These days, I still like a good game of tennis, and I still work out a few times every week as much for my mind as my body: a good sweat can reduce the trials of this world back to a smaller and, therefore, more accurate and manageable perspective. As regards my body, I have continued all these years to work out basically for one reason: to reduce my limitations in what I choose to do. That sounds far more philosophically high-minded than it is, but the upshot is that if I were approached to go skiing or climb a mountain or mountain bike 20 miles with friends, or whatever, I didn’t want to have to say “no” because my body couldn’t pull it off.

That started to get harder the older I got; my body was breaking down, or so I thought. I believed it was the normal attrition of a former athlete, especially one stupid enough to play football. I remember the first time I tried to go out for a jog, but my knees wouldn’t let me. Literally, my right knee could not support me when I came down on that right foot. I was in my mid-thirties, and I was baffled and angry as much as anything. But the body, being the great vessel of adaptation that it is, found ways to enable me to do those physical things I wanted to do. There were trade-offs. I could go out and run six miles, but I wouldn’t be able to do much beyond walk the next day, and even that, not easily. I could play a couple hours of hard singles tennis, but the next two days were going to be a wash. Whatever, I thought. Just part of growing older.

Then I had a child. A son. Like many people these days, I got married after I was old enough to legally be President. For a multitude of reasons, my wife and I were biologically incapable of having children, which didn’t matter at all to me and barely did to her. There were plenty of kids coming into the world who needed a home, and we were happy to adopt. A far more compelling issue, at least to me, was my age. Again, I was 37, or so, by this time; I was having my first child at the same age my father had already had his sixth and final child, and while I wasn’t that old, my body felt old. I was honestly concerned over what I would be able to do with my son. I wanted to be able to do with him whatever he wanted me to do.

In those early years, the toddler years, he wanted me on the ground with him. He wanted me crawling around, being a bridge he could climb over or crawl under. He wanted me out on the playground, climbing the jungle gym with him, playing tag, pushing him on the swing then running under when he was at his highest. At the pool or a lake, he wanted me to throw him. I could usually do what he wanted, but often not easily. My body would ache and not easily go places it used to visit effortlessly all the time. What’s more, what he wanted me to do was unfailingly exhausting. I would often marvel at how tired I was by activities that technically were not that demanding. I worried about being the 50-year-old who couldn’t do diddly with his teenaged son because his body wouldn’t let him.

Then I met Pete Egoscue, the father of modern postural therapy.

This is the point at which this may start to sound like some fake religious testimony, but it is not that. Nor is this some crass advertisement. I repeat, I find the uber-fit folks kooky. I am firmly convinced there are a multitude of better ways to spend adulthood than reaching peak fitness. I happily smoke cigars, I scoff at people who actively cut caffeine from their lives, and no pig that has ended up on my plate as either sausage or bacon or anything else has died in vain. And yet, I am a father who didn’t want to miss out on an array of experiences with his son simply because I wasn’t physically capable. And I was well on the road to being physically incapable.

I started doing Pete’s method of postural realignment through basic exercises he developed, or what he calls “e-cises.” I pretty much followed what his method recommends, which is to do the e-cises almost every day and to get a new menu of them every two weeks or so. When I first began his method, the e-cises took maybe 45 minutes each day. Now, they take 20 to 30.

Here is what I’ve learned about my body, the human body. We are symmetrical bipeds, or at least are supposed to be. That means we are designed to be horizontally even, one shoulder or hip not higher than the other, and that we’re designed to be straight vertically, that is, it should be a straight line from the ankle through the knee, hip and shoulder. When our bodies aren’t balanced and straight, they compensate, and from such compensation comes pain. I couldn’t jog in my mid-thirties not because I played football. That had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t jog because my posture was so out of alignment and dysfunctional that I was asking my right knee to do more than it was ever designed to do. Some days, it could actually pull it off, but there was some hell to be paid later. Other days, it just cried, “Uncle.” Through the Egosuce Method, I got my body aligned, and now I can jog five days in a row if I want to, although I never want to.

