We recently connected with Chuck + Peg Hoffman and have shared our conversation below.

Chuck + Peg, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

In 2015, we decided to leave urban Kansas City and move to a remote village in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington state. This was not just any village, but the most distant and remote village we could imagine at the time. This was a place of aging glaciers and tumbling icy creeks. It was a place where the local wildlife population outnumbered the humans. The first people to inhabit that wilderness valley were the tribes of the Wenatchi, the Entiat, and the Chelan. That same wilderness became a place of wild wonder that sparked our imagination, played on our senses, inspired our spiritual lives, and influenced our art.

There is wonder in the smell of a campfire across a mountain lake; an encounter with a black bear sharing a common trail; the hoot of a great horned owl that breaks the silence of deep snow or in the destructive power of a forest fire that both consumes and resurrects at once. We came to view this wonder-filled wilderness landscape as the original sacred text.

While we no longer live in the wilderness, our art and our spiritual lives continue to be intertwined on a path of discovery that leads to relationships with the earth, each other, and the Spirit that sustains us. Our current home is in the St. Croix River Valley on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota. It keeps us connected to the evolving spirit of life and those relationships developed in the wilderness.

We always find something new emerging from our experiences at edges and boundaries. We find energy exploring both new and familiar paths that expand our relationship to the Earth, Spirit and each other through stories and ritual. We find the most interesting insights come when we let go and listen in an open way. Our spiritual and creative life explores the world that begins and ends in wonder. However obscured, muted, or elusive this path may be in today’s world, it is present, this focused journey of discovery evokes wonder. John Philip Newell says, “We and all people, we and those who have gone before us, we and all creatures, we and the universe are travelling together in one river of life.”

We find wonder may be revealed as we engage at the boundaries of tension. We no longer fear the doubting questions. We carry each other within us. And the universe carries us within itself. By exploring the boundaries of our connectedness, we may even stumble upon truth.

Chuck + Peg, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We tend to live and work on borders and boundaries. On these edges we explore places of tension where wonder is revealed. At these intersections we endeavor to learn, practice, and share sustainable ways to ground ourselves in wholeness. We look to continuously re-form our relationship with each other, with the earth and with the Spirit that sustains creation.

Through our art and in communion with others, we aim to reawaken hope and encourage a new ecology of respect, tolerance, and love. Our goal is to restore durable, adaptable ways of stewarding the earth and to move closer to wholeness as a way of living together.

Our art is a result of collaboration. We go beyond the conceptual sense, to include working together on the same canvas. We paint at the same time, forging ideas together that neither of us could create alone. We experience this as both visual and verbal communication. When we begin our conversation in paint, it is important to let each of our voices be heard, allowing expression of our unique perspectives.

Chaos seems necessary to get to the deeper order that unifies our work. Because we know that ideas usually don’t move in a straight line, we make intentional space for a more organic and flowing nature to take hold. It often takes courage, faith, and time to allow transformation by this practice. We bring this process into our workshops where we create paintings in large groups, much the same way we create our own work.

In life, and in conversation, things get messy. The visual language of color and shape helps us think about larger issues together. We each bring ourselves fully to the canvas. We move from ego and forced will to a space that holds creative tension and gives rise to a reconciling third voice. It becomes both personal and universal. We are always surprised by what we have painted, discovered together, and what we have in common.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Edges, boundaries and intersections have been at the heart of our artistic expression for over 20 years. We see boundaries and edges not as divisions, but as places that hold tension and allow something new to rise from struggle. Tension is a place where we sense the spirit moving and creating within and through each of us. Time spent exploring those boundaries is processed through our art, writings, and workshops, we create a space for wonder, community, spirituality and social change. In the face of current world issues, and with our planet earth in profound peril, we cultivate places where creativity, dialogue and hospitality can begin to nurture seeds of understanding and new possibilities.

Our time spent in places where physical walls divide communities has been particularly formative. Our experience in Belfast, Northern Ireland, over the years is at the core of our inspiration and call to work and live in community. Most recently, as Executive Directors of Holden Village, we have lived our life on the boundary of the wilderness frontier. Holden is a remote off-the-grid spiritual community deep within the forest of the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Through our experiences we have come to believe deeply in re-formation: re-forming our relationship with the earth, with each other, and the spirit that sustains us all.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We served as Executive Directors of an educational retreat center in the remote wilderness of the Cascade Mountains. In the early morning, a day after installation as directors, we received a knock on our door that informed us of a lightning strike that sparked what became the Wolverine Fire. Our time and efforts became focused on planning and managing the safety and evacuation of people and securing the Village. With the help of our managers, staff and the USFS, we worked hard to prepare the Village for the uncertainty of the fast moving wildfire. At first we were all evacuated from the wilderness until the USFS assigned two two wildfire Hotshot crews to protect the village.

Five Villagers including myself were airlifted back into the Village on a Thursday morning and were onsite working with the Forest Service/hotshot crews. We are working on utilities and providing practical support to the firefighter leadership team. Peg remained down lake where she managed operations with a group of Village staff as well as coordinating communications with the Chelan USFS.

The fire burned up and around the Village and was met with burns purposely laid. This is the “fighting fire with fire” It exhausts (burns) the fuels in a protective ring around the Village, so when fire arrives, there is little left for it to burn and the fire loses its energy. This is the difficult, dangerous, and grueling work the hotshot crews of Silver City, NM and Entiat, WA have been doing. The back burn is nearly complete, and the Wolverine Fire continues its march up Railroad Creek drainage. The fire did indeed roar up the valley and around our village without losing lives or buildings. We are grateful to all that helped bring this outcome.

The mountain wilderness is an environment that welcomed and deepened our spiritual journey. Our time there and experiencing the fire up close and first hand remains conducive to our art, our meditations, and to asking new questions about climate change and our changing environment. It has taught us respect in listening to the environment, living within it, and being a voice to change hearts and minds. We are now compelled in our global community to change nearly everything. We are not scientists, politicians, or economists. We are artists. We hope to open people’s hearts to the idea that the flora, fauna, and landforms are part of who we are as humans, and all of life is interconnected. Before we can save this more than the human world, we will have to belong to it.

For more on our fire experience: https://www.genesisart.org/blog/tag/WOLVERINE+FIRE

Contact Info:

• Website: genesisart.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/GenesisArtStudio/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100059695461574
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleshoffman/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/GenesisArt
• Other: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/439056872 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J0fldOe4A8

Image Credits
Photos by: Chuck Hoffman John Noltner Hannah Lauber Greg Pupillo