The sudden appearance of fifty-seven cows in Mariana Cook’s front yard could mean only one thing: the dry stone wall that marked the boundary between her property and her neighbor’s property had fallen down.
Mariana, a professional photographer trained by Ansel Adams, walked the length of the wall on her side to determine where the wall had crumbled. She noticed for the first time how carefully the wall had been constructed and what a beautiful structure it was.
When she learned that dry stone walls, built by farmers to clear their fields of stones, were meeting the same sad fate as family farms, she traveled the world extensively to see them for herself. She was determined to photograph as many as she could.
On the Shetland Islands, dry stone walls made without mortar have been in existence for thousands of years. The walls on the island are called “lace” walls because of the large spaces between the stones.*
To Mariana many of the “lace” walls looked precarious, much like Dad’s neighbor’s dilapidated barn looked to me.
How could a wall remain standing when there was so much space between the stones?
What do you think?**
*To those of you who need to see the wall for yourself: 1. Find the book, Stone Walls, Personal Boundaries by Mariana Cook and look at page 94.
2. Google: “Stone Walls Shetland Islands,” then click on “For the Love of Walls” article and scroll down to the fifth picture.
**This blog is designed as a read only blog.
I will be asking questions a psychoanalyst might ask if you were lying on her couch.
An analyst expects you to contemplate what you think, feel, and know in order to develop personal knowledge of your internal world.
Contemplation by its very nature slows things down.
“Contemplation is always a revolutionary act. It subverts the daily tedium and searches for the kernel of meaning hidden at the center of each thing,” Beverly Lanzentta*** writes in Radical Wisdom (2005).
While you are interacting with this blog, see if you can have the
experience of contemplative space.
I am curious what you will learn from this process. If there is something you would like to share with me, feel free to email me.
***Beverly Lanzentta was cited by Christine Valters Paintner in the Artists’s Rule (2011). Christine is the online abbess of www.AbbeyoftheArts.com.