At the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities, which we attended in San Jose, California, two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend a session with Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln’s Meloncholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. He is currently finishing another book entitled The Power of Two: Creative Chemistry, and at the conference he talked about this work in progress.

According to Shenk, the traditional paradigm of the lone genius has recently been countered by a more nuanced story of the complex network out of which genius emerges. While he doesn’t deny the existence of either the loner or the network, he asserts that a very specific electricity arises from creative pairs: think John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Georges Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. He also argues that there are several predictable acts in the stage life of a creative pair, the first of which is often an attraction of the familiar to the unfamiliar.

And while the two partners must in some way merge, each partner losing his or her particular identity to the other as in the confluence of rivers, “creativity proceeds from dichotomous exchange,” as Shenk says. Roles that become fixed or static signal a dying fire. This dichotomous exchange often involves an asymmetry of power in the partnership and consequent tension and unraveling. Those generative sparks can be extinguished without moments of what Shenk calls repair, moments of returning to the pure joy and delight of the original sparking.

To illustrate one of these moments, he played a clip of the Beatles’ famous 1969 rooftop concert, their last live performance together. During their rendition of the song “Don’t Let Me Down,” John forgets the words to the beginning of the second verse and improvises several syllables of gobbeldegook instead, exchanging bemused smiles with Paul. Shenk identifies this as a moment of repair in a torn relationship—by the time of this performance the friendship between John and Paul had nearly frayed to the breaking point—a recapturing of delight.

While Shenk didn’t use the word “marriage,” marriage easily qualifies as a locus for creative energy, although not necessarily marriage as it’s envisioned today, with its focus on equal rights and equal work loads, of two people completing each other’s deficits into some measurable whole. I hasten to add that fairness and equality, in some form, are necessary to any fruitful marriage; however, the asymmetries and tensions and inequalities that also occur within marriage are often the source of a relationship’s generative genius. Shenk’s taxonomy of creativity between pairs appealed to me instantly because I found immediate evidence to support his structure, not in the pairing of people but in the sparks that fly when unexpected disciplines are rubbed together.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Teri Rofkar, a native of Alaska and a member of the Tlingit people. She began her career as a traditional weaver making baskets from such materials as the roots of spruce trees, maidenhair ferns, and native grasses, an art taught to her by her grandmother and which she is now teaching her grand-daughter. These baskets, aside from being beautiful, can last for hundreds of years and are woven so tightly they can be used as water vessels. When she took a class at a local community college on traditional methods of textile weaving, she realized that she already had most of the skills she needed to make the leap from weaving plants into baskets to weaving goat hair into traditional robes, a skill that had almost disappeared.

To practice her new craft, she needed mountain goat wool, and lots of it, so she befriended local park rangers who worked with a herd that had been introduced in 1923. The rangers informed her when they found spots where the animals had shed or when they found one dead. She became aware of a study of the genetics of the mountain goats, which discovered a herd genetically unrelated to the introduced herd and dated it to the last ice age, indicating that the species had not been “introduced” but was, in fact, native.

This genetic drama was unfolding as she was beginning work on a new robe. In addition to the traditional patterning, she added mathematically correct renderings of the distinctive DNA strands of the two herds. Although in some ways the addition was a design innovation, she knew from her many years of basket weaving that her ancestors had always transmitted a deep knowledge of the natural world through their art. On her website she writes:

Decades of weaving have opened my eyes to the pure science that is embedded in Tlingit art. The arts and our oral history together bring knowledge of ten thousand years of research to life. My goal is to continue that research, broadening awareness for the generations to come.

She wore the robe as she presented her keynote speech, dipping each shoulder and spinning so the robe rose up like smoke around her. “Who knew science could dance?” she laughed. Her delight communicated itself to the audience as we witnessed a moment of repair between ancient art and modern science.

Martin and I returned to Austin just in time to attend the last day of the Texas Book Festival, a spectacular intersection of people who love to read and write. We attended a session facilitated by one of Madroño Ranch’s first residents, Juli Berwald. She interviewed Alan Weisman, an environmental journalist and the author of Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth? Fiercely researched and beautifully written, Countdown follows Weisman’s travels through more than twenty countries asking four very loaded questions: how many people can the land carry? How robust must the Earth’s ecosystems be to ensure our continued existence? What species are essential to our survival? What kind of economy would serve a stable human population, rather than the current exploding one? Despite the complexities of the questions—which Weisman addresses with sensitivity and intelligence—a uniform answer presented itself in virtually every context: education of girls, which almost inevitably leads to lower birth rates and to fewer ecological pressures on the planet.

He tells a story about Esmail Kahrom, an Iranian ecologist whose interest in biology had its roots in the Persian carpets he saw in the museum his father took him to as a child, one in particular, dating back to 1416. It depicted a Tree of Life, and among its branches the boy found an extravagance of intricately woven birds, animals, and even insects:

The depictions were so detailed that zoologists could determine each species. He was looking, Kahrom understood, at creatures now extinct in his land. The eyes of ancient carpet weavers are how Iranian biologists know today what once lived there.

One of the animals that has almost disappeared is the Asiatic cheetah, which exists now only in Iran. Visiting the United States for the first time, Kahrom found himself in a sixth-grade classroom in San Diego, invited by the teacher, who was married to one of Kahrom’s cousins. She showed her students the Iranian flag and Iranian coins and then unrolled a Persian rug, one that Kahrom could tell immediately was ancient and expensive. She introduced him to the class as an ecologist, someone who studies the ways in which all life is connected.

Then the classroom door opened, and in walked a curator from the San Diego Zoo with a muzzled cheetah on a leash.

