The Pause

Chatting with my friend Chris back in San Francisco today he was reflecting on how great it was that I was taking this opportunity (at this point in my long life is irrelevant) to take some time, a couple of months, to simply pause. Stop. Reflect. Decide. Where does life lead me next.  We are all in such a hurry to….what?  Live?  I think that real life, meaningful existence, exists in the moments we simply

Pause

Serendipity was in full bloom after that conversation.  I wandered down to the piazza in search of a Spritz and some dinner.  It’s Barga.  Old town Barga has about 200 people, give or take, that are full time residents within the old city walls. Including the surrounding small villages (suburbs, if you will) the total of the actual city is just under 10,000 people.  I was corrected by a local when I referred to Barga as a village.  It has a Duomo.  It is a City. Lesson learned.

As I was chatting with an artist acquaintance in his gallery, Keane, we got to talking about The Pause.  How valuable and affirming it can be to reset your life clock and your life force.  Mostly it helps clarify your future direction.

He told me a story. A story about one of his pauses in life, one that lasted a full year.  When he first came to Barga over forty years ago from Ireland, he noticed the proliferation of small wall niches with statues of the Madonna tucked within them, they are common throughout Italy and the ancient Byzantine empire.

He also noticed that there were fresh wildflowers tucked loving in each of these niches, apparently changed daily, or close to it.  As the years passed he began to see that the fresh flowers were slowly, inexorable, disappearing.  In their place, tufts of blue, white, and pink plastic flowers began to adorn these relics.  A sad commentary on the “modern” world but still, he wondered what had prompted this cheap imitation of the real life he had observed for years.

It slowly dawned on him the elderly women, the women who held this religious devotionalism near to their hearts, were dying off.  The next generation, still modestly connected to this ancient routine but busy with their real lives now, simply opted for plastic flowers as a time saving device while still honoring their now gone relations.

One Madonna caught his eye.  The niche was high above the road on a wall, too high to reach without a ladder but, somehow, it was being vandalized by marauding youth.  

He Paused

Giving this particular Madonna his full and thoughtful attention, he decided, slowly, to act.  He retrieved a ladder, took her down, and together they went back to his studio.  Mostly known as a painter, his studio was also filled with thousands of small, collected, objects that, as artists do, would be put to use on some future, as yet unthought of, project.

His Pause led him to remake a new Madonna out of whatever he had on hand. It certainly did not resemble anything near the original, now desecrated, object.  More a tribute to the past with a nod to the present rather than a copy of the original.  Taking his ladder once again, he placed the remade Madonna back in her niche.

Back to The Pause

As he reflected on his action, he had an epiphany

For the next year, every day, he removed the current statue, went back to his studio and created a brand new one.  Totally disparate materials, no relation to the immediate past Madonna. Create, ladder, replace. Daily. He did this for exactly one full year, save for a few days devoted to Covid, which intruded even in Barga.

He took a photo every day

At the end of the year, he compiled his daily ministrations and realized that he had a book, an actual work of art, that documented this solemn, almost unnoticed, devotional routine he had created.

Because he had Paused

The book is called “Contemplations on the 365 Days of the Barga Shrine”. It is an art book.  It is a narrative of a year in the life of an almost unseen phenomenon.  It is 365 individual pieces of modern art that nod their existence to the ancient, original, Madonna. 

One final note. Within the center of the book are a handful of pages that are totally black.  A not so subtle nod to the days that Covid took control of everyday and everyone’s schedules and lives.

A Pause Within a Pause

Just before I stumbled on Keane that evening and we began our wander down the contemplative road of Pausing, I was still laying on the couch chatting with Chris back in San Francisco.  I was gazing out one of the windows in the lounge which overlook the ancient, moss and lichen-encrusted tile roofs that lay like clay carpeting, tumbling down the hills beneath my aerie.

I have been frustratingly trying to get the perfect photo of these iconic tile roofs,  the photos you see in every travelogue and photo array of everything Tuscan.  The trouble is, everywhere I pointed my lens, there was a crane working on a refurbishment.  There were hundreds of 1960-style metal antennae, most bent and broken.  There were the ubiquitous satellite dishes, round and white, like dinnerware thrown up on roofs announcing their presence. I was frustrate. But while still chatting to this friend 6,000 miles away, something caught my eye and riveted my attention. A single clay chimney flue, almost ornate in its functionality.  Beautiful, ancient, still doing its job after hundreds of years. But, it was enmeshed and entangled within broken steel antennae like a modern shroud.  I would never be able to isolate this single stunning image.

But we are talking about The Pause

In that Pause, my Pause, I had the sudden realization and inspiration to look at life differently. To refocus my lens, as my friend Barbara has reminded me at various points in my life. To look at objects differently.  Sure, I could digitally get rid of the offending antennae. But then I would not have the reality of the life I am observing every day.  I would have a manipulated image of a life that does not really exist.

I decided to take the shots of this delicate chimney flue, warts and all, and in doing so, I captured the reality of the real world that we see in our very present.  Juxtaposition can be a powerful tool and the truth it reveals is far more valid and prompts far more scrutiny, conversation, and internal movement than yet another perfect Tuscan photo.

Just Pause…..and think for a moment