Coming home to spring
It’s often hard for me to return home from California, a place of such obvious beauty, still so foreign to me. This past trip, I was obsessed with the smell of eucalyptus driving down Highway 1 and the surprisingly lulling sound of the fog horns on the Golden Gate Bridge. They blew almost every night of our trip, like some great sleeping monster snoring out in the Bay.
But Texas has rolled out the red carpet weather for us — the snapdragons have bloomed in my wife’s garden, and the trees in the front yard are “coming into leaf… like something almost being said.”
The creative learning spiral
This is a diagram I copied out of Mitchel Resnick’s book, Lifelong Kindergarten. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how essential it is to stop thinking of our creative lives in terms of linear progress and think of them instead as cyclical, seasonal, and non-linear.
It’s an idea that’s been essential to my own practice, and one I’ve fiddled with in various visual representations. Here’s a page from Show Your Work!:
And here’s a blackout:
Here’s another doodle from my diary, where I’ve mapped some of the concepts from Resnick’s book onto the various parts of the spiral. (You’ll note my extra steal/share annotations.)
By now you might have noticed that the spiral is similar to the feedback loop of the Scientific Method or Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.” What’s essential is that the spiral doesn’t have an end — it is a lifelong spiral.
This morning I watched a livestream of Resnick presenting in Reggio Emilia, the Italian birthplace of the famous educational approach. Resnick talked about how it was a visit to Reggio 20 years ago + a (fantastic) book by Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, that brought him to the idea that the ways we learn in kindergarten should be “spread through a lifetime.” (I just got done reading The Art of Tinkering, a book from Resnick’s bibliography, which seems to me a catalog of artists who have retained a lifelong kindergarten-like sense of play.)
Thinking more and more about the spiral, I remembered a drawing I drew for someone who asked me a question about how I balanced creating and consuming:
Another endless learning spiral…
Domination
Still — always? — thinking about seasons.
A cabinet of curiosity bound by season
“Cabinet of Curiosity” is the (perfect) title for Jeffrey Jenkins’ introduction to the visual compendium of David Sedaris’s diaries: It alludes to the history of the “wunderkammer,” of course (I have a whole chapter devoted to the subject in Show Your Work!), but also, literally, to the cabinet in Sedaris’s London home where he keeps his diaries, his lifelong record of his curiosity. (Complete with momento mori!)
In yesterday’s post on Sedaris’s diary habit, I mentioned that Sedaris averages around 4 volumes a year, but what I didn’t know then is that he usually binds these volumes by season. Jenkins grew up a close friend of the Sedaris family, and writes:
The Sedarises were as attuned to the change of the seasons as anyone I’ve known… I think this attention to the seasons helps explain David’s devotion to finishing one diary and beginning another in conjunction with the year’s solstices and equinoxes. While we’re adjusting our clocks forward or backward, he’s picking out a new diary cover.
I was particularly pleased to discover that the Sedarises celebrated October 1 as an official holiday — I wrote my piece about thinking in terms of “season time” on October 2 this year.