“A containment, a threshold, a place to go…”

Notes on “Going to the Meadow”

Land locked and forlorn, the ink outlining the Great Lakes form a forgotten memory of “a beginning / end,” a memory or a friend. Like the moving Delaware, just beyond these window panes, this spot may feel familiar, but Her current is always moving and never quite the same.

Within the “source” there’s a “paradigm shift” threaded between a collective and community betwixt consumption and care.

The words speak loudly and concisely as well as consistently, as they seem to echo throughout Earthen materials, formed by human hands. Where bamboo, some still green, form the hull of a ship, lashings and loosely bound yarn and string and metal seem to support the whole of existence. From nature to mater to revolving stone. Forgotten earth and hidden truths, undone and revealing all the same.

Textiles and shed cotton take their place among wax imprints and metal structures, like candled memorials — a living memory, deconstructed.

Braided rope, and knotted line sustain this massive skeleton-like vessel. Like Queen Mab, who plats the manes of horses in the night, only to speak as well as spy, one can feel the power of life itself within wisps of lithesome mischief and merriment despite the evocation of daily toil. It’s only after we step back from the fray, perhaps imagining a grand ship alone on the waters of night… There we can sense (John Donne’s) “Break of Day” when those busied folk are found wanting. Those busy heads, whose love lies heavy in words of redress and regret. Those who only see, but never care to listen.

So, as these artists suggest, we should go on “experimenting with sideways witnessing” so I say, yes, and stay — go deep inside while we’re here. Or there. Wherever that place may be once the direction is clear. Or should we simply “be,” (as of it’s simple at all) amongst the collective memory and rage we all have felt. When the youthful smell of revolution seems to subside as faithfully as those aches take on deeper physical forms — from heartsick pangs to pain meds in hand — where do we stand, and from where do we gather, when we finally choose to be one among a many?

And if we are lucky enough to see our responsibility, do we have the ability to respond to what we collectively care about, that is to say, “care for?” Do we not see? That we whisper the same words of all that have come before, when we truly stop to listen?