we_two ovenbird When you have a child you make a world. You create a whole new entity that wasn't there before--a small but growing planet with its own gravity and its own volatile weather systems. You have to learn to live all over again with this new planet orbiting around you. It's not you, but it affects you, it changes everything about how you thought the universe worked. When my first child was small I had so many dark and frightening days, but there were some days when I saw that my son and I were building something together. Small things. Beautiful things. His creative vision was strange and unexpected. Three year olds don't yet have constraints on what they're allowed to see and where they focus their vision. One day we were sculpting with air-dry clay. I'm not always sure what's going to come out of a lump of clay. Clay has its own ideas about what it wants to be. I sometimes just play until a form is revealed, then I refine it, give it some direction and clarity. I built a penguin and then a baby penguin. I built a polar bear and then a baby polar bear. As my son and I worked side by side I reiterated our two-ness in clay--one parent, one baby. One large form, one small. Similar yet distinct. My son hammered his clay into discs then poked holes in it with his index finger. He was in it for the textures, I was in it for the final revelation of recognizable forms. I initially thought that his clay shapes had nothing to do with mine. All the pieces sat on the table for days drying and I didn't think much about how they went together. I assumed they had nothing in common. But one day I wanted to use the figures as part of a photography project. I liked the smoothness contrasted with the roughness. I started rearranging the pieces, sliding them around, seeing how they played together, and suddenly my son's pieces became ice. He had built a landscape and I had built creatures to live in it! You have to ignore that penguins and polar bears don't live on the same continent, but otherwise the whole scene suddenly developed an obvious congruency. My small boy's icebergs were things of beauty, though I initially dismissed them as uninteresting. I think life with children is often like this. I don't always see how my life and my son's life fit together. I don't see where our vision of the world overlaps. He seems so alien to me, so apart. I struggle to understand him because I have lost so much of the memory of being three and all the other ages he has been since. I have no point of reference. It's sometimes only in retrospect that I see how we're similar. Only upon photographing our casual project did I see that apart we made nothing of interest but together we made something I could dare to call art. My son adds this new dimension to my life. He shakes me up and forces me to reconsider. I don't see through his eyes, but he makes my own eyes new. 250413 what's it to you? who go blather from