Small Wonders
There’s a local guy I bump into called Stavros. I don’t know his surname but we’ve connected often along the ravishingly raw coastline that we both walk around every day. We’ve shared some wonderful exchanges. Stavros inhabits his own intriguing world of precise numbers and shapes and textures. He’s a whiz mathematician (although he denies this), but who knew that Pi (ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter) has a direct relationship with the sun - and don’t ever ask me to explain this further because I can’t. But Stavros can.
Stavros is also an artist. He denies this too. He builds simple sculptures with rocks and driftwood along the coastline. There’s nothing random about his work. He considers angles, wind velocity, balance, curves, vantage point, and the dynamic view revealed beyond the sculpture – the passing of the Interislander ferry, the island floating in the middle of the bay, the clean line of the horizon.
It’s always a treat for me to bump into Stavros. He talks a mile a minute whenever we walk together to check on his art installations (my words, not his); tiny oval stones poised on the shoulders of larger ones, driftwood arches that torque and see-saw when the southerlies blow in. There is a creation myth for each of his creations, and Stavros loves to share his stories. Sometimes people deliberately interfere with the sculptures. Stavros puts things back together or creates something new.
His work reminds me of a piece of writing I read in a museum in Santa Fe recently:
Not everyone believes that bigger is better.
Small is not minor, lesser, or unambitious. Small is not something that hasn’t yet grown up, it is its own virtue, its own artistic challenge, its own attention span.
Small commands your full attention, makes you stop to look more carefully, lures you in with the promise of intricacy and intimacy. Small is approachable, compact, portable.
Small is not necessarily cute. It can also be fierce and mighty.
Small has its own special magic. … The world is large and overwhelming; small is one delicious bit of the whole, something to be savoured, like a poem, an appetizer, a whisper, a line, a kiss. After all, it’s the little things in life that mean the most.
Yesterday Stavros polished a paua shell with sand and water before holding it up for us to admire; an iridescent shimmer of sky and sea and earth and sunlight. A miniature universe cupped in the palm of his hand.
Glorious.
Tat tvam asi. You are That.