The Gardan Issue 01

THEGARDAN 01

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"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our databanks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.� — Arundhati Roy

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THE

CRAIGARDAN JOURNAL

COME TOWARD Dear Reader, We’re excited to share with you our pilot issue of the new Craigardan journal, The Gardan. You may not be able to physically attend a program at Craigardan this year, but we can still come together within these pages. Now more than ever our communities must forge an even deeper, more authentic connection through words, sounds, and images.

We hope that The Gardan will unite you with your extended family of creative thinkers, deliver a breath of fresh Adirondack air to your inbox, and ultimately encourage you to go offline. Take a self residency wherever you are.

This is your invitation! The Gardan is intended to grow as a community collaboration. Please contribute to these pages and to our ongoing conversation by submitting now and regularly in the months and years to come. Each issue will share your voices, your artwork, your stories.

You will find companion content to each issue on our website, including: SundayPostcardProject entries, extended interviews, audio and video pieces, new collaborations, and links to purchase books online from independent booksellers.

Come Toward. Discover Place. Build something, grow something, create something together with us.

— All of Us at Craigardan May 2020

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MISSION

RESIDENCY

CONTENT SUBMISSION

Craigardan is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a mission to encourage the human imagination to interpret the world with philosophical, ecological, and artistic perspective.

Craigardan’s artist-in-residence program strives to cultivate a rich and collaborative place-based experience for all of our disciplines. Our truly interdisciplinary program encourages creative thinking and collective problem solving by welcoming diversity in all forms.

The Gardan is a collaborative effort among all our disciplines.

Additional content for each issue can be found online at www.craigardan.org/gardan

To fulfill our mission, Craigardan supports artists, chefs, craftspeople, farmers, scholars, and writers through residencies, social justice initiatives, and other programs.

The Gardan, a project of Craigardan, is an offering to our community in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, with the intention to carry us forward and onward long after.

Each issue is inspired by and draws from the weekly happenings during a residency session, delivering a small piece of our program — along with inspiration and ongoing support — to encourage you to self residency wherever you are.

Together we will be stronger, lighter, and more imaginative than ever before.

We encourage your contributions of words, images, video, field notes, sound, and any other way you wish to connect.

We select content monthly from submissions. Because of the nature of our collaborative process, we reserve the right to determine when, where and how submissions may be published.

We respect the artistic integrity of all submissions. Full guidelines for content submission can be accessed online at www.craigardan.org/ journalsubmission

BOARD AND STAFF Lanse Stover, President

Mary Barringer

Andrea Volpe

David Speert, Vice-President

Allison Eddy

Frances Westley

Lorene Garrett, Treasurer

Kate Moses

Michele Drozd

Catherine Haskins, Secretary

Brooks Thomas Townsend

Janelle A. Schwartz

CONTACT

EDITORS

CRAIGARDAN www.craigardan.org info@craigardan.org 518.242.6535 9216 NYS Route 9N, Elizabethtown, NY 12932

With special thanks to editors Mary Barringer and Kate Moses.

All artwork is used with permission of the artist, who retains copyright of their work

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CONTRIBUTORS

BEN STECHSCHULTE Keene Valley, NY @Benstechschulte

MIKI PALCHICK Seagrove, NC @claykitchenstudio

TARAMARIE PERRI Teacher 2018 Artist-in-Residence Brooklyn, NY @taramarieperri

JEFF MERTZ 2018 Artist-in-Residence Brooklyn, NY @mertzworks

MARCO WILKINSON 2018 Artist-in-Residence San Diego, CA @marcowilkinson

LUKE AYRES Teacher, Chef-at-Large Keene Valley, NY @whookayres

RENQIAN YANG 2018 Artist-in-Residence Utica, NY @renclaystudio

MEQO SAM CECIL Elizabethtown, NY

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TAYLOR HASKINS Westport, NY @taylorhaskinsmusic

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IN RESIDENCE MONDAYNIGHTDINNER

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TUESDAYCLASS

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WEDNESDAYCRIT

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THURSDAYCHECKIN

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FRIDAYLECTURESERIES

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SUNDAYPOSTCARDPROJECT

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WORDS + IMAGES ARUNDHATI ROY AND JEFF MERTZ

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RUMI AND JEFF MERTZ

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JOHN ANDREW RICE AND MEQO SAM CECIL

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COVER JEFF MERTZ OF MARK SHAPIRO Jeff captured Mark holding his pot after the unloading of a tiny, custom-built wood kiln during the week-long retreat in Sicily, Via Del Gangivecchio.

