Transplanted

"It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see."

     First, a toast to those few of you who've sat on a bucket in this weed-infested plot of Internet farmland and waited for the corn to grow.

     The truth of the matter is, I was kidnapped by a sly villain by the name of "Life" who chained me to other priorities and fed me gruel. It took me a good long while, but my daring escape plan worked and I'm here to tell the tale. More than that, I finally moved all these blog posts over to the new website only to decide that I wanted the content on the new blog to be unencumbered by the mass of Internet opinion literature that I have inflicted on you over the past couple of years on this lovely Blogspot site.

   Not-so-long story shorter, I'll continue consistently posting on my personal site, but hopefully we'll begin to see the content and style of my writing mature a bit. Who knows. Perhaps it's just moving the writing from the greenhouse into the field.

     So go ahead and shuffle over to www.paulvermeesch.com/blog and plop down a bucket to watch the corn grow.

Moving

"The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope." - Frank Lloyd Wright

The time has nearly come to say goodbye to this dusty little corner of the Internet. But do not fear! I'm only moving down the street. Though this site will continue to remain up-and-running, future weekly/biweekly/triweekly posts will be found on the (as of now non-public) blog portion of my personal site www.paulvermeesch.com. I'll likely be a bit quieter over the next week or two or three as I slowly move the dozens of blog posts over to the new platform and tidy them all up. The move to the new site is mostly for my benefit as I begin to do some consolidation. I'll be writing you all one more post on this Blogspot platform when the transfer is complete, so stay tuned for a detour!

Defining Moments

"Hell is full of amateur musicians." -George Bernard Shaw

     Though it's an atrocity to quote both Shaw and Chesterton on the same blog, the sentiment was quite fitting indeed. 

     I've often supposed that in heaven--in the world to come--our lives will be accompanied by a soundtrack. Not in a creepy way, like my nightmare of a one man band following me around town setting my life to music, but in some awesome invisible-surround-sound-speaker-system sort of way. I can imagine waking up and deciding over a cup of tea whether it's a Zimmer day or a Jablonski day or a Giacchino day.
     Day dreaming aside, music does have a special way of teleporting the memory back to certain moments in time. Pieces of music become little time machines for the brain. Keeping the iTunes library on shuffle while doing math homework often drops my brain off in Virginia or Greece or California every four minutes instead of keeping it splattered across the twenty-some composite function problems it should be focused on. The soundtrack from The Man from Snowy River winds me up in Colorado Springs. Most of The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe's credits pieces put me in Yellowstone or King's Canyon, and for whatever reason, the artist Moby's work throws me back to Oklahoma.
It does make me wonder if, in the world to come, music will be something like a less creepy version of Cobb's elevator in Inception, transporting us back to those moments in time that resonate so musically in our memories.

     And just because it's no fun to read a blog post without pictures, here are two entirely unrelated shots: one of my grandmother and one of a young girl who was staying at my grandparent's home. Though these were taken quite some time ago, I just recently realized have a pretty neat contrast when they're juxtaposed.

Shooting Horses

"Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby to be picked up and laid down like a game of Solitare. It is a grand passion." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I just finished a project that I've been at for over four months now, and it's rather good to be through with it, though it was a blast to shoot and stitch together. Horses are such fun subjects to video. It's the people I have a tougher time with. The best part of shooting this video was running for three quarters of a mile into the woods hauling gear along so I could beat the trail riders and get my epic shot of the horses coming through the woods. The things we do for art...

From the Ground Up

"The Lego brick is not initially thought of as a material typically used in creating art. But as an Architectural Artist, it lends itself perfectly to my applications just as paint to a painter or metal to a blacksmith" - Adam Reed Tucker.

     Over the past two months I've been grinding away at my first commissioned Lego model. My local library (one of the best in our region of Michigan and one of the reasons we chose to live here) is a gorgeous building, a wonderful resource, and a perfect setting for a Lego reconstruction. Built in conjunction with a monthly artist demonstration event I was asked to build at, the model contains over 5,000 Lego elements from 23 different resellers as far away as Germany. Two months is a tough timeline for a project that should take five to six months, but with some help on the backside of things and the pseudo-flexibility of homeschooling, I managed to get from blueprints, photos, and drawings to the placement of the final, custom-engraved elements in just under eight weeks. The model is now property of the library, and will remain on display in the lobby.

