Lost Wax

It’s crazy how a nose from one direction can look perfectly fine, and viewed from 180 degrees, it’s too close to the eye. When I work on small wax figures, I turn them continuously around in my hands, making sure, for example, the left elbow doesn’t extend below the hip while I carve the right side of the torso. Working on a larger piece, I circle continuously; this partner dance assures everything works from all perspectives. 

Refuge, 2020, in wax in my studio. The endangered sea turtle and giraffe are rescuing the humans.

Our planet faces a ferocious loss of habitat, fifty percent of the species on the earth have disappeared in the last forty to fifty years. We’re a destructive species causing the acidifying of the ocean, the loss of precious topsoil, and the poisoning of the very air we breathe. The animals haven’t caused this harm—we have. But I like to think, despite our recklessness and selfishness, they would choose to save us.

I delivered Refuge to the foundry in early January, needing to cut off the giraffe’s legs to fit in my car. 

The turtle arrives at the foundry.

Not a problem for Zach Gabbard, owner and sole fabricator at Mission Foundry in Hyde Park. He will be taking it further apart—flippers, turtle shell, giraffe head, giraffe tail, turtle tail, and each individual person to make rubber molds.

Once he has the rubber molds, he will pour casting wax into them—the small figures solid, the large shapes like the giraffe body receive a thin layer so they can be hollow. When Zach has these wax pieces complete, he will attach the small ones together and build a funnel above each one—the constructions, intriguing modern mobiles.

The next step is to create the molds to receive the molten bronze. Each of these wax mobiles are dipped into a silica slurry nine times to slowly building up the mold. They are dipped, then coated with sand, and hung to dry for at least a day between dips.

At the pour, the funnel on top of each mold receives the liquid bronze, the wax melts out, lost wax, and the bronze hardens. These hard shells are then hammered and broken to free them from the bronze inside.  

There are still days of work ahead for Zach. He has to cut off the sprues and funnels. He has to sandblast each piece to get the specks of hard shell out of every crevice. Then the individual pieces will be welded together. Zach has to know how to replicate the textures I sculpt in my wax sculpture, and he has to do it in metal so the welded seams disappear. He has to care about the subtleties of the texture, with the deliberateness of a poet choosing words to describe the grooved furrows of an oak trunk.

I returned to the foundry a few weeks ago to position each of the the small bronze figures on the backs of the giraffe and turtle. Zach welded each one in place.

Then Refuge received its final patina and wax polish. It’s a long process. This piece is signed and numbered 1/5. Though my original waxes have disappeared, I have the molds to make four more copies. But always, for each one, we have to first make a new wax model, then cast it into bronze. After five copies, we’ll destroy the molds. 

Lost wax is an apt metaphor for these times: The only way to create something new is to lose something.  While we are collectively facing tremendous loss, it is good to reflect on the space that allows for something new to arise. The loss is real—people’s lives, habitat, species, jobs, freedom. I am alarmed, but I dearly want to believe that we can turn things around. We need humility. We need respect for every living being on the planet. Then the turtle and the giraffe, the heron and the wasp, the oak, the waterlily, and even the gnat will all be helping because we are all interconnected.

Refuge would have been outdoors at the Fuller Museum this summer, but Covid has delayed the opening of the New England Sculptors Exhibit until spring 2021. It sits on a chunk of bedrock outside my studio. I’d love to send more casting work Zach’s way, so if you would be interested in a copy of Refuge for your own garden, let’s talk. 

Refuge, bronze, 2020

Refuge is a hopeful piece. The determined, young giraffe and the tireless turtle are unconcerned with the enormity of their mission. They echo the world’s need for us to engage, to bring our gifts, and to offer help in this time of great loss. It’s a collective dance we can’t do alone.

Pointers for a Writing Life

At the farm, for the month of June, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, I will concentrate on the tasks in front of me. On the other days of the week, as much as possible, I plan to escape to a rental house on Cape Cod. It’s between Wellfleet and Truro on the ocean side, an area I love and where I have vacationed with my children since they were young. My plan is to work on a book I have been writing off and on for five years and more. I would like to finish it, am feeling the pressure to complete this project—or if it seems not-finish worthy, eject it. Send it over and out into the ethers—delete, delete. After all, it is only electronic bits of information.

