More Than The Storm

Sometimes You Have To Be Your Own Lighthouse

My aim is to bring you the wind in the trees or the very first violet of spring, a bit of serenity that exists in the world.

Gwen Frostic

I had planned on writing an assessment of the closing days of 250 years as a nation, but to be honest I had such a mix of black pilled and white pilled thoughts I couldn’t coalesce them into something compelling for me to fashion. You see, I am guilty of ignoring the advice that I should write for an audience. I hope I provide quality, but to be honest I write what I want because it has an immediacy in relation to what I see as important, and hope to challenge you to take a pause and reflect. Ultimately our sovereignty boils down to whether we form our own thought, harbor or express our reactions and if we’re lucky, chart our own course. Liberty with the restraint of responsibility is supposed to afford you that action. Writing is like that sometimes: you have to veer off track and explore the unexpected and uncharted on a whim. And accept that the digression is not a bust.

Out on adventures last week my wife and I engaged in that game where she pretended not to track our progress on her phone, while I tried to piece together directions based on my meager recollection of earlier excursions up north. She puts up with my pneumonic melodies like:

“606 is Grace Road. Paul-Rose, Ellis .. WHITE! Paul-Rose, Ellis .. WHITE!”

That’s how you get around in backroads between Beulah and Frankfort. That dumb song helps me identify where we are when my wife is trying to conjure the Maps app. Trust me, it works and you never need to rely on your GPS. And that’s the point. Relying on yourself.

That day Lake Michigan was taking a dump on the shores, and since we couldn’t go kayaking I remembered an interesting location we drove by constantly, and despite my urge to stop and explore, we ignored it each time. Not today.

The problem was I couldn’t remember the name of the place, what it was, just that it “was the cool place before the series of turns before we come to this Frankfort and Betsie Bay. I remembered it was on River Road where we used to camp so we had to get to where I was familiar before we could work our way back. Old school.

Of course we drove by the place since I had no clue as the name nor nature of where I wanted to explore, the wonderful thing about Frankfort and the rolling hills is that the things are easily hidden and many are only spotted coming from one direction. I kept calling it the “antique place”, and of course that was way off too. Being stubborn, I simply backtracked and retracing our steps so I could spot the building as we approached as it was laid out in my navigator slide show running through my head.

I’ve been drawn to this place due to the architecture - it’s like the 1950s came in and updated the Shire, just a tad. And while the sign says print studio, I manufactured something quite different. Luckily it was far better than what I imagined.

Gwen Frostic Studio

Gwen Frostic was a naturalist, a poet, an artist and a surprisingly savvy entrepreneur. Stupid me never thought to look up the name these past few years despite our pacing her studio several times each summer. Gwen was a Michigan treasure.

Born in 1906 in Sandusky, a farm community near the shores of Lake Huron in the thumb portion of Michigan. She contracted Polio as an infant, and struggled to work with her hands as a child. Yet she grew to become an artist who worked in the mediums of copper, tool and die making and Linocut book printing plates. Her first business was a metal studio called Metalcraft she established in her parent’s basement, but closed once WWII commenced and the supply of materials were diverted to war efforts. During this period she worked in tool and die design in Detroit. She relocated to the Frankfort Benzie area in 1950 and opened a shop for her printing business in downtown Frankfort. Ever the contrarian, Gwen moved her successful business away from the crowds when she opened Gwen Frostic Studios on River Road in the middle of farm country.

But this was not just a shop, not just the etchings and musings of someone fond of nature who would keep all her thoughts in journals for herself. The studio employed Heidelberg Platen presses. Today those same printing machines are used to produce Gwen’s work from the plates that she fashioned herself. Gwen was very hands on, and intimately involved with the 35 people she employed to produce her books and art.

I set my own type, by hand. I’m very conscious of how it appears on the page.

Gwen Frostic

Despite her studio being a production facility, as you can see it was also an enchanting building. As a parent I can tell you my kids would have been running around exploring each room and the gardens outside. It resembles a Hobbit hole in many ways with the roof covered in turf and brush. Today it is under reservation, but the magic is still clearly at hand.

Gwen created her own platform, a distinct visual representation of her relationship with nature that was not only reflected in her art and poetry, but also in the environment where she produced those works. When asked what the source of her creativity and success was, Gwen very bluntly laid out what was crucial to developing creativity.

“It’s part of you. It begins with knowledge. You will never get an idea about something you know nothing about. I don’t care how long you look at the beautiful woods or anything else. Ideas only come from knowledge.”

Her ability was multifaceted, and clearly her time troubleshooting issues with the tool and die components during her time in Detroit in World War II gave her a foundation to service the printing equipment in her studio. Gwen exerted control over the quality of her writing, her art and her business. While she was vehement in her claims she never set out to write and create specifically with profit in mind, I would say that she was certainly capable of recognizing the successful components of her business. Growing up in an area similar to Benzonia and Frankfort, there were other talented people who mostly kept their work to themselves. I fight the idea of reams of drawings, painting and notebooks filled with verses sitting unused when I consider what Gwen was able to achieve. When you realize that many of her books were a mere 38 or 40 pages but were able to reach so many and sustain her operation for so long, it is truly remarkable.

What’s also remarkable is that her imagery was a burst of color. She could convey motion with the curve of a line, with what would be otherwise considered a silhouette, or an impression. This is finely honed craft, and she also studied biology continuously as she sought to deepen her understanding of the nature that surrounded her. If you have spent a summer in the Great Lakes, a fall in Michigan’s north, then the images that Gwen has paired with her poetry captures what you have witnessed. Green grasses and sand dunes during the cold March winds. A crow that greets you as you pull up to your favorite ski center and cast your eye upon the trees to see if Odin’s messengers are watching you.

