Image: Perseverance (c) Harry Araten 

Backstory / Story with image 

Please note: not all this backstory relates to image/notion above
– you may prefer to scroll down to ‘related stories‘ section… 

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"When is the best time to plant a tree?

20 years ago…

When is the best time to plant one?

Now…"

Or if you prefer, as I said in a speech once to business people – ‘when is the best time to buy real estate…?’

I have put this image here as much for you as for myself. To remind about starts…to let them grow in their own way…and also to feed it…nourish and nurture it.

I am writing at the moment and have both the notion of knowing I have started something but also being clear that I don’t know what it will become fully. I am now clear I am wanting to tend to it…but I am completely baffled at the size and scope of the project. I catch myself with questions of bankability. Even knowing that its value has nothing to do with numbers at all…

As I write my family/s (and my) story, "The Family Forest", I am beginning to see how everyday objects and symbols repeat within this story – across different continents, eras and families we’ve married into…

How symbols and their meaning changes overtime, and also stays the same. Becoming silent, meaningful and meaningless…depending on the place, time and people involved. For instance: the potato, passports, tatoos, trains, stockings and cigarettes all hold unsual meanings in the WWII- and post- years.

A single photograph can transport me.

Now I am taken back suddenly to a conversation with the ever wonderful Andrea Hendrickson at St Mark’s bookstore, about the Swastika…and how it moved from being a symbol that was positive, reflected and repeated in countries like India, and in Architecture world-wide, to become something so distorted and negative…Was it nature making balance? And yet what was it about the symbol itself in the first place…did it have its own power already that led people to follow it? Eileen and Bonnie think of this.

And when I think of misappropriated symbols I also come back to letters…to alphabets…and their use and mis-use (my own included)…Yet another children’s story to write comes to mind too…And one for adults. On the meaning thieves.

So I am thinking of symbols the last days. And yesterday, after a conversation about symbols, I re-discovered Harry Araten, the artist above. A few paintings were piled in the corner of Noam’s house. I saw one and it looked instantly familiar. Even though they were different to what I had seen, the image of the crude angel, and the rainbow, caught me.

It reminded me of two paintings I had grown up with. A quick google search yielded one of them, "Green Lights" (below). It is funny to be on the other side of the world from where you grew up and see the same, somewhat obscure, things. On the other hand, perhaps it makes complete sense.

So I am thinking how images and symbols have such a biography…about the beauty and cruelty, tears and laughter in repeated patterns…and about how such little things as words and letters – little squiggles and dots – symbols – can come to mean so much…while also trying to find the words…and the way…

The digging continues. 

 

Image "Green Light" (c) Harry Araten

Related Stories 

I am also reminded that earlier this year I wanted to write stories for children around the environment and taking care. Around the body earth…and I also wanted to re-write this story – the man who planted trees/hope, and include this one, on the green belt movement, started by Wangari Maathai who I heard speak at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005.  – for children. Apparently America has a story called Jonny Apple Tree as well…There is another children’s book on letters I also want to pen / ink too…

In the meantime, perhaps you’ll enjoy reading about the people above yourselves.

Hopefully someone out there will give me a boost to commit and share my ideas and writing in publishable form!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 1:52 am and is filed under action, art, conversation, knowledge & wisdom, musings, quotes, stories, words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.