Art Continues

And so does hope

Tasked with the question of finding “goodness, truth, and beauty” in art, my son, Michael, and I spent some time together at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. Michael’s school assignment was to write a persuasive speech, meant to sway his audience as to the delivery of these qualities into the world through art.

In the Renwick, we stepped into the full “grand salon” display of Janet Echelman’s “1.8,” a fiber and colored light exhibit meant to “examine the complex interconnections between humankind and the physical world.” It reveals Echelman’s fascination with the measurement of time.

How to describe the sensation of not only stepping into, but being drawn to remain, in this room, with light shifting and changing over the walls and topographical patterns of the carpet? We were immersed into light, into the shifting of it over time, and into the way that time pauses when observing something truly spectacular.

Echelman’s installation was inspired by the data recorded March 11, 2011, after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that rippled across the Pacific Ocean toward Japan. The geological event was so powerful that it shifted the earth on its axis and shortened the day by 1.8 millionths of a second.

Michael is 15-years-old. He loves to soar down mountains on his bike and joke loudly with his friends. He moved quickly through most of the museum, eager, it seemed, to be finished with the experience of moving slowly, observing quietly. Yet, in this grand salon gallery, he paused. We were suspended in a moment together. We sat in stillness, watching as the light shifted in the way that it would if we were observing a sunset. I could feel both my heart rate and my breath slow, my mind move into a timeless space. The intangible had been brought into the space of a room, emotions and qualities of life that cannot easily be measured held in a container of that which can.

This was the experience of the Covid-19 art section as well, seeing the copper “fingerprints” that Sharon Massey created for her husband’s mother as a sort of prayer beads to comfort her upon the death of her own mother. Massey’s husband’s grandmother died during the pandemic and so it was impossible for him to comfort his mother physically. Massey etched his fingerprints onto copper to create a strand, something tangible, his mother could hold onto to sense she was not alone. Something so simple took my imagination into connection with a wave of grief and love, palpable, intangible, tangible, that is part of every human story.

What will save us? Maybe it’s remembering this. Here again it is the artists, the ones who work in partnership with the bigger questions of life, who guide us to hold the unimaginable, to place it into the experience of the senses.

For a time, brief though it was, my son and I were held in this together, and it felt in that moment like it was with the eternal. Being drawn to remain and to experience the sensation that art facilitates, could this be an experience of the eternal? It felt like it saved me for a time. And isn’t this how we store up meals of hope for the future, sliding nourishment into the “freezer” for later? Yes, that stillness, these means of connection, they became (please forgive a very old expression) soup for my soul.

As this first week of Advent ends, hope still working its way into my contemplative imagination, I find myself in this prayer: God, there is so much I don’t understand, and bringing wholeness to all that is fragmented is taking a long time. So, what is mine to do today? How can I be in partnership with that which I can, and perhaps even that which I cannot, imagine into being?

Maybe for just right now, this small memory of timelessness and connection with my son is enough. A friend shared this quote with me earlier in the week, spoken by Gandalf in Lord of the Rings:

“Other evils there are that may come…Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fileds that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

Finally, a practice. This one is intended to safely build a little heat and strength for your core and legs: Yoga with Christa