Boston

Boston, perhaps not unexpectedly, became a meditation on pace last weekend.

We went to support and watch my son run the Boston Marathon. The day before we went to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston to see the Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination exhibition and, in particular, the work of Hilary Pecis who also ran the marathon.

Hilary has an art practice and a running practice that both feel distinctively intentional and alive. She paints rooms, windows, gardens—spaces shaped by attention. Walking through the exhibition, I kept thinking about how gardens are never fixed,always evolving, with something blooming and other things dying simultaneously. Gardens require care, adjustment, patience. They change with time, and with the person tending them.

The next day, standing along the marathon route and then later at the finish line, I found myself thinking about the same things. Watching thousands of runners pass, each moving at their own pace, the experience became less about speed and more about endurance. About staying with something, even when it becomes difficult. Doing difficult things literally enlarges our brain.

Both times my son appeared, it was a brief moment—one of many along a long course—but it was exhilarating and it held everything: focus, effort, presence.

The connection between the exhibition and the race felt quiet and clear, available for me because I was looking for it and most importantly paying attention—as both invited. Both unfolded over time. Both revealed something deeper the longer you stayed with them.

I left Boston thinking about what it means to tend—to a garden, to a body, to a life. And how art, as always, gives us a way to see that more clearly.

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