About This Blog

Why am I "thinking inside the box"?

The phrase has a personal meaning for me, which has little to do with society, culture, politics, or religion. My own imagination is very free-floating and hard to corral and channel. As a child of the 80's, I have been encouraged for my whole life to think "outside the box". We stopped learning phonics. We started focusing on "how we felt" about a written work and learning nothing about the author's intent. Furniture was streamlined into odd, alien-like curves, and walls were large, bland spaces with periodic interruptions in the form of abstract art. Supposedly, this was going to make us more creative and more productive.

My assertion is that it has done the opposite.

When I look at my pantry and think about dinner, or consider my wardrobe, or stare at a blank project wondering what kind of house to design (amateur) or what type of story to write, I am left bewildered and unable to focus. In recent years, I have seen an upswing in people "building their own boxes", limiting their own choices on purpose in order to focus themselves and make themselves productive. At the same time, I am seeing an upswing in popularity of fashion and architecture that is based on older forms. I am seeing more squares and more boxes, more Shaker furniture, that beautiful art form called "steampunk", and colors returning to the walls.

Meanwhile, the promised "thinking outside the box" mindset has given us a culture which is more rigid than before, where increasing numbers of people are diagnosed with ADHD or forms of autism so mild that they were never a problem before. We ditched etiquette, and now we have no idea how to speak to each other. We dropped formality, and now we don't know how to behave. We decried simple mundane tasks like washing dishes and tending gardens as "work for the unenlightened", and we have lost much of the old beauty found in simple, honest work.

In this blog, I wish to celebrate the box. I want to talk about things that are beautiful because they are mundane. I will be linking to stories about old ways, old houses, homesteading, and the type of simplification that does not remove that which is important. I want to talk about the earth and the things that come out of it, and the old boxes which we have scorned. I will periodically highlight some of the house design that I do for my own amusement, most of which is geared around bringing out the best of my creativity by purposely limiting myself to a box.