Necessary Art

I had a conversation with a friend this week that surprised me. She basically said art wasn't necessary and for the most part shouldn't even be a major is schools.
I don't know why she feels so strongly this way, although I know it is not because she hates art, in fact she is a gifted amateur artist, but I disagree.
Me the person who only does art if I can find some sort of practical reason for it.
I think that art is all around us, whether it is architecture, or stickers, or gourmet food. We all appreciate different forms more then others but if it wasn't necessary would we, as a race, be driven to create so frequently.
Art makes me happy. It provides peace. I think nice art can contribute to the emotion and the feel of a location. It provides emotional connections. It is evocative and freeing. I think the act of creating brings us closer to God, after all who is more creative?
Art may not be entirely necessary for the human body but surely it is necessary for the spirit.

Search Parameters: Part 2

Quite a while ago I posted about search parameters, but I was thinking about it again recently.
Growing up, I went on hikes and walks with my mom. She notices birds and flowers and names them so I started noting them too. Then, I studied archaeology and I started noticing chert fragments used for projectile points and broken glass. Then, I became curious about firehydrants. Then, I started learning about bones and became fascinated by them. As my nephew once said after I found a bone on a hike, "of course you'd be the one to find a bone." Then, I studied geology,
and rocks and geologic features started popping out at me. And now, I've been going on hikes with Jeremy more and I keep noticing bugs. I kind of love how my search parameters keep getting added to, because really it is just more things to appreciate and learn about.
One thing I try to do in my writing, an character building is to make different characters have different search parameters. I think it is a simple way to add a bit of a different feel to the point of views of various characters. For instance one of my characters likes birds, while another likes horses. When I write from the point of view of the one that likes birds I try to mention more birdsong and seeing specific birds while ignoring horses except to notice their presence.
As I concluded in my last post about search parameters though, what makes even more of a difference over specific likes and dislikes or educational biases is attitude. Am I looking for the positive or the negative or perhaps how to be a hero or a victim. Things like that are bit more tricky to add to a written character and probably even trickier to notice in your life but perhaps all the more important because of that.

Masks

I like a series of books by Sarah M Eden. Each book is about a different brother. In one of the books the mother of all these boys says to one of them "You all keep yourselves tucked safely behind various masks and walls, whether it be isolation or playing the fool or clinging to the appearance of impeccable respectability."
One of the reasons I like the series is because each book is about one of the brothers being brave enough to reveal themselves, to come out from behind the mask or wall they hide behind. And they each do it in a slightly different way because their mask was different to begin with.
This week I submitted my book Legend Speaker for possible publication (again). I wrote a cover letter for it that Jeremy kindly told me was boring... he was right and it forced me to confront my own mask.
When introducing myself I immediately want to say something to portray myself as boring as possible. Like telling people an interesting fact about me is that I have brown hair or I like to dig holes. When writing emails or cover letters or resumes I hide behind stiff formality. At first I told Jeremy it was because I hate talking myself up, which is true, to an extent.... but why do I hate talking myself up? Is it really because I hate bragging... or is it more about revealing myself, being vulnerable, showing excitement...
I was able to rewrite it in a way that wasn't boastful but it did show my excitement about what I've done, and yes it was a lot less formal.
I have been surprised at how much marriage reveals masks.... its been good but a bit uncomfortable.

Using Words with Power

Jeremy says I over analyze words....
The other week at church people were asked to describe attributes of God and some of the words that came up were Omnipresent, and Omniscient etc. Which are true and everything but it doesn’t really mean anything to me personally.
I think language is a super powerful tool, but we often don’t use it to its full advantage. I think one of the most annoying ways we don’t use it properly is when we say things that don’t even mean anything to us. We have all these big words that we throw around but sometimes they don’t represent any better what we meant then a simple word. That isn't always the case of course. People make fun of scientific papers for being overly dense, and they probably are but sometimes a really complicated word is so specific that using it can be far more succinct and clear then a lot of more ordinary words.

Big Picture Little Picture

One of our first stops at the petrified forest we saw little wood chips and chunks of logs. We were amazed at how wood-like they looked (see my last post) and also how common they were.

One of the next places we stopped was a lookout on a low plain where huge chunks of petrified logs scattered the landscape. It was pretty impressive, and once we went down in amongst them it was even more impressive because the ground was just covered with tiny pieces of petrified wood, absolutely covered!

Later in the week we went to another area where the complete logs were being eroded out in place and we could see just how long a single log could be.

It was really neat to see how the little picture (just how many wood chips there were) really made the big picture (the long logs) that much more impressive, because we knew that for each huge log there were that many tiny pieces. The reverse was cool too because understanding the larger picture of pretty much an entire forest of giant trees made us appreciate the beauty of each little fragment.

I feel like often people tel you to either smell the roses or look at the big picture... conflicting advice? but really it is both of those perspectives that make the other all the more meaningful and amazing.

Not Believing Our Eyes

For our honeymoon we went to Arizona for a week and spent much of the time in the Petrified National Forest. It was beautiful and deserty and warm and covered in petrified wood chips. Some of the petrified wood was beautiful bits of colored stone. What I usually think of when I think of petrified wood but what was far more impressive to Jeremy and I were the pieces of shattered stone that looked like modern wood chips, so much so that we felt compelled to pick them up over and over and over again just to drop them on the ground so they could hit their companions and "chink" against them in a very non wood-like sort of way.

Sometimes it looked like we had come across a freshly chopped log with wood chips all around.

Sometimes chunks of charcoal were scattered around.
But everytime my eyes were fooled and it was not wood.... at least it hadn't been wood in a very long time! And despite knowing the liklihood of these woodchips that I continually picked up would probably not be wood I still had to check and prove my eyes wrong.
How grateful I am for multiple senses to test things with and how grateful to know that sometimes my senses are fooled...

Fossils For Kids

This week I went to an elementary school to show off my fossils to a couple of groups of kids. I used fossils from my own collections and some of my friends. It made me realize that sometimes the fossils you collect for coolness are not necessarily the best for educational resources. In other words if I was to collect fossils for educational reasons I would definitely want some plant fossils, amber, tracks or coprolites and a modern longbone.
I'm sadly lacking in plant material, not counting my petrified wood. Amber is an important way things fossilize. My most obvious modern bone, other then skulls, is a moose vertebra which quite a few of the kids asked if it was a tree (which I don't really understand but there you go). Tracks or coprolites are really good trace fossils (the type of fossil no one ever thinks about). They show evidence of the animal but is not part of the animal itself.
I also realized that some of the fossils I do have that don't actually look that cool are really good learning tools. For example the petrified wood is just a big chunk but it is a good example of how the wood becomes a stone. And I have a little piece of sandstone that has imprints of tiny shells and it was the best trace fossil I had.
It was a fun activity though and maybe some of the kids will remember that not all fossils are dinosaur bones!