Floral Residency Recap

We just finished our first floral residency week of the season here. An exceptional, uncanny and productive week with an amazing group of students. They just left yesterday and while I take some time to be quiet and rest, I find myself missing them. Its amazing how attached I get to residents in just a short week’s time…some photos of the weeks work here below….

Many thanks to the team here for supporting this vision of teaching with your help harvesting, cooking, cleaning and running the farm that my floristry practice has found its home in. I am forever grateful for this complex, integrated project whose genesis and continuity rests in making the world more beautiful through flowers. 

 

brief update

 

So much beauty happens here everyday, it’s hard to share it all. We’re in the middle of a floral residency with amazing students from all around the globe. Such generous participants in our world here: they are open, kind and willing to go with the flow. Teaching me as I teach them.

I’m afraid my winter verbosity has fully faded and I’m not one for many words here lately. Overwhelm ensues and it turns out I’m not invincible…

Meanwhile life goes on all the same all around me in this ecosystem of people plants animals and their ideas, needs and desires. A wonderfully complex matrix to occupy. Donnie, god damn him, chasing and chewing on lambs again. RAIN! finally after 6 dry weeks. Meltdowns. Crying. Laughing.

Witches casting spells, bringing flowers. Feeding beans. Making ceramics.

In the midst of it all: an inventory. What is needing to remain, what is wanting to be relinquished?

current state of affairs

Our work here continues in joy and sorrow! Exuberant at times, somber in others. Always full to the very brim, regardless of grief. It is some full-catastrophe-living let me tell you!

Sometimes I want a more ‘normal life’ whatever that means. A break, I suppose. To put on a suit, ride the subway and work in a corporate setting can be enticing from this side. The boundaries! The paychecks! The health insurance! The happy hours!

Alas, not my path, and probably not yours, or …not yours for long.

The ceramics residents are embracing making alongside brilliant teacher Kris Mounsey. Chase has been relaying photos to me as I’m off site all week. Surreal to hold this space and also be physically apart from it. I go back tomorrow and will work on more TV coming to you next week. THANK YOU to those of you who have joined us at the beginning of the saipua.tv project! Coming down the pipeline is a video on growing and arranging sweet peas, making tinctures, and yoga for farmer/florists (wrists, shoulders, lower back!)

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slowing down is a radical act.

the beloved teacher and weaver Jessica Green passed away last week. She bestowed so many lessons that will reverberate in my work always - namely the usefulness of failure and how to hold power and assist its emergence in others. Few of my colleagues were as influential in my thinking and guiding the Worlds End project. Our ideas and methods didn’t always mesh perfectly and I like to imagine we’re both smiling about that now. Onward my friend.

The launch of Saipua.tv

 

Its been a difficult 10 days here and I don’t want to get into detail but suffice it to say hardship, health scares, life and death have all visited us. We are feeling through the lower part of the sign wave that corresponds to the highs we get from living this sort of rich life. Tess, oblivious to it all, continues to chase the hose when I water the garden - an obnoxious but entertaining performance that I indulge in when I feel overwhelmed by it all.

We launched Saipua TV today after a Herculean effort by the team - mostly Vanessa and Chase who worked out all the minutia and built all the framework and systems so that you can NOW! visit saipua.tv and sign up for a monthly membership to this very special educational platform…

As of now, there are only three videos live, but next week, we’ll add three more, and then they will just start rolling out. These are educational/instructional videos designed to be entertaining and teach you conversationally, the way you would learn something from a friend. It also gives you intimate access to the inner workings of this project.Central to our mission is to inspire you to make something, look twice at something, decorate something, and locate yourself in a web of complexity amidst people, plants, animals, and Earth!

This project is a way for us to fling our ideas and work farther afield (someone from Sweden was the first sign up!) and offers affordable online courses ($15/month). After years of trying to figure out how to better fund the farm, we realized that Saipua TV can scale without compromising the integrity of our work - it’s the same amount of effort whether we sell 100 memberships or whether we sell 10,000 memberships (my goal). That is real capital for the farm - money we can use to get out of debt and one day expand the land trust by buying the neighboring properties that are fallow and vacant.

I need you to sign up. And I need you to give me honest feedback about whether you like it, and what you want to see more of. That’s the only way this works - if we’re making you happy, excited, and inspiring you.

 Meanwhile, I was heading to the sheep this morning and looking around absently. These tough few days - and I will fill you in at some point - have left me questioning more than usual what I believe in, what direction to steer this massive cruise ship, and what my joy or place in it all is. Looking at the tidy garden, the blackboard in the greenhouse, and the healthy sheep program, I thought about something I read somewhere: There is no cinematic music playing when your dreams are coming true. Haha, I thought! Here I am! Dreams coming true.

Thanks for joining me.

