Re-construction 🔨
Hundred year old beams and their integrity inspire me. As a kid, I remember standing in an abandoned barn near our house and sneezing. Old hay hung from trapeze-like cobwebs. It was cavernous and I was small and from the back corner, my brother was shouting for help. Eric, our large German Shepherd was bleeding. Badly.
Suddenly there was a lot of activity. Our station wagon pulled up close to the door and Eric was wrapped in blankets and towels were pressed around his front paw to stop the bleeding. The towels turned red. Mom got Eric to the vet and he received the stitches he needed. A piece of glass had severed an artery. Much longer, he may not have made it.
I don’t know if that barn still stands. The one in Johnson, VT where my daughter is working, is laying in pieces on the ground. The beams, boards and tenons will be reconstructed Lazarus-like, on the very same site where it was raised a hundred years ago by a different group of carpenters to serve a different purpose.
I think re-construction is a lot more fun than de-construction. Both require routine, care and attention to detail. In the dephase, each beam has been carefully removed and evaluated. If it passes, it moves into the re phase, awaiting new life.
This week, the chosen beams will be reassembled. Using careful calculations, physics, strength and I assume, a machine, they will be lifted again into place. I hope to be able to watch this process. I just took a deep breath thinking about it.
Earlier today, I had a beautiful experience reading the deconstruction process of a friend - someone who was in the same cultic group that I was in. 💫 She, like me, kicked at the foundation, noting the places of rot. She, like me, identified the bones that had integrity and went on to describe how she took those pieces and re-assembled them into her current work, dedicated to ethical exploration of dreams*.
As I write, I realize I’m in a similar process right now, with Living Cult Free, the nonprofit that I started under a different name, under different circumstances. Together with the board (of directors 😉) we too, are in our own version of deconstruction as we evaluate which sturdy beams go where and rebuild from the ground up.
It’s exciting to build a new space, free from old dusty hay that makes you sneeze. Hopefully it lasts long enough for ancient cobwebs to someday hang from the beams, awaiting a vibrant new crew to come along, noticing the integrity, culling what’s no longer useful - and ushering in new life.
🌟 Do you have a re-construction project?
