Happy Father's Day!

My wonderful father is an explorer, a naturalist, a writer, an artist, a story teller, and one of the most creative people I know.

Scott and I walked through the house, photographing just a few of the lovely objects my father has created for us, like this table, destined eventually for the living room, currently holding a few little starts from my mother on the front porch. The sticks leaning against it are his doing too, left behind after a visit, the sort of interesting detritus he sheds.
The spoons he carved some years ago, during his spoon-carving phase. They are one of my favorite things. There is much power in knowing that the simplest objects of every day life were created by the hands of someone you love. My father taught me the magic in forming relationships to the things in our lives, and also in the little leap of faith it takes to attempt to create these things, practical things, ourselves. It is so meaningful to make a spoon, a bowl, something useful, something you can't really live without. This kind of simple self-sufficiency is so often forgotten, and enriches our human experience if we remember to develop it. I also learned from my father how to make a stew out of bees if I am lost in the wilderness. I prefer the spoon carving, though I haven't actually tried either.
And then there are the spirit-objects, which fall from his fingers like flowers in the fairy tales. These two masks were gifts to Scott a few years ago, and are among the most treasured belongings we have. A Pan-like dancing philosopher, and Scott's favorite, a wind-god.


To my chagrin I couldn't find any of his beautiful boxes in our house. One gets lost in their tiny mystical detail. Broken and lost objects come together to reveal their strange affinities, to show off the new hidden worlds created. I don't have any on hand. Because they are fragile, ephemera, with a tendency to last only so long. That is something my father taught me too: to value the making, the process, the risk of creation, to ignore practical concerns if they in any way confound creativity.

He taught me to be scrappy, inventive, tough, and resourceful, to believe in magic, and to be unafraid to create structurally unsound objects. To see the endless potential in the things other people overlook, to pull things out of dumpsters, that a few hours in the freezer purifies almost anything, to save the tiny bones of smashed creatures, and to climb over the fence at the zoo for the really good feathers. He taught me to ignore boundaries with deep sensitivity, and to see all the world as an invitation to create and to play. He gave me language which is for both of us the first and deepest and hardest medium, and he taught me also to never confine myself to the arts I succeed easily in.

When I asked him a month ago if he happened to have a round table top no more than three feet across that I could have, he magically produced one from the basement. That's the kind of dad he is. Thank you, Daddy, for all the building and the playing and most of all for the wisdom about living you have shared with me. And the endless love.