The thinking behind it all is actually quite simple. Stupidly simple. I remember reading one of Pete’s first books on pain and the body, Pain Free, and when I was done I called and told him it reminded me of Thomas Huxley, the 19th Century scientist who was a friend of Darwin and was one of the bulldogs in Darwin’s corner. Darwin had sent Huxley a copy of what became his Origen of Species, and after Huxley read it, he said, “How utterly stupid not to have thought of that myself.” The Theory of Evolution through natural selection is simple, deceptively simple, and yet for thousands of years every scientist missed it. Pete’s understanding of the body is also simple. We hurt when our postures aren’t in the position they are designed to be, and we reduce pain when we realign our postures. It’s deceptively simple, and yet for decades, until Pete came along, many scientists and medical professionals missed it.

Related: “I Healed My Chronic Pain Naturally in 8 Weeks”

But once my body was better aligned and less dysfunctional, there was more fitness work to be done. While jogging can be an incredible cardiovascular exercise, its benefits are still limited. Jogging doesn’t help my body achieve a full range of motion. Our bodies are designed for us to be able to rotate around and look out the back window as we back out of the driveway. Too many of us can’t do that anymore; it doesn’t matter that, because of mirrors and cameras, we don’t have to. It matters that we can’t, and it shouldn’t be that way. The reason we can’t is that we don’t. And haven’t. So many parts of our body have lost their full range of motion because we haven’t been using that full range for too long. We haven’t asked our hips to move us sideways or to squat. We haven’t asked our shoulders to lift our hands over our head or behind us. And we’ve suffered the consequences.

That’s where Pete’s Patch Fitness comes in. It is a style of workout out that emphasizes our bodies to utilize a full range of motion. [hyperlink first Patch article]. It asks us to jump under things and go over things and move sideways and bend over and bear crawl and all kinds of activities that just get all of our parts moving in ways that they haven’t since we were children. Plus, it’s fun. For Pete, fitness is all about full range of motion and fun. And most of those Patch workouts take less than 20 minutes, like this 15-minute core workout.

When my son was a toddler, I was struggling to play with him some days because my body wasn’t cooperating; it wouldn’t let me. I had no idea I was limited by postural conditions that were eminently correctable through simple exercises and a different way of doing fitness. I was blessed to be shown that was the case. As a result, for many years, I’ve been able to say “yes” to everything my son, now age 11, has wanted me to do physically, which this past year has included wrestling on the ground, skiing for many hours, repelling down cliffs, jumping off of cliffs into pristine waters and rotating my body enough to turn around and give him a smile.

Pete defines fitness as having no limitations on our body’s range of motion, and it is through Patch Fitness that, barring some severe medical condition, we can all get there. I don’t care enough about fitness to argue if Pete’s definition is correct. But I do care about playing with my son. It’s probably my favorite thing to do. And so I continue to stay fit, by Pete’s definition, so that I can keep on doing it, now and for many Father’s Days long into the future.

The post A Father’s Freedom to Play appeared first on Sonima.

All those men in that grainy, vintage footage mimicking playground-like maneuvers among the trees were members of the Polish National Weightlifting Team. Though their “workout” might not have looked like much other than fun, they were building strength, according to Egoscue.

To understand how Egoscue defines strength, first a quick anatomy lesson. The body has four pairs of load-bearing joints—the shoulders, the hips, the knees, the ankles. When the body is in alignment, those joints vertically line up. In other words, if you were to draw a line straight up from your right ankle, it would intersect with your right knee, right hip and right shoulder.

When a body is in alignment, it is balanced horizontally, too, which means that one’s shoulders, hips and knees would be precisely parallel. Feet should also never pronate (rest on the inside of the foot) or supinate (rest on the outside). While everyone is born with perfect alignment, we all get out of whack over time, and it’s not the result of anything specific we did. In fact, it’s likely something we didn’t do or didn’t do enough: Be active. A sedentary lifestyle causes joints to slowly move out of proper positioning, which can lead to pain, affecting the back, neck, head, and other areas.

