How much do students gather in another language.

Teaching walling in Austria this week with my fragmented vocabulary ( very broken German) the problem of overcoming the translation barrier is happily hurdled by having the students first learn to build miniature 'barriers' with 'broken fragments' of stone that they previously gathered.

Volkswagens and Crib Mattresses

Like when you say 'it was the size of a Volkswagen', I’m thankful there are common things that people are familiar with, that make it easier to describe how big some of the stones are, that we have to try to move sometimes - like crib mattresses.

Making the world a little less ugly , one ‘Johnny on the Spot’ at a time.

Our two day ‘Hide-a-porta-potty-with-a-dry-stone-wall workshop’was held last weekend. It went well. And now the portable toilet is well hid. No, it wasn’t right there, being used while we built the wall!

Anyway, the upper third of the wall was completed later by Mark and me . It’s over 8 feet high and hides a lot of shitty plastic.

I really don’t know why you don’t see a lot more dry stone partition walls like this, or maybe I should say, I don’t know why we can’t start to see a lot fewer of these ugly toilets at outdoor venues everywhere ?

Painting with her eyes

I Collect Rocks, Paint Eyes On Them And Return Them To The Landscape To Be Found Or Lost Forever 

By​Jennifer Allnutt 

On a recent residency with Q Bank Gallery in Queenstown, Tasmania I began a project of transforming collected rocks into painted eyes and returning them to the landscape to be found or lost forever.
Queenstown has an extensive mining history and there were many unusual rocks everywhere. So I began a collection and what started as something for myself grew into a treasure hunt/community art project.

Jennifer Allnutt is a contemporary figurative artist based in Melbourne, Australia.

https://www.jenniferallnutt.com

Writers Block

As a person who tries to think of ways of doing fairly interesting things with pretty ordinary stones, Its much easier when you experience any kind of Creative Block 

What makes rocks a composition?

There is a balance implied in asymmetry that can’t be achieved in symmetry.

A tidy wall makes for a tidy yard.

The Blossoms of the Magnolia tree look so beautiful on the branches and yet so messy when you see them on the ground below . It's good to have a stone wall in front of the tree, to hide the mess.

It’s all water under the bench

Can you imagine
Years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy.

Paul Simon

Space Gravel

Rock-stars, moon-stones, sun-showers and shooting-shards are all part of space gravel. 

Keep on....

What’s cement got to do with it?

Permanent dry laid walls have well fitted stones that can often look like they’re just meant to be together, but this satisfying look of ‘inevitability’ is rarely achieved when you cement them together.

Ironically, there is nothing concrete about this.

Aqueduct of Segovia. The Romans built this out of rocks that didn’t end up going to the crushers to be made into concrete. It is basically built dry laid, without any mortar.

Not cement to happen.

All over the world, unimaginably huge amounts of natural stone are blasted out of our planet and busted up into chunks and dragged kicking and screaming to the cement factories to be made into cement. 

Perfectly good stones for building with, are taken for their last ride up to the massive rock eating machines, that turn them into powder, to make endless manufactured concrete products

Tomorrow, let's look at some of the more natural, less destructive, less carbon-emitting, less fuel-consumptive, less mind-numbingly polluting things, that could have been done with these rocks.

Are You Experienced?

Stone is the medium most able to experience us !

We are it’s ‘other’.

And yet the solid non-ego consciousness of stone remains impervious to the mindless barrier ‘other’ materials pose to our meeting.

It looks for us. It reaches out to touch us.

We are strangely mindful of this, and as we touch it and work with it, we say we ‘know’ the stone, and trust that it knows us.

But 

Stone is only able to be known of us, because we have already been known of it.

If we experience it and are touched by its essence, it is because we are experienced by the stone.

And in time, some of that experience may be given to us.

The question ‘Are you experienced’ has less to do with any skill or knowledge we’ve acquired and much more to do with appreciating that wonderful something, beyond us, experiencing us.

When we touch.

When we touch a stone, who experiences who?

Imagine

                               

To make Peace takes a lot of creativity , a lot of initiative, 

A lot of new incentive,

It takes a lot of beginner stuff, pure hopeful unsullied enthusiasm and ...

It takes people who may not believe it can't be done. 

It takes beginners .

Professional people often have only bad experiences to go on, they just seem to know how to make war .

They think to solve aggression they need to be professional.

The peacemakers- the bridge builders build a sense of connectedness between human beings, between us and nature  between our small place in the cosmos and the rest of the cosmos.

These bridge builders are all beginners . 

A bridge likes this gives me hope, and I hope it gives others hope .

Make bridges not WAR 

Former Training.

Removing the wooden form (the former) out from under the bridge is not unlike taking the training wheels off a child’s bicycle. 

For a certain length of time, some sort of support is needed , but then, in a moment of time, that dependence suddenly disappears. That which was there has served its purpose.  

The bridge, and the child, have discovered how to stay upright on their own.

The magic happens, and then it’s all just water under the bridge.

The Franklin Bridge

Photo by Franklin Smith 

The experience of the last five days felt a bit like the dry stone equivalent of a major musical performance. I had been invited to come to Asheville to conduct members of a guest orchestra . The stone/musicians had not seen the music before but sight read and performed the ‘bridge piece’ perfectly. Bravo orchestra !

Just enough.

Our bridge is small enough for children to play on
Wide enough to walk over
High enough for the stream to flow under
Sturdy enough to last a long time...

And big enough for all our friends.

Top of the learning curve

Putting the last few stones in the stone arch becomes the unifying culmination of everyone’s energy, during this important stage of the bridge workshop.

Preparing to jump right in to International Naked Gardening Day today

“Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is— nor what faith or art or health really is.”

