HI! HOW ARE YOU?
Dear Friends,
We hope you and your loved ones are safe, healthy, and finding creative ways to stay sane during these uncertain times of COVID-19. We want to know, how are you?
This web page is a news update and opportunity to re-connect around our activities during this unprecedented and global historic moment. We’ve gathered together below a few thoughts, photos, and links that we hope you might find interesting, and hope it may stimulate a renewed lifelong-learning dialog connecting us together. Our main aim is is to proactively be in touch and tell you that we are thinking about you. We invite and would LOVE you to share news about yourself either in the comment section, email, text message, phone call, social media direct message, or old fashioned snail mail (which we especially love). We’ll gather together your responses and have them to think back upon in future years. All our contact options are listed at the end.
We don’t maintain a purely personal website for ourselves. As you may have noticed from the menu at the top of the page, we’ve created this personal message as a password-protected private web page hidden inside our Tiny World Tours business website. Although this is intended as a private & personal message, and not a kind of business promotion, we’ll also be telling you what’s going on with our work and have included links in case you’re interested in following them.
How Do You Structure Your Weeks?
So far we are both healthy and busy, heading into COVID-19 Closure Week Eight, more-or-less happily ensconced in our downtown Grand Rapids condo. Our immediate families in Texas, Maine, and California are also healthy to date. Sadly the mother of our sister-in-law Ying-Chao died last week in Taiwan (of causes unrelated to COVID). The current ongoing COVID situation prevents Ying-Chao from returning to Taiwan.
We’ve read articles that advise establishing routines to structure the days and weeks. With that in mind, we now have daily routines. Still, our days seem to strangely blur together….has anyone else noticed this?
Since the workout facilities in our building are off limits, we've shifted to a daily workout climbing 50-70 flights of stairs (up and down) ~1.2 miles before breakfast. Each evening, we've been walking outdoors, either in the city center along the river, or out at local parks…this has become an important part of our efforts to stay fit, positive, and connected to life beyond COVID. Michigan’s Governor's Emergency Regulations allow for exercise outdoors, and Nature hasn't stopped just because society has. (Well, Spring has been a little late this year… it has snowed here at least ten times in April…). Please share with us what you are doing to structure your days.
On weekdays, Dana is very busy leading the Grand Rapids Museum (GRAM) from home, staying connected to Museum staff via Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and to colleagues in a local Arts Working Group and the American Art Museum Directors Association (AAMD) via Zoom… some days have up to five meetings—that's far too much screen time! GRAM closed its galleries and offices on March 13, and all public and private events through May 31, as well the spring Gala, this summer's Art Camp, and "GRAM on the Green" concert series. The beautiful Museum building is popular for wedding and corporate rentals and provides a significant amount of operating funds, all now postponed or cancelled. If you’re interested, you can click the following link to get a sense of the many ways people can now “Experience GRAM from Home,” including Virtual Tours, “Behind the Scenes” time-lapse videos, Artist Interviews, Hands-On Artmaking for all ages, and various GRAM Publications, including the Alexis Rockman: Great Lakes Cycle catalogue. GRAM has a very active Social Media program, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
As Dana is busy with GRAM, Mark is also quite busy with Tiny World Tours (TWT) and The Plant at Kyle (TPAK) work despite COVID. Mark is usually busy every spring creating intimately meaningful TWT arts & culture small group experiences with unique access around the USA, in countries like Mexico, Jordan, Germany, the Czech Republic, Japan Bhutan, and Nepal, and in vast worlds like Kcymaerxthaere. Some of these tours emphasize great walks. In addition, Mark oversees reservations, maintenance projects, and marketing for TPAK, a Lake|Flato-designed architectural landmark on 17 acres outside of Austin. Spring is a popular time for TPAK weddings and events, all unexpectedly cancelled or postponed this year because of COVID. COVID has both grounded Mark personally and created a significant amount of work to cancel or postpone and refund reservations for both TWT and TPAK. It’s hard to know exactly when and how these two businesses will resume and stabilize. Mark is hopeful that upcoming summer, fall, and 2021 spring TWT tours to Far West Texas (including Marfa, Big Bend, & the McDonald Observatory), to the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland Oregon, to Armenia, Georgia, Kosovo, Bhutan, Nepal, and Japan may safely proceed in some form. Our usual TWT policy is to decide about each tour ~60 to 90 days before their planned start dates - so we’ll take things one step at a time, in a way that Mark’s Dad might call a “continuous revelation.” We both enjoy thinking about future potential TWT tours to places like Nunavut (Canada), and various near flung and far flung past, present, and future historic utopias (sometimes interesting dystopias), including rich art, architecture, food, and nature destinations. We both enjoy thinking about the future of TPAK as an inspiring arts and cultural venue & institution that will live and benefit many people long after we are gone. This is currently manifested in our TPAK artist residency program with Austin’s wonderful Rude Mechs Theatre Company.