BACK COVER The laying hens out on early spring pasture, by Michele Drozd

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MONDAYNIGHTDINNER

A CONVERSATION AT THE CENTER Kate Moses interviews writer Fenton Johnson on solitude, artistry, and his new book 8

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Photograph byJeff Mertz Sicilian picnic during La Via Di Gangivecchio, Fall 2019

You have to feel badly for any writer whose book was published in the midst of the coronavirus lockdowns.

Except for Kentucky-born novelist and memoir writer Fenton Johnson: his fourth work of nonfiction couldn’t be more timely. At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life hit bookstores just as the global COVID-19 pandemic began to infect the lives of Americans, ushering in an unprecedented lexicon: social distancing and flattening the curve and the difference between the CDC and the WHO, between quarantine and isolation, between alone and lonely.

With the lyrical precision, seamless grounding in research, and elegant narrative logic that make his novels and memoirs a literary joy to sink into, Fenton identifies the state of solitude as part of the essential discipline of creators, as necessary as language to writers or clay to ceramicists. “. . . It is the struggle with and in solitude that defines the artist,” he writes early in the book, going on to illuminate the lives of elevenplus “solitaries” as he calls them, iconic figures across the disciplines of painting, philosophy, music, poetry, fi c t i o n w r i t i n g , a n d photography.

the women artists who achieved fame on the level of their male counterparts were married or mothers.

“After a moment Miss Welty responded,” Fenton tells us, “simply and powerfully, ‘I have known love. I have been lucky, in love.’” To be solitary, in Fenton’s view, is not to be without love, to be less than, but to preserve the psychological and practical autonomy that gives us an opportunity for a richer inner life.

Adding to the cross section of lives of solitary artists captured in these pages are Fenton’s own and those of his parents: while raising nine children (Fenton the youngest), his mother retreated daily to a greenhouse where she grew orchids, all the more exotic for their location in the rural Kentucky hills; his father was a sculptor who built his own “HERMITage” deep in the w o o d s o u t o f m at e r i a l s s a l v a g e d f ro m t h e modernization of the bourbon distillery where he worked. Growing up, Fenton was influenced not only by his parents and their big Catholic family but by their neighbors and close friends, t h e Tr a p p i s t m o n k s o f Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani (who, with all the Johnson kids, helped on Fenton’s father’s building projects, their walls whiskeyscented from reused cypress).

“Being a writer or an artist demands that we develop a relationship with our solitude.”

“We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, a sentiment many now sheltering at home might find to be untrue -- unless they’re homeschooling for the first time, in which case they would likely agree that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Fenton tells us that Thoreau spent four times as long writing his transcendental opus as he spent living on the pond – “eight drafts in ten years” – and that the book was out of print at the philosopher’s death. We learn that Fenton was present, as a Stanford undergrad, when another student asked Eudora Welty – who had been recently called “America’s greatest living writer,” recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom – “Miss Welty, how is it that you, who have never been married, can write so eloquently of love?” The entire room held its collective breath; awkward as the question was, it wasn’t unreasonable.

Until the second half of the twentieth century few of

“Being a writer or an artist demands that we develop a relationship with our solitude,” writes Fenton, although he ultimately sees the “challenge and solace of solitude” as far more widely applicable, however essential it may be to artists in particular. “If the journey through our interior landscape is so critical to our characters, let us become more informed and responsible travelers. Let us start by turning off our phones and spending more time alone.”

