Making a clearing

Now is an in-between season for me. I decided a couple months ago, thanks to this prompting, to slowly go through every closet. Every nook of my living space - both physical and spiritual - and to work on a gentler approach to my life. Less of the things I don't need and more of what is essential.

A couple days after I turned in my dissertation in mid-August, Matt and I were in San Francisco and we were exhausted. At breakfast, we met a man - a chatty British expat with black and green hair who flew in from western Australia where he lived to spend a week creating sculptures in a warehouse in Oakland before going to Burning Man. He told us the dust in the desert is corrosive so you have to wear goggles all week to keep your eyes from burning. He went every year.

Without a doubt, he was the kind of person who struck up conversations with anyone his path. I am the kind of person who listens to every person who strikes up a conversation with me. Luckily, he was a good conversationalist so over coffee and toast, we talked about art, travel, culture, and politics.

The second day at breakfast, our new friend was having a conversation with another couple who was headed home that afternoon. The five of us conversed, and we came to learn that the husband had a PhD in engineering. I told him I'd just turned in my paper before arriving in San Francisco for a vacation. He told me confidently that it would take me a full year to "spin down" from six years of graduate school. He'd taught PhD students for many years and he said he'd seen it again and again. It will take a full year.

He also mentioned that he and his wife had adopted children, and after some thought, I gently brought up our stretch of infertility. I guessed that they might have lived that stress too, and they had. I recognized immediately the grace of crossing paths with someone at exactly the right moment who got how tired I was and who told me: it will take time.

And to cross paths with a wild man who built giant works of art in a foreign country and then burned shit in the desert just for fun. There was a lesson in that chance meeting too.

After this past weekend of Thanksgiving, Matt and I took our dog on a walk in a small bit of woods over the border in Canada. After we got back, the word 'retreat' kept popping up for me throughout the week.
When I finished college and before I got married, I had the incredible fortune to spend time at a Quaker retreat center for four months. I was desperate for time away from home since I never studied abroad or interned in D.C. during college like I felt I should have. A professor was encouraging me to get a PhD then, yet after college, all I wanted was a break to learn how to not work for awhile. Though I had some chores at the retreat center, like mopping floors after dinner and preparing egg salad for weekenders, I spent many nights in the art studio at the potter's wheel. I made so many bowls and plates I couldn't pay the studio back for the clay at the end of my time there. Some of those pieces have broken. Others we still have.

On the cusp of adulthood, I somehow figured out that I needed to learn how to slay back the overachieving forces within me. They are strong. Having new letters behind my name now comes with new pressures, and after six years of too much work and a couple bitter doses of heartbreak, I find myself wrestling against ambition again.

I am fully rooted in adult life though. That's the difference between then and now. Hitting the pause button and retreating for months...well, it's not going to happen.

What I can do is make a clearing. With that open space, I can weave retreat back into my daily life. I can find more moments for leaves to crunch underfoot, for my hands to be full of clay or paint or clothe, and for time to just be. Time to take photos again and to find words to write in this space.

Thirteen years after that long retreat, I still have a sense memory, though distant, of what it feels like to slow down.

I am giving myself a year to relearn how to spin down.

Unbound

One of the best weekends I had last year was camping with a group of friends on Lake Michigan. Despite growing up in Michigan, I had never heard of Nordhouse Dunes before the trip. It's a wonderful place to spend time. Our first night, we walked down to the beach in the darkness, then laid down in the sand to look up at the starriest sky. A few of us swam under the stars. It was early September and very cold so I was sick the next day, but it was worth it. The morning we left, I stole down to the beach for a few photos and a few moments to myself.

This winter I became bound up in a lot of stress that I'm still working to unwind. I've been taking an art class and a mindfulness meditation class, and reconnecting with photography, painting and collage. I've slowly been working on finding more time to be outside, particularly out side of the city. These are the things that help me feel whole.

Tonight, I found the artist Rebecca Shapiro while looking for encaustic artists online. She produced a series for TedX Portland and in her talk, she discusses our desire for freedom and using creative expression to work through the "beliefs and behaviors that keep us bound and from enjoying movement and momentum in our lives."

I like her expression "enjoying movement and momentum in our lives." These photographs remind me of a moment when I was unbound, so I'm thinking a lot about how to create more of those moments in the weeks and months to come.

The In-Between Season

This long, dark winter is extending into spring.

     January 2013, Higgins Lake

It's still quite chilly most days but today there was green grass in the park. Soon enough the treetops will be green too and it'll be time to go back to the beach and to enjoy the sun.

