Entering the Feelscape of Time

NEWSLETTER #05

Entering the Feelscape of Time

What path are you on?

While we usually think of this question as it pertains to a job or a set of beliefs, beneath it lies a larger question: What do you value? It may be connected to your work or a hobby. Perhaps it comes from a parent, a group of friends, or your own curiosity. Or perhaps it is something you can only imagine but nevertheless find yourself drawn toward.

The things we value are always somewhere “out there.” We may feel closer to them while daydreaming, walking in the woods, looking up at the sky, or gazing across an expanse of water. They call us beyond ourselves.

This is where the experience on the upper level of Open House of History begins as you cross into a shifting terrain of time and place.

You encounter a world of crashing waves, lapping shorelines, and babbling streams. You realize that although you may not see anyone around, others have been here. They have searched for many of the same things. They too wondered what was worth pursuing and how to orient themselves within the world.

You have entered the Feelscape of Time.

You are invited to consider the different ways people have sought solid ground and made sense of what they encountered—from the artistic languages of color and form to the claiming of space and the drawing of boundaries on a map.

You continue into the center room, where the Collector of Customs once worked when Waldoboro's economy revolved around shipbuilding and maritime trade. Then, as now, our lives are organized around unspoken questions that hover over the fire: How do you pursue both sustenance and satisfaction? How do you develop habits that sustain you while remaining open to the surprises life brings?

The five contemporary voices inhabiting this room—three lobstermen, a clammer and elver fisherman, and a community scientist—are pursuing these same questions. Around them are photographs of earlier residents engaged in their own work, relationships, ambitions, and struggles. They searched for what they valued just as we do.

Here we begin to see that every one of us is trying to cultivate something we find meaningful, and that we naturally gravitate toward the people that recognize and nurture those values. Whether we realize it or not, we follow in the paths of others who came before us and continue to influence our lives. Perhaps, for now, you simply want to listen to what you find familiar.

As you sit in this historical crossing ground, you hear a soundscape of people working, chatting, teasing, being together. Much of it remains beyond comprehension.

Yet there is a feel to all this—something like the atmosphere of a town, diffuse and heightened all at once. As you watch and listen, you begin to notice joy and wonder alongside frustration, fear, and resentment.

The voices and images around you reveal different emotional ways of moving through the world, shaping what people notice, what they pursue, whom they trust, what they remember or forget, and ultimately what they come to value. Do you recognize yourself in some of these emotional paths more than others?

This room is filled with a diversity of spirits, not people to imitate so much as portals drawing us deeper into the Feelscape of Time.

You do not really know them and never fully will. Yet, as your mind begins to wander, you hear them in all their unknowability, and through some gentle twist of feeling, you begin to feel heard yourself. You are held within a net of relationships. The experience is comforting and, with so many openings, perhaps also gently challenging.

Eventually you seek firmer ground and find yourself in a garden, a more contained and cultivated landscape. Sitting there, you reflect on what you have experienced and on your own life, now newly attuned to connections that extend beyond our ordinary senses, even to the exchanges between plants.

You listen to a gentle guiding voice. You slow down. And you are given the opportunity to respond artistically yourself.

By the time you descend back into the everyday world and encounter other people again, how will you meet them? What histories, what emotions, what spirits do they, too, bring to the encounter between you? What is the way of feeling together?

Please join us for the opening reception of this immersive experience, part of Emotional Currents: Between Survival and Freedom, on Thursday, July 9, at 5:00 p.m.

— Michael Amico
Director, Open House of History