But thankfully there is Annie Dillard. In her book, The Writing Life, she says, “Writing a book full-time takes between two and ten years.” She offers me relief. I have not been working full-time on this project. I have two other full-time jobs—art and the farm. She also says:

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight . . . As the work grows, it gets harder to control: it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.

I understand this ferocity. At home, I cannot open the book for it might take over, grab hold of a leg and not let go. When I am on the road, or somewhere else, anywhere really, on a train, in a hotel room, and now at the Cape, for some reason the danger is not present and I can turn to it, dive in, and to my astonishment, do the work I love—the search to shape of an event, or an object, with words. And then there is the book itself, becoming an entity of its own, taking over, devising its own life. The two of us now living together.

I am writing about moving to Old Frog Pond Farm, assuming the care of the abandoned orchard, and committing to bringing it back organically. What got me here? Why did my marriage fail? How has my Zen practice braided through the orchard work? And what lessons have I learned that appear in my art?

            Annie Dillard again:

The strain, like Giacometti’s penciled search for precision and honesty, enlivens the work and impels it toward is truest end. A pile of decent work behind him, no matter how small, fuels the writer’s hope . . .”

Yes, she is right, I do have hope. And then I fall short, I fail as I judge what I am writing. I hear myself say, I am not a real writer. I read other writers whose work I admire and see how my writing lacks their skill. How does one learn to write? Annie Dillard, thankfully, answers this question.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength; that page will teach you to write.

Other than write, I take beach walks. On my first one, I stopped when I found a horseshoe crab upside down, it’s little pinchers barely moving. I turned it right side up and watched as it began to move. Its long tail spine pointing to where it had come from, its hulk moving towards the waves. It stopped after about ten feet, and I had this sickening feeling that it was dying, right there, in front of me. I touched its pointer, wriggled it from left to right, and it started up again, slowly, another six feet, scraping its way over the sand, leaving its foot-wide trail. We went through this ritual several more times, my teasing the pointer, the crab starting reluctantly to move, but each time it seemed to be moving more slowly.

When it finally reached the waves, I felt this was its most precarious place to be. It stalled. It waited. The surf poured over its hard shell. It seemed to be waiting for something. Then a large wave carried it into the jumble of surf. I saw was the tail spine, sticking up above the wave, pointing.

Mothers of the Earth

It’s a rainy and cold Mother’s Day morning. I smile though, as I walk to the studio and meet two families of geese shuffling their puff balls away from my threatening presence. The tireless care of these geese parents for their young, the overprotection, their ceaseless devotion strikes me as radical. What if we offered this kind of care to the world?

This morning I have no sculpture installations, no farm workers, visitors, or meditators. I thought about what I wanted to do with my free morning—a yoga class for my body, meditation for the mind, painting for the muse. There has been so much doing in the last month. Good doing, yes. Caring for the trees and the land. Meeting and helping artists. Delicious lists of a new asparagus bed to dig, raspberries to weed, young apple trees to weed and mulch, potatoes to plant, mowers to fix, dead trees to take down, buried rice to feed (we’re growing our own effective microbes to inoculate compost and orchard teas) and so on. But writing this blog is not on my to-do list, it is not something I do and say, now that’s done. It grows from a particular seed of quiet with the shape and color that only comes from being alone. I have to weed the garden of its to-dos in order to uncover what is growing.

Last Sunday we had a Crone Ceremony for the first time at the farm. Thirty-three women gathered to celebrate and bless each other.

An Online Etymology Dictionary defines crone with a lot of negativity:

late 14c., "a feeble and withered old woman," in Middle English a strong term of abuse, from Anglo-French carogne "carrion, carcass; an old ewe . . ."

The defintion ends with:

Since mid-20c. The word has been somewhat reclaimed in feminism and neo-paganism as a symbol of mature female wisdom and power.

At our gathering, we made ourselves crowns with fresh forsythia branches and flowers. We joined to acknowledge the new shape of our lives as older women, as wise and creative women with enough experience to trust our intuition. We rang The Olympic Bell and listened as its deep note resounded through the grove of pine trees. We let go of habits that no longer serve our lives today by tossing a symbolic twig or stone into the current of the pond. We owned our creativity and freedom as we sang, Amazing Crones to the tune of Amazing Grace, and celebrated that we still have much to offer the world. We ended our ritual in a circle in The Medicine Wheel as each woman asked to be blessed, and the group chorused, We bless you, and spoke her name.