Early September 2013, Lake Michigan

The View this Fall

This fall, my creative time is pretty much reduced to taking pictures on my android photo and editing them in Instagram (@wandercraft). It provides about 5 minutes of creative time a day, which is better than nothing. Right now, I'm appreciate it both for the limited editing choices and for a chance to think a bit more about composition in my photos. I also like saving up little snippets of life, that I plan to get printed up into a book at the end of the year. It's become a way to feel like I'm scrapbooking, without the clutter or the time commitment.

Most importantly, it gives me a chance to stop a little here and there to take note, whether I'm out seeing something new or close to home seeing the things I see every day, but just a little bit differently.

The canned food rainbow display is by Detroit artist and activist Kate Draughdrill, exhibited at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (not be to confused with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit).

Yesterday I had a morning out with my dad, thanks to Heavner Canoe and Kayak rental.

Despite the chilly and drizzly weather this fall, it's been nice to slow down here and there and enjoy some time at home, which you could read more about in this awesome book a neighbor of mine designed and edited (if you're so inclined).

MAKE: Encaustic and photos

I've been playing around a new medium - encaustic paints. Encaustic paints are a combination of beeswax and damar resin. Since sometime last year I have been slowing reading up on them and ordering or finding supplies to make my own paint. I love all things bees (minus the stings) so this art form really interested me. You can buy the pre-made and tinted paints from a company or on Etsy but I seem to always take the messy route and wanted to make my own. Plus, it's cheaper.The thing about encaustics is that there is a little bit of danger involved because the fumes can be harmful, and making the paints and using them involves applying the right amount of heat as you lay on and fuse layers of the paints. People use an iron, a heat gun or even a small blow torch. In order to make the paint, I scourged thrift stores for a mini crockpot (which ended up not providing enough heat) and an antique iron without holes on the heat plate to use for fusing layers of the paint (which turned out to be too hot - you can see how the iron melted parts of the photo I mounted in my first piece above). Proper ventilation is really important and kind of a problem for me because we don't have normal windows that would allow me to put in a ventilation fan. After the crockpot failed me, I used the stovetop to melt the wax and even though I used the overhead fan, I think the fumes did bother my lungs a bit for the next week.I also ordered Claudine Hellmuth's DVD on beeswax collage on ebay. She doesn't use the damar resin, just the beeswax, so it technically isn't encaustic but her DVD has some really interesting techniques for layering the wax with photos, craft papers, tissue paper, pen and ink, and oil paint sticks. The bottom piece is a collage I made for Matt. One of his favorite movies is Life Aquatic. Captain Zazzou was pursing a shark but the sentiment is the same. Plus, octopi are beloved by Detroit Red Wings fans. He took the photo at the Detroit Institute of Arts which we both moved. The sea diver and octopus are actually these amazing theatrical puppets made in 1903 by Walter E. Deaves.I really loved the process of making these blocks, so I searched out an art class in encaustics and was really lucky and surprised to find a weekend workshop in the Chicago area with an encaustic artist Sarah Rehmer that was specifically about working with photographs and encaustics. I'm hoping to a learn a bit more about process and how to pursue this art safely. We're making a few pieces over the weekend so I'll share the results when I return.

Eight Vancouver Views

During most of the time we were in Vancouver last week, Matt handled the "real" camera. I was happy with my Instax (I'll post the instants once I washi them into my little trip journal). When I did take over the manual  camera for awhile, this is what I saw.

I'll be back soon with a few more details. It was a pretty laid back week but we did some worthwhile tourist-ing.

A very pink walk in the park

Sunday morning it was my turn to walk the dog. I grabbed the camera because the park has been this magical spring dreamland the last couple weeks.  The park is particularly dreamy before the city gets around to cutting the grass. It reminds me of my favorite books as a child where bunnies frolicked with little girls in fields filled with dandelions and long grass. As I was looking through the lens, the bleeding hearts and the pink dripping from the trees and covering the sidewalks like a wedding procession was so sugary sweet that it is almost too much. Mother nature has her bold way of announcing the renewal of life with each trip we take around the sun.

While I shot photos, across the expressway in Greektown a church full of people celebrated Orthodox Easter, singing hymns about Jesus rising from the dead while the trees and flowers did the same.

There are quite a few days living in the city that I bemoan how I never feel like driving out to go to a nature area, even though hiking in the woods is about my favorite thing to do. But on other days I just look up and down and around and it's enough.

Inside/Outside November

I spent the afternoon playing around with TTV. For my first try, I got blurry photos but I think maybe I like it that way.

