The Direction of Intention

Our pin-on-the-map lands between two airports: O’Hare to the south and Milwaukee’s General Mitchell to the north. On clear summer days, or unseasonably warm days like last week, we recline in our Adirondack chairs and watch the planes Etch-A-Sketch in the sky. According to our recent 5 minute contrail-count-study, at any moment, there are more planes in the sky than one might believe.

It always makes we wonder if Ben Franklin or Leonardo daVinci joined us on the patio would they calmly count contrails from their Adirondack chair or would their heads explode at the wonder of it all. It amuses me to imagine Leonardo hopping around with excitement and pointing to the sky.

In my recent past the phrase “digital exhaust” was relevant to my work in the wild, wild world of software development. Like a contrail, the output of our incessant tapping of keys leaves a trail marking our arc through digital space/time. The particular characteristic that had me hopping out of my chair was the notion that “reading” the digital contrail not only marks our past but is a great way of foreseeing future action. Past patterns are terrific indicators of future behavior. Just ask the FBI.

Kerri keeps a paper calendar where she records the significant and insignificant details of every day. It’s a behavior she inherited from her mother. Beaky was a great recorder of events and maker of lists. If I want to know if we had dinner with 20 in November of 2016, Kerri flips open her 2016 calendar and hits me with the details: yes we did and we had blackened Tilapia, small potatoes, and roasted asparagus. I’ve lost many a debate to the entries in the calendar. Her calendars are our personal analog contrail. Our unique life arc through space/time.

It’s helped me answer one of Tom’s questions about his great-grandmother Isabelle. He found a box with stacks of daily flip-calendars that Isabelle kept, each day had a notation about the weather. A hardworking ranch woman, standing on the porch of the farmhouse, in the days before airplanes, she stared at the sky and made a note in her calendar: hot sun, not a cloud in the sky. Tom looked at me as we went through the stacks in the box, asking, “Why would she do that?”

Contrails.

read Kerri’s blogpost about CONTRAILS

Filed under: Metaphor, Pattern, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: analog, artistry, behavior, Ben Franklin, calendar, contrail, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, digital, digital exhaust, future sight, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, Leonardo da Vinci, pattern, story, studio melange, the melange, two artists, Two Artists Tuesday | 3 Comments »