Top: Child With Flower, Oil on Canvas, (1945) ~ Pablo Picasso
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” – Pablo Picasso
It was a cool clear NYC day in early September 2001 when my life effectively ended. That sounds like a very dramatic and ominous statement, and given the dark events of that time it’s not too far from the truth. While I was physically safe and sound, the life I had imagined, planned, and trained for, indeed the life I had known from childhood up until that point had vanished. Oddly enough, it took me nearly 15 years to realize it, causing me to continue stumbling along on a career path that no longer held any personal meaning. “Option A,” my architecture career, was what I had planned and trained for, and I really didn’t have an “Option B.” So I kept working for designers, paying my bills, and mechanically pursuing my original goals in hopes that the meaning would return, or that something new would appear on my professional horizon. Ironically the ending of another life was the impetus for bringing me to the realization that I needed a change.
I left NYC in late 2012 to be present for the end of my father’s life in early 2013 due to Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. I found a job in a related design field that paid my bills and enabled me to purchase a car and a house. I sought professional counseling for what turned out to be 13 years of PTSD brought about by that September day. Then I started a garden, because it gave me a sense of peace. Over the next several years I came to the realization that my life-long priorities had changed, and began the process of figuring out, once again, what I’m going to be “when I grow up.” I began a careful and earnest review of my interests, and what triggers true passion in my life. In 2019 I decided to take a few classes to help me zero in on those passions. As fate would have it, a worldwide pandemic began shortly after, and the world has been plunged into a dark time of change and uncertainty.
Above: The Proto-Indo-European homeland (dark green) and the present-day distribution of Indo-European languages in Eurasia (light green). Joe Roe / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
While we’ve all paused in one way or another to confront the threat, I have thankfully been safe thus far, and used the time of isolation and quarantine to prepare for the next great change in my life. From my earliest memories I’ve been happiest while creating. Whether at play in the sand or with blocks as a child, or as an art student and graduate architecture student in college, I felt peace, purpose and happiness while creating. So it seems only natural to return to a place where I can regain that happiness. I took a look at the meaning and origin of “create” and found it is a verb meaning “to bring something into existence.” Its roots go back through late Middle English “create”, through Latin “creare”, to Proto-Indo-European, proposed to be the earliest common ancestor of some 449 language families spoken by about or more than 3.5 billion people, roughly half of the world population. “Create” derives from “kerh-(2)” and its original meaning was “to make something grow”. That’s fitting, given the peace I find in my garden.