Urban Amish?

I was passing by Parliament St. last weekend when I ran into a furniture store called “Urban Amish “(86 Parliament St., Toronto). It took me by surprised and it hit me as a total contradiction as Amish are commonly  known for their attachment to rural life and their rejection of 'modern' commodities such as electricity phone,cars, telephone (although they do maintain an internal phone line for emergency use), as well as social security, military service (non-resistance is a practice that rejects physical defense and in some cases even legal defense), 'regular' education and some forms of medical assistance.The Amish, as a group, distance themselves from the non-amish world and keep a very strict observance of church and family traditions.

The Amish are generally respected but nonetheless controversial group. They are often criticized  for their treatment to children and their non-resistance position even in times of war, which occasionally have resulted in mistreatment of members of the Amish community by the non-amish.

The store, provides custom hand made furniture and keeps with the tradition with the tradition up to the point of furniture making, nevertheless it is a contradiction in its insertion in a contemporary way of life from the location to the use of electricity, marketing, web page, etc.

A happy medium? It that not seem that way. its too much of  a compromise if actual Amish people are behind it.

Meaningful Little Things

I made a point of going to see the Japanese cherry trees at High Park this year. The Cherries only bloom for a few unpredictable days a year, and then their delicate beauty vanishes.
I was afraid of missing the moment, the one chance you get once a year to see this gift of nature. So on a Tuesday afternoon, disregarding the work load, I rushed to the park with some friends.

In a gentle slope the trees were at full bloom.Each branch densely covered with pale pink-stained white flowers, fresh green in the surroundings and in the background, the Grenadier Pond with reflections of spring painting its waters with hues of green and terracotta.

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While observing this beauty, and how for one moment everything was left behind just because we knew it was our only chance, I thought: If we could only live with such sense urgency!,If we could take every moment and live it as if it was the only chance.
I thought of how many opportunities, moments, we loose in life.How many scape us, because we are afraid to act or we are too late or even worse because they are too little for us to give them space.

But when I saw the cherries, the little things became meaningful. Simplicity, design, time, life, death, the fragile….they all regained meaning. I stopped, slow down. I could think and feel intensely again and while in there have a peaceful sense of completeness

Death, Ink blot and Contemporary Art

"Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become."

— Italo Calvino

Last time I saw my Dad was two years and a half ago. It was winter, and it was winter in my heart as well.
I could not see how to get off that lost and I did not know where I wanted to go and I had forgotten where I came from.

It was a good encounter, he is a poetic scientific mind, or at least that is how I see it; and talking to him , who is in such a different field of knowledge, I find, we have to go to basic to create some form of understanding , that is the way we connect.

Many things had happened… my grand mother, his mother, had died, and I was not there. She was the glue, the reason of my household to get together and celebrate. She was a ‘raw self’, honest,peaceful and beloved by us all.

When my Dad came to visit, he tried to bring me a photograph of the funeral, so I could partake of the last good bye. But he said the photograph, mysteriously got deleted from the camera but he was not that sorry because he said it did not capture how beautiful and peaceful she looked.

Many of my friends have found this idea strange and even creepy, but I can only see love.

Some how we started talking about the power of emotions to affect the perception of things, I thought the perception of peace, present or not, was coming from his heart.The picture was just the fact, his description was the full register of the memory of the event past.

I told him that Contemporary Art was like that, like the Rorschach inkblot test-to put it in medical terms-We 'project' ourselves into the object of art, and if it reaches us, we establish a dialogue with it, we connect, and we find meaning.

“There is an important difference between getting an ordinary object accepted as a work of art and having a work of art taken as an ordinary object.
The latter is simply a mistake, whereas the former entails a philosophical revolution in the very meaning of Art.”

When he left, I still did not know where I was going but I knew who I was and where I came from.