Growth Tip 

Finding your way in difficult times 

A dream, a nightmare, makes him think about his role, or his job, in today’s world in which it appears that crises and gloom besets many Americans and the world’s peoples. What can he do to help? A senior artist is not someone people think of as a leader. 

Arms too weak—a dream analysis 

In a dream I was in a wilderness, but there were trails and a road, a bridge crossing a river. I saw a man in the river, and he swam ashore and I gave him a hand getting out. He said he often went swimming in this river, but it was especially turbulent these days—maybe he shouldn't risk it.

The scene changed, and I was in a queue with many people, and I couldn't find my place in the line; I mistakenly took a place and I was shoved out for having crowded in. then I was again in a wilderness—and now on a mission like a guerrilla task. We had to cross a stream and, on the other side, climb a steep cliff and through a small hole.

There were others behind me, and when I was able to get up to a hole which we had to crawl through and I realized I didn't have the strength to pull myself up. At 72, I could no longer pull my weight in this kind of warfare. The hole was partly blocked by a flat stone, and I was able to push the stone aside and make the passage a little easier for others.

That was the most I could do, however; and even after I made the passage a little larger, I could not lift myself up to go through. As I was blocking the way of the others, they would have to go around. I was stuck. I could not help in the mission. I woke up, thinking, “growth tip.”

Growth tip

In college I took botany as a science requirement. What stuck with me about plant life was that the tip of a stem or branch had the effect of leading the way in the plan for the plant’s growth. After that, whenever I see some greenery that has poked itself through a crack in a sidewalk or a little tree that has broken through stone, I thought about the growth tip.

The growth tip must have a combination of plant-cellular intelligence, strength, fortitude and persistence to manage breaking through. From a seed in soft, moist, accommodating soil, the achievement of easily sending out its first root or stem and sprout in two directions—one toward the sun, the other toward the deeper regions for water and nutrients.

Maybe that’s why I took to the tree as my guide when I was in graduate school and required to state my Master’s Thesis project. The requirement was to help graduate students in art to focus our energy and our minds similarly as to what the students in engineering or science. Trees became my obsession, which was an obvious choice because I had already started on trees as symbols of life itself when I was an undergraduate.

Wake up

I thought about the growth tip the instant I woke up from the nightmare and feeling I can’t pull my weight because my muscles have gone soft, thus useless in guerrilla warfare. But I removed a small obstacle in the pathway. I was of some use, after all. At 72 year of age, are there not things that I possess that will help the young people on a mission we share?

My personal history in art and education suggests that I am a kind of growth tip, having broken through impasses in my work as an artist, designer, and teacher. While I am not a politician or military scientist, my having solved problems that I met in education were good solutions. I continually to offer ideas for better ways to teach, research, practice and give service through the arts to young people in America and all nations.

Times have changed, and the problems I met and solved over fifty years are not necessarily problems that are worth anyone’s time to address now. I seem to be getting nowhere in my ten-year plan for the Seattle Printmaking Center, for example, and maybe it’s a concept not appropriate to the 21^st Century.

Yet, I can still be the growth tip and find a tiny hole or a crack in the rocky ceiling of indifference and confusion about the place of art, design and education. What stops me from doing what I hope to do? I have to ask myself this question every morning. There is light out there, somewhere, and, underneath me like a foundation, the enrichment of my past. It is my basis for believing it is possible to save Earth’s human life sustainability through education of the world’s young people.

In corporate language, such a foundation is called the “stock basis.”

Dependent

There is no mistake in believing that our lives—those of my wife and mine—depend on an educated, trained and cooperating population of young people, for it is the wages that they will earn if they are qualified to get salaried jobs that will, through our Social Security, Medicare and Pension systems, sustain us. Therefore it is incumbent on all “growth-tippers” to mobilize the wisdom to know how to edit and apply our years of experience in our domains-of-expertise.