A bit like yesterday’s update which evolved in unpredictable ways from “Sometimes Citrus” to “Does the Generosity of Friends Make a House a Home?” today’s dispatch meanders from a scene of snowy serenity to twin intentions: integration and cohesion.
Twin intentions? For what?!
Often over the last few years I’ve returned to integration and cohesion — overlapping processes/ideas, at least in my estimation — with respect to design, architecture, writing, and art. Join me, if you will, at least for the sake of argument, in paralleling these creative endeavors. 
The image in today’s post, a digitally watercolored photograph taken nine years ago from our bedroom balcony, conveys some of the similarities between art and poetry. Both creative processes emphasize emotion and intuition over critical reasoning. Feeling forward. Not always, obviously. But in this case, at least, and often in my creative practices.
In the image above the forms and pigments emerge harmoniously, almost accidentally, layering into a whole that requires minimal analysis. This might also describe some poetry. While words replace forms and pigments, our emotional experience is engaged more than our analytic sense. In both creative endeavors an intimacy and immediacy invites the audience into a relationship, evokes a feeling of familiarity and recognition.
I’m hoping to propose a parallel between acts of creating and curating Rosslyn Redux with reimagining our home and our property over almost two decades.
I’m endeavoring to evolve Rosslyn Redux beyond an avalanche of artifacts into a cohesive experience. Into a sojourner’s stopover, perhaps even the sort of sanctuary that Rosslyn has been for us. (Source: Voyeuristic Glimpses & Mosaic Mirages)
Culling, distilling, disentangling, reweaving, integrating, disparate parts into cohesive whole. This is the goal. This is the challenge.
But, having succeeded with Rosslyn, I’m now trying to extrapolate the means for composing a cohesively integrated whole called Rosslyn Redux.
I’m… drawn to the idea of framing a home… [as well as] the ways that parts become a whole. And the ways that we experience those parts and that whole…
Some years ago when we developed our plans for an historically inspired fence… I tried to convey this notion of framing. The fence… helped define and delineate Rosslyn. Not as a home, but as a property. A collection of four buildings that are related to one another. A cohesive and integrated tableau writ large.
The desire to explore the interrelatedness of these historic buildings through stonewalls and landscaping has been one of the most enjoyable endeavors over the last seventeen years. A slow motion sculpting of Rosslyn’s 60+ into an aesthetically and functionally appealing program, discrete elements coalescing into a logical and well integrated experience. The relationships between the discreet parts — in some cases fixed in brick and mortar, in other cases evolving gradually with experimentation, maturation of flora, and the patina-ing and aging of the built environment — continue to meld with revision and the passage of time. Editing and reevaluating help distill the successful initiatives from those best abandoned. And little by little, relationships develop, an affinity emerges. A completeness, a wholeness, set apart from surroundings… (Source: Framing Rosslyn)
In the case of Rosslyn Redux, the “discrete elements coalescing into a logical and well integrated experience” remains an incomplete and ongoing enterprise. The process has proven to be, is proving to be, remarkably difficult. But profoundly rewarding when small victories are won.
But I’ve fallen into a trap. I’m talking about what I want to be talking about instead of doing the work. Let’s shift gears. 
Snowy Serenity
If this poem
were a watercolor
of the scene
beyond and below
our bedroom balcony
(after snow
stopped falling
but clung to trees),
the ground
and the sky
would be white,
unpigmented places,
negative spaces,
visual line breaks,
page and poem
unwritten, resting,
the sound of a
single solitary
snowflake settling
on frosted branch.
The eye rests;
the mind pauses.
Cold woodland
dissolves into
layer upon layer
of misty metaphor,
but blue-gray
winter’s rhymes,
are warmed with ochre,
a clapboard beacon
buoyed between
whitespaces,
a 19th-century
carriage barn,
… [something about sanctuary, but I’m firmly stuck here. For now]
Cohesive Integration
Not sure I’ve made much headway with respect to achieving cohesive integration with Rosslyn or Rosslyn Redux. It seemed some sort of cross-disciplinary exploration might be forthcoming. But I’ve come up short. Perhaps more luck tomorrow.
What do you think?