Postcards from Three Pandemic Junes

The June column from Paradigm Worker, a place for reflections on how we think about things, and why it matters. This issue is the fourth and last in a series about a project called Postcards from the Pandemic. [View the March essay to start from the beginning of this series.]

Saturday, 6/6/20
I journaled about truth and transformation. A neighbor chalked “LOVE” on their driveway.

–From: Postcards from the Pandemic: June 6, 2020, back of postcard.

As the pandemic first rose and rode across the world like a tsunami, it washed away schedules, work patterns, social norms, and plans for the future. Normal, orderly time was broken up and scattered, –some of it lost all together. I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces, ever since. So, in March, 2020 I decided that each day from March 21 to June 21 I would collect and catalog a moment with an image and an observation to create postcard vignettes of my experience. I completed this almost every day.

June. June 21^st, 2020 was the destination when I started my ‘postcards from the pandemic.’ The sense of order I sought in March of that year depended on the daily containerization of time with each postcard, but it also depended on fastening my experience between two immutable annual events: the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. These anchors provided a stable time frame as all other patterns disintegrated. As the end point of my self-defined time capsule approached, I reckoned with what the intervening moments added up to, but a conclusion didn’t come. Again, in June 2021 I tried to finish the story, but I felt stuck mid-narrative. Now, this time, all my intended endings each June stop here, on June 21, 2022 out of sheer will or exhaustion if nothing else. It is time to bring the story home.

June 2020: Turning Points

The landscape outside our front door was changing with a major road and infrastructure project underway. In June 2020, in front of our house, a natural gas main was being replaced. For years I’ve felt like infrastructure was a hidden architecture of interconnection, even when it connects us to what is uncomfortable to reveal, like our dependence on fossil fuel. It felt morally suspect to be updating fossil fuel infrastructure as the climate crisis worsened. I had a sense of exposed complicity since eventually we are all connected to the pipes downstream. With incremental progress, our climate story was still in tension and I longed for a cultural and political tipping point toward resolution.

Meanwhile another large shadow infrastructure of racism was being dug up and laid bare for all to see. The pandemic took backstage in June as our nation made starts at reckoning with its racism after the viral video of the George Floyd murder in May. The University of Minnesota closed at noon on June 4, 2020 for the memorial service. I attended online to dwell in the moment that was about telling the story of his life, his death, and about the broader issues that they had come to symbolize. This was a milestone in our nation’s evolution. Near the same time, Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced a bill to form the Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation.  The bill’s litany of “whereas” statements (from slave ships to internment camps) acknowledged the suppressed shadows of our history—the truth-telling groundwork to chart a different future.

While some of society was churning with milestones and a sense of movement, Spring for our family just faded into summer. The usual events that mark seasonal turning points were subdued with the pandemic. After a trimester of online schooling, we drove through the parking lot of my son’s school and waved at the teachers from a safe distance to acknowledge a completed school year. This was the closest we’d get to in-person school connections for a long time. Drive-thru life flattened experience as the environment and transactions were viewed through a car window. Even after our dog’s neutering operation, he was delivered to our car by curbside pick-up.

June 2021: Liminality

If time slowed down in 2020, it seemed to completely stall in 2021. Our boys had an entire year of online school, and all in-person conferences and travel were cancelled. Summer looked promising after the vaccines, but we were still in a holding pattern. A fitting symbol for me of 2021 is the broken wall clock in my office that is frozen at 3:38 and 47 seconds. Its second-hand pulses but will not advance. Occasionally, I put in a new battery and wiggle the gears, hoping for a different outcome, but it always gets stuck, like visual metaphors of stopped time in sci-fi movies.