     In other news, as of yesterday, my personal site, paulvermeesch.com, is now live. This site will be a portfolio of sorts as well as an umbrella for my different interests, and a method by which I can be contacted more easily. Eventually, this blog will likely be migrated over to that site as well once I can iron out the kinks of Wordpress.

     And not only have I been building a small library and small website in the past few weeks, I've also been building a small business. Through paulvermeesch.com/lego, I am now available for Lego modeling commissions. Drop me a note with who, where, or what you'd like to see built out of plastic bricks, and I'd love to talk with you about it!

Trapped in a Reference Frame

"It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen garden, shining flat on the hillside like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure on which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen." -G.K. Chesterton

Humans have ever aspired to be birds. From the time of Icarus all the way to today's inane wingsuit jumpers, mankind has wanted to soar over mountains and treetops, preferably in slow motion and to epic music, because slow motion and epic music make things all the more awesome. But why? Why did DaVinci and the Wright brothers and all those comic book authors dream of human flight? Perhaps it was because they were all sick and tired of living in two dimensions, of only being able to venture into the third by falling off a cliff or being shot out of a cannon. Perhaps mankind was sick of its reference frame; weary of seeing ground beneath its feet and all things from the same lousy perspective. Mankind strove to reach outer space not just to explore the stars, but so that it could look back at planet earth; so that it could defy its reference frame and see the globe from a distance. Distance gives perspective. This is why model train layouts, like architectural models and those miniature scale sailboats are so enduringly appealing. They allow the viewer to escape his reference frame and view the trains and buildings and boats from a greater "distance." This is likely why Legos are so appealing to me. They have the potential to recreate life in a different reference frame, one where the ground needn't necessarily be beneath our feet. Indeed, extreme distance gives perspective, and extreme closeness gives wonder. I've often wondered what it might be like to swim around inside of a plant cell, or be like Calvin, imagining himself as a bug in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. One can escape the bars of our reference frame by gaining distance or by imagining, like Chesterton's traveller, that we have always been living on top of an enormous giant. Our appreciation for the commonplace will inevitably grow as we see the commonplace from a different perspective. 

The Kingdom

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." - Winston Churchill 

     Just as there are two ways to reach home, perhaps there are two ways of reaching the kingdom of God. The first would be to travel around the world and through potentially eons of time until one reached the messianic millennium. The second would be to never leave.

     The kingdom is that ambiguous little thing that kept popping up all over the gospels. Whatever it was or is or will be, God thought that it was important enough to warrant a trip to planet earth to tell us about. All too often, I think we might look through the wrong end of the binoculars when it comes to Jesus's first coming. If his only purpose was to die and be raised in order to break the curse of sin for all mankind, why didn't he allow Herod to murder him as a child? Salvation might have come thirty years earlier. Obviously, the messiah's life and teaching are supremely important in the grand scheme of history. With the physical life of his son, we might argue that God began the kingdom of heaven on earth. Jesus did not lie when he said "the kingdom of heaven is now" for the kingdom was now. The mustard seed of the kingdom of heaven, planted and nurtured by the life of the carpenter from Nazareth, has been growing for the past two thousand years into a sturdy young tree. Indeed, time will only tell when the growth of the mustard tree will be complete, but perhaps many of us have been waiting for something we already have. We wait for God's commands to be written on our hearts without realizing that many of the commands already have been written onto our hearts with the Holy Spirit prompting us toward righteousness, where our ancestors relied on the commands written in stone. 

     Like the Chestertonian traveler who leaves Bristol and journeys around the world to a strange land of rolling hills, tamed dragons, and peculiar people under tall, magical, black hats, only to find that he has returned to Bristol with all its top hats and motorcars; so too, we should rediscover the kingdom of God not as something to be expected, but something to be lived out. Every plant that the Father did not plant will surely be uprooted, but the roots of the kingdom of heaven run deep.