Another issue that arises from misalignment is weakness. Even the fittest athletes are weak when they are misaligned. A guy who can bench press 400 pounds, for example, might not be able to side squat under a low branch. Think of it like a game of Jenga. When the blocks stack up seamlessly, you can build a pretty high and sturdy structure. However, when a few blocks are slightly out of place (picture some edges sticking out), stability is compromised, which means it won’t be long before that tower comes crashing down.

The same rules apply to your body. When you’re aligned, your joints can operate more freely, communicating with each other and working together as a unit to lift or support more weight. You have a full range of motion with your load-bearing joints, regardless whether you’re upright or in another position. Which brings us back to how Egoscue defines strength: The ability for ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders to talk to each other in a balanced way, regardless of the position.

If you want to get your body back into alignment, Egoscue’s Patch Fitness can help. The core eight principles behind its exercises recruit muscles to move joints back to their intended position for optimal function. Depending on your posture, it can take days, weeks, months and, in rare cases, years to realign the body through Patch Fitness. But, little by little, if done regularly, these key movements can help shift your joints back into place where they have full range of motion again.

Related: Unlock Your Body’s Fullest Potential with Patch Fitness

Much of modern weight training has abandoned the concept of full range of motion. It focuses on isolated muscles—which is a misnomer because no single part of the body can be divorced from the rest—in an attempt to promote a specific strength that is measurable. But that strength is incomplete as it tends to measure a specialized type of strength, such as how much you can bench press.

This myopic approach to fitness isn’t limited to just weightlifting. Running, for instance, is a great form of exercise, but if all you’re doing is logging miles, you’re promoting a tightness in the hips that will eventually affect the knees and lower back. Cycling is also great, but if you’re only pedaling, you’re reducing the range of motion in your shoulders and hips, which may eventually stiffen your spine, causing neck pain, headaches, elbow and wrist pain—all the result of the body no longer being allowed to work as a unit. Of course, some athletic trainers have learned this, and are still learning it, which is why there is more and more cross-training among our athletes. But many people in the fitness world still fail to comprehend the importance of the body as a single unit that needs to be aligned.

Changing load positions—compelling the shoulders, hips, knees and ankles to move across every plane of possibility—encourages full function of our bodies, which, in turn, enables for greater strength in every position. The fact that our training has gotten away from this basic truth has made people weaker, even the strongest among us.

The post A Holistic Approach to Strength Training appeared first on Sonima.

“He showed us everything,” Pete recalls. “I mean, the kitchens, the banquet facilities, even the laundry rooms.” But there was one place that Manuel conspicuously ignored—a big circular building that he didn’t acknowledge as they walked past it toward the outskirts of the grounds then again as they returned to his own office for cool refreshments. Before the tour ended, however, Troi asked delicately, “Manuel, what is this building? Why aren’t we going in?”

“Oh, that’s just a fitness building. Would you like to see it?” he said nonchalantly.

Both obsessed with fitness, Pete and Troi were excited to take a look, so Manuel invited them in. It was a gorgeous, state-of-the art facility. One long stretch of the circular wall was a bank of windows that overlooked the Pacific Ocean and some majestic palisades. In front of those windows was a line of treadmills, all vacant. In fact, the entire gym, beautiful as it was, was a ghost town. Pete asked why, and Manuel explained that it wasn’t peak season, so there weren’t many Americans at the resort.

“They’re the only ones who use this facility,” Manuel confirmed. Then he shook his head, confused and disapproving. “We have incredible places for people to jog and walk. We have pools and beaches and so many ways to have fun and exercise. We just don’t understand why anyone who wants to exercise would choose a treadmill over any of those other options, but Americans always do.” He paused then before he added, “When they’re on the treadmill, they never look like they’re having any fun.”

