FEAST OR FAMINE

Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work   by Mason Currey (2013) is a compilation of how well-known people structure their day to do their ‘best work’ – how they organize their schedule to be productive and creative.    This includes everything from eating to doing mundane tasks to sitting at their desk to prepare for work. It is about daily routines – not the random, ad hoc, or variety of activities in people’s exciting lives – but the everyday, small, incremental habits that get a job done. It is often about willpower.    There are about 170 people mentioned in this fascinating book, with their routines and regular habits, from full-time creatives to those who have regular jobs; from artists to designers to engineers; from family people to loners.     Their routines range from word counts to counting hours; working at home to working outside; dressing up or staying in pyjamas; with the aid of alcohol or the aid of lists; rising early to working all

   

  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013) is a ‘braid of stories’ from Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and storytelling.   The book begins with sweetgrass, believed to be the first plant to grow on Earth – a sacred plant. The author tells us about other important plants too: pecan, strawberry, maple, witch hazel, freshwater green algae (‘the water net’), water lily, corn, and so on.   Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant scientist, and she adds, ‘but I am also a poet and the world speaks to me in metaphor.’    She talks in powerful poetic prose of the ‘communal generosity’ of plants, a ‘mycorrhizal network’ that unites people to land and ancestral responsibility, and the gifts of plants that go beyond food and shelter to songs of wisdom. She tells of the ‘grammar of animacy’ and indigenous words that encapsulate all meaning: such as ‘ puhpowee ’ meani

    Painter, engraver, and printmaker Francisco Rocca is Colombian-born, from Bogota, studying Fine Arts Studies at the National University of Bogota. He has lived in Paris since 1972, and taught engraving at the American Parsons School of Design in Paris from 1996-2012.    He says he was inspired to work on the theme of mangroves … ‘All these roots buried in the water emerging in search of the light create a tangle of invasive aerial and uncontrollable lines in an unfinished natural profusion.’   Ramon Cote Baraibar wrote of Francisco Rocca’s works, ‘For Francisco Rocca, the warm colours and shapes that are sometimes realistic, sometimes fleeting, express the solitude, the sensuality, and the tension of the encounter that leads to love. This mark of sensuality is also contained in objects of everyday life, because the passion of desire seems to be a common thread of its aesthetic construction.’   Francisco Rocca’s current works on mangroves are exhibited at the JGC-Contemporary Engrav