Kate Moses of The Gardan had a chance to catch up with Fenton Johnson via Zoom – what else? – learning that he was awaiting the arrival of a new laptop, which had been shipped from . . . Wuhan, China.

TGJ: Oh my god, you’re kidding.

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FJ: No, I’m not! And another coincidence – I have an abiding interest in the Adirondacks. I’ve thought about leaving Tucson, where I live now, as much as I love Tu c s o n , a n d I ’ m considering a move to the Hudson Valley, which I know well and like a lot.

But the Adirondacks – those winters are long.

I’ve driven down from Montreal through the Lake Champlain Valley, down to Lake George. It’s certainly very beautiful, beautiful country.

appropriate agreement that you do not talk until late in the afternoon.

And around two o’clock in the afternoon, it gets really dull. I used to fight that. I mean, I still do. But what I’ve discovered over and over again is that usually without my being aware of it at the time, a month later or a year later or six years later, I’ll go back and look at the work I did and I’ll say to myself, I was not smart enough to write that sentence. I was not wise enough. I was writing that sentence and TGJ: The Hudson Valley is something took charge similar . . . But there are that was smarter and certain things about the wiser than I am. It’s about weather in the making a space where Adirondacks that you just that deeply buried voice can’t replicate. After my has enough room to first long muggy and emerge. We don’t realize buggy summer here, that even if we have an when Autumn arrived I open, flexible schedule cried the first time I saw like I have here in Tucson, the leaves turn color. The where I spend virtually all second week of October day alone and I’m pretty or so, it’s jaw-dropping. disciplined, there’s still I’d never imagined it like the opportunity for that – the colors just killed distraction. It’s always at The jacket art for At the Center of All Beauty is one of me. It was probably that hand. And the great thing Paul Cezanne’s series of paintings of Mont Saintemuch better because about an arts colony Victoire in the Provencal region of France; from his summer is kind of experience is that it pretty studio in Aix-en-Provence Cezanne painted the miserable for a westmuch removes the mountain over and over again for years. coaster and it seems as obstacles, particularly if long as winter. Almost. you go there without a car. You’re really thrown onto your own resources. I FJ: This reminds me of the process of staying at arts think it’s important when you are talking to people who colonies. The first time I went to MacDowell I was there are new to it, not to romanticize the experience, for six weeks. That was a week too long. The second because it’s hard. But I found it in every case to be time I’d learned and I went for five weeks, which meant really productive.

I did four weeks of really, really, really intense work. But first comes what I call the transcendent boredom, TGJ: You’re right, there’s something that will take over which I think of as a state that is necessary. You need it if you allow it. And that transcendent boredom -- that’s to achieve what you’re at the arts colony to do. The first such a great phrase. I’ve been thinking about that so few days you walk all the trails, you see the pretty sites, much these last two months, about how people are you say hello to the people but you get the very freaking out about having to be at home. And granted,

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a lot of them are suddenly tasked with being teachers for their children at the same time that they’re trying to work. But that aside, I’m really perplexed at how many people are so deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a kind of enforced solitude that they just don’t know what to do with themselves.

just like the French person. He was like, What are you talking about? What is this phenomenon? And yet everyone in Anglo cultures understands it. It’s about the mass dislocation of people from the countryside to the cities with the Industrial Revolution, with work in factories. The first use of the word loneliness in the way we see it is from 1811. It’s simultaneous with the Industrial Revolution. Whereas Wordsworth only ten years before could write famously, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” What are the associations you have with a cloud – beauty? Life-giving majesty? So isn’t it interesting that you have that transition of the use of the word “lonely” from beauty, majesty, life-giving, to – the dictionary definition of lonely is pretty good, I looked it up: “dejected for want of companionship.”

That’s Merriam Webster. And that transition of meanings happens in the space of about a decade.

FJ: That’s because capitalism makes a business out of taking charge of our time. It’s one of the many ways that capitalism infantilizes us. You know, we’ll take charge of your time for you. Which then makes it socially maladroit if you don’t know the most recent Netflix movie or HBO series or whatever, if you’re not able to talk about that, then you’re viewed as being – fill in the blanks, “hermit” is the most complimentary word. Part of the motivation behind writing this book was to take the measure of the appropriateness that attaches to being alone. And liking being alone.

