Page 7 - Introducing The Gratitudes

Bricolage
According to Merriam Webster a noun, pro- nounced bri·co·lage, of French origin, from bricoler to putter about; construc- tion (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand; also ;something constructed in this way. According to French social anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss, the artist “shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life.” Lévi- Strauss compared this artistic process to the work of a handyman who solves technical or mechanical problems with whatever materials are available. He referred to that process of making do as bricolage, a term derived from the French verb bricoler (meaning “to putter about”) and related to bricoleur, the French name for a jack-of-all-trades. Bricolage made its way from French to English during the 1960s, and it is now used for everything from the creative uses of leftovers (“culinary bricolage”) to the cobbling together of disparate computer parts (“technical bricolage”).
experiences by gathering materials from diverse and sometimes divergent sources, and arranging them in a thoughtfully struc- tured manner.
The curators came to the task with a clear objective, an atti- tude, a point of view, and a desire to serve. We used our contex- tual tools and perspective to organize materials in order to en- courage a robust, meaningful story around a topic.
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INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
The curators filtered the informative, inspirative, content from the immense firehose of ideas, infor- mation, and images that populate the collective im- agination, the printed record, and the digital microsphere in order to provide readers with a rich bricolage of voices, a vibrant context, and a diverse reading and viewing experience.
“We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who
are here with us.”
– Annie Dillard
The curators involved in this project are biographed in the Ac- knowledgements at the end of each book in the series.
■ The Source and Sense of Wondering The Gratitudes series asks a seemingly simple question, “Why are we here, what is the meaning of life, what are we supposed to do with it, and how do we know when we’re doing the right thing?”, and tries to answer it through the curation of the ideas and voices of a broad range of people, from a wide variety of traditions, pro- fessions, attitudes, cultures and locales. As the American writer Annie Dillard beautifully answered, when in 1988 Life magazine asked her thoughts on the meaning of life:
“We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
“According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new com- binations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new struc- tures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even.”
Think of it: to witness and abet. The first is relatively easy in the good, the righteous, times in our lives, and difficult otherwise. The world, and the things of it, are indeed wonderful and it’s not hard to find wonder to witness, when we’re paying attention. We wit- ness the passages and people, the places we visit and enjoy, the minutes that tick by, the pollen in the wind, the glint in the waves, the petals as they open, the breath of sprites in the air, the kiss of a lover, the smile of a child, the tender hand of a parent and grand- parent touching us, the tears of joy and grief we share with loved ones, and so much more.