Despite the stagnation, time did progress. The most striking embodied evidence that a year of pandemic had passed was that our two sons, who entered the pandemic with boy voices and bodies, emerged spring 2021 taller than me and with man-pitched voices. They had grown into the present, but I lingered in the past, trying to catch up on the postcards. I printed the original photos and rubbed a bar of paraffin wax over portions that I wanted to preserve and highlight. Then I used a thin gray ink wash that I brushed over them, dimming the photograph except where it was preserved with wax. The stories I try to tell of the pandemic are like the postcards. Portions are preserved and curated as the rest are released into the background. Before they are filtered like this, stories are in limbo as undifferentiated collections of details. In June 2021, I was wading through what mattered, but I was still mid-story, in liminal time.

June 2022:  Resolution

My attempts that first pandemic spring to capture time and hold a bit of it had spilled over into the next two years. The June 2020 observations and images had barely been recorded in real time. The creation of the physical post cards fell out of sync, and the 2021 video recordings of receiving the June postcards lost their intended “one year later” alignment and were not received and recorded until early March, 2022 with snow surrounding the mailbox. I had made a mess of bringing order to the times. And yet, the mess was its own record too. Each March I made new plans. Then, as my desired order disintegrated each April, the broken timelines of my project seemed a more accurate picture of my pandemic story than my original intentions. Despite my fondness for the project, it was exhausting trying to finish the story. This was a story that had no apparent ending.

Now. This brings me to the present. Despite a lack of resolution, I am ready to set this story down midstream and call it my reckoning of the early pandemic. I say “early,” since I don’t see it ending any time soon. I simply can’t drag any more months and years forward into summer 2022, waiting for narrative closure. I hereby declare June 21, 2022 as the end of my story of the early pandemic.

As I resign myself to this, I realize that it may be the loss of ordered time–not its mastery–that is my greatest pandemic lesson. Perhaps the narrative impulse I am drawn to is also a trap. It is not the sum of the moments the post cards capture, but the moments themselves that give life meaning.

On the eve of June 20, 2022, in my U.S. Central time zone, I watch a live stream of the solstice sunrise at Stonehenge. A crowd in silhouette faces the ancient sculpture as the alignment approaches.  The moment comes and the sun hovers as anticipated by prior civilizations over the composition of stones–a setting for the solar jewel. With ethereal new age music playing in the video, people raise their hands, phones held high to capture the turning point. Perhaps older civilizations also raised their hands in praise for this moment while they captured it with their eyes.

Comments roll in from all over the globe’s many longitudes, wishing blessed solstice and expressing hope for peace. For centuries we have looked to these celestial events to connect with the eternal cycles. I wonder how many, like me, had hoped that such an auspicious moment might signal a change for the better, still imagining a turning point for our larger story toward its destination. But the cycles of the sun are heading nowhere. They make no progress and reach no resolution. These celestial turning points are always flowing, opening as many possible stories as we might imagine.  As it has always been, there is no true beginning or end. This fluid emergence of the now is reliable. Moment by moment, we are always in progress and already home.

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How have you reckoned with your pandemic experiences? How are you still? May you find peace in your stories.

Postcards from Three Pandemic Mays

The May column from Paradigm Worker, a place for reflections on how we think about things, and why it matters. This issue is the third in a series about a project called Postcards from the Pandemic. [View the March essay to start from the beginning of the series.]

Sunday, 5/24/20
Watching the sermon by phone, we learned that a morgue worker placed daffodils on the body bags.
–From: Postcards from the Pandemic: May 24, 2020, back of postcard.

As the pandemic first rose and rode across the world like a tsunami, it washed away schedules, work patterns, social norms, and plans for the future. Normal, orderly time was broken up and scattered, –some of it lost all together. I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces, ever since. So, in March, 2020 I decided that each day from March 21 to June 21 I would collect and catalog a moment with an image and an observation to create postcard vignettes of my experience. I completed this almost every day.

May. They say, “April showers bring May flowers.”  The conditions are set, with seeds, soil nutrients, warmer temperatures, and water. These create not only potential, but seemingly a pressure for something to germinate and emerge. So, too, do fires bloom from a set of conditions that set the stage–dry kindling or fuel, heat, wind, and ultimately a spark.  One can see the continuity, –the interdependence of before and after a triggering spark, but the event creates a threshold that ruptures one state of things to create another in response. There is no going back.

