BE THE BOAT AS ART
MAKE IT STAND OUT
At Be The Boat, we’ve been inspired by the many ways our message has resonated with you. Please scroll below to see the ways boats, water, the sun and sky, trauma, perseverance, resilience, and fortitude have informed your artwork. We are so grateful for the ways you’ve shared that our mission and message have moved you.
Be The Boat!
Hunter’s Canoe
In a moment of what some may call foreshadowing, Hunter built this “boat” (a ribbed canoe) while in high school. It still hangs in his former room, and we treasure it.
Ocean Balls and Bronze Boats
Our kitchen island is seasoned with rich tokens of the sea. My grandmother’s psychedelic planter, mother’s potting vase filled with sea glass, my mother-in-law’s empty vase (awaiting flowers!) and two favorites….an ocean ball, filled with sand and shells, from my brother, sister-in-law and brother-in-law and a bronze dory boat from my dear friends Sue and MBK. No matter the menu, these totems keep watch!
Be The Boat Clay Tile
We were the recipients of so much unexpected and undeserved kindness in the wake of Hunter’s death and we wanted to honor those who served as our “Boats of Love” during tumultuous seas. We turned to one of our most compassionate and creative friends - Sue Foran of Expressions of Faith in Clay - and commissioned these clay Boats of Love tiles as expressions of our love and appreciation. Beautiful, aren’t they?
“Row The Boat”, PJ Fleck (Coach, MN Gophers )
Merry Beth Kowalczyk, among our most stalwart emotional supports, sent me an article in which PJ Fleck, coach of the Minnesota Gophers, uses boat analogies to guide his program. “Row the Boat,” Fleck later told the Twin Cities Pioneer Press, is “a never-give-up mantra…. Your back is to the future, which is something you cannot control..You don’t know if there’s rocks, water falls, stormy seas, you don’t know what’s ahead of you. You’re rowing in the present, which is the only thing you can actually control, and the only thing you can actually have an impact on. You either choose to take your oars and put them back in the boat and stop, or you put them back in the water and continue to go.” What an analogy for grief and perseverance. Wow. Google him and you’ll be inspired!