Continuing with optimism for the future, Mark has been prioritizing time to improve skills related to TWT and TPAK business & accounting, website and social media content creation (e.g. photography, video editing, email campaigns, and written word). For example, this web page has been created using the Squarespace platform. Dana is also becoming more adept on some of the latest workplace productivity systems, books, and software. If you’re interested in these things, including tools and tips, please let us know! We’ll be happy to tell you about some of our current recommendations and obsessions. If you know folks you think we should meet, please introduce us!
On top of this though, this COVID crisis has compelled to think our beyond our usual work roles and responsibilities, to become better stewards of our relationships, and try hard to not take anything for granted. Dana has found the book, Gratitude Works, to be meaningful these days, and stimulated by ideas about better living found within wide array of podcasts including Optimize with Brian Johnson, The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish, Good Life Project, The Accidental Creative, The Psychology Podcast, On Being, and Focused.
The famous Winston Churchill quote, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” put us both to thinking what we might do to make use of this strange time. In addition to establishing our new daily routines like exercising and reading, we came up with this major reach-out communication project. We looked through our address book and carefully curated a list of folks we feel close to and ardently hope to maintain lifelong connections with - that’s probably how you ended up viewing this page. Please stay connected!!!
Would You Like Us to Call You Some Weekend?
We feel it’s helpful to mark time with different pace weekends. We’ve started scheduling phone calls and zoom meetings with friends from around the world, reading (we own so many unread books!), tidying up our condo, watching tv, movies, and documentaries. We’d love to schedule a weekend (or weeknight) phone call or video call with you - please let us know when and how might work best for you!
We have been eating well! We’ve been supporting local businesses by ordering take-out from our favorite local restaurants, and at home enjoying vegetables from local farmers through community-supported-agriculture (CSA) programs. At this time of year, Michigan is known for wild oniony-garlicy Ramps and for wild Morel mushrooms. Both have great wild tastes and textures and very brief Spring seasons.
We devote more time these days to cooking meals with an eye on nutrition—Mark is on a keto-focused diet, which includes many vegetables, eggs, avocados, nuts, nut beverages, and chocolate! He continues his passion for making ice-cream using the ice cream maker Dana gifted him. For example, here’s a recipe for a very creamy low-carb chocolate avocado ice cream that doesn’t actually require an ice-cream maker (click here) – it resembles a rich chocolate cake batter. Mark has riffed in it by adding a couple teaspoons of almond extract, cinnamon, toasted almonds, and toasted sesame seeds – delicious and keto! What are you cooking / eating?
Already surrounded by a treasure trove of books at home, Mark has enjoyed reading “Seven Years in Tibet”(loved the book & didn’t care much for the movie), “Marfa: The Transformation of a West Texas Town", “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain”, and “Bringing Citizens’ Voices to the Table.” Dana’s readings include his grandmother’s memoir, “The Footprints of the Pheasant in the Snow”, “The Obstacle is the Way”, and “Forged in Crisis: Leadership in Turbulent Times”. What books & movies would you recommend?
We also make time for longer walks, often with friends (keeping physical distance!) and often in wooded locations, and sometimes ranging up to five miles. Although Mark is no longer on the board of the Friends of Grand Rapids Parks, he now he is fulfilling a desire to get to know local park trails better. We’re excited and delighted to be discovering many gems. Are you able to take walks? If you live near us, would you like to join us sometime?
“Walking is man’s best medicine.”
CONTACT INFO
Please write a comment and/or email and let us know that you received this and anything you’d like to share about you and your family! We look forward to hearing from you and learning what you’re doing with this unexpected time! The comment area is at the end of this page. We’ll gather together your responses and think back upon them in future years (and share them back if you’d like).
Other Contact info & links:
Joint email: danamark@theplantatkyle.com
Mark’s personal email: mholzbach@alum.mit.edu
Mark’s cell (also used for WhatsApp): 512-689-6777
Mark’s Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn
Dana’s personal email: danafh@gmail.com
Dana’s cell (also used for WhatsApp): 512-653-8188
The Plant at Kyle’s website, instagram, facebook
Tiny World Tours’ website, instagram, facebook
Mailing address: Mark Holzbach & Dana Friis-Hansen, 335 Bridge St NW #3301, Grand Rapids, MI 49504
Please assume we do not know all of your current contact info including your preferred physical mail address, email, phone, social media, website(s), etc. It will be wonderful to receive this info from you even if it just confirms what we may already have in our address book.
Let us know if you’d like to be on The Plant at Kyle’s or Tiny World Tours’ email mailing list(s) to receive announcements, discounts, and occasional deals. It’s fun to imagine our lives after quarantine.