This was our Friday night

Matt and I have been rolling this concept around for awhile, to each pick our favorite shot of the week. We've been thinking it could be an interesting challenge and a new way to see the year ahead of us. Some of what we see in a given week is the same, but we see it differently. Other days and even weeks take us in completely different directions. He's taking photographs more than me lately but I miss the camera. We've talked about starting a new site for this little project, but until that happens, I'll post here.

mje/spe 001

Our friend Andy Kem's design work can be found here.

The Power of a Landscape

This place has this crazy ability to completely surprise me. To make me do double takes and to scratch my head in total wonder. Truly. I think it's reorganizing my whole view of the landscape and my place in it.

I see this view of Canada almost everyday. What's amazing about it is that I'm standing in the good ole' U.S.of A. but I'm looking across this slow moving river at another country. It's close enough that I could swim for it, but I'm sure that border patrol would nab me halfway across. I do fantasize about it though. 

Other than inspiring my imagination to go a little too far, Canada's shore provides, on an average day, a less-than-inspiring view of some houses, a few factories and an ugly casino, which after dark shines these Gotham-like search lights across the sky that just accentuate its garishness. Kind of like in Back to the Future 2 when Biff screws up1985.

But this particular evening while I was rushing to my car to head for a yoga class, I stopped and did that double take thing. I thanked my lucky life because I had my camera on me for a change.

For those moments, the mother of sky and water transformed this scarred urban landscape into a place of total wonder. The river was just barely frozen over. Just enough to wash the surface with a watercolor reflection of the clouds above and all those lights on its shore.

A few weeks before I'd listened to Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on nurturing creativity where she talks about how we need to think again about creativity as not something you own, but as a gift that passes through you. She talked about a poet, Ruth Stone, who said that she would "feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape and she said it was like a thunderous train of air" and at that moment the only thing to do was to run like hell to find some paper so that she could collect it before it disappeared. I felt the same way this night when I pulled my camera out of my bag in an excited rush.

When I got home I ran inside and told my husband I couldn't believe the shots I got. Was I really the one to capture these? How incredibly lucky that I was there at that moment, paying attention, and ready to set my camera down and open the shutter. Capturing these images was a gift to me. They transformed my entire perspective on this place that I see almost daily. Now I see a place where nature - water, sky and light - holds enough power of me over me to make me stop and change my plans.

I never made it to that yoga class.

Natural Detroit:: 1

The New Year gets you thinking, you know. Since moving to Detroit, I haven't been feeling quite like me. And, honestly as a result, this blog hasn't been feeling quite like me. I've been busy so I didn't have much time or energy to figure out what was a little off. Then the other week while couch ridden from a long drawn out cold, I stumbled across this lovely blog called Resurrection Fern and I realized clear as the sky what was missing from this space.

I settled on the name wanderCRAFT because while posting to my first blog (which I started over six years ago - gak!), I gravitated towards crafts, nature, and things I stumbled on when I'm out wandering or traveling. That combination felt like me. Since moving to Detroit, I haven't felt the same inspiration to photograph and it made blogging not quite as fun. The spark was gone. I was okay with the lapsed inspiration as we settled in, but as three months turned to four then five, this gap kept nagging at me more.

After stepping back, I finally owned up to what I think was holding me back. I'm not inspired to photograph abandoned factories and derelict urban scenes but I admit they abound. Others are capturing that side of this place very well and I'm fascinated by what they see through the lens, but it's not my muse. My calling is to find nature again, even in this very urban place. That's what makes me feel whole. In Boston it was pretty easy to escape to the woods or the ocean or even the mountains, but here I'm going to have to try a little harder to seek out new places. Finding my connection to nature here is part of this place feeling like home.

Sunday I was still sniffling and coughing from this terribly drawn out cold but I insisted we take off for an hour to a park not too far outside of the city. You see, this weekend we were scheduled to drive several hours up north for what I'm sure was a wonderful celebration of one of my closest friend's parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Compared to where we're living, they live in the wilderness. Stars. Woods. A river that does not have a casino on its shores. My heart broke at not having the energy or health to get away.

Sunday, before the sun made its departure for the evening, this walk was the best remedy. When we stepped out onto frozen Lake St. Claire, I felt a little bit like Maria when she stepped out onto the mountaintop.

I need to find more and soak it in. My one little word for 2011 is 'stretch' and part of my challenge is to stretch my boundaries. Over the last five months I've managed to cocoon myself into this little comfy nook and routine in the city where I don't often stray. I really love it here. But I need to get out too.

Here's to finding myself outside in 2011. Stretching myself up to the wide open sky.