May 2020: At the threshold

I had to breathe carefully in May 2020. I entered the month very sick with a deep cough. Some springs are like this for me, but this year it was accompanied by the questions, “Is it Covid?” and, “Will I die?” Fortunately, it wasn’t and I didn’t. With the help of time, rest, and medications, my body returned to homeostasis.

Other disruptions from the first pandemic May didn’t show any signs of returning to normal. Every few days a new event was cancelled: in-person graduation ceremonies, our summer vacation, and a summer camp I was supposed to lead. The pandemic was infecting the future and it was sinking in that these changes were only the beginning. We were in a new period of time–a new pandemic regime of separation that would last a while.

I read articles about loneliness, particularly of the elderly. I cried seeing a picture in the paper of a child and a grandmother reaching through a wall of clear plastic fitted with plastic sleeves so they could hug each other. We need each other, and those without a household “pod” were vulnerable. So many Covid patients died alone. In a sermon I attended on my phone, I learned of the story of a morgue worker who placed daffodils on the warehoused body bags, even though nobody was there to see. People can be so beautiful in times of hardship.

And other people can be so incredibly ugly. I didn’t know yet about the murder of George Floyd on the evening of May 25^th when I recorded my postcard vignette about how our dog ran through the screen door, tearing the fabric that protects the illusion of separateness.

“I can’t breathe.” The 8 minutes and 46 seconds of torture could have been an invisible murder, but instead it was ignited by a spark of witness, amplified by social media, and spread to a wildfire of response. I was stunned by both the rupture and the response, as well as by the nearness to home. Over the next week, the heat grew to a critical mass and it seemed like a state change was underway. Three days later on May 28^th, the officers had still not been arrested. I signed a petition, conscious of the inadequacy of my action. That night the third precinct police station was in flames, 22 miles from my home, making international news. May 29 Derek Chauvin was arrested. So was a CNN journalist at the protest in Minneapolis. They had to set their video camera on the ground sideways and there was an eerie, rotated, live feed of protesters feet beyond the pavement. May 30, 2020 there were alerts in and around Minneapolis and St. Paul, growing nearer to our home as protests were accompanied by riots and looting, and rumors of white supremacists amplifying the chaos for their own aims grew. The major freeways in town were closed and curfews were set. This continued into May 31, and I wondered if maybe this was it–when a revolution would start. When we wouldn’t go back to how things were before.

May 2021: Holding patterns

A year later in May 2021, had things changed substantially for racism in the United States? Some changes were there, with Chauvin’s guilty verdict in April, many confederate statues had been removed, and there was more talk about anti-racism in my academic circles. But it still felt incremental and in slow motion. No revolution, but perhaps a gradual evolution. A slight moving of the needle. I felt both inside of–and a constituent part of–the thick mass of cultural inertia. My small inadequate acts and participating in the status quo blended in with the mass sedation. Whatever momentum I felt the prior year subsided into a new normal.

Meanwhile, in May 2021, there was the illusion that with the vaccines we’d be on our way out of the pandemic and return to our old normal. Perhaps we could gather again and puncture the separateness from each other that breeds isolation. At the same time, I was reflecting on reconnection of another type. I was working on an essay called “Integrated Bodies” that was about the paradigms of the Planetary Health Education Framework. Planetary Health is an emerging approach to viewing environmental problems and human health challenges in an integrated way. It centers a recognition of the interconnectedness of our human bodies with each other and all other life forms of Earth, and the wellbeing of the Earth itself. Recognition of our interconnection is the foundation of our mutual health.

I believe that–that being together, in solidarity and in company with each other, and with the rest of life on earth is central to our collective wellbeing. Our bodies are ultimately, one body. This connection provides a sense of belonging but also a burden to hold and protect those in our larger community.  The hurt in the world is huge and hard to hold, but less hard if we hold it together.

