Putting Down New Roots

My anticipation to re-enter my studio is growing. The studio has been gutted, old electrical wires stream in all directions like seaweed underwater, boards pulled from the walls lay with nails protruding. One part of the ceiling remains as a loft space with a raised roof and new windows. The other side is open to the eaves. There’s no insulation, lights, or finish, but I can taste the new space.

Filled Studio, Empty Studio, New Construction - same view.

I have always loved my studio, even at its most crowded, inefficient, and difficult to work with. It’s been my space. A space I can leave messy, where I can leave tools where I want, and only I need to know where to find them. It has always had its own organization, betraying its chaotic outward appearance. It’s been a shapeshifter — tables appearing and disappearing, floor space growing and shrinking, and hooks on the ceiling filling with nettles and mint drying.

But now all that is changing. Nothing inside hints at what has happened over the last sixteen years. What lies ahead is unknown.

When I moved in, I brought my materials with me — old tools, rusted metal, fabrics, and curious debris. I continued to make sculpture, sometimes exploring new themes, but always following a known path. Two months ago I emptied every iota of matter — the process took weeks. But, in another month or two, construction will be over and I will have an empty space, a blank canvas. I want to do something different, something that arrives not from the materials, but from inside my heart. A close friend who came in to see the progress asked about moving stuff back in, imagining the fun I would have arranging the space. I realized I wasn’t thinking about that. I’m not thinking about arranging anything, or moving anything back in. I’m only anticipating the experience of this new state of emptiness and my own creativity. I want to feel the art coming from my own body — stripped bare, and I am looking forward to sitting and feeling the empty studio in silence.

Yet, I know that this space can never be truly empty. I will carry the daily news will me: the dire situation of the unfathomable numbers of people displaced by frightening natural forces and horrendous human-caused tortures — their isolation, desperation, and need for help.

The Way of Peace installed in Lawrence, MA, Linda Hoffman

I am beginning to articulate new questions. What is it that I truly want to add to the world? Does art make the world more comprehensible, tolerable, sharable, beautiful? I’ve lived my life believing this. I am humbled by the enormity of the possibilities and challenges, and at the same time excited to meet this new space, share it, and see how it will influence my art. Planting new seeds in the studio, I'm hoping their tiny root hairs will find fertile ground. 

A String Workshop

Materials

Pick up a ball of string or rope at the hardware store. Choose one that appeals to you, that resonates with you. It could be nylon and yellow, or natural jute, clothesline, or cotton.

Session One: Introduction

We'll take a seat around the work table with chosen material and begin by asking why we chose this string and not the fifty or so other options.

For example, some strings are quite thin; others are smooth. The one I have in my hand is nylon braided – I can see the tufts at the cut end have frayed, with the outer nylon opening outwards and the finer strands from inside standing up. I didn’t realize at first how many strands there were inside and how the wrapper holds them so tightly together. I wonder if I take it apart further what I will discover.  

There are manila ropes, cotton ropes, polypropylene ropes. Some are twisted; others are braided. What does yours look like? 

Session Two: Finding Your Way

Unravel some of it, play with it, tie it, untie it, loop it, braid it. Then recall that this is the thread of your life. There have been slack times, tightly stretched periods, twisted times, and knots. Sometimes there’s a knot that is so tight you can’t find a way to loosen one of the strands. You give up, leave the knot there, and go on.

Can you call to mind one of these times? A change in your life, the death of someone you love, or even a small knot, such as when you answered too quickly. Can you see that every event is connected to everything else? My own knots are like rosary beads: I know my way by touching them.

Session Three: The Way it is

Read the following poem by William Stafford:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it, you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

What has been the dominant thread that you see weaves through your life? How has it supported you? Have you lost it and then found it again? The golden thread throughout my life has always been art. What is yours? What are some of the other strands?

Filling the Vessel, Linda Hoffman,  in process 1999 

Session Four: Your Golden Thread

Share some of your string with another participant. Find a way to weave the two strings together. Do this without speaking. Then talk about what you created with each other.

Source, Linda Hoffman & Margot stage, installed in Worcester

Session Five: Creating a Sculpture

Make loops with your mass of string. Let it fall to the ground. Then pick it up and hang it from the ceiling. We’ll look at everyone’s unique creation.