Like the cherry petals that have fallen, the flowers in our crowns faded quickly. I tossed mine into the woodstove the next morning. But, this week, the orchard apples opened their pink cloud hues and row upon row like trackless waves billow on every side. Will the Gods favor us with a good crop? Will the low temperatures forecast for Tuesday night freeze the about-to-open blossoms? Will bloom sustain the wind and rain long enough for the pollinators to do their work on the next sunny day? 

Will our bodies trouble us too much so that we can no longer do the things we love? At our gathering we had one women who could no longer walk unsupported because of progressively debilitating Multiple Sclerosis. As she stepped with her walker into the middle of the circle, we felt her bravery and her struggle. 

On this Mother’s Day, I offer a prayer for the earth and a blessing for our children and their children. May we do the work to provide good medicine to heal our beloved planet Earth. May we creatively cultivate the opening of all hearts for every sentient being. May we find the seeds of quiet to reconnect with what is important so that future generations will blossom and bear fruit.

We’re all mothers of the earth. Happy Mother’s Day!

The Apple-Shaped Earth

My last blog post was about the threat of one million square feet of warehouses being built not far from our orchard. With the concerned opposition of many citizens of Boxborough, we held back the tidal wave of development — at least for the moment. The planning board pulled their zoning articles from the upcoming town meeting warrant. There will be no vote on re-zoning until the fall. That change will give everyone time for regrouping and envisioning. The property at 1414 Massachusetts Avenue is still owned by Lincoln Properties, and warehouses are the most lucrative way for them to develop their land. The website of the Boxborough community group, Save Our Town Character says, “The potential for Zoning changes to allow warehouses as described below is still very high.” The need to protect the land and the character of the neighborhood is ongoing, but spring has officially arrived, and farm work has begun.

On our first day, Blase, Holly, our new farm worker, John, and I enjoyed the yearly ritual of burning the apple prunings. Ignited by a dry Christmas tree, crumbled newspaper, and kindling, the fire of prunings swayed in the wind. Sparks rose, and apple smoke filled a cloudless sky. Mallards, great blue herons, a woodpecker, and red-winged blackbirds chirped melodies.

I staked for the planting of fifty-three new trees from the apple rootstock we grafted one year ago. Blase attached the back hoe and has begun digging the holes. He is as much devoted to this farm and the orchard as I am.

It will be a marathon of planting. In each hole, the tap root will lead to the north. We’ll mix a little compost and our own bio-char from the burn, a great amendment for the soil, made by dousing the fire before it burns to ash. A cedar stake will go in each hole to support the tree as it grows, and we’ll back fill by hand, removing the large rocks, our most reliable crop. Trees will be watered, blessed, and mulched to suppress the competition with tough orchard grasses. We’d gladly welcome volunteers!

Next the airblast orchard sprayer needs to be tested and calibrated for the season. And oh, the hardest part for me, what are we going to spray? There are more options now for organic growers, and one tendency is to want to try everything. Another approach is to allow the trees to fend for themselves, building up their own immune system like a child must do who goes to preschool. I prefer the middle way, doing what we can to help build the immune system of the trees by improving the soil and spraying nutrients.

Last weekend we visited our grandchildren. Both girls had runny noses, and Blase came home with a nasty cold. As a friend remarked, “Young children are like Petri dishes.” Some might say apple leaves are similar. Every leaf is an incubator where good and bad bacteria and fungi duke it out, and the strongest wins and colonizes the leaf. We want to do what we can to encourage the good guys rather than spraying to get rid of the bad. And, once in a while, we will spray an organic pesticide for a particularly destructive pest, rather than lose the crop.

A mid-June apple hidden behind a leaf with spots of cedar apple rust.

The next two months will be the most crucial for the orchard. Will we have blossoms? Pollinators? Fruit set? A crop? Today, with the added pressures brought on by climate change, these are real questions.  Orchards, like lands protected for conservation, keep us alive emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Our country was founded on the promises of agriculture, of self-sufficiency, of everyone growing food and fruit. The fruit orchard was a symbol of this belief in hard work, community, and opportunity for all.  We are now far from this ideal as we destroy forests, oceans, and even the air.

Sculpture LH

But the apple remains a fruitful inspiration, as it was in the nineteenth century when Walt Whitman wrote in A Song of Occupations, decades before space ship photographs,

The sun and the stars that float in open air,

the apple-shaped earth and we upon it,

surely the drift of them is something grand.