May 2022: Surrender

There is only so much hyper-vigilance we can sustain at each new wave of pandemic development. There is a limit to the outrage we can hold for each new societal crisis. And it is hard to stay in in the mode of a “climate emergency” after each new IPCC report warning of climate collapse.  Each milestone holds the potential of being a threshold event, yet most of the time the promise is unfulfilled.

May 4^th, 2022 the CDC announces that the US Covid death toll has reached 1 million. This is shocking, though predicted, and articles memorialize the loss, trying to put faces and stories behind the statistic. The milestone washes over the news, and subsides. By the evening of Memorial Day the death toll is one million, four thousand, seven-hundred and sixty.

May 24^th, 2022 nineteen children and two teachers are massacred at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. This is shocking, though predicted. The rupture is met with grief and outrage at the lack of common-sense gun laws, just as the Sandy Hook shooting was almost ten years ago. One would think. THIS. This is it—the threshold of heartbreak where things change. Except, we seem to have a learned helplessness from all the other hundreds of school shooting milestones since Columbine. Maybe this time it will be different. Or maybe it won’t.

Maybe this year’s wildfire, hurricane, lost species, lost shoreline, or disaster-destabilized country will be the threshold for serious climate action. Or maybe it won’t.

It feels like surrender sometimes. The sparks flare but do not ignite meaningful transformation. Will it take larger triggering events?

There is an unstruck match on the cover of Malcom Gladwell’s decade’s old bestseller, The Tipping Point; How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.”  The book explores the counter-intuitive leverage that small events can have. I say counter-intuitive because, even major events – like Covid death tolls, and school shootings, don’t seem to transform our situations. Using the metaphor of epidemics, the book explores the dynamics of transformative change and how contextual factors form the essential conditions for change and set the stage for a spark to become a wildfire. Many of those conditions depend on interconnected networks of people.

I am beginning to think that there is a place for surrender in my desire to support transformative change. I don’t mean surrendering to the status quo. I mean surrendering to connection—both the belonging and the burden of both action and grief it entails. Buddhist activist, Joanna Macy, says that grief for our world is an important part of the journey to healing it. We can’t close off from grief, or we risk closing off from care and love that are the foundation of effective action.

In addition to taking action in support for change, I also may need to make more space for grief that — sitting with my own and my community’s pain. Love and connection are the way forward. There is no going back.

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What ruptured in your life, and how did you respond? How are you still responding, holding things together with community, even as things fall apart?  

This is the second in a series looking back across time at the ongoing project called Postcards from the Pandemic

Thursday, 4/2/20
We held a memorial for our cat.

–From: Postcards from the Pandemic: April 2, 2020, back of postcard.

April. Despite its association with spring and new life, April is the month of two inevitabilities: taxes, and–for me–death. April has become my “Memento Mori,” which in Latin means, “remember that you have to die.”(2) In his April, 2020 article, writer Michael Austin, explained why T.S. Eliot in his poem, “The Wasteland,” called April “the cruelest month.”(3) Austin notes that it was written at the end of a prior great pandemic: “April is when we dare to hope. In the Waste Land, nothing can be crueler than hope, since it can only lead to disappointment.” (1)

April 2020: Death visits

Entering the first pandemic April, the daily postcard ritual I began in March offered a sense of order and solace, but I have a history of bad Aprils, and so I wasn’t too surprised when things fell apart. Aprils of my past have included the death of my mother, the death of our cat, a family crisis, and a job layoff. As Prince, who also died in April had written much earlier, “Sometimes it snows in April.” (Being from Minnesota, he knows what a cruel tease April is, pretending to be spring, only to become cold and snowy over and over again.) And on April 1, 2020 our cat, Alfie, died.  We held a memorial on April 2^nd.

By April 9^th, my post card ritual had begun to disintegrate. I jotted observations in my journal and snapped some pictures, but didn’t even try to assemble them into postcards. Infrastructure replacement continued along our street in April. The branch gas line was moved 10 feet closer to our home, leaving access trenches that looked like open graves. This felt aligned with the 10-year anniversary in April of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which happened in 2010. April, 2020, saw more events like graduation plans and art exhibits moved online, or cancelled altogether. My kids suffered through online school, sitting behind dark zoom boxes looking at the names of classmates.  By the end of April, 2020, the CDC reported 65,187 Covid deaths.

