Yes.

You keep
working.

Many of my friends and colleagues retire. And, in that movement, I contemplate what that means for me, if anything. My Dad retired at 65—and, given his highly action-oriented lifestyle, along with my Mother, he unfurled his career to engage in the other things—
gardening, carpentry, project work, the arts, cultural explorations.

What it comes down to—for me—is the relationship to the work.
How does your exploration of joy and beauty, curiosity and
learning intertwine with to the work that you do?

What if you think of working—that effort—
as your commitment to the craft, your craft—
what you are “making” as your contribution.
What do you make?

Working could be making—making would be working.
And, of course, as we all know, we make our way.

Will you keep making? I’d hope for an affirmative answer.

That you’d keep going the way of your journey.

And that you’d go in, go out further, go deeper.

50 years, I’ve been working in the space of making—bringing the best in my own craft of beauty-making forward.
That stands as a legacy for me, and the quest of beauty-making
and, more crucially, the search for beauty.

To this half century practice—I’ve worked as
a designer, craftsman, calligrapher and teacher in the space of making things.

It goes into the equation of creative sequence, which begins in the inspiration in making ideas. Which then plays out to creating places—whole, sensate experiences. Which leads to finding answers—in the response of experiencers. Which then electrifies solutions. And, in this creating—I’ve worked for my self, the crafting of a life, and the making—in that journeying, which is more of a meander of discovering— for others. Yes, I’ve worked for myself and my deeper sense of my Self—I never had a job, just my own practice. And that’s a two-sided edge. A lonely pathway: one, you don’t know how to lead, and two, nor do you what it means to be an “employee.”

Never been one.

The other is, that’s all you’ve done is lead: in that lonesome stride, you’re first in line, the first of your pathfinding, the first down the way, the first into the valley of unknowing.

And what of the future? You shall be, as any leader, first into the mist.

First, the risk.

But, between the two, they are the same.
Make as a leader, or mark as a follower.

You make.

In creating for others—the cycle of changing, improving, evolving—I too have grown. I’ve gone far out into the world to learn. And listened. And gathered. And, I, in this working, this creating, have chosen to look to the balancing of the twain. Still, the meditations of creating, the contemplations of why, are forever. The work remainsfor evermore.

I must stay on the pathway, curious wanderer that I am.
My advancements deepen—they go into the grain of things, the genetics of making, the psychic space and the physic manufacture.

Go deeper into that good night—and the morning thereafter.

There is always more to explore.

As I’ve offered before, the work is an encircling—it’s a ring around yourself, the layering of your depths; and so too, in that rippling, it is a ringing of one person to another. It is about relationships, of course. And it is about telling—the story, the relating—of one to another; or one to one billion. Carry on. That is the work: it is a trans-formation, a translation of the content, the idea—one form, one tier, one plane of grasping—to another form, another knowing. And knowing: an Other.

There is spirit herein—there is energy, that eternal delight, the captivation of it;
it is the migration of this creative force,
from one vantage, to another vista.

You see it here, now it’s there.
This, in all, is a long meditation, that began, really, decades ago.

It is this:

The work of creating—and about being a designer—is about the mystical conversion of the gatherings, the spirits of others—their imaginings, their tellings, their ideas—and offering these in another form, that deepens the connection, between one and another.

Transformation

“Energy is eternal delight,” as William Blake sings—and there is joy in the opportunities of this practice. I look to move. And, in this movement, my work is about finding adhesion between people. Transforming energy—
from one plane of awareness, the open page, to a presence that is newly defined.

It is simply that—from inspiration to mind, from ideation to hand, from hand to fingers, pencil and the drawing-out of the ideal. That ideal, literally, is what we are drawn to.

These are dreams: formalized.

And I will continue this working until I die.

Tim Girvin
Principal | Founder | Chief Creative Officer
GIRVIN | Design | Partner OseanStudios