I recently went away for a few weeks with a friend and her family. It was the first time I was able to spend close and safe time with her nephew since just after he was born. Entering the Time of Two, his vocabulary is bursting and stumbling forth; a frightening thing to have a toddler repeat the things you say! At this same time, I started listening to ‘This Movie Changed Me’ – a podcast about the transformative role movies play.
In an episode about the movie ‘Boyhood’ poet and novelist Naomi Shihab Nye breaks the movie up into parts. Being a poet, she describes evocative moments in the movie as vignettes, and one can really imagine these as visual stills- the complex and intricate moments that make up our lives.
One of these small moments was a description of the movie by Nye in which she describes the movie as “the slow time of childhood when your whole job was looking around.” It caught my attention and I felt it encapsulated the time I had spent with this little boy; joyous, complex, intense and learning moments, and so it was also the impetus for this week’s Duo.
My experience rearranged the way I chose this week’s works. I would usually meditate on the works and then write an instinctive response. In this iteration, in the same urgent way this little boy was feeling out new words, Nye’s words sought out these two images.
This week’s duo is an ode to the smaller knowledge-and-delight-seekers around us.
(This week’s Duo chosen by Candice Cruse.)
Textiles