Soup and Strawberries

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, writer Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about wild strawberries… “It was a gift that could never be bought.”

I am more aware than ever that if you want to gift something, make it yourself.

What can’t be bought?

Made-ness. Intention-ness. Made with your own energy, attention, intention, and time.

What happens when I make soup for the people I love? When I ask my Mom for the recipe? When I go looking for the right ingredients over many days? When I adapt it to what I can find at an Iquiteñan market? When I spend a whole afternoon getting it right because I wanted to give a gift instead of making a purchase.

The gift was far more than the soup.

“Because they had given us a gift, an ongoing relationship opened between us” writes Kimmerer.

I am starting a business to sustain me. What of that in the context of gift-giving? What kind of gifts of time, energy, and attention can one give? How might one ultimately sustain oneself outside a transaction?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what makes a gift. Feel free to reply or message me to share your story or experience.

Creation

Creation itself was the fall. A burst into the thorny beauty of the real. Annie Dillard

Thank you, Annie Dillard.

Creation can also feel like our own failure.

That’s unfortunate and usually unspoken.

Thorniness can be piercing, a reminder that we are still alive at all - creating instead of merely consuming.

Would we rather be in the waxy, overlit region of the unreal… at a mall?

Choose your fall wisely, for in thorny beauty is where we remember we are still on alive time, not dead time.

Put Your Own Art Up on the Walls

Creation is a gift. It’s a sacrament, a returning to the world.

Creation is a dance between the maker and the made. There is an I who makes, who gives birth. And there is another I who reflects on what she makes.

Last year, I made a painting that captures this dance. Swirls of grey matter evoke a skeleton, an X-ray, and the inside of a nearby galaxy. In its abstraction, it embodies the mystery and complexity of the creative process.

In the end, what matters?

What matters is having created it. But I agree with Seth Godin that what makes it art is that it’s shared.