I Googled the term and found.
inscape | |
— n | |
the essential inner nature of a person, an object, etc | |
[C19: from -- Coming across a new word in a book is a treat in itself, but when you encounter a word like this, one that puts a name on something for which you've never had a name before, its like finding money on a walk in the park... doubly good. I immediately identified with this term. For example; recounting the smell of crude oil and Marlboro cigarrettes, the bins of seemingly haphazard hardware and parts, and an old transistor radio quietly eeking out the daily market report and commodity prices, I am confronted with the inscape of my maternal grandfather. My grandfather's shop, perhaps disorganized to others, portrayed his inscape, as someone else's formal English garden might. His garden doesn't grow peonies or tulips, but it still blooms with the redemption of springtime. His is a redemption of old things that others have lost sight of the value of. I've seen a pile of rusty junk become a perfectly restored small gage tractor worthy of an antique show, not unlike a gardener's roses in well tended beds. I've seen a discarded tank become an air compressor to rival anything you could buy from Rural King. This collection of things seems to have a life of it's own when I walk through the shop even years later, they are a monument to something much bigger. I understand that inscape is more than just the physical objects, its about the life that intersects with them and gives them meaning. It's what gives the garden it's soul, the machine shop it's life, and reminds us, I think, that we are the inscape of someone greater than ourselves. At least at our best we are.. or at least I'd like to be.. That's enough for now. There will be more... |