“Somewhere in the not so distant past, fitness got off on the wrong track,” Pete says in hindsight. How? Accidentally. “It wasn’t malicious,” he says. “It was just an unintended consequence.” Which is partly why he created Patch Fitness back in the 1980’s. Patch Fitness is many things: It’s a great workout for any part of the body. It’s an efficient exercise plan for any busy person. It helps realign the body, improve metabolism and boost energy. It’s a workout that burns calories, enhances cardiovascular capability, and tightens the physique everywhere. But just as important as all of that (and numerous other benefits not mentioned), Patch Fitness is fun. And that’s no accident.

Related: Unlock Your Body’s Fullest Potential with Patch Fitness

There’s a human compulsion to measure outcomes and effects, and in the age of endless data at our fingertips, there’s an epidemic of measuring just about everything we do, all under the auspice of charting progress. Today you may be able to do only 15 pushups, but after a month of working out, you can do 25 push-ups, and that’s progress. And that’s good, right?

“Not necessarily,” Pete says. “At no point are we measuring the joy.” In order to accommodate this focus on measurable progress, much of the fun gets squeezed out of the fitness in America, and the problem with that is that the less fun something is, the less likely people are to do it.

That’s why the fitness of the Patch emphasizes the enjoyment aspect. “Every sport ever invented is the combination of spontaneity and fun. Native Americans didn’t invent lacrosse because it seemed like a great way to stay in shape. Volleyball, tennis, football, soccer—you name it, they weren’t invented from a studied effort to stay in shape. They were invented spontaneously as a way to have fun,” Pete explains.

The Patch abides by similar principles—spontaneity and fun. “When was the last time you got down on the ground and crawled around? The last time you stepped up on a chair or hopped on a bench or squatted to get under a split rail fence? You don’t think of any of that as exercise, but it is,” Pete says. That philosophy is a primary impetus behind the Patch.

Whether you’re a professional athlete or a potato fresh off of the couch, when you bear crawl under a bench or jump over that same bench, you are doing it at your level. “You’re not focused on how many reps you’re doing or how fast you’re moving. There’s no digital readout of how many calories you’re burning or steps you’re taking, all of which removes you from the present enjoyment of an activity,” Pete says. “You’re just doing it to the best of your ability in the same way you used to just swing from a jungle gym when you were a kid or jump over a fence on the way to school. That focus on measurement is about fear. It’s about making you feel inadequate if you don’t do enough reps. If you’re exercising from a position of fear, you can achieve a sense of accomplishment at the end of a workout, but you won’t have any fun.”

Again that matters because a fun workout keeps you coming back. “It’s very unpleasant for people to try to get fit doing something they don’t love doing. If you don’t love running, but every day you’re way to fitness is a run, then at some point you’re just going to stop running.”

This fun factor also has an impact on the actual physical performance. “Over the years, I’ve worked with every kind of person, from hundreds of pro athletes to regular people who wouldn’t remotely refer to themselves as athletes,” he says. What Pete has noticed among all of his clients is that when they’re having fun with their workouts, their performance actually improves. Furthermore, the recovery time from that performance decreases. Even the pro athletes, when engaged in conditioning they don’t enjoy, tire more easily and think they are not in good shape.

“They’re constantly paranoid about what they’re doing because they intuitively sense they should be doing more,” he says. “They’re right, but not in the way they think. What they should be doing more of is trusting themselves, trusting their instincts, and migrating toward fitness that they find more fun.” When they do that, they get in better shape.

To date, there have been no studies measuring how much the enjoyment of exercise impacts the body as opposed to conditioning that’s less exhilarating, but relying on his 40 years of observation, Pete knows it to be true. Joy matters. Which is what Manuel at the resort in Baja intuitively knew and what Pete unfailingly remembers every time he puts together another Patch Fitness routine.

