Share the gift of health, wealth and happiness !

Another Hughes & Co project available at the Holiday Sale.

Hi Everyone

For anyone that I missed in my email here  is the invitation to the next Hughes & Co Holiday Sale. I will be adding all my work in progress on my blog over the next few weeks and in addition Andrea will be posting on  http://hughesandco.tumblr.com.

Really excited to see everyone !

Please feel free to forward this invitation to all your friends and family, as everyone is welcome.

Irked by the pressure I felt to complete a task (I hate this about myself) I started working in the garden last weekend making my annual Christmas wreaths. As my mood softened, the sun and, the beauty of the day made me ‘really’ look around and I did a mental shift. I started to reflect how we define our days through nature, but in turn fail to acknowledge this; because we take it for granted; in our introspective day to day pursuit of living.

All I initially felt last weekend was that the weather was mild, that the wisteria was not too dry to bend, and that pruning at this time would allow the plant enough time to heal before the first frost. Three facts that governed my day; three facts determined by nature. And three facts I originally disregarded until I started to look outwards.

As an urbanite removed from nature’s cycles for basic survival (by this I mean I don’t live from my own sustainability) I failed to see at first how it defined my day. Listening to the weather channel, reading about flash floods in Britain or taking a daily walk in the local trails at a fast pace with a mind clouded with relentless dull tasks is not communing with nature. Every day we all live by and through nature; it delineates our mood, what we wear, how we eat, what activities we do, but somehow as part of our mindless routine we overlook the intricate power that nature holds over us.

We hold the belief that we can harness nature, cultivate it and make it yield to our advancement of intellect and technology. What a huge joke! As time and time again we see world disaster, death, illness, hunger, poverty and hardship brought about by nature’s influence and not in a subtle way, but in a searing catastrophic way. Which, makes us shudder, but fails to make change.

Our relationship to nature is very complex, yet paradoxically ambivalent. Without its life force we wouldn’t live, yet we deny this any reverence. It’s the metaphor of plodding on with our heads down and failing to see the horizon and the on coming………

I lifted my head, briefly last weekend; the effort is to keep it up.

Often it’s what is unwanted, the residue, that is the most interesting.

The hollowed out fruit skins, the melted candle wax, the paint stains from print making.

Simple images, that we overlook in our quest for the real, the authentic accurate entirety.

In this case, it’s the wood shavings from a furniture maker’s industrial plane.

Somehow a quick unedited email or text just doesn’t resonate like the slap of an envelope dropped through the mailbox.

There is no (or very little) ritual to writing via electronic mediums. We don’t gather pen, paper, envelopes and stamps. There is no tactile experience of the handling of the paper, no smell of the ink and no gummy taste from the envelope seal and stamp. We send a brief overview of what we would have said, almost as a duty, a quick afterthought, often in phrases without grammar or punctuation.

Perhaps worse is the fact that by making letter writing obsolete we have no permanent stored record. Nothing, (unless we save all our emails and who does?) to look back on, to inform future generation, to help chart history. Whole biographies have been written around letters; published to give others an insight into an intimacy that the people corresponding shared. Somehow I can’t imagine this same intimacy being gleaned from email’s and text messages. I can’t imagine the biographer asking to access someone’s computer or phone and retrieving shared messages. And, even if this were to happen, how clinical to take some cyberspace rudimentary messages and try to pass them off as full factual accounts.

Finally, how sad for my daughter, and the predominance of a generation who mediate relationships through text messages, that she will never have a love letter. Just an abbreviated list of phrases or words (If she doesn’t delete them), staring at her from a small, hard plastic screen.

Last week was so rewarding. I loved every minute of teaching and interacting with five remarkable young adults !  Above is some of  their finished artwork, which show so much thought and artistic merit. This weekend, I am left somewhat sad that they won’t be back here on Monday.