There’s a sentence somewhere in the book, something like, “There’s no greater crime than solitude.” That’s the context of both Cezanne and Van Gogh having the neighbor kids throw rocks at the houses where they were painting, you know, because they were crazy old men who were living alone.

TGJ: That makes perfect sense to me. It seems there’s a connection among so many of the creators you illuminate in your book and their attitude to the natural world, to their surroundings, and also the society they keep, so to speak, and their comfort level with both. I’m thinking of Cezanne wanting to paint Mont SainteVictoire repeatedly for years, and your pointing out that it was like Cubism waiting in the wings.

TGJ: That was devastating to read when Cezanne had kids chasing him with rocks as he walked to his studio.

FJ: What I realized about Cezanne, who was an untreated diabetic, is kind of amazing, and it’s because I dated a diabetic for a while and he taught me this.

Right at the time I was dating him was when they invented and perfected the pump, subcutaneous pumping, where you have insulin delivered at a steady rate. So he would no longer have these enormous fluctuations of mood, highs to lows. And he didn’t want to get the pump, because for him, those highs and lows were like taking LSD or something, it was like a hallucinogenic high for him. I’ve talked to other diabetics and they say the same thing. So when I was looking at Mont Sainte-Victoire and thinking of Cezanne, I realized here was a diabetic with no insulin.

Insulin didn’t come along until twenty years later. What he was painting was a result of his untreated diabetes – it was hallucinogenic, fractured, you know, sort of like Monet painting waterlilies that way because he had cataracts, and he was painting what he saw. Cezanne was painting what he saw in these hallucinogenic moments in which, you know, almost undoubtedly he painted to the point of diabetic collapse.

FJ: Kids are being taught something that a lot of times adults are oblivious to, they’ve absorbed it so thoroughly, which is that a solitary person is a misfit in some way or another and at the very least ought to have the consideration to hide away and not make herself or himself visible in society. I have been writing an Op Ed about the Industrial Revolution and loneliness. I tried to explain the word loneliness in French to someone in France. And they said, Oh, solitude. And I said, Well, no, solitude is something else, loneliness is . . . And I was trying to find the words in French. We had this conversation and finally this person said, Phht, which is sort of like, whatever.

If we had a society where we felt that we were taken care of, rather than left to fall into oblivion if anything went wrong in our lives, we would not have – at least not so acutely – this phenomenon that we call loneliness, which at its roots is the fact that one knows that if I don’t have an income, I can’t afford health insurance, and if something goes wrong I’m toast. The Dalai Lama had to have loneliness explained to him,

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An Evolving Course We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then to being human.

And always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring, when we dimly recall being green again.

That is how a young person turns toward a teacher, how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively.

So humankind is being led along an evolving course through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream.

It will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are. — Rumi

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TGJ: Isn’t this where your idea of ‘transcendent boredom’ comes in, in a way – Cezanne painting what he sees, again and again, until it becomes something else, and you thinking about Cezanne within the context of his body, his obsessive painting over and over the same mountain, and your coming to a realization. I love that as an artist you can actually slough off everything else and get to whatever it is, that vein that you need to get to for your own creative work. You have to be present for it, sometimes physically present too, as you were in Provence, visiting Mont SainteVictoire.

for the next six, eight months, maybe longer, to attend a physical event, a live event. So we will have to figure out some way that these two ways of approaching art can work together.

I was having a discussion over dinner about six or eight months ago and we got to talking about the term homo sapien, you know, we’re homo faber, man (or better, people) the makers. We make things with our hands. We have opposable thumbs. It's what we do. Where does that energy go? It’s got to be put somewhere. I said, We should subsidize everybody making art. My friend said, The Dutch tried that and they have warehouses filled with bad art. And I said, We have warehouses fi l l e d w i t h d e c a y i n g nuclear weapons, which would you rather have?