Photo by Hailey Wist

The post The Most Important Element Missing From Your Workout appeared first on Sonima.

The question came as a bit of a revelation to Egoscue. Instinctively, he knew he could improve their conditioning. Years of experience studying all of the body’s joints and muscles and how they’re interconnected had long prepared him to create the exact fitness plan they needed. Yet, it hadn’t occurred to him to devise an exercise program using his extensive knowledge of the anatomy until right then. Without much hesitation, he responded, “I think I could. Follow me.”

They walked about three-quarters of a mile from Egoscue’s first clinic in San Diego (he now has 26 clinics worldwide) to a horse show park, an outdoor space where equestrian and dressage riders practiced hurdling over both permanent and temporary obstacles with their horses. A former Marine, Egoscue was well-versed in how obstacle-course training can make you fit and strong. So to him, this place was perfect for what he had in mind, especially since it was set outside (nothing like fresh air and mother nature to inspire you to move).

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“It was very challenging, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. You felt good when you were done. And no matter how tired you felt going through it, you felt energized, too,” Egoscue recalls of his fitness regimen for the military.  Back then, however, Egoscue didn’t see the obstacle course as much more than a means to an end. It took him a few more years to connect the dots—combining his later acquired knowledge of the anatomy and unique insights on the role posture plays in our health—to fully understand why those courses were so effective.

“It’s all about negotiating obstacles in various positions and circumstances. It’s an inclusive, holistic way of conditioning that compels the body to work in the way it was designed to work. Bicycling, jogging—these are beneficial, but they don’t promote balance and strength in a varied array of positions. They don’t promote the health of joints and full range of motion, and therefore, don’t boost the metabolism as much. That’s what makes people feel energized—that metabolism boost,” Egoscue explains. That experience maneuvering obstacle courses as a Marine was exactly what Egoscue aimed to replicate with those high school students at the equestrian show park. And he hit a bullseye.

Watching the boys, Egoscue realized he had stumbled upon an ideal means of exercise: An enjoyable way to produce balance, strength and endurance. Of course, he knew he had discovered nothing new. After all, he was only harking back to fitness techniques he had learned in the military.  But during a time when so much fitness had turned (and continues to turn) to the specialization of skills, isolation of muscles, repetition of routines and reduced range of motion, he had been reawakened to the importance of full functional movement in our conditioning.

“Word spread about what I was teaching these kids,” Egoscue remembers. Soon enough, he started training others in the show park, devising exercises and arranging them in a specified order—and people were loving it. Some even asked him to design and build a unit of obstacles that they could do anywhere, anytime. For those who couldn’t meet in the San Diego park, Egoscue created a structure—a series of bases and beams (pictured above)—that people could go over, under and around anywhere.

Over, under and around make up a key concept for functional movement, which is the element that makes the Patch—as Egoscue’s new exercise program later became called—such an effective workout. The young boys had come up with the name for the stretch of commercial tomato patches dividing Egoscue’s clinic from the show park.

“Functional means allowing the human body to fall into its natural groove of movement. If you get on the ground, go over things, under things and around things, you’re eventually going to get more functional. You coax the body to perform natural movement patterns,” says Brian Bradley, postural alignment specialist and vice president of Egoscue. These are the same patterns that may have been lost or neglected due to a sedentary lifestyle.

It all harks back to one of Egoscue’s earliest claims, fully explored in his first book, The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion: The more we move our bodies in ways that promote full range of motion, the healthier those bodies will be. Even folks who hit the gym regularly are often not as healthy as they could be.

“So much of what we do in the gym is about trying to be perfect in our form,” Bradley says. “First, that’s just not natural. Second, and ironically, by striving to be ‘perfect’ and even symmetrical, people in gyms are losing their natural balance. They’re inadvertently strengthening and working one side harder than the other. With the Patch, people naturally achieve balance through their bodies working as a unit.”

