The Art of Noticing: Seasons of Harvest & Migration
An interview with Mary Jo Hoffman and local appreciation for seventy-two microseasons
THE PHOTOS ABOVE FEATURE THE BOOK “STILL: THE ART OF NOTICING” BY MARY JO HOFFMAN. THEY WERE STAGED ON OCTOBER 8TH ALONG THE YAHARA RIVER AND WATERSHED IN MADISON, WISCONSIN.
Dear friends and readers,
As I prepare to publish this, I hear on the radio that one out of four gas stations in Florida is out of fuel and my extended family is preparing to weather another catastrophic storm. It feels surreal.
Where I live, the weather could be described as perfect. Stunning. The sort of days you want to bottle and relish with gratitude, knowing that change is coming. The world is so deeply connected, and yet we are each living in different versions of reality. My heart breaks for all that so many are suffering, and for all the ways these days are not perfect.
According to the “seventy-two microseasons of the north,” a new-old idea explored by the artist Mary Jo Hoffman in her beautiful book, STILL: The Art of Noticing, this is the time when sunflowers wilt and die.
Mary Jo and I have been emailing a bit in recent weeks, so I’m going to take the liberty of using her first name here. She lives in Minnesota, a few hours west of my home and we experience something similar in our seasons. For over a decade, she has shared her worldview at stillblog.net, where she posts one photo a day. That regular meditation evolved into a refined art of noticing, what she calls “going narrow and deep.” The book, already in it’s second printing, is available from Phaidon. I wrote more about how interesting and important I find Hoffman’s work in an earlier post, “Why I Hate Wind.”
I’m very excited to share my Q & A exchange with Mary Jo below. Aside from the shift in light and color palettes that comes with this season, it’s also the Wisconsin Book Festival. Wisconsin Book Festival brings together readers and authors and thinkers. It’s a chance to relax and be read to, to have deep conversations, and to exalt in the largeness of ideas and possibility.
Wanderlife is all about enlarging the spirit and lighting up the brain, so in addition to the fun e-conversation I had about STILL: The Art of Noticing with Mary Jo, I wanted to let readers in the Madison-area know that I’ll be introducing Mary Jo at the WI Book Fest on Saturday, October 19th at 4:30 PM at the Art & Lit Lab. This event is organized in partnership with the WI Book Festival, FlakPhoto Digest & Projects, and the Wisconsin Science Festival. I hope some of you can join us!
An Interview with Mary Jo Hoffman
The following Q&A has been published in the ALL Review. Thank you to Steven Espada Dawson, the ALL editor, who made some wise choices in editing the original interview for a wider audience.
I hope you enjoy the exchange of ideas as much as I did!
JB: It will be ‘the time of migration’ according the 72 micro-seasons you’ve outlined in the book when you are in Madison on October 19th. What can people expect to see or learn about if they come to the event? How do you prepare for events in different places?
MJH: Madison in October! What a treat. I am a Badger alum. And I vividly remember how beautiful Madison is in October with those clear blue skies, crisp cool mornings, and the low-angle light glinting off the lakes. Madison in the fall always reminds me of Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, which was a very influential book for me when I was in my 20s. It is where I first learned about sandhill cranes, and now 40 years later I have a resident pair of sandhill cranes living in my backyard each summer.
When I visit other states to give workshops, I will often bring bags of dried botanicals and nature bits with me to have attendees play with. Of necessity, those will all be from my local trails in Minnesota. But I do like to study the local flora and fauna of the places I visit so that when I am lecturing I can use local references instead of my northern ones. It's just a little extra effort and people seem to appreciate the gesture. After the workshops, I always try to spend at least a few hours in a local park gathering bits to bring home and add to my growing collections of seedpods, pine cones, leaves, beach rocks, etc.
JB: To keep up with your daily practice on travel days, I picture you asking taxi drivers to pull over so you can gather ditch weeds! Have you ever been busted by airport security for having strange seeds or other contraband?
MJH: I never have! I have been stopped at customs coming home from Europe several times for trying to sneak food items into the country. But it surprises me that I have never been flagged for bringing collections of nature bits home. Sometimes more than half my suitcase is filled with nature from wherever I’ve just been. I leave clothes behind so I can bring home more found treasures! Striped rocks from the Mediterranean are priceless. Sneakers and jeans not so much.
JB: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” is a quote that you reflect on in the book. Is there one useful and one beautiful thing that particularly speaks to the living conversation you are having today or this week with your chosen world?
MJH: I have one item that I use almost every day and that makes the world feel right every time I pick it up. It’s the Niwaki Rattan-Grip garden snips that my husband bought me last year as a gift. If you are a gardener and haven't heard of Niwaki, do yourself a favor and look them up, although you will not be doing your checking account a favor.