We as people need to make things with our hands. That’s what we do. I don’t know of many people who have been killed by bad art.

And then I went on to say: and who’s to say w h a t ’s b a d a r t ? Fo r g e n e rat i o n s w e k n e w about cave art and we called it scribblings.

Pr i m a t i v e . A n d t h e n Picasso came along and said, “I'm going to imitate that.” And suddenly it was great art.

Maybe no one would come to this conclusion but me. I feel this book is an environmental book, because I believe Pascal when he says, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s” – let’s say people’s – “inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We go out and destroy the world rather than make peace with what has been given to us. If we can do a better job of making peace with what has been given us then we will treat the world and its creatures – by which I mean the plants, the rocks and the trees, the animals – better than we currently do. In the book I quote Jesus

“It’s a vision that is encountering the same challenges and difficulties and stumbling blocks that any vision is going to encounter as part of becoming realized. In that way there is no such thing as bad art, good art. Go out and make art.

Make more art."

FJ: What this period of time we are living through is revealing to me is that there are real advantages to technology that inperson presentations can’t always duplicate. One of them is music, the moving image is another, and having people who are at remote locations participate. If you can make it work, there can be a symbiotic relationship between the technological presence and the other end, the in-person presence. As writers we’re really lucky at this moment, because writing lends itself organically to being read, taught, experienced online. There are those who say, and I’m one of them, I love the printed book, I can’t read anything of great length or seriousness online. But the technological medium is sympathetic to writing and teaching writing. If you’re teaching dance or teaching sculpture, then online is a lot more problematic.

Our situation now is forcing people to grapple with having an online presence, and the resultant potential dilemma for being in the physical presence of art. It’s likely that people will be slow to coming back to large gatherings, they will be reluctant, at least

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saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And I think he means literally, right here. That’s what it means. Right here, right now. I have the greatest admiration for people who are down on the frontlines trying to prevent mountaintop removal or whatever might be the case. The reason I write about issues of spirituality and philosophy is because I feel the bigger issue is we have to change how we live on the planet.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Michael Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans. It’s getting a lot of attention right now, and it’s free on YouTube. Basically I agree with everything he has to say, although he ends at a very bleak place. What I would have had him do — and I don’t think this is Pollyannaesque at all — I would have had them go where somebody is actively addressing the challenges that he has so eloquently set forth. Like a Craigardan. Whether it saves us or not, whether it ultimately works or not, you’re doing it and as long as you’re doing it, then it’s not some sort of fantastical vision. It’s a vision that is encountering the same challenges and difficulties and stumbling blocks that any vision is going to encounter as part of becoming realized. In that way there is no such thing as bad art, good art. Go out and make art. Make more art.

FENTON JOHNSON At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life $26.95, 244 pages W.W. Norton & Company ISBN: 978-0393608298 (Also available in Audiobook, Audible, Kindle) BUY NOW ONLINE

Photograph of Artist-in-Residence Emma Silverstein forming a pot

by Ben Stechschulte

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“Logic, as severe as it can be, must be learned; if for no other reason, to know its limitations.

Dialectic must be learned: and no feelings spared, for you can't be nice when truth is at stake...Man's responses to ideas and things in the past must be learned. We must realize that the world as it is isn't worth saving; it must be made over. These are the pencil, the brush, the chisel.� — John Andrew Rice

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TUESDAYCLASS

TASTING SPRING

By Luke Ayres

I was once trying to make a subtle pea-flavored ice cream to accompany a carrot cake dessert for a spring menu. I was unsuccessful using fresh peas; they were doing something weird to the texture, making it chalky and not very delicious.

Sweet Pea ice cream goes great with carrot cake but it could also pair well with some lemon sorbet or with shortbread. This is a fun recipe to use up some of those abundant pea shoots found at most farm markets in early spring.

It finally dawned on me to use pea tendrils and treat them the same way as I would to make basil ice cream. It worked perfectly and the result looked and tasted like spring.

As it gets later in the season, switch the herb to basil and pair with some macerated local strawberries for summer in a bowl.

