Bricolage House
You walk down the garden path and cross to a stack of books. On top of the stack is a letter.
Dear Reader,
I’m so sorry to have missed you on your visit to Bricolage house, but I hope that you have been enjoying your explorations of the garden. The garden is the place where I come to slow down and to reconnect with the natural world—the place where I slip into enchantment. In the garden, I remember to breathe.
There is an inherent connection to the natural world that I think all of us experience as children. Despite modern lives that exist largely in interior spaces, most of us seem to find a way as children to connect deeply to animals and plants. For me, the latter predominated. When we were young, my sisters were the ones who collected and played with stuffed animals for hours on end. I was much more likely to escape into the woods with a book of fairy tales, where I had several “secret” trees and a special patch of moss that I would pretend was my bed. I don’t remember ever being taught to understand or appreciate nature. The woods whispered their secrets to me in my earliest memories. They provided me with an oasis; a place of enchantment where magic and imagination ruled. My time in the woods helped me to connect with a greater mystery— what some might call God.
As we move into adulthood, many of us lose our connections with our natural environments, and with them the feelings of wonder and enchantment that come with spending time in nature. We curl into ourselves and detach from the vital tapestry of life, leaving instead a modern world that is overtaken by the diseases of waste, consumption, and greed.
[1] Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, pg. 85
I’m going to make a leap here and link this disease of modern culture and thinking to a very specific phenomenon; the post-enlightenment, post-industrial attempt to rationalize and scientize every aspect of life. Scientific truth has been neatly balanced at the top of the value pyramid in Western cultures for a long time, resulting in the dismemberment of all other ways of knowing. Life is by its very nature non-linear, non-rational, and non-ordered, and perpetuating the illusion of universal order in life has made it difficult to perceive the complex interconnectivity of everyone and everything on this planet. We have become so accustomed to packaging our ideas and experiences in prefabricated boxes that we have lost sight of the big picture. This puts us easily under the spell of large manufacturers who wish to sell us their own special variety of logic. Pushed along by the illusion of scarcity, we rely ever-increasingly on these outside manufacturers and giant corporations to provide all of our basic necessities (and a lot of invented necessities). Yet, for all of our advanced technologies, we have failed even to produce a culture in which humans are happy and healthy. The living planet and its plants and animals have very little value in our society, aside from their utilitarian purposes (food, shelter). This devaluing of the natural world comes at a great cost, and has resulted in absolutely horrific crimes against the planet and the life that depends on the earth’s health for its survival. Well-meaning citizens buy organic food, but also buy a new iphone every year.
I have recently been reading Joseph Campbell’s books, and am intrigued by his descriptions of early cultures; cultures which created active mythologies that invited and acknowledged the unknowable, mystical aspects of life. These mythologies helped to keep windows open to the non-linear and non-rational ways of knowing. Here I think, dear reader, of the words of Albert Einstein:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed.…”
Joseph Campbell referred to artists as the modern myth-makers, the shamans of today.[1] As artists, we seem to uniquely capable of reclaiming magic; of re-awakening that lost sense of wonder and illuminating the chaotic nature of life. Society gives us this permission. We can serve the essential task of disrupting the mechanistic illusion of order.
In my own life, I find myself increasingly drawn toward the embrace of life’s chaotic undercurrents; of legitimizing and illuminating non-sense. Perhaps this is why I find art making so seductive: it is one of the few remaining aspects of modern life where we can connect with that which we cannot explain. To justify including the arts, schools point to increased test scores, corporations point to increased productivity, and scientists point to mental health benefits, but are any of these reasons really why we make art? I don’t think so. Art making is an invitation into mystery. As artists, we willingly walk into the waters of life’s chaotic currents to explore our own ultimately unknowable life on earth.
I’m sorry to have missed your visit. Perhaps next time we shall meet. In the meantime, enjoy your time in the garden.
Ever yours,
Edwina Gump