Tom & I just spent the better part of a Sunday at the Field Museum of Natural History, one of Chicago’s many world-class destinations. Although the Field is probably best known for being home to the T. rex Sue, we were not there to see her, although admittedly, it’s virtually impossible to not see Sue given her prominent location at one end of the vast main gallery.
Be that as it may, here is what we were there to see:
1. A rare display of hundreds of Viking artifacts
2. An exhibit about mastodons & mammoths
3. A 3D movie on the Galapagos Islands
And here is what I came away with:
1. Scads of design ideas for that package of Precious Metal Clay that has been sitting on my desk, alternately beckoning & taunting me, for over a year
2. The knowledge that mammoths once roamed what is now our backyard, a notion that I find strangely pleasing, even comforting
3. Further appreciation for the concept of deep time, the idea that Earth has been around for a mind-boggling number of millenia
4. And yes, okay, a new pair of sterling silver earrings featuring a Viking motif…
Even more important, & perhaps because it came on the heels of the previous Sunday’s total eclipse of the moon, our visit to the Field Museum also filled me with a reinvigorated commitment to making art. Why would this be so? I think it’s because natural history museums, planetariums, naked-eye viewing of celestial happenings & the like provide us with glimpses of the continuity of the Universe & I, for one, find continuity on such an enormous scale both soothing & inspiring: Soothing because I have a place on this continuum; inspiring because I have something to contribute to it.
Picturing a woolly mammoth grazing thousands of years ago on the very same spot in my garden where the neighborhood bunny nibbled my Bibb lettuce last June gives me a handhold onto the sometimes-inconceivably distant past. Gazing at a gorgeous brooch wrought by someone in Scandinavia hundreds of years ago challenges me to hurry back to my studio & discover what I can come up with. Marveling at the richness of life forms existing on some volcanic remnants in the middle of the ocean reminds me of the incredible complexity of the universe of which I am fortunate to be a part.
Far from making me feel small & unimportant, though, these links to the past energize me because they position me in, & connect me to, the Whole. The perspectives of deep geologic time & long-ago cultures always reward me with the same inner excitement & lightening of spirit which arise from recognizing that since each of us is a part of the Whole, what we do matters. So once again, I go back to my studio with a renewed sense of the Universe encouraging me to work without fear, to engage rather than withdraw, to contribute rather than withhold.