The Moon is full, so it’s not a good time to ask this, but are you always self-contained, and in complete control of circumstances? A Zen Master is. I think.
Maybe I could just at least have a zen rock garden.
When we got a house, I thought I could have one, but the places I had in mind didn’t work out, so the idea was shelved.
Until I was put in charge of balloons at my son’s third birthday party.
Seventy white balloons to form a grid, and ten black balloons to form the special big rocks. Cost less than $10 for the balloons.
I could use little nails to anchor the balloons in the grass, but it was tough to get the nails in those little knots. The balloons flopped around and were different sizes. Not regular!
“Hey….” I noticed. “It’s not windy.” Take the nails out and just put the balloons on the ground.
The black balloons I taped together, in one case attaching them to a stick to form something meant to resemble a scholar’s rock.
It was a lot smaller than I hoped it would be. I could have used ten times as many balloons, but who’s going to blow them up? For just the 70 I took two Advil for the earaches.
Then I got a ladder, climbed up on the roof, and started photographing it: from the roof, the ground, standing on a chair, a table, behind the balloons, in front of them, beside them, in the late afternoon, in the evening, after dark.
Then the wind blew. In the morning, they’d gotten all over the yard, even into a neighboring yard. They ran alone, as couples, in packs. They popped. They got stuck in a lilac bush, against a fence, the side of the house.
Out of dozens of photos, I chose two dozen and thought of options: print which ones at which sizes?
With cheap copies, I designed a poster, and had good copies made of those, but some didn’t print correctly and had to be deleted from the project or kept in their imperfect forms.
I had roughly equal numbers of landscape photos and portrait photos. Instead of one poster of all the photos, I thought I would arrange them, by those styles in linear fashion, so that the project would consist of two separate pieces.
To the local frame shop to get mats made on which to paste the photos. For that, I also had to get good archival paste and a brush, and practice on something else before pasting the photos onto the mats.
After experimenting exhaustively with the order of the photos as they were placed on the mats, I was satisfied I had them in the best order.
Then I had to mark the margins and try to paste the photos perfectly, which I failed to do, as the lady at the frame shop pointed out. I consulted with her as to how to frame the piece, and how to get perfect margins between the photos and between the photos and the frame.
Three weeks later, the job was done and I picked it up.
Then it took two days to figure out the best place to hang it at home.
What fun it was to have those balloons and carry them out into the backyard as people watched, wondering what exactly I was doing, making it up as I went along, encountering unforeseen problem, figuring out solutions, finally arriving at a piece of work I hadn’t anticipated at all– George’s Third Birthday Zen Balloon Garden!
Well, the next one will be way better.