Evenly Spaced

I had the opportunity to attend the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts MFA show last Friday, I won't give it a full review (it wasn't great), but one piece in the show came to mind the other morning while I was swimming laps.  The installation piece consisted of paperclips of all shapes and colors.  They were hung on the wall with identical brad nails in a perfectly arranged grid, which must've been ten feet wide by two feet tall at eye level.  Paperclips.  Evenly spaced.  Conceptually there wasn't a whole lot going on in the piece, as far as I could discern.  My guess is that the creator was exploring the "artist as collector" Joseph Cornell thing (without the dope shadow-boxes).  Despite the shallowness of this piece I enjoyed the shit out of it on a purely visual level.  The regularity of the rows pleased me beyond any of the other (more finely crafted) pieces in the show.

Here on the farm we use black plastic, four inch tall pots to plant our germinated seeds which will later be used or sold as starts.  The plastic pots are made in Washington and shipped to us in a cardboard box, stacked 12 high.  The pots fit in nine rows, four pots deep in each flat.  After some elementary math, one can see that three stacks of pots equals exactly one flat!!  Bitchin'.  There is something deeply satisfying to me when things fit together perfectly (whether its pots in a flat or tetris shapes).  It is the same satisfaction I got from the perfectly spaced paperclips.

So what?  I believe this fulfillment can be applied as a way to live our lives.  Balance, spacing.  One easy example I can think of is mood.  A few weeks ago I was hanging out in the Art building of the college I attended drinking beers with friends late into the night.  I was in an absolutely jubilant mood, cracking jokes and dancing around like a lunatic.  My self-confidence was also off the charts, but I knew the mania could never last.  A few hours later when I was biking home, I suddenly experienced the very opposite of temperaments.  I felt like shit.  Not because I had had one too many beers, but about everything--my artwork, my life, myself.  It is rather unusual for me to feel so low and I attribute the swing of mood to imbalance.

Here on the farm there are chores one does not enjoy.  This morning I spent all of 3 hours digging thistles out of a row of brassicas (broccoli, kale, and the like).  The first hour was fun, I whistled and hoed.  The next two hours were, well, tedious.  But here's the thing, you just have to take it on the chin and stick it out because then before you know it, it's lunch time and you get to eat macaroni and cheese and laugh with your friends and there you have it--balance!  So just like the row of leeks we planted yesterday in the pouring rain, life calls for even spacing.