I am captivated by the evocative patterns, codes, and beauty of seashells. Who and what are they? Small earthly creatures, millions of them. Capable of exquisite design and construction. Precise. Mathematical. Inventive. Shells represent unceasing evolution over the past 500 million years. This process could continue on and on into the planet’s future. Humanity’s past valuation of shells occurred at a confluence of art, culture, and science.

Botticelli’s Venus. The cowries currency of Africa. The shell of St. James, the fisherman disciple of Christ. Closing one of his Taliesin Lectures, Frank Lloyd Wright described the seashell as the “housing with exactly what we lack- inspired form.” Shells were once the treasured objects for the wealthy on summer trips to the sea, but they have always been accessible and collected by coastal and island peoples regardless of economic class or culture. They are the essence of accessibility and simplicity, a “gift of the sea” wrote Anne Morrow Lindberg. Shells have a heritage of stimulating the beholder to find a playful solution to the great mysteries at the source of their creation.

“Can you hear the Ocean within a Shell?”

Posted on May 20th, 2011 in

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Torrential rainfall. A rising river. Time passing amidst the drive for survival and direction at the water’s edge. Below, a timelapse created by cinematographer Hunter Snyder. He has joined our visual study of the surrounding landscape. Here, we visit the nearby Ducktrap River in the last days before snowfall on the coast of Maine. Melody is Dirk’s evocative banjo from WATERBOUND (see previous blog entry).

Posted on December 6th, 2010 in Environmentalists, Indie Film

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Dirk Powell is our film’s Song Composer, responsible for finding musicians and tunes that fit, as well as contributing some of his own music. I’ve always been extremely moved by previous recordings of his song WATERBOUND, then heard this new recording from across the Atlantic… which he performed with friends at the Glascow Royal Concert Hall. Someone videotaped the event and posted on YouTube. Wow!

In Tennessee, “waterbound” apparently means “flooded.” The tone and lyrics are seeped with a special kind of agony, the kind that a flood or a shipwreck can cause. Not just loss. But the cleansweep loss that made the story of Noah and the flood so devastating, and the survivor’s guilt so poignant. Lyrics below.

WATERBOUND

I went out late one night,
The moon and stars were shining bright
A storm come up and the trees come down,
I tell you boys I was waterbound

Waterbound on a stranger’s shore
River rising to my door
carried my home to the field below
I’m water bound, nowhere to go.

Carved my name on an old barn wall
Or no-one would know I was there at all
Stable’s dry on a winter’s night
If you turn your head you can see the light.

Black cat crawling on an old box car
A rusty door and a falling star
Aint got no dime in my nation sack
I’m waterbound and I can’t get back

It’s I’m going and I won’t be back
If you don’t believe me count my tracks
The river’s long and the river’s wide
I’ll meet you boys on the other side

So say my name and don’t forget
The water still aint got me yet
Ain’t nothing but I’m bound to roam
I’m waterbound and I can’t get home

Posted on November 11th, 2010 in

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Our timelapse and landscape talent Eleanor is also a history buff. She made some observations about the stonewalls that we found in South Hope with the last timelapse we shot. Building stonewalls are experiences of Americana, of who we are and where we came from, in the big picture of the stone and wood we’ve literally held in our hands over the years. E.O. Wilson differentiates the living creation from the non-living creation. With this lead, my interests in this filmic inquiry are primarily with the living. But the American divorce from nature runs deeper than that.

FROM ELEANOR: “Rarely in need of replacement, constructing stone walls were massive undertakings. This is one reason why they are so familiar in the earliest settled regions of the country, like South Hope Maine, where the frontier mentality had yet to take hold: unlike their children and grandchildren, these farmers expected to spend their entire lives on a single plot of land. A worker could lay between twenty four and sixty four feet of wall per day, assuming that the stones, or “fieldstones,” as they were called, had already been transported to the building site.

Historian John Stilgoe notes that wooden fences, which became the popular barrier among farmers outside of the northeastern US, were replaced every fifteen to thirty years. When in the early nineteenth century, depleted woodlots triggered a timber shortage, it was the stone wall laying farmers that had enough wood to keep their fires burning. Of course, it was also these northernmost people who, hibernating from frigid temperatures, were most in need of firewood.”

For more information on the life and times of stonewalls, see: Robert Thorson, Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls (Walker & Company, 2004).
John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (Yale University Press, 1983).

Posted on September 28th, 2010 in Christians, Educators, Environmentalists, Parents, Scientists

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Posted on September 17th, 2010 in

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