Hi Friends,
Planning brings me solace. Dates, times, schedules, project management, process, protocol, all of it, I think having something to do with seeking for certainty in a world of such uncertainty and many surprises. Lately, aside from home projects, involving an almost obsessive love of straightening and organizing, I am planning at LongHouse, where I hold back from over-planning in favor of learning from the place, from the staff, about how it grew up. At 31 years old this year, the place is both young and mature, in need of a refresh and also gloriously healthy. It’s also spring, always a time of reawakening and refreshing and renewal, and all gardens need some loving tidying, raking, planting, and readying for smiling visitors to return to our place of peace and quiet.
With huge interest in origin stories and how things change over time with vision and discipline, I am reading everything I can get my hands on and listening widely to anyone who can help me imagine the transformation of abandoned farmland that Jack bought over three decades ago into the wonder that the LongHouse garden is today. The farm, left alone since the 1870s, he found “riddled with fallen trees and vines as thick as my wrist.” As he honored the ancient oaks and nurtured young beeches and high bush blueberries, he thought, planned, looking at both English and Japanese gardens and then did his own thing, famously saying that “I don’t play games with no chance of winning.” As his garden emerged, planning gave way to opportunistic moments, what he called “the open bowl,” a concept that applies to the plants he introduced, the paths created, and the art that punctuates the landscape.
Open bowl seems obvious, especially at LongHouse which is filled with open vessels—ceramic pots, wooden bowls, baskets—so many receptacles for receiving, filling, gathering. Technically the term open bowl is used by professional keglers to describe a non-sanctioned game, bowling or play without frames or borders. So, open bowl refers to freedom, relaxation of rules, willingness to release control. The unplanned moment. I can feel my anxiety with uncertainty rising. And then a walk in the garden helps me to loosen up and allow things to just happen.
In the past two weeks, we saw the open bowl in the most marvelous way and while I stood in awe, those on staff who have witnessed the open bowl many times just smiled. Even while we are working according to carefully scripted days of gardening, cleaning, schedule arrival of sculptures, all in anticipation of a planned opening day of April 30, a call came in, a tip that we had to see a sculpture on view at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, just up the block from the Noguchi Museum. An up and coming artist, Moko Fukuyama, had made a triptych sculpture out of oaks felled by Hurricane Sandy at the schoolyard at East Woods School in Oyster Bay, Long Island. She had brought the trunks to Socrates, loved them, polished them, nourished them, painted them, made them into gigantic fishing lures paying homage to Shinto traditions of characters inherent in a landscape. Her so-called Hell Gate Keepers are about abundance of land and sea and life.
The trick was that we had to see them fast, closing day May 20, before they were sent to storage, a fast dash to Socrates on a Sunday afternoon to meet the artist and her collaborators.
Talk about open bowl: the pieces are inspired, the combined origin of the materials from Long Island and homage to Shinto traditions (the same that inspired Jack’s house) too good to be true. We had one week—seven days—to figure out how to truck nearly 2000 pounds of tree sculpture from Queens to East Hampton. Against all odds of supply chain delays and traffic jams and uncertainty, the amazing staff at LongHouse jumped on the phone, found a willing trucker who collected the pieces and brought them to us on May 28 (ok eight days).
The largest piece weighs a ton alone, and the team created an ingenious rig to move it from into the garden, to its appointed spot, involving a forklift driven backwards!
Many other works of art and garden projects are planned way ahead. Yet the sheer wonder of allowing the unexpected to occur, within reason, was the greatest moment of solace of all. The exhilaration of chance, the nail-biter of expectation, and the sheer joy of welcoming new works of art into our space.
Take a walk
Wherever you are, spring is happening–here in New York the bulb plants are popping up everywhere, trees are leafing out, and the forsythia is glorious. I walk the dog, trying to leave my podcasts behind and just look at the prettiest season of all.
And onward
Until next week, keep walking and looking, slowing with curiosity and courage.
Carrie