I was putting together a birthday present and I didn’t want to make a paper card. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted it to include a reference to a conversation me and the person had shared.
Touching grass
The conversation was me and Patrick walking in the field. We spent an hour in the sunset playing with the grasses. We watched as the weight of a grasshopper sent a blade of grass into an oscillating shake, and we observed how if you touch a tuft very gently and then slowly pull your hand away, the tuft for a moment, holds on, as though it isn’t quite ready for your hand to move away. Patrick observed that the blade of grass in its own way, was trying to understand us, trying to figure out what it was touching.
Different grasses
Each type of grass responded differently, and it was a very full hour we spent inspecting each of them. What we learned very quickly, is that it is very difficult to touch grass softly. No matter how much we concentrated, the human body moves constantly. We can’t not. Even if we think we are being still, the fingers are quivering ever so slightly. This movement feels so much more noticeable when trying to hold a finger pad to a blade of grass and for everything to remain perfectly still.
I said, you could spend a lifetime on this meditation. Just learning to be so still that you can touch something as delicate as grass and it not move.
Patrick said, whatever God is, perhaps that’s what it’s like when God wants to touch us.
Patrick in a field of grass.
So when it came to a birthday card, I didn’t feel like I had much to say. Sometimes I feel sick of words and having to push thoughts into them. So I mused on the grass and began to play. The image of a clear plastic house came into my mind. I liked the excessive modernness of it. I liked how devoid of hiding spaces and the idea that you are being observed in your home. I watched as in my mind’s eye, I could see the plastic house juxtaposed by natural materials. It felt honest, what we create is imbued with a self consciousness. As human’s we can’t help but be affected by what we make, whether it is an art piece or a home. I thought about how seemingly unselfconscious nature is. But it isn’t to judge human’s. I do not see the plastic house as something critical. Rather just an observation of a feeling.
I spent a blissful evening alone, playing with plastic and clay and dried grasses and white pebbles. Pebbles I took from a larger collection that I found on Tyninghame beach. I printed a very small Patrick and a picture of the field where we had the conversation, and by the end of the evening, his birthday card was ready.
Deciding to put paper Patrick in a hole with his feet sticking out, was unplanned, but when I saw it was possible, it was unthinkable to do anything else.
