We stop to visit all my old friends in the hometown cemetery. We clean the ground level grave stones and back off the encroaching grass as a cold mist and rain temper our resolve. The stones are made of Morton Gneiss (Sioux Quartzite), a stone that is native to the region in which I live. …
As I dwell in Milwaukee……..Home of the Harley! At the age of 15 I started working at a music store in my home town. Even though it was a small town it serviced an area 100 miles in all directions. The local community had no concept of its importance. The music store that I worked …
Pottery and its relationship to humanity Ten thousand years before we became agrarians a man or a women squished some mud that contained a greater amount of clay. (20,000 years ago.) It had different properties than that of mud that was found along the river bank. The clay resisted absorption differently than the mud. The …
Few envisioned the lifestyle would ever end? Decades allowed us to travel this nation with our posses of artists, artisans and craftsmen. We displayed little thought of its impermanence. We met up in Dallas, Duluth, Fargo, Milwaukee and Bozeman, Montana, Phoenix, Tempe, Tubac and Tucson. Thousands of miles inbetween….. We shared flat tires, engine heat, …
I spend time in London more than many of my U.S. friends. I hang on every word that is uttered by my friends in London. I have a small library of books on London. I have a predilection to everything London. I ponder the last decade and the times I’ve spent there. I go there …
A Haviland pot shard smaller than a penny. It’s glaze and thinness stood out on the shoreline of a tiny little lake (Lake Okabena) in the middle of the expansive Great Plains of North America. The small town hadn’t even been in existence when the Haviland’s started their pottery and porcelain business. The French Company …
He cruises past me with a broad smile on his face. He is lying flat on his skateboard pumping the ground, the bituminous recreational trail. He may not know it that he is surfing/skateboarding on Sailboard Beach, a famous beach known for windsurfing festival and regattas. He doesn’t know the notoriety of the beach because …
A number of years ago we were exhibiting in the South West U.S. and on our return trip we spent some time at the Taos (NM.) Mountain Film Festival. There we met Dr. Mark Plotkin and watched the premier of his documentary “The Shamans Apprentice”. Dr. Plotkin is an ethnobotanist from Harvard and has spent …
Much of our lives are spent in the moment, we toil, we strive, we engage, we gossip, another month arrives we pay our bills and then we start over again. Much of our society hasn’t the time or patience to consider who we are?, what we do?, where we come from?, where we have been? …
I’ve grown up with a common name for my age group. “Bill”, so common I’ve come to realize that many times at restaurants I get over looked. I’m a fella with a rather mild mannered demeanor and in a large crowd that is waiting to get a table I often seem to be overlooked, more …