Sweet Pea Ice Cream 1 cup pea shoots, packed A scant 3/4 cup of sugar 2 cups cream 1 cup milk 1/4 teaspoon salt 6 egg yolks

Strain the pea shoots out of the milk and pour the milk into a clean saucepan to warm over medium heat. Once hot, pour a fine stream of the milk mixture into the eggs, very slowly - a little at a time - whisking constantly. (A hand towel folded under the bowl will hold it in place if you only have two arms.) Gradually pour the rest of the milk mixture into the eggs and whisk until combined.

Combine pea shoots and sugar in a food processor and blend until well chopped and mixed. Scrape contents into a saucepan with the cream and milk.

Heat until steaming and just starting to bubble around the sides. Remove from heat and set aside to steep for 30 minutes to an hour.

When ready to continue, quickly whisk the egg yolks together in a mixing bowl and set aside.

Pour egg and milk mixture back into the saucepan and heat on medium heat until a thermometer reads 170 degrees. Stir occasionally, as the bottom can scorch if left unattended. When 170 is reached, remove from heat and pass through a fine strainer and into a clean bowl. Place in the fridge to chill.

Once cold, churn in your ice cream machine following manufacturer’s specifications.

Photograph of this year’s lambs by Michele Drozd: executive director, ceramic artist, and current farmer

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Performance: Thomas Graves and Jennifer Kidwell

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WEDNESDAYCRIT

WINTER GIVES WAY Excerpt from A Gardener’s Education

By Marco Wilkinson In a seed there are two poles, like north and south of a world. They define the limits of extension. Extending, they generate a magnetic field of force around them. Generating this field they gather affinities. Gathering is another word for chemistry, the chemistry they develop with the world around them. Every seed, from pea to pin oak, from Sempervivum to Sempervirens, has from the moment of germination one axiom to follow that overrides all others: Grow or die.

Crack a bean open and inside you’ll find a plant in miniature. Folded like praying hands are this future plant’s first two leaves, and hidden at the heart of this prayer is a cell. Pointing like a little finger is the radicle, root of all roots, and at the tip of this finger gesturing towards the future is a cell.

A new seed fell to earth in Warfordsburg, Pennsylvania at the Flickerville Mountain Farm, a week after graduating from NYU in search of the work of hands instead of mind, in search of some meaning and a sense of competence.

Crawling on hands and feet like a baby across acres planting lettuce felt like nothing less than growing for the first time into some form I never knew I could be. At the end of each row, a new self waited.

LEFT TOP: Mixed Growth, porcelain sculpture by Renqian Yang, ’18

LEFT BOTTOM: Keeping, an installation by Miki Palchick for the AGRARIANAA show at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. Ceramic pinch pots made for soil collected at each of the WWII Japanese-American Incarceration Sites

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Photograph by Ben Stechschulte of artist Kyle Brumsted in the Craigardan pottery studio

THURSDAYCHECKIN

A POPULATION OF ONE

By TaraMarie Perri

A r t i s t s , m a ke r s , w r i t e r s , n a t u r a l i s t s , a n d contemplatives nurture harmonious relationships with solitude. Rituals and practices give definition and form to time spent alone with canvas, kiln, or pen. And yet an unexpected abundance of solitary time could uproot the most well-honed creative environment.

What if the current daily experience – or “slow living” – were a fresh mode of creative practice and contemplation? What if home were mountain retreat? And solitude were studio? And stillness the master teacher?

No matter what our vocation, every being is entitled to a meaningful life. Contemplative arts take many forms and creative forces have an organic way of forging new pathways. Experiment with living slowly and simply. Cook, read, walk, sit, listen, breathe, rest, reflect, remember, daydream.

Use your senses. Think less. Feel more.

Solitude as a state of being elicits a variety of responses: fear, avoidance, yearning, and romanticizing. Solitary time is rich fuel for the creative process and sometimes the loneliest place on earth. A profound tension arises in our solitude.

