MAY BLOG
Mid-May in Vermont, for many of us, is our favorite time of the year. There’s a haze of green buds/new leaves everywhere, but you can still see through the branches for a sense of space that the full massed green of summer blocks out. Then there are the flowering trees, apple, crab-apple, plum, cherry, and then the lilacs, and then the lilacs (the lilacs are so wonderful they deserve double mention).
Everything is fresh. The new green of the fields is much more intense than further on into the summer when the first crop of hay has already been taken, and its cool 60–70 degrees, which in our geography feels warm. In our geography, where we have strong seasons, the spring comes after the long dark winter, which intensifies its wonder. And the wonder of spring induces “a rebirth of wonder” in the studio, and everything seems fresh and possible.
“Everything is connected, everything changes, pay attention,” VSC Visiting Poet Jane Hirshfield said when a friend asked her to edit a 700 page book on Buddhism. Jane agreed to do it but also told her friend, “You know I can get it down to 7 words” – and those were the words: “Everything is connected, everything changes, pay attention.”
Paying attention to interconnectedness is what makes VSC a special place…an environment and community where everything is connected and artists and writers spend their days in their studios delving into their interconnectedness, with the planet, the spring, the human community, and doing it more easily and fluidly here than elsewhere, because at VSC we work to support the awareness of the connectedness of all things as a foundation for making art that can express our mutual interconnectedness at a meaningful level.
Happy Spring!
Jon Gregg
Founder