by Perry Shimon
I live in a small village, both alike and not alike from other small villages. Within it, there are many artful relations. Many mornings, I bicycle to the bluffs overlooking the ocean. Along the crumbling promenade, people have hospitably installed and dutifully maintain simple benches and chairs, made from wood, where one may rest and take in the sensuous abundance of each day.
The roads in this village, in the areas where most people live, are unpaved by design, ensuring everyone moves slowly, lessening the fear and danger of speeding automobiles. The coastline where we live is designated public and accessible to everyone, in one of the greatest and most appreciated acts of art and hospitality that colors my life.
In the winter months, when the days are more precious and the sky more abundant with clouds, I watch the sun rise from one of several beloved benches. I’ll often continue to my friend Peter’s home, perhaps bringing a book, a song, or a thought to share. Peter has said in the past, in his offhand and friendly way, that all he wants is to live in a world where friends come over to visit unannounced. He is often learning a piece of music from the past, making small, thoughtful changes, and then sharing the inherited and reimagined songs. He types up his poetic thoughts with an old rusty typewriter on thin onionskin paper sheets, which he collects neatly in a wooden box he stores beneath the bed in his small cabin.
In the food cooperative where he is a part of the collective, he arranges small quotidian objects of pleasant and curious character into small shrine-like assemblages that bring feelings of peace, friendliness, and welcome. The cooperative, limited as it may be by the constraints from which it emerges, suggests an alternative conception and social organization of work. Most people work five-hour shifts a few times a week, there is no firm hierarchy or boss, and by and large, colleagues treat each other with dignity and respect, if not friendly and familial warmth.
The cooperative sits in a small plaza, free of automobiles and protected from the wind, where the community gathers, doing the maintenance of understanding itself with quotidian conviviality. Opposite the food cooperative is a community kitchen, attached to a community center, and connected to a beloved public library. Between the food cooperative and the community center is a small building the size of a bedroom, affectionately called the ‘Freebox,’ where the community deposits things that are no longer of use or desired by one person but could be useful or desirable to another. On the remaining side of the plaza is a house that is collectively shared and protected through a local organization from the cruel, dislocating forces of the real estate market. Within, an intergenerational group of people live together amicably and tend to these common spaces. Each week there are events, classes, seasonal gatherings, rituals, performances, plays, food banks, and community meals.
From the food cooperative and farm stands, I collect vegetables and bread and bring them to my small home or to the kitchens of friends. We often eat from vessels made by Carey, a local potter and friend, who has been making beautiful ceramics for longer than I’ve been alive. His pots bring me great happiness every day while I use them. I visit him often, mostly to sit quietly, sometimes talking a little, and our dogs play together in the yard he shares with Patricia, another skillful potter and artist who makes everything around her quietly shimmer with quotidian beauty.
My daughter Agnes makes bowls and cups from clay as well. When I use them, or wash them, I feel the contours and echoes of her hands. I can almost feel her small fingers in mine when I move them around the vessel, and they provide me a great sense of love and appreciation. I use them every day, and often to hold some other object of importance and regular use.
My companion lost her mother, suddenly, at a tragically young age and she has a collection of plates and bowls that her mother made for her. These earthen objects, made with her hands, are great treasures that we use and care for daily and keep her present in our lives.
Each day, a slow, contemplative walk yields more beauty in relation than could fit into an art gallery. Each day, I notice the play of light on water, the weather on the ridge, the seasons of plants, birdsong, smiles on my neighbors’ faces, the laughter of children, wisdom of elders, the many migrations, passings, and renewals. I notice falling and fallen leaves like brush marks, each with their own changing beauty, small artful unfoldings.
My friend Allison, like other dear friends, became so with a mutual love and openness towards the possibilities of art. Through our shared appreciation of art’s potentiality, we became friends. She’s a great visual artist herself who makes paintings and prints that articulate in a like fashion the beautiful becomings we encounter during our walks on the mountain, in the forest, and along the ocean. As much as I enjoy her paintings and prints, I enjoy watching her cut mushrooms and ginger, turning them over in oil, inside a pleasantly patinated copper pot with a rough-hewn wooden spoon. We often sit by the fire, reading aloud or talking, while the flickering light animates the beautiful objects, often found as they are, assembled on shelves and in alcoves around her home.
The Japanese philosopher Soetsu Yanagi, who in the early twentieth century helped found the Mingei movement dedicated to the beauty which resides in the life of everyday objects used by ordinary people, suggested that beauty knows no borders and mingles where you can hear voices speaking in friendly tones.
There are many friends and neighbors who make my world artful and pleasurable through their words, expressions, vocations, and diverse practices. This open and becoming notion of art-in-relation has developed my senses and sense of what is beautiful and important. This capacious, friendly, welcoming, and abundant sense of art accompanies me through the quotidian, and I offer that art’s greatest gift is its capacity to occasion friendship.