We witness the vastness of our inner world and find humility in our relatively small presence on the planet.

Pico Iyer writes in The Art of Stillness, “Movement makes the richest sense when set within the frame of stillness”. When we become deeply still our natural rhythms come forward. Remain open to a variety of outcomes.

Stillness, like solitude, may be startling at first, though it is commonplace to hear complaints of “busy” and “no downtime” and “just wanting time for myself” in response to the constant movements and structures of modern living. Perhaps these habits of mind become deafening when we sit alone or in the absence of our usual distractions.

Pe r h a p s t h e s i m p l i c i t y w e c r a v e f e e l s uncomfortable when we try it on. Our nervous system wiring has been trained to look for a schedule and the next dose of alerts delivered by our devices. Doing is familiar; being is elusive.

We do less. We do only what needs to be done.

We slow down. We get out of our own way while new ways of making art find an opening to emerge. We let go of product and goals. We welcome process and path. We discover we already have everything we need. We forge deeper relationships with nature and others. We make friends with who - and where - we are.

Iyer further offers, “The idea behind Nowhere – choosing to sit still long enough to turn inward – is at heart a simple one. It’s the perspective we choose – not the places we visit – that ultimately tells us where we stand.”

The human desire to connect to move and commune with others is natural. However, an aversion to being alone with still simplicity is one to patiently investigate. The escalating pace of our world is ultimately unsustainable; taking a pause gives us the rare opportunity to practice trusting the necessity of our solitary time again.

Nowhere. Population of one. Pitstop or destination.

Where solitude is fertile ground.

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The peak of Hurricane Mountain at daybreak

by Michele Drozd

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FRIDAYLECTURESERIES

ARRIVAL ON HURRICANE MOUNTAIN A Tale in Two Parts By Michele Drozd and TaraMarie Perri

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Photograph of an artist-inresidence throwing off the hump

by Ben Stechschulte

How We Arrived: Part 1

When young potters learn the science of clay and glazes, they learn chemistry, geology, and the history of earth itself. It is powerful stuff.

Clay is a material that talks back.

Its birthplace, geologic lineage, handling, grit, and the mood of its handler all influence the conversation. The artist may coerce, nudge, beg, bargain, or sweet-talk clay into doing what they want - but clay often has its own agenda, hidden deep in its history, which will contribute to the message regardless of the handler’s best intentions. We must simply embrace the moment that emerges.

Craigardan was founded by potters on the western flank of Hurricane Mountain. As with most good tales, Craigardan has multiple points of origin. One dreamer laid an architectural foundation, one dreamer believed that art and food and farming are inseparable, one dreamer saw life in community-building. And so it goes.

Clay is a global material. It can be found under the fingernails of every culture from the earliest beginnings of humankind to the most modern of modern makers. It is humble and luxurious. Malleable, yet defiant. It teaches as it learns. It is functional and sculptural and everything in between. It is love and hate, the best days and the worst. It is addiction and necessity.

In its first few years, Craigardan grew on the energy of the people it served. As is the case with most epic adventures, the young organization met conflict, had to leave its birth place, and thus set out into the world to find its true place.

Hurricane Mountain is a sentinel in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks. It stands at the nexus of wilderness and environmental conservation; historic and current preservation efforts; mountain living and the resurgence of farming; and the survival of rural economies and small towns.

Clay can be collaborative and inclusive, requiring large families or small towns to pitch in on its gathering and firing. Clay can be isolating, solitary, and meditative — offering process as art and art as life in the most monastic way.

Just as we left the mountain, it drew us back home.

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To the east, Hurricane Mountain watches over the lands traversed by the Abenaki and Mohawk people, later settled by ambitious homesteaders carving out their settlements within a vast wilderness. It is here, on the eastern flanks of Hurricane Mountain that Craigardan now stewards 320 acres of recently logged forest and overgrown fields, reimagining the land as a place-based residency program for artists and thinkers, potters and farmers.

There is likely no clay to be dug on this land, but we’ve brought our own. Each artist, each writer, farmer, musician, scholar, and chef will come to the mountain, bring their materials, their heart and their grit to this place — for many years to come.

