of this is actually about a water bottle. I have been an artist and photographer since high school, a combat photographer after that, then a stretch running a flatbed animation camera at a multimedia house, and by 1987 I was twenty seven and starting my third year of art school, still certain fine art was the thing I was actually built for. My professors did not agree, or at least they never said so out loud. What they said, almost daily, was how hard it is to make an actual living as an artist, and never once did they turn that same energy toward all the different ways a studio art degree could be used. I believed them.
I switched from art to accounting and business, which is probably not the natural landing spot for someone who is dyslexic and has ADD, though I do not regret it exactly. It was simply a thing that happened, the kind of decision that feels reasonable in the room and only shows its real size decades later. What I was doing before they talked me out of it was fiber art. Felt. Paper made from plants I grew myself specifically to make paper from. Sourcing wool, learning to full it and needle it into something with structure. I was, in every real sense, doing what I am flying toward right now but never really took it past the beginner intrigue, interest and skill level.
Studio Notes
The property in Clasheen that I am visiting is not a hobby garden. Something like twenty-five years have gone into it, thousands of specific plants, flowers, shrubs, and trees, chosen and grown on purpose for eco printing, natural dyeing, and a permaculture way of keeping a yard and garden. I did not pack dye and I did not pack a recipe. I packed a stack of blank silk and the intention to go looking once I land, which is close to exactly what I was doing at twenty seven with homegrown paper stock and a bag of raw wool, before somebody convinced me it was not a serious enough way to spend a life. Thirty nine years is a long time to take the long way back to something. Sitting in that college studio being told how hard it would be, I would not have believed I’d end up here anyway, just later, and by a much longer road than the one I was on.
On the Table
There is a place in the Nebraska sandhills I have not been able to stop thinking about since I started reading up on where I am headed to stay in Ireland. My mother grew up in the sandhills, a sod house on a hill with the Dismal River running at the base of it, and I spent enough of my own childhood visiting that ground that it got into me the way a place only gets into you before you are old enough to know it is happening.
Grass that moves like water. Plants and birds and insects that exist nowhere else quite the same way. A kind of quiet that is not empty, just unhurried. I never lived there full time myself, only visited, but it shaped something in me early enough that I have never quite been able to explain it. Reading about Clasheen this week, the plants gathered and grown there over decades, the whole property built around slow, deliberate attention to what is actually there, I recognized the vibe of it before I ever recognized the place.
It feels like home. Not anywhere I have lived. Home anyway. I do not have a tidy way to explain that, and I am not sure I am supposed to yet. Some places seem to know you before you know them, the same way, maybe, that fiber work never actually stopped being mine even during the thirty nine years I told myself I had left it behind.
In Good Company
Watch: The Eyes Have It, a 2003 60 Minutes segment on John Stilgoe and the discipline of looking closely at ordinary places. Seeing him do on camera the same thing he does on the page made the book worth pulling back off the shelf.
Read: John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic has been on my shelf for years, and a long layover felt like the right occasion to open it again. Stilgoe’s whole case is that the ordinary, overlooked edges of a place, a parking lot, a drainage ditch, a concourse nobody lingers in on purpose, are worth actual attention, and that the person willing to look gets rewarded for it. You can order it at most of your local bookstores. Support mom and pop businesses first. If you can’t get it locally, here is an affiliate link for your convenience.
Listen: Wendell Berry reading his own poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” recorded for On Being. Under three minutes, and it did more for the twelve hours in that Denver concourse than the protein bar did. https://onbeing.org/poetry/the-peace-of-wild-things/
A Quiet Note
Trips like this one, the slow accumulation of small true things in an unfamiliar place, are exactly what Unhurried Letters is built around. If you want the version of this one that shows up on paper, with a signed, limited edition, fine art print, a postcard and something to actually hold onto, that is where it lives. If that pace sounds like something you want more of, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.
Leave the Light On
I still have hours before boarding. The boots are still dry, still under the chair. Somewhere on the other side of that flight is a garden built for exactly the kind of work I was doing before anyone told me not to, in a place that already feels like the sandhills felt when I was a kid, for reasons I cannot fully account for yet. I do not know what to do with that other than get on the plane and find out.
Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Tio
“It feels like home. Not anywhere I have lived. Home anyway.”
References
References
John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: A Field Guide to the Everyday Landscape (1998)
Touring Harvard Yard with John Stilgoe —
John Stilgoe, Writing History for the Mainstream —
The Eyes Have It, 60 Minutes, 2003 —
Unhurried Letters: https://unhurriedletters.com
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