California Cloister

The weather here has been beautiful -- there was a little bit of rain and the green things look happy. We have baby peaches on our elder peach tree and the Cecile Brunner (old-fashioned) rose is revving up to cascade blooms.  Meantime, in the back office Anwyl has had a push for work and was up this morning at 4:00 am getting ready for a meeting. Somehow the Function office in Taiwan was involved and so that meant a super-early start. But he reported at lunch that the client was happy.

I taught my first moved-online-class yesterday -- it's a capstone seminar for seniors where they usually show work. But many of them had work trapped in the school when the shelter-in-place order came down, or are moved back home, or otherwise not in good conditions to continue what they were working on. So we began by just having a check-in. One of them, a sculptor, talked about deciding to switch gears for the graduation show and make an online piece since the show will be online; he inspired several of the others to think about that, too. It was like a small miracle to me that I didn't have to bring it up, that it just emerged from the class -- they are really rising to the occasion despite the general collapse. And they seemed happy to see each other, if just on Zoom, and were supportive of each other in a way that hadn't been so marked in the group before. I told them something to the effect that they were on the cusp of history, that their class had an opportunity say something about the changes that are happening all around in their art. It all left me feeling much better.