The Nature of Rustic Fashion
There is a hunger in the land for authenticity.
You see it in the Rustic fashion that finds its way into opulent mansions in the form of walls covered in aged barn wood and holes in walls covered with sliding barn doors. In fashion, it is fake. Perfectly refined. Manufactured and soulless. People of wealth cover their walls and the holes in them with substitutes for things made with human hands and authentic hearts. Walls and holes have their spiritual counterpart, covered in symbols borrowed from the authentic. They are symbols of longing for that which is real, but ironically out of place in outwardly refined spaces – homes, businesses and lives.
There was a woman who stayed in the CONEX cabin a couple of years ago. She startled and confused me when she told me, with passionate voice how she loved the imperfections of the CONEX house. These imperfections were things like trim poorly fitted around a window that I had apologized for and promised myself to improve sometime when I could get to it.
I overheard another man speaking on his phone. He was a guest telling a friend of the rough, poorly executed construction of the CONEX cabin. He was a contractor, a man of skill in construction. Yet I was surprised to read the comments he left in the guest’s journal. It was high praise for his experience of the cabin. It was, above all, creative.
Where does that come from?
It is a throbbing loneliness of the heart. The angst of wondering “am I enough?” Have I ever created anything of real value? Something with meaning? I think every thinking person experiences that sometime – many, all the time.
Today’s search for meaning, comes from a place where everyone is part of a machine, a tiny cog. Unable to claim anything in their life that they produced, that is unique to themselves. In a world where people toil facelessly in their cubicles or over the internet, isolated in home offices. Or executives who, in corner offices command others, well paid, and after a lifetime of stress, consider their inflated bank accounts, fine cars and houses - things that they had no hand in building -and wonder if it was really them who built anything or was it all extorted from the real labor of minions. (That is the story I fled from). That is NOT to say that the work of all these was not productive or meaningful. Only that we live in a world where we are existentially separated from meaning. We long for proof of it.
Perfection is outside of us. It is produced by machines and computers that demean and minimize the contributions of those who built them anonymously, as part of large, inscrutable forces beyond them.
Rustic fashion is a pale reflection of a real affirmation that every man can create something wonderful and artistic. The imperfections and scars are affirmations of real toil, whether mental or physical. And in the act of creation, we create ourselves.
Imperfection is the nature of the human condition. To embrace and love it, while striving to overcome it, is to accept and love oneself.
There is something deeply affirming in the recognition that imperfection, when the result of one’s best strivings, (not indolence or giving up) is the soul of man. It is the striving of the soul and the satisfying exhale of breath when one behold’s his work, and owns it as a piece of himself – And others, submersed in that work, recognize a bit of possibility in themselves that is wonderful and real, not a false reflection of what one thinks the world demands of him or her, an image carefully crafted on facebook that one knows is a lie and hates themselves for the telling of it.
This is the essence of the rustic appeal. Rustic is a true reflection of the longing of the human soul for authenticity in a fake world.
My cabins are built, not out of my expert craftsmanship, but out of finding my own creative solutions to problems that men of expert construction skills learned as journeymen in a trade and repeat with cookie-cutter precision to appeal to the masses based on well-worn formulas. My cabins were built slowly, conceived slowly. Ripped apart from time to time, redone, improved, upgraded, evolved.
They are evocative of the human striving for meaning and authenticity.
For guests, the houses I offer are an escape from that which is false. They (houses and guests) live in a natural setting that exudes all of God’s creativity. That which took all of eternity to create and, by design, has no end. God evolves His work where there is never a finish in sight. The art is in the endless possibilities. I think God is the master of repurposing, that which is dead and discarded, into something living, wonderful, yet still imperfect. My best work is repurposed from something underutilized or deemed worthless. These are metaphors for our lives.
A higher state of perfection may be our aim, but meaning in life is in the struggle to rise above. It’s the scars and imperfections that testify of that strife to lift oneself above the banal and meaninglessness of life. It’s the scars, the imperfections and the work in progress that signify that which is real and authentic.
Contact Information:
Phone: (931) 450-2426 | (931) 273-9657
Email: Grant@TNwaterfallGetaway.com
Location: Browns Hollow Rd, Tracy City, TN 37387, United States of America