I began charting this journey with tears.
I didn’t know how to take a lifetime of ideas and apparently incongruous interests and utterly unclear and anything but straight paths and try to turn them into something tangible. How to imagine them into a series of things that you could hold in your hand and be invited into diving more deeply into your life. (Even with, maybe especially with, an ass-over-teacup sprawl as part of the dive, as we are a place of reveling, so somber wasn’t the goal.)
I had an idea. It was a big one, in that it wasn’t just one thing. One item. That “one thing to do and do it well” thing.
It was an idea for a whole series of different offerings that all felt connected to me, and the challenge was to figure out how to bring it out of my unregulated brain into something that other people could see as having those connections. That they weren’t a random array of projects and products that were perhaps charming or evocative, but were too much, disconnected and scattered.
I adore the scene in A Beautiful Mind when John Nash is in his office and all of the numbers light up into pathways of exquisite meaning. That’s what I was looking for. And while I know the film was at least in part presenting it as his ass-over-teacup sprawl into mental illness, for me, it actually was a scene about an exquisite kind of illumination. He was seeing in a way no one else could, because he loved not only the numbers, but what they said to each other, in a way only he could do.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
The forms. I realized I needed the shapes, forms – giving my airy nothings a local habitation.
I needed to make the connections visible to more than just me.
Because listing off teas and tins and books and crackers and pajamas and games and toys didn’t, oddly enough, instill a kind of enthralled comprehension and interest in people.
So I started with the things that mattered.
At the heart of it: the magic of Spillian. All of which I am enchanted by, and while I can claim the authority of recognizing it as it emerged and polishing those emergings, I also know that so much of it was already there in the bones of the place, just waiting for someone to wake it up.
It’s about imagination. And reveling – in possibility, in deep belonging, in rituals so human as well as feeling magic. And about breaking rules; the kind that feel stultifying.
And a sense that it’s not about providing answers, but creating fertile meadows for questions. And questing after the things that really matter to us, in ways that don’t require us to abandon our lives and join the French Foreign Legion or a group of wondering monks with begging bowls.
That the enormous and extraordinary can live in and be sparked by small things. Wildness lurks in our domestication, and possibility can sneak in through slivers small enough to stick in the pad of our fingers.
So I started with a name. SpillianQuest.
Image by Adam Reines (who married his love Zachary Olsson at Spillian) of ‘Spillian Under Glass’, made by Daniel Zimmerman for his wedding to his love Andy at Spillian. Where things that matter become things.
Curious about the wider world of Spillian?
