Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Community

I've been thinking a lot about community recently. Partly because I have been writing about my Cabrini work for a review binder I'm putting together, and also because I have been working on making images of community with my ASM teens.
I am so attracted to community and people. Unfortunately my busy schedule has kept me isolated from the people I want to be around most. Hopefully that will soon change.

I have recently been reading books by Chaim Potok about the Jewish community. One in particular: The Promise. This is a book about relationships, and the psychology of people. I can't do it justice by writing a summation here. All I can say is that I was changed by this book.

Currently I'm reading: No Compromise, A Keith Green Story. This book is about the life of Keith Green. It takes the reader through his trials and journeys finding faith. I find it interesting his pull towards Jesus, and all the circumstances that led him there. His music has always touched me. He died in a plane crash at 28, and was married with 3 kids and one on the way. What I find interesting is that he was only a year older then what I am now, and seemed to have a much more fulfilling life then what I've had.

I am unhappy working so much. Perhaps I'll be happier with less jobs, less money, but more time to involve myself in a community. Why else are we here, if not to make relationships with one another?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey SB,

I've always thought that the thematic "hook" for your work was community and human relationships. Both your relationship with the people in your photographs, and the relationships of the people in your photographs.

Working a lot is tough. Especially when you work so much and still struggle to pay the bills. But were not alone in that. Almost everyone coming out of Art school goes through similar struggles. Many have it even harder than we do. So while I certainly understand where you are coming from (last night I was so tired that I fell asleep in my rocking chair), we have to keep plugging away. After all, Mrs. Huxtable says paying dues comes after you went to school. You work hard, pay dues, and hope that you get to do what you want to do.

In the meantime, we have to be "creative about being creative." Graduate school was a privileged time where we had lots of time to do our work. Now, not so much. But you have to make it work somehow. How about self-portraits? Pictures of your students? It might not be exactly what you want to do, but you have to make it work.

Believe me, I'd rather be walking around the Forest Preserves than downtown...

BG

Anonymous said...

Hi Sarah,

Came across these thoughts on community. They are by an existential philosopher by the name of Jaspers:

"The thesis of my philosophizing is: The individual cannot become human by himself. Self-being is only real in communication with another self-being. Alone, I sink into gloomy isolation--only in community with others can I be revealed in the act of mutual discovery. My own freedom can only exist if the other is also free. Isolated or self-isolating Being remains mere potentiality or disappears into nothingness."

BG