But even with the April snow, the crocus and bloodroot bloomed here. My older son created an island in Minecraft that we sailed to in the digital sunset. A teacher assigned a hologram project to my younger son causing tiny blue jelly fish to float above his cell phone. The memorial Lilac for my mother was budding on April 26^th the anniversary of her death.

April 2021: Living with death

Maybe the battle of order and disintegration are a seasonal tradition, for me. After starting daily postcard receiving rituals in March 2021, making a video of each one, the burden of holding order once again yielded to April. My kids were still in online school, one year later. By the end of April, 2021, the CDC reported 577,854 Covid deaths. Almost 9 times the cumulative Covid deaths as of the prior April. The climate crisis looms over Earth Month celebrations and pledges. April 20, 2021 was the 11^th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill, where 11 people died. But the biggest news on April 20, 2021 was a guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd the prior May, holding a glimmer of the possibility of justice.

April held more silver linings. On April 9^th I received my first Covid vaccine and by the end of April both my husband and I had our second shots. It seemed like things were looking up. Jon Batiste’s “We Are” album played in my car on the way to and from vaccine appointments and errands, becoming a sound track to spring 2021.

April 2022: Death and remembering

In April 2022, the birds have their own disease outbreak, with bird flu killing both commercial and wild birds. We took down our bird bath and didn’t fill our feeder to help the birds “social distance,” but commercial birds don’t have so many choices. As of April 29, 2022, the CDC reported 991,030 US Covid deaths, making me wonder when – not if – it will surpass 1 million. And then what?

This April, Earth Day falls in the same month as the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, like it always does. This April, I watch ‘Servant of the People,’ immersing in the surrealism of Volodyrmyr Zelensky playing President Goloborodko before he was elected as a real president. This April, instead of first vaccines, we debate when to get our second booster shots. Perhaps the pandemic is a permanent condition of life now.

This April, Jon Batiste, now decorated with multiple Grammys, still plays ‘We Are’ in my car. This April, my boys go to school in person as they have most of this school year. There are buds on Mom’s memorial Lilac. Crocus and Bloodroot bloom in the snow – again.

What disintegrated and what persisted, — blooming despite it all —  in the stories of your pandemic springs?

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Notes:

1. Austin, M. (2020, April 2). Why is April “the Cruelest Month”? T.S. Eliot’s Masterpiece of Pandemic Poetry. Medium. https://michaelaustin-47141.medium.com/why-is-april-the-cruelest-month-t-s-eliots-masterpiece-of-pandemic-poetry-13300db19466
2.  Definition of MEMENTO MORI. (n.d.). Retrieved May 1, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/memento+mori
3.  The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot republished on the Poetry Foundation website. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
4.  Jonee Kulman Brigham. Postcards from the Pandemic – Full Spring Studio, LLC. From http://fullspringstudio.com/postcards-from-the-pandemic/

This is the first in a series looking back across time at the ongoing project called Postcards from the Pandemic.

As the pandemic first rose and rode across the world like a tsunami, it washed away schedules, work patterns, social norms, and plans for the future. Normal, orderly time was broken up and scattered, –some of it lost all together. I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces, ever since.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced that the COVID-19 outbreak was now a global pandemic. Before this declaration emerged, its seeds had been germinating below my sustained attention.  My life was not altered when December’s unnamed virus cases appeared in China. It was unsettling in January as the story became closer, surfacing in the U.S. on January 19^th and having its unseemly portrait created by CDC artists on January 21st.  I felt more foreboding in February, when the World Health Organization named the virus “COVID-19,” suitable for its destined ubiquitous role in daily life.  Later in February, Italy was shutting down. On March 6^th, having already planned the trip, our family boarded a plane, wiped the surfaces with bleach towelettes, and arrived in San Diego to see my 90-year-old dad. When we entered his house, he held his arms back and said, “No hugging!” –a smart precaution for his age, and our first experience of social distancing. We made hug gestures in the air, and sat apart from each other on his patio with lemonade and salted peanuts. The following week, on March 10^th, we flew back to Minnesota. The next day, we were in a global pandemic.

