week 4: the week that didn't happen

sheena is patient + kristen is slow.


this morning, jesse was looking at pictures of bread makers + bread making; he said, "look how perfect that is." 


it was perfect: a rounded dough.


to make bread, there are rules: timing, measurements, touch. the process includes "timelines" and "procedures" that keep a pleasure, a kind of commitment to the heritage, the making, the passing on.


one major reason for our impending move is to get a little more structure, a little more "settling" + normalizing. i like waking up to a calendar, getting my holiday cards out on time, even planning three months out. 


and in the unmaking: leaving our jobs, leaving the midwest, re-doing all the structure we built together, we found joy too. the joy of sharing it all together, bending to uncertainty, and learning more about what we actually want. 

We've been lucky enough to be undoing Chicago and the "rat race" sense we were stuck in by living in a really lovely place where we are mostly in solitude, together, and outside. It's been helpful to go to the woods, to retreat. 

it does seem logical to think that the unmaking can be sewn back up, made into a bundle that makes more sense 
than our present moment. as if we are done retreating, thinking, hibernating, and ready to return with full + thoughtful intention.


i was hoping this process with sheena would help me accept more "organic" processes, would help me accept the messiness. so far--not so much. sure, i think it makes me notice some unexpected + pretty things, makes me more attentive to details, but it makes me also want to put things together better, more perfectly.

Keri Herer's work makes me think about placement, intention, and how important "direct" decisions are. I go back to thinking, it's not enough to have happy accidents, more important to have conscious decision making that show the relevance and urgency of making something.

Last week, the week that didn't happen, I chose words and stitched them together: thought a thought through.

Sure, I did my "mess" project and dropped coffee on paper, but I was more moved by the intentional mapping and measuring: by annotating the mistakes and giving them more precision. In the same way that I was more moved by Sheena's decision to leave the work outside, to find a still life and assemble / arrange the pieces enough that she observed a "creepiness" in the work she created.

When I followed Sheena's thought--about the "post" process being a new piece of work, a more direct piece of work, I took a look at the remains of our holiday cards: the two stamp practices, the drips of pain from testing colors, and the wrinkled paper. This part seems more lovely than the coffee drops on paper because it's closer to the making, closer to the accidentally lovely thing because it's a byproduct of intention, an echo of what we made.

It seems that the time in nature is similar: seeing the after/post frost and noticing what's left behind or residual. This might be the mess that moves me: what's left behind.