How We Will Arrive: Part 2

practices through meditation. It is written that they also possessed acute control of their nervous systems by training and strengthening their senses to unlock deeper perceptions. Hence they cultivated a keen understanding of nature and the greater universe.

Over many generations the rishi-scientists ascended into the laboratory of the Himalayan mountains. From above, the rishis studied humans, oceans, sun, moon, planets, stars, animals, herbs, plants, elemental properties, and seasonal cycles.

Bear burr, rough Their observations over time wild growl in the hedge compiled an understanding of the at the edge of dynamic relationships between the field patrolling the perimeter. nature and the human body, what Little bear burrowing causes disease, and the potential in your den, deep excavations for the elements and cycles of the uncover sweetness but you’re natural world to heal us. not going anywhere without a fight.

Paw at me, rough me up.

The stories, parables, and tales scratched cheeks run through that survive throughout the field and the autumn sun generations and translate across fills the emptied-out blue sky. lands and cultures are few. The

Humans have been going up into the mountains since the beginning rishis are part of an ongoing Your sleuth of sibling all of time. Wise people, hermits, history of wise ones, intentional seekers, artists, farmers, and menace with spikes, barbs, fangs, and communities, and fertile lands. claws, adventurers alike have taken the This history is an invitation for the but you little bear bury trek. The allure of solitude, moment and a harmonizing your tiny p ea c e f u l a b i d i n g i n n at u re , principle for our future. nails in and hug, hang, hanker for expanding views, and discovery some new home away from speak to the heart of their quests, Today we are still contemplating here before the winter crashes in. often fueled by an intention to as we experience new challenges answer life’s greatest mysteries. of humans living as part of the Mother’s soft underbelly, Many ancient cultures – Egyptians, natural world. The tradition of moist leaves and duff, Incans, Mayans, Romans, Greeks, going into nature for a hermitic or rub your cheek Native American Indians - have contemplative life is a choice into the ground wise ones: the seers who held the e x t e n d e d t o e v e r y o n e . Th e and pray secrets to the well-being and upward trek now serves as rite of you make it harmony of a place and a people. passage. The mountaintop is a until Spring.

The wise ones often have peaceful refuge for residence and mountain stories or anecdotes of communing alone or with others in — Marco Wilkinson going up into the clouds. Upper nature. The practices of awakening world, heavens, sky mind, birdsour senses, eating seasonally, eye view are all aspirant metaphors making, and working on the land are for the place above us associated with attaining peace reappearing as revolution and remedy to the or wisdom or higher intelligence. challenges of technology and contemporary life.

The ancient culture of India celebrates the rishis. The term rishi derives from the Sanskrit root which means “to see”. The rishis were a soulful tribe, of sages and poets, who had mastered the highest forms of spiritual

What if these practices are also a reconnection to the ancient human intelligence already living deep within our cells? Our nature is to quest and question, and the mountains continue to draw us back home.

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Photograph of Taylor Haskins by Ben Stechschulte

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SUNDAYPOSTCARDPROJECT

SEND US A MESSAGE

This postcard comes from Taylor Haskins in Westport, NY. Taylor is a musician and composer and his new album, Interstellar Phoenix, is available now. He is also the host of The Thread, which airs Saturdays at 9pm on North Country Public Radio, NCPR.org

View Taylor’s postcard online at: www.craigardan.org/sundaypostcardproject

The Sunday Postcard Project is a way to say hello, send out a virtual message in a bottle, and know that your message will be heard and appreciated. In 45 seconds or less, tell us how you’re doing - show us what you’re working on, what you see, hear, smell, taste. Describe what you’re listening to or reading.

Show us what you’ve made. Describe the place you’re in - or share whatever you’re moved to share.

Find submission guidelines online at www.craigardan.org/journalsubmission.

One submission will be selected each month for publication in The Gardan. All video postcards will be shared and archived on our website.

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Musician Taylor Haskins

There’s new earth to discover.

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