FLOCK PROTECTORS
Birds Kill Time, 2012
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight! We are very happy to take this moment in time to welcome our beloved Flock Protectors to the Time Travelers Union. These hard working members have one of the toughest jobs in this union.
Flocks carry generations after generations of time within them. This means flocks contain continuity—but the experience of continuity is merely an emergent property of the scale of our existence—just like time. Of course there’s a good chance that the experience of continuity and time might actually be the same thing! How can you then protect a flock of time travelers—a flock that cannot be found on a single field of existence at one time?
Needless to say, the protectors who watch over our flock of time travelers are special beings. We honestly have no idea how you do what you do, but you do it well, with devotion and heartfelt steadiness. You who hold those threads of connection between the past and present and future, you who bring liberation to the past from the future, you who create temporary rafts of connection on the larger river of time: We are eternally grateful to you all.
About the creative process:
Hi folks. This image sees the return of the Highland cow featured in October of our 2014 calendar. That calendar was called “Abacus Corvus” because we were counting crows (one in January with one more added each month) and we later named ourselves after it. And privately, we named this cow Bumfit. The word bumfit means fifteen in the ancient Irish sheep-counting language of Yan Tan Tethera, and we loved the resonance with counting and the sound of the word just really fit this guy.
The old image reminds Jo of an old watercolor cartoon image, like in Calvin and Hobbes and Corina thought it looked a little too much like something on a box of margarine. We were excited about giving Bumfit a new look, really glorifying their shaggy locks and luminescent mass, and updating the color palette. And we honor the quality of counting, of adding, of gathering, of amassing, of shifting collectivity that Bumfit helps us access as our mascot for the Flock Protectors in our union.
