gathering

Looking out at the wind whipped waves I see white horses beginning to prance on the loch. Clouds are sweeping in and soon there will be rain. For now though I am sitting on a little beach that is made up almost entirely of shell fragments. Mostly they lie in loose swathes between the rocks and pebbles softly crunching beneath your feet. Others however have been shaped by the rhythm of the sea and have come to rest in beautiful patterns, laid out like a music sea score. A gathering of fragments.

For me there is a subtle difference between gathering and collecting. For though gathering results in collections it lacks formality and is altogether more random. It is more like the pockets of children. Pockets that have joyfully and spontaneously been filled with stones and twigs, shells and bottle tops, bits of string, a lollipop stick, a lost toy, sweet wrappers still sticky. These are pockets full of treasure. No forethought, no planning, no curation. Sheer magic. It turns capitalism on its head.

The scraps and fragments that accumulate on my workspace also become a gathering and in gathering will gradually become a book. Just like emptying a child’s pockets and discovering treasure there is something deeply satisfying about making something whole out of the discarded and fragmented. Well……it’s a kind of alchemy. An antidote to the cult of new.

In making the book tiny scraps of paper and fabric are gathered and connected. The discarded is recovered, the lost is found, a story is revealed. Paper fragments flutter then rest, offering a glimmer, a shadow. With tattered traces and worn edges something is made. This is life.

But it is in the sharing that real magic is made; the gathering of a bit more of the story that connects us all. The creative, thoughtful, imaginative, vulnerable, imperfect story. Ordinary. Extraordinary. Think of it as an act of rebellion against the prevailing attitudes of our consumer society where consumption is frequently seen as our primary role. Our only means of achieving happiness. There is a different story to be told.