Cindy on January 19th, 2010
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” ~Twyla Tharp
Two of my art pieces are in the Michigan Annual art exhibition through Feb. 27 at the Anton Art Center in Mount Clemens. A link to an Oakland Press article on the show includes a photo of one of the pieces, “Shrine to Mary: Our Lady of the Lost & Found.”
The other piece (at left) is an altered book titled “Nature.” A tribute to Thoreau’s Walden, it was made from a vintage insurance ledger and embellished with things I collected on long walks and bike rides.
Most of my artwork features found objects or recycled materials. I’m drawn to the rusty, ragged beauty of broken things. (I’ve been caught going through trash and pocketing rusty bottle caps littering the curbs in my neighborhood on trash day.) Most of my pieces are personal tributes to favorite works of literature or poems. –CL
Cindy on June 8th, 2009
Build a campfire, write your own song, dance your ass off, hike 10 miles — be something that’s not just part of a machine.” — Robert Downes
Visiting Traverse City, Mich., this spring, I picked up the April 20 issue of Northern Express Weekly. I always enjoy the “Random Thoughts” column, penned by Robert Downes, the paper’s publisher and managing editor. So I wasn’t surprised when Downes’ column, “Going Natural — Offline,” hit me where I live and prompted me to reach for the scissors. I clipped the piece and saved it.
In his column, Downes opened with an anecdote about Jack Hicks, a retired Chicago-area librarian who cancelled the Internet because he thought it was “a time-waster” and a mere “imitation of real life.” Downes went on to say that he understood where the librarian is coming from — and wondered if our lives are “being twittered away” when we spend so much time online.
“Those of us who were born long before the digitalization of childhood can recall a time when kids spent as little time as possible indoors. You ran around barefoot outdoors all summer and only came in when your parents yelled themselves hoarse, long after sunset,” Downes recalled. He also pointed out that we shouldn’t be surprised that we now battle the issue of obesity among four-year-olds.
But today’s kids aren’t the only ones losing touch with reality. Too many adults have taken up permanent residence in cyberspace, and I wonder if there’s a correlation between Internet use and the worrisome rise in adult ADD. Though I’ve not been diagnosed with it, I’ve noticed lately that I’m not as focused as I used to be. I jump from project to project — as if I’m merely Web surfing. A lot of my friends complain, too, about feeling vaguely distracted or hollow — and unable to read as many books as they used to.
Out of touch?
Summer is approaching and I’d rather be outdoors as much as possible — and not on my laptop or cell phone. Yet I know that veering off the information superhighway is akin to Thoreau dropping out of society for his Walden sabbatical. Regardless, it’s tempting.
Back in the day before e-mail, blogs, and Facebook, I spent A LOT more time moving around in the real world. (And kids, it really wasn’t that long ago.) I lunched with friends at the outdoor cafes downtown, interviewed people “in person,” finished the books I was reading, took my son to the park and played with him, met with editors at the newspaper office, took long walks with friends or my husband, worked in the garden until dusk. When I did work online, I focused on getting more assignments and polishing my own writing. I didn’t spend time commenting on other writers’ blogs, and didn’t check for new Facebook messages every 15 minutes.
Today I’m nearly compulsive about my time on the computer. I’ve barely poured my first cup of coffee before I’m in my office checking my e-mail. And I never travel without a laptop on vacation. Thanks to all the hours I spend online, I finish reading fewer books, newspapers, and magazines — and have let many of my subscriptions lapse. And whether I’m in town or out, it seems, my friends and I send e-mail or send Facebook messages more often than we chat on the phone or visit in person. This can’t be such a good thing.
Recently, a couple of my neighbors and I decided to establish a weekly dinner date at a local restaurant — within walking distance — for some real community contact. This is long overdue. While I’d never cancel the Internet or disconnect from the online friendships I value, I need to devote more attention offline to the people and things that mean the most to me.
As Downes suggests, “It might be good for the soul to take an annual vacation from your iPod, Internet, cell phone, Twitter, MySpace, and all the other electronic strings attached to your life for a week or so, if only to reboot your sense of humanity and become a ‘real person’ once a year.” My only question: Why just once a year? –CL
– Garden photo copyright by Cindy La Ferle –
Cindy on April 1st, 2009
“A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.” — Henry David Thoreau
While I’m taking a break this week, I wanted to share a small piece of good news with you…. Earlier this month, I was honored to learn that one of my altered books, “Nature,” was chosen for inclusion in the annual Michigan Fine Arts Competition at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center.