On a larger scale, I spent the last couple of years trying to remove all plastics from my house, as much for aesthetic reasons as for environmental ones. I would say I'm about 90% of the way there. (Interestingly Ziploc bags are proving to be my kryptonite.) The reason I mention it is that the aesthetic difference has been enormous. Without shiny plastic and primary colors around, the house feels so much more grounded and situated in its environment. Because everything in it is made from natural elements, there is less clash between the inside and the outside. I can feel the difference every day. And I highly recommend it.
JB: You have been very generous in explaining your process and technique. Are there other art forms that you experiment with privately or aspire to try?
MJH: Yes! I have been doing collage for as long as I have been doing my STILL photography project. I have kept visual journals for the last 25 years. Interestingly, although I feel I have found my visual voice with STILL, I have never found a similar unique-to-me voice with collage. I have published some of my collage work and it does get acquired by art consultancies, but I do not have a consistent body of work that is recognizably mine. Recently my husband and I became empty nesters, so I will probably be adding one more creative practice to my routine. And I haven't decided yet if it will be painting, printmaking, or collage. There is an idea I would like to experiment with on canvas or paper, based on the concept of 72 micro-seasons that I wrote about in my STILL book. In some form or another, that will probably be my next foray into a new medium.
JB: You wrote that showing up every day to make art makes you an artist. Do you remember the first time you called yourself an artist? How did it feel?
MJH: It really is interesting that so many creatives and makers have a hard time calling themselves artists. I don't understand why that is so, but it was true for me as well. I think I started calling myself an artist when my photographs started selling beyond just friends and family. Now I have a very well-received book, released by the world's largest publisher of art books, and I'm selling my images several times a week. And despite all of this, it feels as if I am intruding into a forbidden realm somehow when I call myself an artist.
JB: It must surprise you to be a role model for the art of noticing, speaking for all the other weirdos who feel out of sync with the ‘real world.’ Do you have any advice for yourself or a list of ways to get back on track when you are having an ‘off’ day?
MJH: Firstly, I am a bit of a rebel and really do cherish being a weirdo. That has been true since I was a child. Being a noticer, however, began early in the life of my STILL project around 12 years ago. One of the biggest rewards of this daily practice has been how centering it is to spend at least a little part of every day being a noticer. To be wholly present, however briefly, with my attention focused outward on whatever surrounds me has proven to be the best mindfulness practice I could have conceived. I give lectures about this. There is a lot of research to support it. But I can also say, anecdotally, for myself it has become the heartbeat of my days, and I can’t imagine who I would be anymore without it.
JB: “It is in the atmosphere of such intimacy that the word love makes any sense.” This quote from STILL reminded me of when I first read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and her invitation to become native to our place. I feel like your work speaks to this desire, this longing, that many of us feel. Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share on the concept of home, or if you’ve read Kimmerer’s work, on ideas in that book?
MJH: Oh goodness, Braiding Sweetgrass! What a gift that book has been to the universe! I was about five years into doing STILL blog when I finally found Braiding Sweetgrass, and the feeling of recognition I felt while reading that book was profound. And then I realized that my STILL project had simply led me back to the knowledge that indigenous people had always had. And we had lost. But there are a lot of weirdos like you and me out there now so perhaps we will find our way back.
On this topic of becoming native to our place I have so many thoughts. I recently gave a lecture at the 92nd St. Y on the topic of Placefulness – Which is a term I borrowed from Jenny Odell’s wonderful book How to do Nothing. Placefulness is the opposite of – and I believe an antidote to–the placelessness we are all feeling from too much life online. My husband and I call this attitude “going narrow and deep”. When air travel became affordable, and remote work a possibility, we watched as nomadic lifestyles took off and we sensed that something was wrong with that as a solution what had come before, even though we agreed that work life before remote work was not a good solution to our problems either. We had a hard time articulating our feelings. But then, I started doing STILL. And we moved to a tiny rural village in southern France. And we went very narrow and deep in that unremarkable, un-Instagrammable, place. And we realized then that globetrotting to world capitals and remote beaches could be as disconnected as staying online in one place. Neither one is a substitute for spending enough time in one place to understand how it has formed you, and who you are as a result with your sustained interaction with it. Contemporary nomadism often strikes us as running away from things as much as toward them.
Thanks for reading! Hope to see some of you on October 19th!
Sincerely,
Enjoyed reading your interview! Wish I could have been there to experience it.
I had purchased her book STILL in early October and it is such an ‘immersive’ joy.
I really enjoyed this interview. Thank you.