It’s that whole-body aspect that makes the Patch so efficient. Many forms of exercise, especially in the gym (think bench pressing, squats, even lunges or rowing) utilize just parts or peripheries of the body.

“Every single exercise we use in the Patch tires every muscle,” Bradley says. “That’s why a 15- or 20-minute routine from the Patch is worth two days of normal training. It’s also a great warm-up for any type of training you might do afterward. It centers your balance and makes you a hip-driven mover. By using your hips, your body gets twice the result with half the effort.”

And it doesn’t stop there.  “As your day unfolds and you do the activities of normal daily living, your body continues to get more functionally strong and balanced because of the changes that occurred in the Patch workout that you did earlier that day or a couple days prior. Every step you take after the Patch enhances the effects of the Patch.”

While there is an actual Patch apparatus, a series of plastic, portable bases and beams that Egoscue designed and that can be moved inside or out if you happen to own one, the fact is, a Patch routine can be done anywhere. It does not require a specific space or a specific setting. “It just requires you, your imagination and your surroundings,” says Egoscue. “Any outdoor setting with a bench or stairs or playground becomes a Patch. Any indoor setting for that matter, with tables or benches or chairs.”

The cherry on top: Doing the Patch is actually fun—though you won’t catch Bradley using that word to describe it. Making the program sound too playful has its disadvantages. People might be less inclined to take it seriously. But Egoscue is often quick to point out that originally, all forms of what we have come to call exercise were predicated on the notion of play and fun. It’s only in recent decades, and largely in America, fitness has become an obligation more than a joy—for adults, that is, not kids.

“Watch a group of kids running around a playground. They’re exercising like crazy, but they don’t know it. They just think they’re playing and having fun,” notes Egoscue. “Same with the Patch. It’s a hell of a workout, but it’s all disguised as pure, unadulterated, childlike fun.”

Photo by Hailey Wist

The post Unlock Your Body’s Fullest Potential with Patch Fitness appeared first on Sonima.

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The role of art in our society and its impact on us both individually and collectively has long been deliberated. Auden famously said that “Art accomplishes nothing,” while, at the other extreme, Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, allegedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not make the Civil War: one half of our country allowing one race of people to own another race, and Lincoln’s refusal to let that continue, is what made that war. But it is fair to wonder and speculate on art’s effect in our world. My Dante professor in graduate school once told us of some famous London conductor who, during the German blitz of his city in World War II, stuck his phonograph in the window and played Beethoven’s Ninth while the planes bombed and droned. The music did nothing to deter the planes and bombs, but it must have fortified that conductor in some essential way. And also perhaps his neighbors, who must have heard the music.

It’s certainly fair to discuss the societal impact of public art because societal impact is the reason for its existence. Barn art is public art, massive depictions painted on a massive canvas for anyone who might happen to drive by, which is what I did in Ohio about ten years ago. Prior to then, I had not seen any barn art since I was a little kid in rural Illinois. Janice Meister was a classmate of mine, and when we were in first grade, her mother (whose name I cannot recall), painted one of their barns which stood near their house two miles outside of town about fifty yards off of the road. It was remarkable what she painted—a black silhouette of her husband in his tractor set in relief against a sunset background, green corn, golden sky. It was huge. I have no idea how she did it.

The barn artist in Ohio responsible for the bicentennial pictures I first saw ten years ago is named Scott Hagan. He’s thirty-nine years old, lives in Jerusalem, Ohio, is married with two kids, and came by his passion the way many of us do: instinctively.

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“I was just looking for a new challenge,” he said. By that, he means he wanted to try his hand at a larger canvas. Largely self-taught, Scott attributes his artistic ability to his grandmother and especially his mother, and throughout grade school and high school he painted just about anything he could—paper, mailboxes, birdhouses, cars. But as he said, he wanted a new challenge, “and at that point the biggest canvas I could find was Dad’s barn, so I asked if I could paint something on it.” Scott wanted to paint a Tasmanian devil, but his dad didn’t want that, so they settled on an Ohio State Buckeye with Brutus (the Ohio State football mascot for those not in the know.)