March 2020: Marking time

After the trip, as the unraveling continued, I decided to use art to create an island of structured time amidst the chaos. Here is how my artist’s statement began:

In March of 2020, as the realization of the scale and impact of the pandemic was gradually taking hold in me, I sensed the cascading losses of certainty. Plans for the future – for my job, for social gatherings, for my children’s schooling, for what it meant to go to the store – all these were up in the air. The rituals of planning, setting goals, and meeting deadlines were suspended. Life became tentative. Time was distorted and disordered. In response, I decided to do something to reclaim what sense of normal time I could. Like a shipwreck survivor marks days on the wall of a cave, I decided to mark time based on the reliable cycles of day and night. Each day from March 21 to June 21, I decided to collect and catalog a moment with an image and an observation to create postcard vignettes of my experience. I completed this almost every day.1

Each postcard was a moment, a shard of time from the wreckage, that was safe within its 4×6 format. I printed the photographs, applied paraffin wax to preserve certain features from the memory, and then I washed diluted sumi-e ink over the image, darkening the unwaxed elements. For the back of each postcard, I wrote the date, and a short observation in silver pencil on heavy matte black paper.

Some postcards, like the one from my minister’s sermon on March 22, spoke to the tension between normal and altered life. Others reflected my increased attention to disinfecting surfaces, with a close-up of a freshly-bleached doorknob, or my particular attention to my son’s hands as they touched playground equipment. Toward the end of the month, our cat became very sick.

March 2021: Opening time capsules

In summer of 2020, having barely made it through creating the content for postcards from March through June, I set the project down. It was exhausting holding time together as it was relentlessly pulled apart. But, in March of 2021, one year after starting–and with the pandemic still growing–I felt the urge to mark time again. I hadn’t really had a plan the prior year about the end of the project, –just that at some time after the pandemic, I would present or exhibit the postcards in an art installation. I thought about how postcards are meant to be mailed, and my next steps are described in this part of my artist’s statement:

The postcard records were like micro-time capsules, sent from the early pandemic to a later version of myself. A year later, still in the pandemic, I thought about how I would retrieve these messages, and share them, joining with the pandemic reflections as multiple as the population. The post office delivers mail across distant geographies – from one mailbox to another. I decided I needed a mailbox to deliver mail across distant time periods. So, using a salvaged mailbox from my childhood garden, I set a stage for the postcards to be retrieved across time and remembered.   After assembling my records of pandemic moments into postcards each day, I video recorded and ritualized a daily visit to receive the mail, reading the messages, and viewing the moment partially preserved in an altered photograph. 1

 It took nearly an hour each day to film the mailbox ritual, record my voice reading the postcard, and then edit the footage, and post it online. It made each memory heavier with the weight of the effort. Video editing can be fussy, and require attention to detail, replaying and editing over and over again. Perhaps it served as a meditation, as if a story would emerge if I just tried again. After posting each one on YouTube, I tweeted it into the ether, in my new, unfollowed Twitter account. What was the purpose in all this? Why send these memorialized moments into the atmosphere? I wasn’t sure, but once started, I did not want to break the momentum. The repetition created order, even as the weather changed, the soundtrack recorded passing cars, and birds, and the pandemic cases and deaths continued to rise. March 2021 marked about a year since my kids started remote schooling, my work life existed through Zoom, and since we’d visited my dad. My husband and I waited our turn to be eligible for the vaccine.

