Monday, September 05, 2005

temporality


watched this movie last night with some amigos. it's a documentary about andy goldsworthy, an amazing artist. a description of him and his art from his website:
"Throughout his career most of Goldsworthy's work has been made in the open air, in places as diverse as the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, Grize Fiord in the Northern Territories of Canada, the North Pole, Japan, the Australian outback, St Louis, Missouri and Dumfriesshire. The materials he uses are those to hand in the remote locations he visits: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns. Most works are ephemeral but demonstrate, in their short life, Goldsworthy's extraordinary sense of play and of place."

i was struck by his patience, and easygoing nature. to be sure he is an intense man on some level, because it would take some serious intensity to be out in the damp cold at 5 am stacking rocks to create a work of art. yet when the pile of rocks would fall, for the third or fourth time, he would shake his head, exhale, and mumble one curse to himself. if it were me i'd be running up and down the damn beach, chucking rocks and swearing my head off, and maybe work myself into an aneurysm. i hold on so tightly to things, writing, relationships, school work, etc. that when it doesn't go quite right, i throw a tantrum. it is good to remember that some things are simply beyond my control, and that's okay.

nature has a strange mix of the eternal and temporary, and there is beauty in both. the flowers will bloom, wither, and die in a matter of days. but year after year you can count on flowers appearing. i can pick up a rock at the beach and skip them out into english bay, yet it will wash back on to the beach long after i've died. nature has such a different rhythm from the way we've made life out to be. i want to be able to be in the present moment, yet let it run through my fingers the way the river stream flows between rocks.

i think we try to hold on the bloom of the flower all the time, and bask in that obvious beauty, try to maintain that in ourselves, in our appearances. we've lost the appreciation for the fallow time, for the quiet and dark winter, when there isn't much to look at, but oh, the things going on beneath the surface, the preparation for growth! impressive. awe-inspiring. beautiful. and then to be able to let things go after they have bloomed. but to freeze something that is meant to be temporary for all time, to try to buck the rhythm of nature... makes it less precious, turns it into something that looks like those crazy airbrushed models on the magazines that leer at you in the grocery store checkout. it just doesn't look right after a while.

i'm all over the place. time to go back to my school work.

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