The Sitting Room

Sit down inside W.S. Merwin’s hand-built garden dojo. Immerse yourself in the sounds of his palm forest, deep in the Pe‘ahi Stream valley, on Maui’s rugged and rural north coast. 

NOTE: Please make sure your sound is turned on. Click the bottom right corner of the video to enlarge.

---

Sayler / Morris
Threshold (Meditation Edit for The Merwin Conservancy), 2020

This new edit of Threshold is a meditative video created by artist duo Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler / Morris and The Canary Project), in collaboration with The Merwin Conservancy, as an offering of sanctuary in a time of crisis. The filmmakers wish to thank W.S. Merwin and Paula Merwin for generously welcoming them to film at their home in 2016.

Threshold was originally part of a site-specific installation in collaboration with Ian Boyden titled Palm: All Awake in the Darkness that was commissioned by American Writers Museum in Chicago with support from the Poetry Foundation.  The video was shot entirely in and around a small room that the poet W.S. Merwin built for meditation. This room sits in the middle of a palm garden that Merwin and his wife Paula grew on a wasteland left by colonial plantations on Maui. Tree-by-tree, they transformed the land into what Merwin called a “garden that aspires to be a forest.” The title of the video is taken from one of Merwin’s poems in which he writes, “what did I have to do with anything I could remember / all I did not know went on beginning around me…”

Concept, direction and editing:  Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler / Morris)
Sound design:  Matthew Patterson Curry and Sayler / Morris
Videography: Sayler / Morris
Additional videography:  Lauren Harper
Color correction and additional editing:  Andrew Rice

Produced by Sara Tekula for the Merwin Conservancy

Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

---

“The Sitting Room” has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BOMB Magazine, among other national media organizations.