March 2022: Mending the loose ends of time

Once again, my fresh spring plans of 2021 had not resulted in completing my pandemic story. Maybe I sensed a conclusion was premature. As the two-year anniversary of the global pandemic approached in March 2022, I longed for closure, — or at least an end to this chapter. I recently read an article in the Atlantic by Joe Pinsker about how disorienting and disheartening it was for people to not be able to close their pandemic narrative—especially in Fall 2021 when Delta pulled a “gotcha” on our dreams of ‘normal’ life.  The author called it “narrative fatigue.” Humans like a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. But my broken pieces of timeline were fraying.

So I decided, once again, to try to regroup and finish the project, for real this time. Which brings me to this essay. This time, I decided, I would scoop the moments into month-sized stories, weaving the months in one direction across the years in the other. Maybe these woven time lines can hold the story together this time. I know from so many articles, videos, and artworks by others, that I’m not the only one with narrative fatigue.

How did you,–and are you still– holding your stories through each pandemic spring?

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Notes:

Spring is a time of transitions. Blood Root peek up from the damp, grey-brown earth with their fragile stems and delicate petals. Buds thicken the ends of tree twigs with green potential. Robins, with mouthfuls of dried grass, weave their nests anticipating a new generation within small blue eggs. In each of these cases, something had to disintegrate to provide the circumstances for something new. Soil nutrients are based on the investment of last year’s life.

I’ve been thinking about transitions. March 21 marked the 11^th birthday of Full Spring Studio. And today, April 22^nd, Earth Day, is the ground breaking ceremony for the new interpretive building at Westwood Hills Nature Center in St. Louis Park. While I don’t live in St. Louis Park anymore, I have an attachment to it, particularly to Westwood Hills Nature Center, since it was here in 2008 that I started work with a great team and community on Children’s Nest Egg (In the Park), a participatory public art project. And it was this project that inspired me to start Full Spring Studio, LLC.

Children’s Nest Egg, was always about transitions. Its guiding poem travels from the story of an all-encompassing “Earth” as mother, to the fragile blue egg in space that “must be cared for as our child.” Likewise, its path into the nest is a transition in scale. As a person enters the nest that is larger than life, they are made small like a bird, only to find an Earth egg inside, re-sizing them larger than the planet. The project is also about the transition of disintegration and renewal. Over time, the woven branches that make the nest wall, decompose and settle until a new volunteer group builds up the nest again, stacking branches and sewing them in place with the giant wooden needle and Manila rope. The nest renewal reinforces the theme of nature appreciation and stewardship that community members expressed in their poetry engraved in the bench near the center of the artwork.

Dis-integration

Last June, I got a call from Mark Oestreich, Director of Westwood Hills Nature Center. He said that an exciting new project was planned for the Nature Center – a green building that would produce as much energy as it used, demonstrating its environmental responsibility as it welcomed visitors to explore the nature center. In order to make space for the new building, Children’s Nest Egg would need to be dismantled.  While I was sad to see the project end, I was excited by the new community expression of environmental stewardship that would take its place.  We planned for a closing ceremony on September 29, ten years after the opening ceremony.

Later that fall, I started to remove the pieces. Each one felt invested with meaning. The Earth egg had been sat upon (though never hatched), climbed upon, jumped off of, and contemplated against a backdrop of poetry, branches, and the trees and birds that surround it. The main poetry boards had survived many winters, buried in snow, and the letters started growing small tufts of moss. The metal poetry “feathers” of the bench, still carried the community’s wishes  – the “gifts of wild” they wanted to leave future generations. The original shiny gold brass engraved letters had become black, which contrasts just as well against the chrome mirrored plates. How many people had seen themselves reflected between the words of these poems, and watched the sunlight dance through the leaves, reflected off of the arc of the wing? Children who contributed poems are now young adults. My mother, who contributed a childhood nature memory, is now passed away. Ten years is very little time, and also very long.

