Listen To Take Your Time
I’m going to start including an audio version of each issue of Take Your Time. Here’s the very first one.
Illustration
Scooter and Pancho are my two senior dogs. Words cannot describe my love for them. My husband and I adopted Scooter in 2017 when we lived in Washington D.C. We always wanted to name our dog Scooter, so it felt like fate when we saw his little profile on Petfinder. And Pancho, well it’s a little bit of a long story, but we adopted him in July of 2020. They are peas in a pod and I can’t imagine my life without either of them. We don’t know either of their precise ages since we adopted them later in their lives. Scooter is maybe 14 and Pancho is possibly 8 or 9.
As I watch them get older, I think about how they perceive the passage of time. From what I’ve read dogs are very present and “live in the moment.” Dogs have their own sense of time which is very different from our sense of time which includes thinking about the past and the future. Because they’re both older, my husband and I wonder about their lives before we met them (so much that it inspired me to write and illustrate a children's book about Scooter), but do they dwell on the past as we humans do from time to time? Do smells or sights trigger memories for them? When they bark in their sleep are they revisiting a trauma or a pleasant lost memory? I’m convinced yes, but there’s no way to know for sure. I might never know what they experience or experienced, but I do know that my time with them is so precious.
Related Reading:
Inspiration
In high school and college, I spent a lot of my winter breaks, spring breaks, and even an entire summer with my sister in New York City. Those are some of my favorite memories that I long for, to be exploring with my sister in a very exciting city full of art. We always made it a point to go to the MoMA on Fridays and get dinner somewhere afterward. When she was at work, I happily explored the city on my own and went in and out of a lot of museums like The Guggenheim. This exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 is one that impacted me. Now that I think about it, so much of the art was about time and documenting its passage or breaking free entirely of our notions of time and space. I think I must have seen it during spring break in 2009, I remember it being really cold and how warm I got going up the spiral ramp at the museum. There are a few pieces in this exhibit that I often feel the need to pull up to look at.
Tehching Hsieh's Time Clock Piece “Doing life and doing art is all the same – doing time. The difference is that, in art, you have a form. This approach gives me freedom.” Tehching Hsieh spent 1980-1981 punching into a time clock. I had to look this up, a time clock is also known as a punch clock which is a device that records start and end times for hourly employees. So he would punch time using this punch clock at his New York studio on the hour, every hour. It captured one frame of himself and the clock on film. I guess it’s a lot like our home security system; constantly photographing ourselves as we come and go. I wonder about the times not captured on film and how he spent them.
James Whitney’s Yantra Filmmaker James Whitney created Yantra between 1950 and 1955, by punching patterns into 5x7″ cards with a pin. Yantra is a Sanskrit word that means “instrument,” “machine,” or a mandala. Mandala, also a Sanskrit word, means “circle” and is a geometric design or pattern that represents the cosmos or deities. Every time I watch this video with swirling dots sometimes forming recognizable shapes or scattering in what seems like a random way, it takes me back to the moment I saw it at the Guggenheim. I hadn’t really seen something like this before.
James Lee Byars’s The Death of James Lee Byars “I hope that people will experience my way of practicing my own death as something useful themselves.” James Lee Byars created this stunning gold and yet empty altar in 1994 when he was dying of cancer.
I think I met with a friend afterward for a walk, I can’t really remember. This exhibit I think has its obvious critiques and flaws, the Eurocentrism of it all, and the focus on white cis male artists, and while that’s true, at the same time I credit it as cementing my love of art. It showed me the transformative power of artistic works.
Ideas
It’s Never Too Late to Pick Up Your Life and Move to Italy I’m at this point in my life where I’m realizing I want to make some big changes and at the same time wondering if it’s too late. I can’t remember how I stumbled upon this series from The New York Times called “It’s Never Too Late…” Julia Cameron the author of The Artist Way would call this synchronicity. This quote from Holly Herrmann who made her dream to move to Italy a reality said, “Make a list of five essential things that need to happen to make your plan a reality. Start with one. Don’t look at all of them because that can be overwhelming. If you can accomplish one, then go to two. Then see if you can finish the list. Don’t do anything drastic. Do a test run to see if you’re suitable for this kind of life and if it makes you happy or uncomfortable. I had a strong drive to do this. If you’re compelled to do something, you should attempt to do it.” How would you finish this sentence? “It’s never too late to _____”
Ending Quote
Time by Janet Norris Bangs, which appeared in the February 1933 issue of Poetry magazine.
