“stewards of transformation”

I spent the afternoon at the Wedding Cake House with a group of RISD students, there as part of a class, considering restoration, repair, preservation, damage, and decay. I had been invited to talk about the anthology that T and I co-edited a few years back. We were asked about process, our work individually as writers and then how we worked together. For the volume, I had written about ghosts and I suggested that as a starting point. That I am interested in not only what is visible, but what is felt, known, sensed in ways other than in language. And in working, I want to make those ways of knowing explicit, specific, in focus.

A student asked about value. How to know what has value, how to prioritize what to retain, restore. What to let go. He was asking about objects. Then another observed that perhaps the question is one of the lifespan of a thing. To think not only about its value in the present, but the way value has been created, imbued, transformed. Perhaps, they offered, what we can do is care for the objects as best we can for the time that we can, knowing that during that time, there will be change. We can think of ourselves, they said, as "stewards of transformation," and the phrase felt so wise and so precise to the moment, that we all laugh-gasped with pleasure and recognition. Isn't that what we are, to all that is in our care? Our objects, our work, our homes, our families. Our memories, our truths, our loves? What a beautiful and loving way to understand our time, living with tenderness and with care for all that we are holding for the time that we can.