So do these memories and stories disintegrate? If so, into what new form do they re-integrate? I have started to explore this question as I inventory what remains, hanging in transition between seasons:

1. A poem, whose parental stance toward the Earth, no longer fits my world view: now excerpted into “weathered words,” -photographs of a story in the process of disintegration and re-integration. (The actual poetry boards are in storage, waiting for their next role.)
2. A concrete sphere, painted as the Earth – a kind of puppet in our Nature Play Story: now sitting in my front yard, a “weathered world,” currently un-adorned and looking like it landed as a meteorite from outer space, denting the actual Earth which it references.
3. The outer feathers of the wing bench made of metal: now in a metal recycling facility, to be melted down and remade into future forms unknown. One scrap of a feather remains with me, a metal memento.
4. The inner chrome-plated feathers, many engraved with poetic commitments to the future: now carefully sorted for safe keeping. Their magic was in their transition – from an author expressing care, transmitted into words across time to be received by another reading and connecting to that care, perhaps tracing fingers along black letters, the size of butterfly legs.
5. A well-worn nest of branches, rope, and decking: now will bio-degrade at another location, returning to the soil and becoming new earth.

Re-integration

An earlier version of Children’s Nest Egg had been built at the Arboretum’s summer exhibit in 2007. Most of the decking from that sculpture was sold for reuse since it had only weathered one season, but the circular nest base ended up in my back yard. Last Friday, as my sons and their friends were building a fort and were running out of materials, I suggested they disassemble the badly disintegrating nest platform and re-use it for their shelter.

Duration has its appeal, but there is a time when it is clear that things must be taken apart, and something new must be made in its place. This can be a gentle process, with nothing wasted, like nature’s cycles. Old ways of thinking, at the pace of preservation and conservation, can be appreciated and harvested for all the care they embody, but they are eventually remade into radically new forms. -Like the youth movement in St. Louis, Park that helped drive bold new climate-responsible goals for the city. Or like the aspirational design of the new interpretive building at Westwood Hills Nature Center: now, today, breaking ground, fortified by past investments, sending forth a new story for the future.

You are Invited to the Children’s Nest Egg
Closing/Transition Ceremony and Program

Saturday, September 29th, 2018
1:30 – 3:00 pm (presentation at 2pm)

Location:
Picnic Shelter and Children’s Nest Egg
Westwood Hills Nature Center
8300 W Franklin Ave,
St Louis Park, MN 55426

At the Event:

• Artifacts from Planning on Display
• Presentation of Project Stories
• Reading of Community Poetry
• Transition Reflections and Ideas
• Closing Ceremony
• Take-home Memento (limited number)

Ten years ago this fall (September 2008) the Children’s Nest Egg public art project was dedicated at Westwood Hills Nature Center.  Since then, countless children and visitors have entered the room-sized nest to explore, sit on the earth-egg, and read the poetry from the community engraved on the bench that expresses the “gifts of wild” that community members appreciate and want to leave as a legacy for the next generation.

As you may know if you live in St. Louis Park, starting next year, a very tangible legacy is being planned for construction on the same site. A new nature center building for Westwood Hills will be a state-of-the-art green building  that improves public access to the natural environment and programming at Westwood Hills Nature Center, and models environmental leadership to future generations. This project necessitates the removal of Children’s Nest Egg, and there are no plans to relocate it at the Nature Center, due to limitations of space.

In light of this transition,  and to honor and appreciate the contributions of the funding organizations, as well as provide space for a community farewell to the art work, I have been working with Mark Oestriech, Manager of Westwood Hills Nature Center, to plan a closing ceremony in September near the 10 year anniversary of the Children’s Nest Egg dedication.  This is a way of thanking those who invested in this project and to properly close a project in which so many expressed their heartfelt feelings for community and the environment. The closing program is scheduled for Saturday, September 29th, 2018 from 1:30-3 pm at Westwood Hills Nature Center.

I hope to be able to talk with you about your own Children’s Nest Egg memories and stories, as well as ideas underway for the transition of Children’s Nest Egg – physically as well as its story. However the documentation and next steps for the sculpture unfold, the replacement of Children’s Nest Egg with a building that is a testament to the community’s environmental commitment is a meaningful turning point in the history of this special place.

Hope to see you at the event!

-Jonee

The Event is posted on Facebook, too. LINK