Be The Lighthouse

Lately it seems to me that we are waiting for the crescendo or perhaps that final wave that tilts us into a new era and all is lost. There are clearly plans put into place, we would stupid not to recognize the signals. But once we’ve identified these threats, are we still mired in analysis paralysis trying to figure out what the “Grand Strategy” is as opposed to acting? Sometimes just doing something is enough to shake your fear and see that the shadow cast by the enemy is in fact larger than the enemy itself.

We are too reliant on systems, and not our own resources. And the close of our first 250 years was not celebrated with a focus on individuals forging paths for themselves, it’s on the magic soil and the new age provided by the benevolent digerati. A promise of connection is really a false one as you are mined for opinions, and slurs that keep AI sounding “edgy”. Is this what you want? Elawn Musk mandated a $200 a week limit on AI use at his own company, while his utilization is unfettered. Sounds a lot like Twitter, doesn’t it? Freedom of speech, but not of reach.

That’s the next 250 years if you allow it. I know, what can the small, unknown voices do against the raging storm? Well, sometimes the storm passes, and if you are the lighthouse, you weather it out.

Gwen Frostic forged her own platform. Think about the 1950s, and starting a publishing company in the remote regions of farm country. No viral internet. No social media. No demographics. In fact, how many times have you heard people say “Yeah. Build it, and they will come will never work.”? Talk about giving up on your self determination.

That’s what occupied my thoughts during the 250th anniversary. It’s what crossed my mind this morning when encountering other writers’ conceptions of why they write. How do I as an individual, a thinking, stubborn ahole of person that I am push on? Well I don’t think Gwen even stopped to dwell on that question. If so, it might have stopped her. Her doctor’s prognosis for her condition due to polio was that she would have limited use of her hands. She conquered that barrier - she set her own type and created her own lithographs. And it’s clear that she felt she was the source of her own failure, and that developing knowledge and skill was the only way to forge ahead. “Ideas only come from knowledge”. Those are the words of someone who doesn’t even stop to ask “why not” to in response to naysayers, it’s a kick in the pants to depart from the sidelines and embark. And by learning she did not mean recitation. Learning had to involve facing failure and limitation, starting and failing, and starting again.

Writing, or anything that we set our minds to where we are faced with high resistance and yet prevail by learning, is a lonely path. Writing is how we tend to our thoughts - our sentences are a pale artifact, as words are abstractions that meagerly describe only a part of what we comprehend. Perhaps that’s because we’re still honing our translation boxes that act like maple syrup evaporation pans where we boil away the sap that are our ideas to create something sweeter. Pour 14 gallons in to make one gallon of the dark amber liquid we treasure, a sweet taste. Perhaps AI slop is the Aunt Jemima awful corn syrup alternative. Perhaps relying on the digital collective prevents us from making our way. Surely if you rely on what is provided to you unquestioningly and you ignore that nagging feeling of a landmark tucked away in the recesses of your memory, you are steered away from discovery.

Here’s something my wife showed me this morning. It’s illustrative of what our passively drinking in “content” and relying purely on the analysis of the crowd is doing to us. As a baker she is constantly on the hunt for different equipment for her sourdough bread production. While skimming Facebook she saw the story of a business that had been in existence for 42 years, family run, and the proprietor was now closing down after a struggle, and hoped to sell off sour dough storage bags. From the photo you may gather where this was headed.

The website is a front, it’s run by an offshore company that is selling beeswax bags. My wife relayed that she could not find any of the 2300 glowing reviews mentioned on the site on every page. Supposed fans on Facebook were promoting the products. There is even a group dedicated to Brenner’s Bakery that operated in Seattle, Bellevue and Rhinebeck, the faux location. It’s a mingle of mentions of the fake bakery promoted by cut out bot accounts and photos from the past of other bakeries. Quite a scam that is assembled and delivered to you by this digital complex where truth is voted on via 5 star reviews. The Wisdom of Crowds dictates “truthiness”. Many others do point out the scam aspect, yet Facebook doesn’t intercede. The Brenner’s Bakery scammers have gone to a great extent to fashion the semblance of nostalgia akin to what we felt when discovering Gwen Frostic’s haven she built for herself. While Brenner’s is easily spotted as a scam, it’s evident that our nostalgia is being mined too.

The world will be occluded from us when we rely on this Digital Wisdom. The facets with best ratings will be what you are urged to use to make judgements, and you’ll drive right by treasures. One of the best bakeries in my town, Hermans, was not on social media, Yelp or the other apps while it was in operation. It operated out of a rundown 1950s style storefront on Main Street, yet it had the best baked goods. Better than the foo-foo French Bakery just a few blocks away where the nouveau riche congregate. Google wouldn’t not have discovered Hermans for you.

There is a storm of noise beamed at you, many will claim it is information vital to your success, or that it is crucial for your health, or that it will bring you a world of discovery. But it’s all gamed very easily, and we have given up our agency by forgoing talking about these systems as tools. Instead we are encouraged to chant about “the brink of something transformative” again and again, so Digital Wisdom has taken on quasi-religious overtones. You don’t want to miss out on AI putting you out of a job sometime in the future so learn to prompt today. Ignore the fact that the grand future is one where you won’t be prompting at all because AI will everything. But stay engaged. It will be overwhelming.

This deters you from building your own pneumonic to avoid lazy lookup and being tethered to your phone, exercising your own memory or listening to that voice telling you to veer off the path. But you must be the lighthouse, that tiny structure that stands up to the storm. Latch onto something, nurture it yourself. Learn, ideas come only from knowledge. Fail so much when attempting to achieve your goals that failure becomes a warm up for you. Knowledge of what to do better is also part of the foundation for surviving the storm.

Ideas come only from knowledge. And perseverance. Be that lighthouse in the storm.