Then we will clip some of everyone’s string and tie it to our own string mobile.

Notice how in your sculpture your string is still dominant, but the other strings add color and texture, accents, and interest. Your string is the support and your creation is unique.

Session Six: Letting Go

Bring a few objects to our next session to add to your string. Words in wire, sticks, a nail, a shell. Nothing that you are attached to and wouldn't mind losing. Put out on the table all but one of your objects. Walk around and choose a few objects and then add these collected objects to your string mobile. We’ll walk around together noticing how we feel about our chosen items distributed on the other mobiles.

Look at your own piece and share your reaction to it. Does “I don’t like mine” or “I like mine” occur to you? Now, recall that this is your life. Grab and hold and love it. Form it some more. Keep shaping it. You can’t discard it. Keep using it.

After Applepicking

On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. One runs from tree to tree . . .  picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples. 
                                                                        ― Sherwood Anderson

Applepicking is over. It’s early this year because two of our most plentiful varieties were hit by weather issues. We’ll pick and press those that remain for cider, cook and freeze applesauce, and store the Blushing Golden apples (they are good keepers), but otherwise it will be time to put the orchard to bed. We have nutrients to spread, mowing to do under the trees, and vole protection to install — actually quite a lot of work to do. It’s been a long year of preparation for such a short, and not very profitable, season.

The trees look sad with their limbs bare and their leaves fading and falling. It’s been a fall with summer temperatures, and the trees prefer it cooler. I can imagine the trees speaking among themselves these lines from Robert Frost’s poem, “After Apple-Picking,”

Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired. 

The trees do their best. They fight the wars with pests, they take up nourishment and water as they can, and they stand amidst the winds and hail. Their world is changing more quickly than they can adapt to. I visited a friend a few weeks ago, and the line of maples around her house were all brown. “Maple die back,” he said. I nodded. Whatever that means. For we don’t really know what is happening.

Mike Biltonen is a New York State orchard consultant who writes a newsletter at Knowyourroots.com about the pressing seasonal issues in his orchard world. In July he wrote:

But most importantly, the effects of climate change and apple tree decline are not avoiding any one. I am seeing orchards with many different problems and manifestations of sudden apple decline (SAD). Orchard management for climate resilience is the defining issue today.

One commonality – regardless of how you grow your trees and fruit – is that no farmers are going to escape the impacts of climate change. For some the consequences may be dire resulting in complete orchard collapse. 

When I first read this in the newsletter, I put my head in the sand. It sounded so ominous. But reading his newsletter again, and with the season for applepicking over, I am looking at the reality in our orchard. The new trees, the trees I have planted from 2006 onward, produced a beautiful crop. The fruit was unblemished and tasty and their production was bountiful. The trees that succumbed to weather issues were the three varieties that were already in the orchard, Macintosh, Blushing Golden, and Golden Delicious, trees that are now over 35 to 40 years old. Is it that these trees are feeling the weight of their years? They are not standard size trees—these can live 100 years—but semi-dwarf, which have a considerably shorter life expectancy for optimum production. Maybe they are reaching that time in their lives, and I am expecting too much?

With climate change, an aging orchard, and, oh, yes, my own aging — I am conflicted about the prospect of continuing to make the orchard a viable place for pick-your-own organic fruit. Fall 2016 we had no fruit because of the spring freeze, and now this year we had only about 50 percent apple production. I want to jump ship, but as the captain I will stay on board. There is something about the orchard that demands this fidelity. We’re discussing a rejuvenation plan. We’ll take down some of the oldest trees and the two rows of Macintosh apples, the scab magnets, and plant more scab-resistant varieties.

The orchard has given me so much. Its branches have spread over the pages of my writing and its roots grown into my art.

From One Seed, Apple prunings and bronze figure, Linda Hoffman & Gabriele White

But, now, I can understand how the prior owners left the orchard on its own for years before they moved away. It can be just too much effort. I have learned so much from working intimately with the trees. We have had some great years of bumper crops, the orchard a ravishing vision of color and scent that delighted countless apple pickers. But fall is in the air.  Both the trees and I need a rest. I turn to Mary Oliver’s words for repose.

            Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

Plein Air Poetry

Today is for poetry at Old Frog Pond Farm. This afternoon, twenty-four poets will gather and walk the trail around the pond and through the woods, along the orchard, to the meditation hut, with a stop at the rock turtle, and back to the dam. The poets will be reading the poems they began writing earlier in the year inspired by a visit to the farm.

We need poetry to mine the subtle, the tenuous, the painful, the ecstatic, and elegiac feelings of our humanness. We need poetry when we are tired, hurt, hassled, and missing connection to our own heart. “I come to the farm,/having very nearly forgotten myself,” begins Lucinda Bowen. “And here blooms a memory. . . my surprise at improbable sweetness.”

Early in the year, Susan Edwards Richmond, organizer of the event, and I, choose a theme. This year’s subject, Memoir, “invited the poets to dig deeper, to go beyond surfaces, and draw, sometimes unbidden, wells of feeling from the landscape,” wrote Richmond in her introduction to the chapbook of poems. 

Susan Edwards Richmond, Plein Air Reading, 2013

Poets sign up to participate. Throughout the spring and early summer, they visit the farm and walk the paths. When they come upon a view, a place, a tree, or a sound that awakens their muse, they stop and write. They return home, work on their poems, sometimes visiting again. In mid-summer, they submit their poems to Richmond, editor of the chapbook. For some, Richmond responds with suggestions, working closely with the writer to enhance the poem; others’ work arrives fully fledged. Then Richmond orders the collection, giving shape not only to the book, but to the walking event. Our slow-moving herd of poetry appreciators can’t be running from the dam to the orchard to the bell; then flying to the meditation hut and back again — or the walk would take us far into the evening hours.

Sometimes it is one of the outdoor sculptures at the farm that moves the poet to words. For poet David Davis, the ringing of Paul Matisse’s Olympic Bell brought back memories of Nepal. “Forty years ago in Katmandu/I heard a monk ring a temple bell/That shook my chest and opened my ears.” Polly Brown begins her poem with, “A sculpted figure by the pond,/gathering sky in her round arms,/Is my mother—alive but so lightly tethered/to the place and condition of her body.” She, too, mentions the bell, “hauling on the hammer I sound the bell/in the woods,/ and they [her mother and father] fly to me.”

Some poets invite us to feel the plight of the greater world. Linda Fialkoff writes, “So many refugees/choked into one small boat/fueled by a damp, ragged/body long held hostage.” It is as if she knew that Alicia Dwyer’s Suspended Encampment, a hanging sculpture behind the Medicine Wheel, would be arriving for the sculpture exhibit. Dwyer’s sculpture not only refers to the plight of Monarch butterflies, but to the migrations of people, the refugees throughout Europe, and now, the homeless millions in the aftermath of the recent violent storms and earthquakes.

Suspended Encampment, Alicia Dwyer (partial)     Photo:Robert Hesse

bg Thurston picks up a stone and hears, “Sometimes sorrow/sits like a stone in your heart/and you are unable to lift it.” For Heather Connelly Bryant, the raspberry patch evokes a strong memory, “Yet I was wrong—now there is new life, new love, new/hope— infidelity no longer hangs in the air, everywhere.” Richmond, also wrote near the raspberries, “each of us now with our own green past, red stained fingers. Only rarely/was there enough/but we were always sated.” 

Richmond and her husband brought their children to pick raspberries at this farm years before I moved in, and she was so happy when she learned that I would continue to care for the patch and open it for public picking. Since that time, Richmond and I have collaborated on many projects — Wild Apples, a journal of nature, art, and inquiry, five years of Plein Air Poetry at the farm, and our most recent collaboration, a children’s book, Where’s My Bonkers? about a girl, her mother, and an apple. It’s always about collaboration at the farm. We share, inspire, and co-create together.

Cover Art & Design:  Lynn Horsky

We invite you to join us this afternoon, Sunday, September 17 at 2pm to walk and listen to the poets read their poems. I guarantee you will be sated.

If you can’t make the event, a limited number of chapbooks will be for sale at the farmstand and on the farm’s website. The walk is free and open to the public.