From Susan in the soap factory…

 

Susan writes from the soap factory…

Every once in a while we begin testing a new soap scent. It can be a long process, so not undertaken lightly.

Both Sarah and a private client have requested a Pine Tar soap. Ok…I’ve put it off a bit, because I’m not a fan of pine tar….

But then again…Sarah doesn’t like the Saltwater soap and it’s one of our biggest sellers. [See below]

Always a librarian, I embarked on the research first.

Pine tar is a very thick resin…kind of like molasses. And it seems that it makes the soap ‘trace’ very fast. That means that it gets thick quickly and is sometimes hard to get into the soap mold smoothly and without air pockets. Not something I’m a fan of.

First I read that you should mix first with some of the hot oils in the recipe. It helps to ‘melt’ the pine tar a bit and incorporate it smoothly with the oils. No need for an essential oil….pine tar has its own strong scent. This makes testing so easy….it’s the fragrance blending that takes so long when developing a new bar…

After looking at different recipes, I wanted to use our basic recipe (just 4 ingredients: olive, coconut, castor, and shea butter). I added 10% pine tar to our basic recipe and then recalculated the amount of lye it would take to saponify the whole batch.

Around the same time, I was teaching my Soap and Business Residency. Matthew, one of my students, was also interested in testing pine tar soap. So we divided a very small recipe (less than 1 pound) and tried it out. It came out great.

Later I made a bigger batch….just 2 pounds of soap. Still small enough to have good control over the possibility of a fast trace. I usually use an immersion blender to speed up the process, but it wasn’t necessary with the pine tar. Just stirring for a few minutes was enough to get a trace and pour it into the mold.

Next, I made a 15-pound batch. Testing a larger quantity means more heat is generated. And more heat means faster trace that can lead to soap so thick it’s hard to get it into a mold.

All is well….the pine tar is done….it had some good reviews from the staff.

The next buyers on our website get to try a bar.

Just put ‘pine tar’ in the note section and I’ll send you a bar…as long as the test bars last.

— Susan

photos from the week

 

the nature construct

 

Inside the ‘nature’ construct that seems to have been central to my work at Saipua, and here on the farm, is this ‘cameo’ quince, planted about a decade ago and blooming every year around the middle of May to an ever-shrinking florally-focused audience armed with clippers. The more for me!

I say ‘has been central’ because my thoughts on nature have been shifting fast alongside my bumpy migration away from urban floristry and into the rural fringe - ultimately a location better suited for contemplating philosophical and political questions I’m interested in spending my time on. The ‘nature’ of that floristry past was a prop of sorts, a decorative item that was an aesthetic addition to life, to apartments, to weddings, and to fashion shows. An evocative image most often consumed on a small screen. Happy to have provided that for many, and happy to still dabble in that work (teaching again this year after a year off and - last I counted - I’ll be making flowers for 4 weddings in 2023).

Blame what you want - the rise of monotheism, the bible, Decartes, Elon Musk - but we as a species have been distancing ourselves from our embedded earthly selves for a long time. The invention of the phonetic alphabet diminished the connection of language from any worldly phenomenon. (As opposed to - for example - the pictogram-based characters of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which constructed a language whose symbols were rooted in earthly world objects and happenings.)

Where we went ‘wrong’ or how to make it ‘right’ are not the questions I’m interested in. Instead, I’m curious how we might coax forth a new paradigm that looks nothing like the ‘nature as resource’ place we’ve been in. I like to envision a new Genesis in which animals speak their own names to Adam while he listens…

I’ve been listening to the Joe Rogan show (probably not where you were expecting this to go). I think it’s wise to know the landscape as much as one can, and besides, he had on Michio Kaku recently, a physicist I have enjoyed listening to from way back when he had a regular slot on WBAI. Pentti used to listen to it after lunch when I came home from kindergarten.

Michio Kaku is known for birthing string theory. He is an avid futurist, a proponent of AI and colonizing outer space, and is obsessed with solving the God Equation (or the theory of everything). Hyper-optimized, masculinized sci-fi topics that generally land in a bucket I’ve labeled ‘circle jerks’.

I’m not advocating anti-tech, luddite realities. Our technologies are expressions of ourselves; from cave paintings to the alphabet to binary code to the rise of atomic computers (est. approx. year 2100 with 1M times the computing capacity of current hardware). These expressions stem from the basic drive we have as animals to continue our species and the very specific human desire to understand our world and where it came from.

As if it’s for us to know.

I’m attempting to write the text for the new Worlds End School website without using the word ‘nature’ because so much of our work on the farm is to center ourselves in relationship to the ecosystem. This is what embedded, embodied work means to me - who are you, right now, where you are, with those people right around you?

I don’t want us to get to the stars only because we destroyed everything here.

I am advocating for materialism in the philosophical, feminist sense; that only through direct interaction in the physical world will we have enough agency to evolve into who we really want to become. Not destroyers.