The teacher asked her astonished class what would happen if the endangered cheetahs disappeared altogether. Would the students suffer from the loss? Would they still be able to live their lives? The class agreed that they would, even though they thought the cheetahs should live. The teacher pointed to the beautiful rug she had brought in, noting that it was years in the making, with its more than one and a half million knots. What if someone came in and cut out one, or even two hundred, of the knots? Would you be able to tell? No, she said. You wouldn’t even notice.

But what if you keep cutting, she asked, as her students and the cheetah watched her. Opening her arms to include the space beyond the classroom walls, she said:

All this is the carpet of life. You are sitting on it. Each of those knots represents one plant or animal. They, and the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our groceries are not manufactured. They are produced by what we call nature. This rug represents that nature. If something happens in Asia or Africa and a cheetah disappears, that is one knot from the carpet. If you realize that, you’ll understand that we are living on a very limited number of species and resources, on which our life depends.

These stories weave together many things, but what struck me was the union of the textile arts with modern science. So often the realm of women and household, textiles claim a lower rung on any cultural-status ladder than the hard sciences, but their marriage can strike all sorts of generative sparks. Jewish mystical theology identifies the work of the chosen people as the restoration of God’s shining shattered dwelling place, associated with the feminine principal, with God’s exiled self: tikkun olam, or repair of the world, whose signal marker is delight. In a culture that so often measures itself by efficiencies of scale and measurable, predictable outcomes, I wonder if we wouldn’t be well served to seek out irregular marriages between powerful and humble enterprises, between unlikely partners like science or technology and the arts, rather than seeking to separate them, as so often happens in times of economic stress. In these unlikely partnerings perhaps we’ll see some repair of our moth-eaten world.

What we’re reading
Heather: Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening
Martin: Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City

We’re now into our third year of blogging; today marks the 106th consecutive Friday that we’ve published a new installment of our musings, including three guest posts, one by each of our kids. (We hope they’ll write more.) Today’s post, however, will be our last for a few weeks, as Heather and I have voted unanimously to grant ourselves a brief sabbatical.

By the time you read this, I will have departed for another backpacking trip across northern England with my friend Bruce Bennett; our itinerary will take us some 200 miles in two weeks, from Ravenglass on the Irish Sea to Lindisfarne (Holy Island) on the North Sea. While I’m gone, Heather is hoping to hole up and work on a book project on which she’s collaborating with her fabulously talented sister, Isa Catto Shaw. For the next few weeks, then, neither of us will be producing a weekly blog post.

Duke Ellington once said, “I don’t need time, what I need is a deadline,” words that have become a sort of mantra for our blogging selves. Some weeks the ideas and words just seem to come pouring out; other weeks coming up with a thousand (more or less) coherent (more or less) words on any topic feels like heavy lifting indeed. In either case, putting together a new post every other week has been a revealing and useful discipline for each of us. I believe that our writing has sharpened under pressure (I think of Louis Howe’s advice to Eleanor Roosevelt on public speaking: “Have something you want to say, say it, and sit down”), and that we have both found resources within ourselves of which we had no previous inkling; the surfacing of these unexpected ideas and connections has been a great and unexpected pleasure. I also believe that our collaboration has been a great boon to our marriage, especially as our nest has emptied, and that each of us has discovered new ways to delight in and complement the other.

With all due respect to the Duke, though, time—more specifically, time off—is exactly what we’ve decided to grant ourselves (and you) as we all stagger toward the end of this awful summer of record-setting heat and drought.

The gift of time, and of quiet and nourishment, is exactly what we hope our residents receive from us, and pass on, in the form of creative writing, thinking, art, to a wider audience. Madroño Ranch, this beautiful place that we have come to occupy through no particular merit of our own, has been a gift of great richness to us and our family. How could we respond except by trying to share it with others? Lewis Hyde, in The Gift, writes that “when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.” This belief is the true underpinning of what we’re about at the ranch.

When we started this blog, in September 2009, Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment existed mostly in our heads; at that point we didn’t even have a real Web site. Since then, and most particularly in the last eight months, we’ve made astonishing progress.

Since we harvested our first two bison in late January, we’ve managed to sell virtually all the meat—close to 600 pounds!—and have seen our herd increase to forty-three animals. We’ve also hosted six wonderful residents, with four more scheduled to arrive in the next few months, and a series of ethical hunting and fishing “schools” which have been featured in Texas Monthly and mentioned in the New York Times.

The residents who have graced us with their presence so far are an extraordinary group: Melissa Gaskill, a science and travel writer from Austin; Stacy Sakoulas, a painter from Austin; Juli Berwald, an oceanographer from Austin; Julia Clarke, a professor of paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin; Sasha West, a poet from Austin; and Jenny Browne, a poet from San Antonio. We’ve enjoyed getting to know each of them, and admire their work tremendously. But you may have noticed that all six are of the female persuasion, and based in Central Texas. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we’d love to figure out how to broaden our pool of applicants to include writers and artists from other parts of Texas (and beyond!), and also perhaps the occasional male. (Though two of the four upcoming residents are men, and one of them lives in Virginia.)

And we (by which, of course, I mostly mean our ranch manager, the amazing Robert Selement) also need to arrange our next bison harvest, and finish out the Hunters’ Cabins where residents will stay, and install the rainwater catchment tanks at the Main House, and figure out what to do about the invasive pond weed that is threatening to choke the lake, and plant the vegetable garden and orchard, and (most important of all) figure out how to make it rain, and and and….

In other words, we still have a great deal of work to do before we can declare Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment a success—before, in Lewis Hyde’s terms, the gift is fully in motion. We hope and expect to return from this sabbatical refreshed and inspired, but until then Free Range will be on hiatus. We hope that you, Faithful Reader, will understand and excuse this interruption, and will return once we’re back up and running again, presumably in late September.

In the meantime, many thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in a few weeks!

What we’re reading
Heather: T. C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done
Martin: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt