Cabin Videos

I talk kind of wistfully in the first "cabin video" about the loss of my grapevines to Donny's fruit trees. So I thought it only fair to put up a picture of his apples.


I’ve been working on these cabin videos. I’ve done three. So far I’ve only been able to get one to post to The Given Self website: http://www.thegivenself.com. That’s what I’ve been doing rather than writing. They’re almost like video blogs but they’re too big to post here. I can’t write short, and I guess I can’t talk short either. I start out feeling as if I’ve got nothing much to say and then this whole stream pours out of me once I get going.

There’s a woodpecker tapping on the side of the cabin. Henry calls them peckerwoods.

This break from the usual to work on video has been a strangely happy time. Doing something new is so engrossing. When I did the first two last weekend, I was so focused, in a creative way, that there was stillness everywhere else. Then when I finished them and saw myself looking relaxed and happy, I felt as if I’d accidentally captured “me” – I mean the real me, the person who I feel myself to be. It was so weird. It was so…inspiring!

Maybe that sounds narcissistic or something but I mean really…when do you ever “see yourself”? How many “family entertainment” videos have you been in that make you cringe and vow to run each time a camera ever gets turned on you? You never again want to be put through watching yourself scowling as you give a feeble wave when someone tells you to say hello into the camera, or even worse to see yourself eating or even standing around looking bored.

After I got that excited, happy, “Holy cow how did that happen” feeling of “seeing myself”… I felt as if I could never do it again. It was just a happy accident that I got what I did. And yet it suddenly felt like a standard. The whole zone of that experimental feeling of doing something new left me as soon as I got to thinking about how I could do more videos that were like the first two.

I find that really profound and confounding – how in doing something “new” there is this pure creative energy, and how trying to “do it again” causes that same energy to fly the coop. It’s one of those things you know happens, and yet when you experience it happening it always surprises you.

I had to wait for that energy to wing back before I could go for a third. But it did. It came and lighted softly. I’m truly amazed. If I’ve used that word (amazed) sixteen times, I apologize, but there it is. I am amazed.

Here’s the deal with what I set out to do. There was a little bit of that “should” feeling in it.

“What’s the next step?” Oh. Video.

Then I had this weekend open up in which I had time. I wondered if I could “do it myself” and just wanted to see if I could. I’m not very technical but I figured if I needed to wait for someone to help me I’d not ever do much of anything with it. I never expected it to be fun, but it was a gas.

All I’ve got up so far is the one introductory video. I tried doing a short one for posting here but I kept running over by about 30 seconds. Then after I’d done it five times trying to shorten it, it lost some of its spontaneity and appeal. So that’s the state of affairs at the moment.

Each video somehow turned out more like Course of Love videos than I intended – or I guess I should say I really didn’t intend anything. I just had this thought of doing “cabin videos” and the natural starting point seemed to be telling the story of how I got the cabin, and that…and then it seemed everything else I had to say…did relate to A Course of Love in one way or another.

That’s just the way it is and I’m not going to fight it. I’ll probably end up posting them to the Course of Love site once I get it all figured out. For now, this is simply the way it happened.

Foot in the Door

I was talking to my son today and he was suggesting that I do something new.

He asked, “Do you like stained glass?”

I told him that I paint to do something new. I said, “I started doing it to be creative with something I don’t have to be good at.” He laughed liked crazy.

“I like that,” he said. He went back to laughing about it several times in the next few minutes. I eventually laughed too, saying, “I never thought of it as funny.”

The front page photo of the Weekend Life section of my daily paper had approximately 152 of the 5000 pieces of art that were just submitted for an exhibit of work by Minnesota artists – “no matter how famous, no matter how obscure.” The once-every-ten-year event is called “Foot in the Door.” This one is “Foot in the Door4.”

Chris Atkins, coordinator of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program, said this about the art that hangs in floor-to-ceiling salon style:

“If you can imagine seeing a crowd and seeing every voice in the crowd – it’s kind of like that. You have all these things swirling around, but you can see the voices. And you can go up to each one and look at them with their different accents or their different languages or their different dialects. It gets you from all sides – it’s a pretty amazing experience."

Now, I can’t tell you exactly why I love that quote so much, and if you love it, you might not know why either, and shoot, most of the time, I can’t tell you why I love a piece of art for that matter. But I do love the quote, and the photos of the art, and the whole thought of all the voices getting a chance to be seen and heard and the way the whole thing shouts.

There are so many ways to have a conversation.

Check it out. artsmia.org, then hit the “more” button and the “artworks” tile on the next page.

Quote from St. Paul Pioneer Press, “Look, Ma, I’m in the MIA!” Amy Carlson Gustafson, p. 5, 2-19-10.