Summer Workshop: Plants, Sunlight and Sight

A happy and blessed summer solstice to you. We’re enjoying the long days, and the plants are drinking down the sunlight, ready to do some serious growing (if they haven’t already.)

I hope you can celebrate this time of year, and also the Nativity of John the Baptist on June 24, another Christian holiday woven with the earthly seasons.

I’ve somehow finished a few projects in the space of a week. I’d been working on these off and on for the past couple of months since Easter or so. It feels good to see them through to completion. At some point I received the grace of simplicity, and could say “yup, that’s good enough!”

A wooden chest made of some very clear plywood recovered from a dumpster. It’s fit with dovetails, and finished with linseed oil. The kids who receive it will have a blank canvas to decorate, but look at the grain in that surface veneer! (Turns out to be an operatic stage and the rudiments of a mythic castle as well to 7 yr olds!)

Another box of assorted wood scraps, finished with linseed oil, and incorporating some art glass for the top. I’m inspired to make some art-glass windows!

And this mortise gauge turned out nicely.

I have more products in the web shop. Such as linseed oil & beeswax wood finish.

Stop in Wednesday 5-7pm for workshop hospitality, or at other times by appointment.

Linseed oil comes from flax, and here it is growing in one of my gardens. It’s almost like all that sunlight it is consuming now returns to be seen in glow of the oil. It’s blue flowers fade by the afternoon. I will experiment with gathering fiber from this crop, along with the seed.

I spent a good week in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in June. I was teaching with the Summer Youth Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Their theme was ‘faith in a time of climate displacement.’ The young adults, program leaders and I spent a very rich and compelling week simply encountering the land and neighborhood, as well as works of art and sacred architecture.

A great gift of the week was an opportunity to visit St Nicholas Catholic Church in Millvale. The interior houses and offers to God the murals of Maxo Vanka, a 20th century artist. They present powerful images of God in Christ, Mary, the saints, working through angels. And they possess potent message of peace and justice, remembering the sorrows of war, of poverty, and migration for work that brought its own hardships and suffering. They are trying to preserve these murals and the sanctuary which they adorn.

Maxo Vanka Murals (link)

lazarus and dives, ca. 1930s america

Earlier in the week, I was sitting in church on Sunday. The reading from Genesis repeated over and over that God saw the creation, and saw that it was good, and very good. This is God’s way of seeing, seeing things bettered, made whole, re-formed, beautified.

Since then I’ve been following the stories in Genesis for this theme of ‘seeing.’ Again and again characters like Abraham and Sarah and Hagar see things and respond in varying ways. They respond with wonder, or faith, or devotion, or fear, or aggression, or compassion. Not unlike how we see and respond to things in our own limited and growing hearts.

God’s mercy lets the eyes of our heart heal and see anew. God sees us with an infinite capacity of heart to see. We are changed by this sight God holds us in, we come to participate in that ‘seeing.’ We are changed by those whose hearts have received this capacity to help others ‘see’ in such ways.

And may that seeing adorn you as you encounter where you are this summer.

bumble bee, salvia