Enter serendipity.

Of course Scott’s grandfather was impressed with what Scott had done—he was his grandfather, after all (not to mention probably a Buckeye’s fan). So he took a picture of the work to the local newspaper, The Barnesville Enterprise, where the editor was so impressed that he gave it front page coverage. The story was in circulation just when a state official responsible for helping to plan the upcoming state bi-centennial was in town. Originally, the talk in Columbus had been to put up a billboard in every county honoring the bicentennial, but this official had something else in mind, something more lasting that harked back to her own childhood many years before.

Throughout much of the 20^th century, barn art was used as advertising—companies hired artists to paint barns along the sides of roads in order to advertise their products, much like this John Deere painting Scott painted for one client.

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It all came to a halt in 1965 with the passage of the Highway Beautification Act, but by then thousands of barns across the country were painted with an advertisement. The king of barn painting was a man named Harley Warrick, and he estimated to have painted over 20,000 barns himself. That official from Columbus remembered those barns from her youth, so after being in eastern Ohio at the right time to see the newspaper story on Scott’s Buckeye barn, she contacted Scott to offer him the job of painting a barn to commemorate the upcoming bicentennial in every county in the state. 88 counties. 3 years to do it. He took the job. But the serendipity doesn’t stop there.

With so many barns and so little time, Scott knew he had to devise a better system. “For that first barn, I just climbed on a ladder, and I painted with one hand and had the design on a piece of paper in my other. I’d paint a section then get down and move the ladder around and paint another. It wasn’t very efficient, but I didn’t know what else to do.” It was at this point that Scott’s father mentioned that someone who used to be a barn painter lived not too far away: Harley Warrick. Scott gave him a call and arranged to meet the master.

Harley showed Scott how to use a block and tackle system, a rope and pulley, to move a platform up and down on which he could stand to paint, and Harley even gifted Scott the stage upon which he stood for many of his years. Harley also shared with Scott a common adage that isn’t common the first time you hear it: “If you can find something you like to do,” Harley told Scott, “and you can find someone to pay you to do it, then you’ve made yourself what you want to be.”

Scott has made himself what he wanted to be. Since the bicentennial job, he has had steady work painting all kinds of barns around the country—his work can now be seen in eighteen states, and his goal is to paint a barn in all fifty states. His work covers a wide array. Sometimes it’s an advertisement for a company or cause, sometimes it’s an idiosyncratic request, sometimes it’s another historical commission, such as when he painted a barn dedicated to President Rutherford B. Hayes’ in Hayes’ home county in northwestern Ohio, and sometimes it’s another commission for a major project, such as when Monroe County, Ohio, hired him to paint quilts on twenty of its barns.

I asked Scott if what he did was a calling, language he’s not uncomfortable with as a devout Christian. “Maybe that’s the word,” he said. “I believe it’s wholeheartedly what I’m supposed to do, paint these barns.” At one time early in his career, he was under pressure to take a job at a nearby plant as it seemed to offer more security for himself and his family. It was offered, “but I felt so strong about what I wanted to do that I turned it down,” he said. “A year later that company folded, and I’m still working.”

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Part of what makes an artist, of course, is his or her vision, an ability to see what most of us cannot see, and where most of us see a barn, many of them beautiful structures in and of themselves, Scott sees something else—a canvas. Potential and possibility. “I have driven around and seen so many barns that I really hope I get to paint something on someday.”

Not all barns are alike. They differ in material—some are wood, some metal, some with batten strips, and that material sometimes helps to determine the art. “Metal barns all have ribs about every five inches, long vertical bumps. You can’t pull the paint as easily as you can across a flat, wooden surface. It’s just a lot harder to do a diagonal line across an uneven surface, so for metal barns, when I can, I avoid designs with diagonal lines.” Barns also differ in age, some older, some newer, some vintage or antique. In their difference is their aesthetic, and Scott tries to match a picture to that aesthetic and will subtly work to guide customers to meet his vision. One customer in Illinois had an old, weathered, wooden barn, and Scott convinced her to go with a Coca-Cola ad from before World War II. He even scuffed and burnished the final product to make it look older than it actually was.

