collect snails

From Lana fillipone at the city of craft show. It’s superwonderful and makes me smile.

I’ve loved her stuff since the show she had at distil gallery. So glad that I finally get to add something of hers to my collection.

” There is a snail trail that lives vibrantly in my memory of each of these places. A kind of intimate detail that is specific to my experience of place.”
-me

“The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.”
~ Wole Soyinka

`Will you walk a little faster?’ said a whiting to a snail, / `There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.’
~ Lewis Carroll

‘The snail lives the way I like to live; he carries his own home with him.’
-Julio Cortazar

Snails have this funny sort of resonance to me. I, like most people am thwarted by the occasional crunch on a dewy spring morning on my walk to work, reminding me to look where i step. They move slowly and force me to be more mindful of my surroundings for which i am grossed out, but grateful. They, like many small creatures live in variation all over this planet.

The simple snail, has been found in one form or another on land and in the vast oceans since the time of the very earliest dated fossils. They are distinctive, and small enough that they can be distinguished among the rubble of larger animals shuffled by ice ages and modern displacement.

I identify with the humble snail, its limitations, its pace if you will, i feel as though even if i don’t produce children of my own, or evolve in some grand way, there will be an echo of my existance, there will be some way in which i am relevant, without trying to be. I will make an impression on my world in my small way.
I will go far and wide, with the currents that guide my life, i will adapt and move through the challenges before me.
More than any of that one of the things i love about the snail, is that it is this self-determined but self sufficient thing.

Snails are home wherever they go, and that is what i aspire to.

I really don’t know what lies in my future, i dream and i imagine, but i can’t know…. but wherever i go, i struggle to take my home with me. I work to be happy with what i have. Sometimes what i have is brilliant and that is just dumb luck.

So in honor of this tiny satisfyingly geometric survivor, I hereby begin my collection of snails, ammonite, and evidence of well paced mollusks everywhere.

-k