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RE: L.O.E.S - 4 - The Power Of A Name
I'd like to first drop this link, which i'm sure i've dropped before...
https://randomwire.com/wabi-sabi/
Thank you for the reminder that our cultures live on in the things we create out of such a culture...tools, homes, communities. I am beginning to understand how we all come full circle in the end.
I don't know anything about the Tlingit peoples or their culture. So are you part Tlingit or were you born full American, but raised with these good folk? What was live like in your era in Alaska? The only thing i know of Alaska is it's cold...and that some guy a few years ago was breaking bones for bone marrow...
This might not even be Alaska...i must now confess...i havent truly looked at the American map in 10 years. Don't ask me where NY is i have no clue! I'm getting back into my geography!
You know the Japanese have the same mindset when crafting Katanas. The spirit of Japan is embodied within the blade. Your reflection on chairs reminded me of this. I now cast my mind's thought-cabinet filing system and now understand why craftsmanship was much honoured in the years past. Artisans will always have a place in society because they have a heavy duty of passing on the relics of the old world, with old world memories and feelings, by the creation of their own hands. That's a beautiful thing!
I use materials as I am provided them, or can provide (donate) them, for jobs. I was told by a woman who had been raised in Hawaii, apparently around the sizable population of Japanese heritage there, that my work embodied wabisabi. Often I repurpose materials for folks that need something but have no ability to provide the necessary materials, so I use whatever I can scrounge that can be made to work. I assumed wabisabi was an aesthetic, which apparently is part of what it is, because of the rustic look repurposed materials create. I am quite surprised to learn there is a moral precept codified in the concept. Wabisabi is much more than I thought it was.
That guy says he's in the Brooks mountain range, which is in Alaska, but ~2000 miles north of Sitka, where I grew up amongst the Tlingit. Alaska is very big. Texans think Texas is big, but when an Alaskan saw a Texan carrying some watermelons, he asked him where he got such nice grapes.
I am not part Tlingit, but do have some Chippewa ancestry, and interestingly the Chippewa are part of a larger group of Native Americans (the Anishinaabeg) that includes the Ojibwa and Cree whom, like the Tlingit, have been found to have Denisovan admixture. I only learned this just today and just now realized that this shared genetic heritage results in I and the Tlingit being very distantly related - through hybridization with another human species (Although, perhaps tens of millennia ago. If you go back far enough, we're all brothers). I spent hours researching as a result of that question, and will have to make a post of it, because it's a ridiculous answer to your innocent question!
As are scholars that pass down ancient knowledge of interpreting the world through trigrams and hexagrams. Very little of the ways of our ancestors, perhaps predating the Bronze age, is known to us today. The Zhou Yi is a rare treasure, and you are it's guardian.
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