–Walt Whitman

Rock enroled students.

We are all students, oft times, travelling over bridges we haven't made yet. The knowledge of what is known, and not known, passes both ways. We start from a place where we overlook the obvious and cross over to where we begin to understand the intuitive - all the time never, blocking  the flow of continuity - but simply accommodating the course of nature . The stones are strong supporters of such multi-layered education. The universe is the place where all matter, and all that matters, is (are?) compressed into the arc of enlightenment .  

The first week of May is the best time to build bridges.

The dimensions for the centring, which will support our next dry stone bridge, have been carefully worked out, and the lines where it will be going, are shown here in green. It will be built by seven students in the next five days.

May 1st. What a lovely setting. You can just see Nels standing where we are going to be building the bridge this week.

Build it, and they will come

We recently created this catchment area on the property to collect water from a year round spring  . The rains came and created a new pond , and then the geese came and created, a mess, no no , created a beautiful photo opportunity,

Beknownst or Unbeknownst?

Is the thing you created based on something original?

The answer must be ‘Yes’

Since it is either, something you just made up,

or just a copy, (unbeknownst to you, perhaps) 

of what had previously existed.

That’s because the word ‘original’ can mean

‘What was there from before’

Or conversely,

‘Something entirely new’

Cool Moves

Walking Assembly from matter design on Vimeo.


It's a pity these are not big stones, rather than concrete. Big stones love to be moved, just as much as the small ones. Big stones love to be shaped too. Sometimes they have to be shaped into spheres in order to get them where they need to be. When they get there, they can be shaped again into big cubes or large steps or huge standing stones like the Ring of Brodgar in Scotland. How else could they have got them there?


.

Long ago is not that long ago

Laser Level

The laser level makes figuring out how high and how flat this stone pond catchment pond we’re creating is to be. It’s much easier than doing it by eye.

Just have to make sure you don’t leave it in the pond after it fills up.

Symbiotic Synergy

A wall of indigenous ‘rough rock’ meets an incoming ‘round rock’ migration, along the line of insight, and the angle of repose. One is planar, and perhaps some what plainer. The other is not complaining, easy going. Taking time to be well rounded, well traveled. 
The one’s contours of caring and caressing accumulate and bubble, while the other’s flush geometries look on with welcome face and both participants enjoy appearing in various concepts of permanence. 
We relish the patterns of commonality and difference. Together and separate, examples of the same thing. The unity of differences. The complexity of oneness. The undulating non-duality. 

Walking Away With It

It seems Andy Goldsworthy is pursuing a variation of a very clever 'walking wall' idea that wallers from Canada (and Britain and the States) gathered together to actually build much earlier here in Toronto, back on the night of September 29th 2012. 

See https://thinking-stoneman.blogspot.com/2012/10/nuit-blanch-have-you-ever-heard-arch.html

The idea, originally conceived by Evan Oxland and Akira Inman, included many other exciting components, including an arch, professional graffiti art, music, and a powerful light show - all these elements accompanying the process of the wall being assembled and reassembled, with stones taken from the back of the wall and moved to the front, so that it walked  slowly east along Queen Street, during a fabulous night of Nuit Blanche festivities.

Metamorphic Rock

Looking at the undeniably rocky terrain ahead , I’m desperately hoping the earth somehow is getting poised for a much needed, yet totally unimaginable cosmic ‘phase shift’🦋

Tunnel Vision

There is a story here. Can you guess what it its before looking at the photo below?  The story is about a perceived need for expediency.  It's someone's decision to actually think the look of urgency and inconsistent workmanship in one section might not impede the overall perception of wonder and mystery of the whole.   

This is a story of us thinking we always need to 'help' mother nature. It betrays a frantic eagerness to make a natural wonder 'last' – to resist change – to fix what isn't broken – to think that permanency is of a higher value than aesthetic . We decide that we know best, and see no value in vulnerability or the possibility of impermanence – that safety and convenience are more important than the humbling awesomeness of reality.

One man's garbage can is another man's "yes I can".

I came across a photo recently of me standing beside what would have been essentially my first attempt at building a nearly full-scale dry-laid arch entranceway.  Leaning on that temporary arch of glacial field stones, assembled those many years ago, as part of likely the first dry stone wall 
demonstration ever at a Highland Games event in Canada I remember the strange confidence I had felt that my arch idea was going to work. I had never done one before.

I hadn't planned to build one that weekend at the Uxbridge Games. It was supposed to be just a wall demonstration. But by the end of Saturday I'd already used all ten tons of random stone to build a sample length of wall. 

I could either take it down and rebuild it on the next day, or try to think of something completely different. The idea of knocking a hole in the middle and using the freed up stones to build an arch occurred to me as I was driving to the Elgin Park that Sunday morning.

I had to think fast. Next to my DSWAC site there was an empty plastic trash barrel which I decided to 'borrow' for the arch form. I secured it in place with pieces of wood so that the top of the barrel laying on its side would support an arch opening of stones you could conceivably duck your head and walk under.

The arch project attracted way more onlookers that afternoon than my efforts the previous day trying to get people excited about merely building a wall 'without mortar'!
There's nothing like the risk of failure to get people thinking about gravity and physics and the wonderful mystery of arch construction. 

When the form was removed there were cheers of excitement and congratulations. I was elated and relieved that the ad lib demonstration had been such a success.
After the crowd had inspected the arch and all the questions answered and comments addressed, the people dispersed.
People came and admired it the rest of the day.

A fellow came over later in the day, and tossing the wrapper of his ice cream bar into the plastic barrel, walked over to me marvelling at my lowly arch and asked how on earth I had been able to manage to position the stones over the opening all at the same time in order to make it. 
I pointed to the garbage can.