I watch a lot of British tv. Midsomer Mysteries was one of my favorites, mainly because of how it portrays British culture. I was fascinated with the idea of the British Village. In America, we don’t really have villages.
Technically, maybe we do have villages, but they’re nothing like the romance of British villages. We have small cities and rural townships. Ours are looser in some ways. We live far away from one another. Cars and roads have really made the structures of our villages. Britain was structured around horse and foot travel. That’s just the beginning of the differences I see.
What really fascinates me is the intangible elements that create a village. I stretch the definition sometimes – is a village really just “a small settlement usually found in a rural setting” (National Geographic)?
No. For me, it’s everything from a tiny unincorporated hamlet to a small city. It’s about the character of how we create community and how we relate to each other and to nature. It’s the magical elements that bring beings together into a tangible, working whole.
That’s what the American Village series is all about.
In American Village I, I set out to express my experience of being on my own block. I wanted to combine the feeling of the Coburg Ridge and the Douglas-fir in my front yard with the busy, distracting, unsettling feeling of the busy city street on which I live. In my own yard, I often feel bombarded by the noise of the city, yet when I get centered and focus on those huge, natural spirits of the mountains and my friend the Douglas-fir, I can find balance. For me, living in an American village is all about finding balance from minute to minute, day to day.
In American Village II, I was aiming to capture the view from one of the highways I regularly travel. I wanted to capture the dichotomy of the residential and school yard space that’s surrounded there by billboards, highway, and bustling commercialism. I wanted to capture some perspective on the area.
We humans love to think we’re at the center of our cities. We believe we built them therefore humanity is the city’s beating heart.
The true Heart of the City is Mother Nature. She rules the natural world. She gives us the materials to build. She guides our minds and hands as we work. She invites all that is wild into our finished creation. She inspires our every move.
And she reminds us that the work is never truly done.
Our cities are living creatures. All that is Wild and Natural is the city’s beating heart. The city is as much a part of Nature as the raw materials we used to create it. We’re just custodians.
That’s the place I explore in Heart of the City.
Villages the world over dominate the places where they’re rooted. Humans have settled for so very long in many of them in one form or another. It’s no wonder so many people think they own the land where they live.
The land we call America is still Wild. Trees and Land dominate this place. We humans talk about owning land, but that’s fantasy. The Land owns us. Mother Nature has made space for us, but she’s still very much in-charge of the show.
Our Place is about showing respect to the Wild Beings whose guests we are here. It’s a reminder of how small we truly are next to the powerful Spirits who have shaped the land where we live. It’s also a celebration of our neighbors, human and non-human alike. Our Place in this Land is best when we’re in harmony with our neighbors and when we acknowledge that the Land owns us, through and through.
It’s never dark any more. Before there were cities, we lived for centuries upon centuries amid the varying quality of light. We moved from forest to city, and even then we lived between the light and the dark under sun, moon, and stars for hundreds of years.
Today, we humans have spread light everywhere for safety, fear, luxury, commerce, travel…the list is endless. We’re constantly inventing ways to banish the dark from our lives. Light 24-7 the time has changed life.
America 2024 arose out of a moment of recognition that we are all one, despite the ideas that seem to divide us. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. You experience love, loss, chaos, anger, fear, joy, wonder in your life. I do, too. We all do. The division is just a bloody idea, an artificial slash meant to divide us so we fall. The powers who seek to divide us know how bright and beautiful the truth can be. They prey on it and on us, engineering our fall through conspiracy to divide our nation. If it were an us-them question, the answer would be simple. The problem is, Wa are Them, perfectly united in creating this illusion of division. United We Stand…United in Division We Fall.