Monday, October 30, 2006

Free Spirit

It's Monday, and time for a bit of metal:

I love the challenge of creating fluid waveforms with knitted silver "fabric". This particular piece grew out of my present internal struggle to define my path, and come to terms with my inability to plod forward in a straight line. Society places great value on folks who have an unwavering direction in life, working at a single profession for decades, always at peak productivity, invisibly absorbing child-rearing and loss and illness, never questioning whether there is any other way to live. But life - real, organic human life - is about cycles - circadian, menstrual, yearly, lunar, birth and death, health and illness - and diversity - one child could raise themselves, another needs focused moment-by-moment parenting to thrive. Surely living in harmony with these rhythms is more than just weakness and acquiescence. As for veering side to side - how else does one discover the extent of being without testing their limits on all points of the compass? I cling to the belief (backed up both by faith and chaos mathematics) that this seemingly random oscillation is, in reality, a cohesive whole, with meaning and identity, and a strange, complex beauty.