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Then there’s the ritual of the actual job, which begins with the drive to the site. “I meditate on that drive about the work ahead. By then, I’ve seen pictures of the barn, and I’ve settled on the image the client wants painted, but you can’t get a real sense of the job until you see the actual barn.” Which is why when he arrives at the worksite, after he’s officially met the client and before he begins painting, he stands back and stares at the barn for quite a while, like any painter before his empty canvas. Then comes the painting, the quiet, deliberative process that Steinbeck once called, “The indescribable joy of creation.”

“It feels special when I’m out painting,” Scott said.

His favorite job was one he had last fall for a barn so remote that the only people who were ever going to see the work was the man who commissioned it and his family. “That guy was passionate to have his barn painted, for himself, and I was passionate to be there painting it. It was quiet the whole time. All I heard was the sound of nature. I relish that quiet. It’s meditative. The more quiet and meditative a job is, the more I come home a better person. I’m blessed in so many ways, and I’m so thankful for all of it.”

I asked Scott what impact he hoped his art was having on the public. “I haven’t really thought about it,” he said, which was such a refreshingly humble, unself-conscious response to hear an artist make. Then I asked what impact it was having. “People tell me on Facebook to keep up the good work because they like seeing it. They say they appreciate me beautifying America in this way.” Clearly, Scott was uncomfortable talking about himself, but he became much more effusive when I asked the impact public art had on him.

“There’s some public art in Bucyrus, Ohio, that you really have to take note of,” he said. He was referring to massive murals painted on buildings by the artist Eric Grohe. “I stand in front of those murals, and I wonder about the artist who has the talent and takes the time to paint like that. The work looks 3-D, and on that kind of scale—for me, that’s beauty.” He continued, “In Portsmouth, Ohio, there’s a mile-long flood wall with murals all over it. The stuff is picturesque. It’s a bunch of individual pieces of art about 40 by 20 feet. It’s beautiful. When I just stand there and look at that stuff, I take the moment and forget about everything else in the world.”

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I have seen Scott’s work in person only by happenstance, which is the best way to come upon something wonderful, and only in winter, which for me is the best time to see that work. Growing up, I saw the barn Janice Meister’s mom painted in every season; in autumn and spring it was part of a nature’s busy mosaic, and in summer, once the corn got high, you could hardly see any of it from the road. But in winter it was a different story. Against the backdrop of the plains in winter, Scott’s art was captivating, ecstatic, warm and reassuring. It was filled with humanity.

Related: A Poem for Hope in Overcoming Depression

In his prose poem, “Prairie Farmstead,” the Midwestern poet Tom Hennen writes about the imminence of one night in winter: “The farmhouse lights have come on and throw warm yellow into the dark. Those still outside with chores they must finish know there is something they cannot name, a chill they feel not from the frost. Then the animals watch the humans closely. When the first call of the owl floats out of the cottonwoods the night has begun. The sentry is in place until morning light. All is well.”

All is well. That’s what seeing Scott’s art on those December drives made me feel. Will all be well? For some, certainly, but not for all and not all of the time for any of us. It never is, and it has always been thus. And yet, on a winter evening when the sun began to fade and I saw one of Scott’s paintings, it became easy, just for a moment, to believe that all was well for all. Knowing better was irrelevant. Scott’s passion brought me that moment of grace, which may be the most any work of art, public or private, can truly deliver, but surely that is enough. Moments of grace are precious and dear, and the more each of us have, the better each of us, and our world, must certainly become.

The post Ritual Inspiration: Scott Hagan, Barn Artist appeared first on Sonima.