For me, there has always been a mystical connection between writing and art — just as there is a connection between my gardening and cooking. Like many of my altered art and mixed media projects, “Nature” was inspired by a favorite work of literature — in this case, Thoreau’s Walden. It was crafted from an old children’s board book and rebound with the cover of a turn-of-the-century leather insurance ledger from a thrift shop. The cardboard pages in the book are collaged and embellished with ephemera, nature quotes, and found objects collected from flea-market visits and, of course, nature walks. The exhibit runs through April 17. For more information, click here. — CL
Cindy on November 11th, 2008
This essay appeared in slightly different form in the Christian Science Monitor and is included in my essay collection, Writing Home. Though I wrote the piece in 1997 when my son was young and I was working at home, I think its message still works today, given our current economic crisis…
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Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I now have a mind-boggling array of options. A mother who works as a journalist, I can choose to conduct my business in an office building or work at home on my computer while caring for my child. Without leaving the house, I can e-mail relatives in Scotland, read nearly any newspaper in the country, and order a complete fall wardrobe online.
Every day I have more choices than I can reasonably consider. And so, like other tired Americans, I carry the burden of complexity — a burden so overwhelming that there are times when I imagine trading places with Henry David Thoreau.
It’s only fitting that I rediscovered Thoreau the week I purged my home office with a dust rag and a vacuum cleaner. The autumn mornings felt ripe for pitching and sorting, for creating blank space where none existed before. Walden, Thoreau’s famous treatise on simple living, was jammed behind a pile of unread paperbacks on an overcrowded shelf.
Like other writers with good intentions, I’ve always admired Thoreau but hadn’t read Walden since it appeared many years ago on a required reading list at my state university. I’d retained only a few pithy quotes, and recalled only sketchy details of Thoreau’s Spartan cabin in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts. But suddenly, here was the book, whispering to me across the century — “Simplify, simplify”– and begging me to take another look.
Glancing through the pages, I realized Thoreau’s words had been wasted on me when I first read them. At the time I was a young college student living in a cramped dormitory, eager to graduate and buy enough furniture to fill a spacious suburban apartment.
“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind,” Thoreau warned in the chapter titled “Economy.” Only an overworked adult — one who is drowning in the debris of modern life and pressed by the weight of too many commitments — could truly appreciate Thoreau’s genius, I mused as I kept reading.
Yet it also occurred to me that things were vastly different for Thoreau. The “comforts of life” in the 1840s were not exactly cushy by today’s standards. His concept of luxury might have been taking tea in his mother’s bone china saucers. So what had he given up to commune with nature?
Even before he moved to Walden Pond, Thoreau hadn’t accumulated three television sets or a closetful of designer clothes. He didn’t own several pairs of expensive athletic shoes for all those philosophical walks he took. He didn’t wonder where he’d store his blender or Tupperware while he roughed it in the woods. His cot in the cabin couldn’t have been lumpier than the straw-filled mattresses in most mid-19th-century homes. And Thoreau never had to trade a personal computer for a pencil.
So, how tough was Thoreau’s sabbatical with simplicity? Is it true that he occasionally walked from Walden Pond back to Concord, where Emerson’s wife had a home-cooked supper waiting for him?
As Andrew Delbanco notes in Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), reading Thoreau can make us feel âaccused of hoarding comforts.” We might even try to find holes in Thoreau’s impassioned pitch for the simple life. And yet Thoreau is, as Delbanco says, “an irresistible writer; to read him is to feel wrenched away from the customary world and delivered into a place we fear as much as we need.”
Just as Thoreau did, I’d like to weed out, pare down, live deliberately, be a resident philosopher. (Would the family miss me?) A life devoid of clutter sounds positively blissful, especially when there are no empty spaces on my calendar. But making this choice is so much more difficult in a culture fueled by sheer busyness and commercialism. There are few places, few wooded Waldens, where one can escape the incessant bombardment of to-do lists or product advertising.
Visiting the ârealâ Walden Pond in Concord for this first time this fall, I was amazed and disappointed to find the place overrun. Locals were strewn on its small beach. You couldn’t walk the path around the pond without rubbing shoulders with other curious sightseers; there wasn’t a spot left for solitary reflection.
If nothing else, my rendezvous with Thoreau got me thinking. What — and how much — do I really need? What price have I paid for modern technology and convenience? In which landfill will all my stuff end up?
And how would I fare if I were delivered into a place I fear as much as I need, as Delbanco put it? Could I survive in a one-room cabin with barely more than chair, a wooden table, a bowlful of raw vegetables, and my laptop? Honestly, I wish I could. – Cindy La Ferle
Two of my art pieces are in the Michigan Annual art exhibition through Feb. 27 at the Anton Art Center in Mount Clemens. A link to an Oakland Press article on the show includes a photo of one of the pieces, “Shrine to Mary: Our Lady of the Lost & Found.”
