After her passing, I found myself grappling with the complicated inheritance of our ancestral family home in the small town of Shelburne, Vermont. A place of material abundance and great natural beauty, High Acres Farm also harbored a difficult history of alcoholism, divorce, depression, infighting, trauma, and secret abuse, stretching back in our lineage for generations. Haunted by its patterns of suffering, yet inspired by its future potential, I performed a series of twenty-one “rituals” to prepare our land (and myself) for the best possible future.
In Fragments offers an example of what I call “Life Art” — art that works with an actual life situation, using whatever people, places, tools, materials, stories, and dilemmas are endemic to a particular frame of experience. Through their intense specificity, these radical rituals provide an open template for others to adapt — inviting us all to be active co-creators with life.