I spent today weaving a dozen baskets for birds. On June 22nd I will be in The Growing Place's Gardener's Art Festival. This being the first week of summer, it is exciting to be able to spend a whole Friday making art, and more appropriate for that art to be garden inspired. The idea is that birds will take the wool from this basket to make their nests- it promises to be fun to later explore one's garden looking for brightly colored tufts of wool in the bird's nests.
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| A hand woven basket, filled with wool, accented with a ceramic heart. Intended for birds to use the wool to make a nest. |
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| Pink wool, with a stoneware leaf. |
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| Notice my awesome new 50mm F/1.8 lens?! |
I believe that I have found my favorite chapter of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past yet. The 6th of the 7 volumes, 'The Fugitive.' feels so close to life and love and memory. I don't believe I'm spoiling any surprises in the book, just a few beautiful thoughts below:
…I had supposed that I knew the state of my own heart. But our intelligence, however great it may be, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge which had not been given me by the finest mental perceptions had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of grief. ~Proust, The Fugitive.
But the infinitude of love, or its egoism, has the result that the people whom we love are those whose intellectual and moral physiognomy is least defined objectively in our eyes, we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears, we do not separate them from ourselves: they are only a vast and vague place in which our affections take root. We have not of our own body, into which flow perpetually so many discomforts and pleasures, as clear an outline as we have of a tree or house, or of a passer-by. And where I had gone wrong was perhaps in not making more effort to know Albertine in herself. ~Proust, The Fugitive.
The woman whose face we have before our eyes more constantly than light itself, since, even when our eyes are shut, we never cease for an instant to adore her beautiful eyes, her beautiful nose, to arrange opportunities of seeing them again, this unique woman — we know quite well that it would have been another woman that would now be unique to us if we had been in another town than that in which we made her acquaintance, if we had explored other quarters of the town, if we had frequented the house of a different hostess. Unique, we suppose; she is innumerable. And yet she is compact, indestructible in our loving eyes, irreplaceable for a long time to come by any other. The truth is that the woman has only raised to life by a sort of magic spell a thousand elements of affection existing in us already in a fragmentary state, which she has assembled, joined together, bridging every gap between them, it is ourselves who by giving her her features have supplied all the solid matter of the beloved object. Whence it comes about that even if we are only one man among a thousand to her and perhaps the last man of them all, to us she is the only woman, the woman towards whom our whole life tends. ~Proust, The Fugitive.
How do we choose the home that we make for ourselves? Be it the physical home we live in, or the home we make in the heart of another human being. Perhaps it could have been somewhere else, someone else- How much do we imagine and hope for those we love, rather finding those qualities in reality?
The colorful wool that we can track across our backyards is a small, but beautiful way to know that we have indeed helped another.
