“What Shall We Do Now?”

 Shall we buy a new guitar

Shall we drive a more powerful car

Shall we work straight through the night

--“What Shall We Do Now?” by Pink Floyd on The Wall

Perhaps the “location, location, location” mantra for real estate can be used for the continual discernment in which I’ve been engaged since I began The Artist’s Way in 2008: “vocation, vocation, vocation.”

While I was home for Thanksgiving, I was talking with my grandparents about work (not CEP, but work as a verb, the thing humans do), and I was describing my yen for work in which I use my hands for creation of physical things, not just typing words (words and figures that ultimately do not result in a product other than intellectual order or a receipt).  I took a picture of my grandmother’s hands in 2011 as she kneaded dough for rolls, and the picture, “The Secret Ingredient” ended up winning a top place in the Office of Religious Life’s “What is Love” photography contest that year.  Hands have since been a theme between my grandparents and me.  My grandfather (Elmer Naples ’62) held up his hands, each finger joint bulbous from use.  He said it was mostly baseball while he was at Princeton and afterwards that made his fingers crooked, baseball and his woodworking and home improvement projects.

Disfigurement is in the eye of the beholder.  If I’m going to be pointing fingers, I want it to be a finger well-used for creation of real things.  I feel it very deeply that that’s my vocation, making stuff (specifically healthy vegan and gluten-free baked goods!), not making intellectual order.

All in all, it was all just bricks in the wall.