miriam waddington: advice to the young

1

Keep bees and

grow asparagus,

watch the tides

and listen to the

wind instead of

the politicians

make up your own

stories and believe

them if you want to

live the good life.

2

All rituals

are instincts

never fully

trust them but

study to im-

prove biology

with reason.

3

Digging trenches

for asparagus

is good for the

muscles and

waiting for the

plants to settle

teaches patience

to those who are

usually in too

much of a hurry.

4

There is morality

in bee-keeping

it teaches how

not to be afraid

of the bee swarm

it teaches how

not to be afraid of

finding new places

and building in them

all over again.

Waddington, Miriam. "Advice to the Young" The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982.

national poetry month begins tomorrow!

this year is the 10th anniversary of national poetry month in canada (and 15th anniversary in the united states), and as such i will be posting a poem by a canadian poet (or two) each day of april. you can find out more here. to quote john steffler, parliamentary poet laureate:

We live inside language, shape and share ourselves with it and use it to handle the surrounding world. In an atmosphere of job-talk, technical jargon, sales pitches, sound bites, bureaucratese and grocery-store chitchat we get mental asthma, we shrink to anaemic fragments. Poetry, with its fireman’s axe, comes to the rescue, opening doors and windows we’d forgotten we had, reviving words slumped in heaps in the basement of our mind, and those resuscitated words are oxygen in our blood. How good it feels to have depths and energy, to share in the hungers and insights poetry radiates. Poetry is language fully alive, excited language, which conveys and generates an excited experience of life. 

experts wanted

from malcom gladwell's blink (and i'm paraphrasing here):

The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to have a much better understanding of what foes on behind the locked door of their unconscious...The first impressions of experts are different. By that I don't mean that experts like different things than the rest of us -- although that is undeniable. When we become an expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. What I mean is that it is only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions.

i know, i know - the word expert is loaded, even suspect. in fact, during university, the whole concept of being an expert (and related ideas such as mastery) were very much "interrogated" as being x-centric (and by x i mean choose your term: western, male, hetero, etc.) and an imposition negotiated by various avenues of power blah blah blah. today, there's a real sense (propogated by sites such as wikipedia, for instance, and the blogosphere - and yes, i appreciate the irony here) that "everyone's an expert" i.e. everyone's opinion about something holds equal weight. even though it doesn't. so we're uncomfortable with the idea. it may even offend us.

regardless, its roots are old - the 14c in fact, from old french - and that springs from the latin: expertus, (from experiri) "to try, test". the sense of "person wise through experience" existed as early as the 15c. expertise (16c french) in turn denotes "expert appraisal, expert's report".

some various definitions include:

• a person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject
• having or showing knowledge and skill and aptitude
• having or showing or requiring special skill
• skilled through training or practice

to become an expert means that one must have some experience with something, one must be an explorer, one must have intimate knowledge (a passion?) of and for a subject or activity. there's a full-person'd engagement with something: heart, mind, soul and body.

so here are my questions: what are you an expert on or about? or do you even consider yourself an expert? why or why not? does the idea of being "an expert" make you uncomfortable? why or why not? alternatively, do you know anyone you consider an expert on or about a particular topic? why? i'm curious.

art, faith and integrity in the public square

this should be great. over the rhine makes beautiful, rich music and the panel topic should provide for some great discussion. greg has a lot of good stuff to say, and i know that val and karen are very much committed to working out this topic in their life and work. unfortunately, i won't be able to attend since i will be participating in the NextGen: Canada program. so if you go, take notes or something.

please.

my studio

as an artist who works in series, works with installations, and often uses collage (as much as a conceptual approach to artmaking as a medium), i have acquired a lot of miscellaneous bric-a-brac over the years. 

 

 

and yet, this is nothing compared to what my studio space was like in university (they gave me my own room to work in due to the sheer amount of chaos i generated in my allotted studio space). or the warehouse space i had while in calgary. i miss having room to really spread everything out.