Epilogue

Closing reflections and a gift of thanks

Welcome to this final weekly reflection on In Fragments — a simple sharing of credits and thanks, along with a few closing thoughts:

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It’s been quite a journey bringing this project to completion over the last seven years. I’m especially grateful to Scott Thrift for his help making sense of the hundreds of hours of footage, to Julio Monterrey for composing such beautiful music, and to Ethan Bond-Watts for his partnership in the arduous glass-making process of 2016.

I’m also grateful to each of you who’ve chosen to follow along with these 21 weekly reflections over the last five months — no small feat of endurance itself. As a humble token of thanks, I’d like to offer you a linestone from here on our land. I’ve been collecting these stones for most of my life, as the picture below will attest, and now look forward to collecting one for you. For me, the stones are a symbol of individuality and interconnection — the way in which we’re each exquisitely unique, while also sharing a common point of origin. If you’d like to receive one, please send me a note in the mail and let me know your preferred address:

Jonathan Harris / P.O. Box 3 / Shelburne, VT 05482

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I first shared In Fragments last September Equinox with a group of around 100 family members and friends, who gathered at High Acres Farm in the wooden hayloft of our old “Red Barn” — the same space where Hall of Mirrors had been performed exactly six years before, on the September Equinox of 2015. The space was hung with around forty of my mother’s vintage silk scarves, which she used to wear to the Met Opera in New York. During that night’s screening, the scarves were flapping gently in the cool autumn breeze, making it feel as though she was with us, there in the room. The next morning, we performed a closing ritual using a collection of her childhood glass marbles, which we planted in the landscape like seeds, holding our hopes and dreams for the future. To learn more about this gathering, please see: Seed the Future.

Once again, here’s the full two-hour film in case you’d like to view it as a whole:

And if you’re still curious to learn more about the project’s origins, process, and evolution, you may also like to explore the illustrated essay: Working with Life.

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I hope that the 21 films of In Fragments (and their associated reflections) have inspired you to think about making your own Life Art — starting by identifying a situation in your life that you’d like to evolve, and then working symbolically to enact a transformation, incorporating people, places, stories, dilemmas, and objects that exist in that frame of experience. In this age of glowing screens and digital everything, it’s important to remember that ritual is a technology, too — albeit one that doesn’t require electricity. Ritual is a timeless tool for working with the medium of life, and a potent venue for aesthetic imagination.

If you have any parting thoughts on In Fragments — how it’s shifted your thinking, possible ideas for its future, etc. — please feel free to leave a comment below.

In closing, here’s a picture of the perfect double rainbow that graced our land here last Sunday. Stretching through the sky, it encompassed three lightning transformers that were planted in the ground below it: Magic, Imagination, and Blessings.

Wishing you those things and much more.

Happy Solstice!

— Jonathan