Meeting the Muse after Midlife is out now on Amazon or at your bookshop! 

Finding the essential in aerospace and art

Credit: Blue Origin

I recently had an opportunity to tour Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ privately-funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company. Tucked in an industrial area near Seattle, with no signage divulging its name, Blue Origin felt to me like a cross between the National Air and Space museum, a state of the world design/manufacturing plant, and Disneyland.

Inside the facility, we were invited to enter a version of the shiny projectile-shaped spacecraft described by Jules Verne in his 1865 classic, From the Earth or the Moon. Elegantly furnished with hardwood paneling and Victorian-era memorabilia, the elegant four-chaired sitting room takes you back to a period when space travel was only a fantasy. Now, if company staff members want to refuel their imaginations, they can hold a meeting in the small chamber.

A thrill for me was sitting in a mock-up of the space capsule, currently under construction, which will someday take six passengers for a ride up into space and back. As I climbed into one of capsule’s six reclining, contoured seats, shaped to protect me from the gravitational thrust of a launch and landing, I had a mini-flight experience. I heard the roar of the launch, felt the capsule shake, and watched a video simulation of what I might see out of the large window to my right on a real flight. (Watch a video simulation here.)

Don’t expect to fly economy class any time soon!

Like all visitors, I was sworn to not divulge any other amazing stuff I saw at the facility. But imagine this hypothetical scenario: What if you were the second richest man on earth and had a dream, which you could personally fund, so you were able to hire some of the world’s best and brightest engineers and manufacturing professionals and support them to have fun as they designed and built a piece of the future? Without investors, you wouldn’t need to pressure staff to be profitable from the git-go, yet your staff would inevitably make some incredible discoveries as they worked at the edge of science, engineering and manufacturing. And, chances are, some of those discoveries would be useable in as yet unimagined ways.

That would be an out-of-this-world opportunity! No wonder staff at Blue Origin seem so jazzed to be working there. (Need an energy booster yourself? Watch what 400 crazy-happy rocket scientists look like.)

As I toured the company’s foyers, I saw numerous displays of aerospace memorabilia as well as bold and inspiring quotes.

This one by Antoine de Saint Exupery, author of The Little Prince, and himself an aircraft designer, really caught my eye:

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” *

That phrase applies both to engineering and to art.

The art of taking away

For ten years, I’ve been a beginning student of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana, “the Japanese art of flower arranging”—to use a poor but literal translation. Ikebana International calls Ikebana “a disciplined art form in which the arrangement is a living thing where nature and humanity are brought together. It is steeped in the philosophy of developing a closeness with nature.”

Instead of arranging flowers by filling a vase Western-style, (which I admittedly still do when my garden is in its abundance), you focus, in Ikebana, on form and movement, line and mass, and highlighting empty space, often pruning material until the essence of an arrangement is revealed.

For as long as I study, I will be training my eye to see “when there is nothing left to take away.” My amazing Japanese teacher, Nobuko Relnick, is able to see what I cannot. Even with fifty years of teaching, she continues to study and approaches her creations with a mix of humility, reverence, delight and art. For me, this is about more than flower arranging: it’s a practice for life.

Four questions for you

Last week, I shared with you that I am starting on a book project (gulp!). Thanks to those who sent encouraging words. I realize that in adding a big project to my life, I may need to simplify, and look for what is no longer essential that I can prune away.

In the spirit of paring down this post, I leave you with these questions:

  • What is essential to you right now?
  • What clear lines, patterns or forms are revealing themselves in your life?
  • What is happening in the invisible or unsaid (or as an artist would say “negative space”) as well as in the visible and spoken aspects of your life?
  • What would your need to prune to heighten the beauty and purpose of your work or life?

 

(*As a quote checker, I think the translation by Eric Raymond may have slightly embellished, but I’ll let it stand as it was on the wall at Blue Origin.)

2 Responses

  1. I am always learning and inspired by you Sally. Your life and spirit on point.
    I love the 4 questions and am packing them up to help me pare down.

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