Director's Note 14/1/18
That’s snow mixing in with the rain outside my window. Just enough to cover Paul Druecke’s Garden Path. It’s easy enough to imagine the garden covered with a layer of white; better still to imagine the snow melting and revealing tracts of grass suddenly green. Alas, the lawn is as dry as it gets in a bad August. I could be looking out on sand, or very short hay. It’s down in the barn, where the seeds sprout in the greenhouse, that you see some living color.
April is typically a brisk month for Lynden’s staff. Weather permitting, Sergio Salinas and Patrick Kernan, fresh from their vacations, dive right into sculpture conservation and building renovation, tackling the jobs set aside in winter. The landscape crew prepares beds, trims brush, and spends more time outdoors. Sculptures that have wintered inside begin to appear on the grounds. In preparation for all this activity, we’ve brought in reinforcements. Margaret Halquist has joined the facilities and sculpture crew and though it’s still too cold to apply paint or wax outdoors, the smaller sculptures are making their way to her to be waxed in the barn. You will also be seeing a new face at the front desk: Kellen Abston can be found there two days a week, awaiting the visitors who come when the weather turns.
Still, the mind is off in the warmer months, planning spring and summer activities. Courtney Joy Stevens is thinking about flower gardens (April 7), Kyle Denton is foraging for herbs (April 22); Chuck Stebelton is following the migrating birds (April 29); even our family workshop is about tiny gardens (April 15). The rest of our April activities are less seasonal, but it’s interesting—as we come off one of our worst flu seasons in several years--that the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 forms the backdrop of Susan Meissner’s new book, As Bright as Heaven, which she will introduce at a Women’s Speaker Series event next week.
And while we are happy to roam outdoors, picking flowers and spotting birds, we also believe that creative activity—writing, making things with our hands—can help us explore life’s essential questions. Therefore, we are offering two workshops, and launching a new series, on the introspective end of the spectrum. The Illumignossi Project returns for another iteration of its two-day workshop for elders, Legacy Lights. These workshops book fast; we have just added one for May that approaches legacy, and light, in a Jewish context. In Re-story-ation, poet Amanda Ngoho Reavey, an adoptee from the Philippines, invites you to explore your origin story. The new series, Self-Care Sundays, is a project of artist, author, and activist Jenna Knapp. Knapp has created the Self Care Studio, which has manifestations online but sometimes ventures out IRL as a pop-up, to persuade us to take a moment to care for ourselves. You will be able to make an aromatherapy inhaler at the April drop-in, a good follow-up to the herb walk that afternoon.
We hope to see you at International Sculpture Day at the end of the month. Once again, Debbie Pagel of Eat Cake! has accepted the sculpture challenge and is making a cake based on Tony Smith’s Wandering Rocks. We would like to share it with you on the afternoon of the 28th.
And don’t forget to get your summer camp registration in soon!
