Hello friendly computer. Let's talk to the world.

Four weeks of graduate architectural studies has left me all but incapable of producing meaningful speech, so I'll just talk with this picture. These red cords of fabric are pieces being prepared for a braided rug. This project, which I started last winter, is both the most functional and the most time-intensive art-work I have ever had the pleasure of practicing.

Somehow we distinguish art from craft. I can never quite get my head around all the arguments that promote this differentiation. The artists say one thing, the anthropologists say another, and the consumers another.

One thing is for certain, however: architecture school has given me a completely different understanding of the intersection of function and beauty. Art, as I understand it, is not demoted by functionality but rather made somehow more real, more connected—to humans and human life. And on the basis of need, which all organisms share, it is connected to the rest of our fellow Earthlings, both animal and vegetable. Spending hours agonizing over cantilevered barns and Shaker architecture may have something to do with this newfound emphasis on art-craft. But I think perhaps it has always been there inside me, especially considering the lifelong trail of craftiness I have traversed (i.e. braided rugs).

Doing something tedious and doing it well is, I think, truly admirable. Thus I make a wish and a hope that this conceptual place and all else be an illustration of care and concern for each tiny human step and its rightness and goodness. Let all our actions be art-craft. Let all our thoughts be delicately directed.

Arc to Arcturus, then speed on to Spica

Ah, such beauty and wonder is found in the experience and sensation of doing. Jane- of course you've found a delightful name under which our freshest ideas and discoveries may be shared. It is a name most perfectly befitting, and inspiring, given our current reality of living miles and miles apart.

So why not let our combined brilliance mimic that of the stars? Since we cannot always inhabit a local community as we once did, why not expand the feeling of proximity to that of the Local Interstellar Cloud? (Which, I'll have you know, is referred to by casual astronomers as "the local fluff".)

At the moment I find myself at the dizzying brink of what feels to be yet another new season of my life. In less than a week I will begin the year of my life that will be marked twenty-three years old. Virginia Woolf has just renewed my obsession with finding a satisfying way of explaining the boundaries that exist naturally and are created in various ways between ourselves and our selves. I have ambitious plans to begin creating things (handsewn creatures and characters, books, stationary, small fragments of beauty to adorn necks and ears) and attempt to sell them on etsy. Money, always my enemy, is a practical necessity at this time of floating aimlessly amidst student loans and my desire to be able to support myself.

Well, rather than slip further into a rambling, bramble of worries, I will head off back into my day, and try to ward off the borishness and failure that has characterised my recent job searching. Happily, my mind has been inspired into action by these perfect words..

to act quickly, on instinct.
to let go of the fastidiousness and obsession.
to be and to do.

memorandum

he sits in the other room talking on speaker phone.
i jot 'to-do' lists and sip water, coffee, water coffee, preparing to tackle a big project.
it came to me quite suddenly.
and this post, this first post, is a memorandum to myself:

to act quickly, on instinct.
to let go of the fastidiousness and obsession.
to be and to do.

so here it is.
it will get better over time.
you will add to it, i hope.

if you are not familiar already with arcturus, i hope you will look it up.
had i given it more thought, perhaps our name would be more fitting and meaningful.
but, the beauty is, this too can change! growth, evolution!

woven, interconnected--a meeting point outside space and time.
safe, strong, resilient but deeply sensitive and aware, open.
this space, for us.