“Cast upon yourselves a spell against stagnation.”

Jun 11

— John O’Donahue

View of the Pueblo from my window at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico

How is it that some of us go forward with vigor and adventure to the end, and some of us wither? Or, most likely, we have both qualities but wish to increase the former — the vitality that is connected to hope and self-confidence. How do we free ourselves from the mind-weeds and negativity that are obstacles to renewal? How do we cast a spell against stagnation?

The challenges will keep coming. Here in the desert, having time before class begins, I am making a list of things that are antidotes to ossification, the word itself reflecting the rigidity of bones. Here is my list so far:

Sit alone next to a tree, a place where you cannot be found except by the tree.
Turn left instead of right.
Reach out to someone you don’t like.
Stop thinking about your work and do it.
Stop thinking.
Make room for serendipity.

Make room for serendipity! All of you have had the experience of coincidence or “happy accident” that cannot be explained by any rational means. The experience of serendipity, which brings surprise and delight, is not found by being speedy or strategic. For example, many of our advances in technology — “googling” answers, GPS, or more recently, using your phone to find any book in your home through “instant recognition”, interferes with the chance for serendipity. Speed is the new god, and is not the friend of serendipity. Serendipity arrives, always unexpected, when we come upon something we were not looking for. Instead of immediately tracking down the book or word we want, we discover something we had forgotten about, or never knew. This is compelling, and so much more uplifting than finding what we were looking for. Serendipity brings the feeling of having been given a gift, of some kind of mysterious collaboration. It changes the entire quality of your day.

As you may know the word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole, having read the fairy tale of The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes were always making discoveries by accident of things they were not in search of. Serendipity arrives in the slowed down, lost and wandering times. Speed, convenience and efficiency work against creativity, and for stagnation. Of course we all benefit from efficiency (and I would be lost much more often without GPS), but it often has too much emphasis, and this kind of too much will eventually make any work dull. As Austin Kleon said: The real art is in finding what you didn’t know you were looking for.

We got to explore this way all week in Taos. There is a serendipity even in who shows up. We have just finished our class, Textures of Writing, where my friend and co-teacher, Denish Lach, came all the way from France, taking us through many experiments in texture and tools. For the first part of the week she gave us the structure of using the same size square and the same text for each tool and exercise. Below are some images from the students using various tools to write out their text:

Flat wooden tool (left) | glass pipette (right) | © John Hammons

Fine point pen (left) | flat wooden tool (right) © Lynn Whitten

Fine point pen (left) and glass pipette (right) | © Ellen Bauch

Fine point pen (left) | Ruling pen and sumi ink (right) | © Eileen Boniecka

Fine point pen (left) | Tracing the letters & coloring negative shapes with a paint marker (right)
© Anne Bagby

The next part of the week was dedicated to finding pattern and texture from landscape. We were dedicated to our physical desert environment and printed copies of photos, as there were no cameras, phones or watches in the classroom: