Solicitous Opening.

[Image Credit: a fake image of what the parting of the Red Sea might have looked like - The Glue Society]

Life has provided so much to write about lately that it is difficult to write about anything. In short, finished up teaching a design studio at Columbia, book project continues but goes on momentary hold while I head to Nebraska to help my dad harvest a couple hundred acres of corn and then on to Madagascar to cure malaria via sustainable land design with a group of lemur geneticists. Needless to say, there are 10,000 blog entries implicit in all this landscape architect-ing and I must draw them out eventually or the moments will go unrecorded. In all honesty, the midpoint is shifting to a much larger radial tangent and it's temporarily disorienting. Midpoint goes global, now encompassing a couple oceans, several continents, and enough immunizations to turn ones blood to mercury.

The most important thing to record at this particular moment is the consummation of 125th Street. If you've followed my ramblings for any period of time, you know I have spent the better part of 2 years obsessed with a belligerent streetscape in Harlem. It's a place as tempestuous as a toddler tantrum, so taking it on as a student studio project was brave. Hindsight is always prophetic. I hope this two year wrestling match is training for what lies ahead in working with aboriginal communes and villages in Madagascar to achieve our goal of land use development and education for a more economically and environmentally sustainable future.

So, the studio ended on a happy note. The students performed a few miracles in the final 24 hours and made me proud as they presented to a cadre of my generous design friends in the city (thank you Jamie, Michael, Roy, Phillip, Liz, Molly, and Runit). They also displayed a slight evolution in thinking about and reading the world around them. And most importantly, each project was vastly different than the others, signifying individuality - something deeply important to me as an educator. I hope this experience changed them as humans. I know it changed me.

Finishing the semester is an important threshold. It signifies a true purging of information, numbers, details, and specific knowledge amassed while working on 125th Street at the firm. Letting go of these things is one of the more personally difficult tasks I have faced. But teaching is the perfect way to purge because one really is transferring it on to others, in this case in the form of education about ourselves in the physical world (which, really, is the essence of landscape architecture). Sometimes it's nice to get rid of things that are no longer useful to make way for new commitments that are also challenging enough to draw blood. I remember a poetic monologue my friend Shaun once performed. He explained that scars and remnant pain from incidents are memories made endearingly physical. There are certainly a few scars - if Heather is reading this I hope she laughs - but the discomfort is certainly lessened, and maybe even disappearing through expelling towards an investment in the future of others.