The days are hot. The swimming pool is proving to be a superb remedy for hundred degree heat at the Neans house in Austin. The relief of evening is filled with cicadas crooning the dark of a new moon. And we find ourselves with the constant delight of black dogs underfoot.
We’re building a temple. It is Our Temple. It is your Temple. To share and do with what you like. We are evolving as a team and as human beings and people. And this is an action towards trying to be together under the sky’s roofing and hoping that, being here, we learn to appreciate the work. Sometimes it is hard. And so it’s good to stop sometimes and consider the temple we share already. And our homage to that, in every day’s doing, will hopefully somehow come to resemble that great muse.
Sometimes there are circular movements that seem to me like a spiral fractal, like a succulent that will survive in a desert. There are things sliding sideways to provide room for another layer. Some of the panels for the Temple feel not dissimilar from this, with layers and curves and circles and circles on top of circles.
Angelic Mistake
When people work this hard, the circle of a rim of a cup of coffee seems sacred. But sharing a pot of coffee between six cups with twelve hands on them which belong to creative and intelligent and skilled people is a great thing.
The opportunity to work on the Temple is a great base for learning so many skills crucial to effectively sustaining myself in a shared community. These social circles will continue growing, growing outward and webbing and twisting and meeting and grasping and connecting more with all of this tissue that tethers us together. We gather throughout the day, and with tension that we sometimes slowly come to bear we grow closer to one another and bind with the purpose and knowledge that we hope to create and support that monument which each of us brings different meaning to and nurses and nurtures and works painstakingly to build.
As for working and bringing things with us of worth, I want to work on a panel for Africa that treats Burning Man to a depiction of the god of entrances and communication. A man represented with a hat, the wisened cane of an old and bent elder, and a cigar between his teeth set into a plane of African tapestry reminiscent of fire worship (a sign of change, growth, passage through barriers). I might surround him simple cave drawings from the South of the continent, or emblems of water from the East. Or he stands alone, as he does in tradition. I feel like he stands as an important monument in indigenous African-Christian composite religions as well as native rites and honor. I want him to be there, and so I will bring him into the Temple.
Papa Legba statue
What else is there to bring? Bring your jokes and your self and your spirit and hands and dreams. We’ll be here. We’ll have you. And we’ll appreciate these things.
See you soon.
Comments (1)
Jun 30 2009 by Ira
