Imbolc                                     Black Mountain Moon

When Kate and I went out last night, we went to a Regal cinema and afterward across the street to the Macaroni Grill for dinner. We could have been in any upper middle class retail enclave in the country. While there is a soothing, predictable quality to these often brick or stone centers, virtues not insignificant in a huge and varied nation like our own, we both commented that we could have been on France Avenue in Edina. In fact, we couldn’t tell the difference while inside the theater and eating at the Macaroni Grill. That’s ok once in a while, but visited frequently these standardized spaces can, like the electric light bulb, begin to blur, then obfuscate the true nature of a place.

Becoming Native to This Place, the book by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute which I quote from time to time, is the antithesis of this form of shallow standardization. He insists, like Aldo Leopold in his land ethic and Wendell Berry in his work on his family’s farm in Kentucky, that we root ourselves, both literally and figuratively in the place where we live. Particularity, not universality is key to their thought.

The core goal of Die Brücke, a movement among young Dresden based artists at the turn of the last century, was to embrace the German/Nordic soul, one based in the particular physicality of the soil and geography of Germany and the people’s nurtured by it, and give expression to that particularity, not the universality presumed by the application of reason.  Die Brücke rejected the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason, distanced themselves from art’s classical tradition, favoring the Fauves, other key French artists like Cezanne and Gaugin and the Dutch Van Gogh.

This dialectic of reason and soul is a main theme of this new millennium, one with its trailhead deep in the ancientrail of Western philosophy. It may be the main theme of my life, a driving energy behind most of what I do.