Living Life with Art

Rumination: The act or process of chewing cud.

Experiencing art as a digital blip on a small screen is anachronism to me. I'm skeptical about using fast technologies to share slow processes and thoughts. Even with the sound off (and it seldom is), the digital world is a noisy, frantic place; my sensibilities have more in common with a grazing cow than a computer screen. But here I am - off we go!

Art asks questions, inspires long thoughts, remembers things, tells stories, observes. It engages with beauty and mystery, humor and delight, with anger and pain and grace. Artworks come to us always as bearers of an idea with a particular point of view, but the insights that they carry and the lens that they offer aren't always obvious at a glance. Sometimes the only way to receive them is to live with them for awhile, to use them, move them around, find their edges and soft spots. To let them climb into your head and crawl around under your skin. Nuance, inflection, intuition – these things take time. It takes time to make a piece of art and it takes time to encounter it too.

The daily repetition of engaging with artwork in the real world around you provides that kind of time, and it changes you, it wakes you up. Mixing bread dough in a bowl that was turned on a potter's wheel by a friend, stirring soup with a smooth wooden spoon carved by my son, climbing into bed under a quilt that I made by hand, laughing with friends over a new painting in the studio - that's how living life with art works for us. It's a way to pay attention as we move through the real world.

In the instant it takes to click through to the next screen, a person is only able to register a quick impression of what they see – like it, pin it, pass it by. That's not how we do things here. I'm hopeful that what you see and read here at the Farmhouse will encourage you to pause, look around, and take in the things around you that are beautiful and hopeful, things that engage your senses and and make your fingers itch to do something real with your hands. We want to make you chuckle or take a walk or listen deeply to a story being told. Rumination leads down unexpected paths – green pastures, still waters, restoration of the weary, overstimulated soul.