Picking up the Pieces

[Rick Rothrock <rothrock@xxxxxxxx>]

Linda:

Last year a delicate finished piece of stone sculpture
fell from its pedestal in the night and shattered,
waking my wife and I from a restfull sleep.

I mourned its loss and chastised myself for my failure
to more properly mount it. I accepted the loss as one
more tragic event in a season of "spilt milk" tragedies
that were occuring in our life. Later this spring I
pinned and glued the delicate piece together ,attached a
strand of barbed wire to it and placed it in the garden
as a trellace.

All summer the vines of a cucumber plant grew through
it. I ate the cucumbers and trained the vine through the
piece. This fall (after September 11) , I participated
in the Milseburg basalt symposium in Fulda, Germany.
Among our discussions were topics of peace and conflict
and injustices of the world.

We also discussed the concept that spiritual or
emotional reality is a fifth dimension in sculpture and
that this reality is not subject to the same laws of
physics that govern the first four. Upon returning home
this fall I "harvested" my new work from the garden,
hung it on the wall, and wrote the following poem:

The present retains all the mortal remains
of past perfect moments now shattered and strained.
of ensuing seasons of growth and decay
that never recapture the pristine array.

These former material traces of time
betray what is hopeful and truly divine.
That healing, forgiveness and final repair,
reside in the soul and inhabit the air.

My motivation for working stone comes from the
occasional glimpse of reconciliation and sublime beauty
that I find in the natural material. It is a window into
the fifth dimension. While the rest of my "failures" are
just broken bits and chips, this one lives on as a
simple reminder of the struggle to find harmony and
balance in nature and in our lives.

Rick Rothrock
http://www.rickrothrock.com/