60 SQUARES: The Chosen Point

Possibility, Phi, and the Forms That Wait to Become Matter

This essay began with a single, ordinary painting and a cloud that was never on the canvas. From that small act of imagination it moves through questions of what it means for a form to exist before it is made, through the resistance of geometry and the self-returning proportion of phi, through the physical work of cutting and bolting steel into an open lattice of sixty squares, and finally outward to the civic ground we share. It is an inquiry conducted with tools in hand and with the deliberate refusal to claim more than the making itself can support.

I. A Cloud That Was Not There

II. The Painting Is Not Exhausted

III. All Times and All Versions

IV. Mathematics Before Matter

V. Phi: Relation That Returns to Itself

VI. The Forms You Made Before You Had the Language

VII. The Icosidodecahedron Opens

VIII. Sixty Squares: The Chosen Point

IX. Expansion Without End

X. Fuller, 137, and the Discipline of Wonder

XI. Possibility Becomes Political

XII. Ending: The Cloud Through the Lattice

~~~~~

60 SQUARES: THE CHOSEN POINT

John F. Sendelbach, August 11, 2026

I. A Cloud That Was Not There

The painting hangs slightly crooked in a hallway that smells of old carpet and disinfectant. It is the kind of picture that arrives without ceremony in a doctor’s waiting room or a thrift store, carrying a cracked gilt frame whose gold has long since dulled to a thin, uneven shine. The glass is filmed with dust that no one has cleaned in years; behind it the canvas measures perhaps eighteen inches by twenty-four, its pigments faded to a quiet, almost apologetic range of greens and grays. A thin water stain darkens the lower left corner where moisture once crept in and left its mark. Near the top of the frame a small nick interrupts the molding. The paper backing is yellowed and soft to the touch if anyone ever bothers to turn the picture around. Nothing about the object asks to be noticed. It has already begun to decay in the ordinary way that overlooked things decay. Metaphysics, if it is going to begin at all, begins here—not in a temple or a seminar room, but in a common, slightly damaged thing that has been hanging long enough to become part of the background.

FISTFUL OF CHANGE ©2026 John F. Sendelbach

FISTFUL OF CHANGE 

©2026 John F. Sendelbach

VERSE 1

There’s a man beneath the awning where the rain runs off the tin,

With a paper cup held empty and the weather setting in.

I’ve held that cup myself, friend, in a different kind of rain,

So I reach down through my pockets past the lighter, past the change.

Past the lint and past the small dreams I was saving for some day,

Pull a fistful of the silver and I give it all away.

Never count it—what’s the use in hoarding what you cannot name?

He says, “Spare change,” and don’t that ask me two things just the same:

Spare a little of the silver, and spare a way to change.

CHORUS

Fistful of change, fistful of change,

You can lock it in your anger or let loose into the rain.

It’s the same cold weight of silver when you give it or you swing,

But the opening of the hand is where the mercy enters in.

Fistful of change.

VERSE 2

Now I never give the whole of it; one coin is always there,

Cold against my sweating palm like something I can’t spare.

Reeded edges, green old copper, little circles in the skin,

Leave a tattoo in the flesh that even rain won’t wash again.

Is it small change? Is it real change? Does it matter what I do?

Did I move a single stone, or just make a show for you?

I have pitched them in the fountains for the words I couldn’t say—

But you can’t make a wish with a fist; you’ve got to give it away.

CHORUS

Fistful of change, fistful of change,

You can lock it in your anger or let loose into the rain.

It’s the same cold weight of silver when you give it or you swing,

But the opening of the hand is where the mercy enters in.

Fistful of change.

BRIDGE

They can make change of a man, you know—they’ll break him down in parts,

Spend him out a coin at a time, right down to his wounded heart.

I’m the change come back from the counter, I’m the remnant of the score,

What was left of the transaction in a town that mends no more.

I had things I meant to build here; most got halfway to the ground,

Worn beyond my own reflection like a coin passed all around.

But a beaten coin still spends, friend, and a beaten man still gives,

And the fist this town once closed on me won’t tell my hand how to live.

VERSE 3

So he takes it in his fingers, and he don’t say that he’s glad,

And I wouldn’t want his gratitude for something small I had.

No debt is owed between us—only two poor men in gray,

And a little piece of metal passing hand to hand away.

I can’t tell you that it saved him; I can’t say it saved me too,

But I felt it leave my hand, and something lighter followed through.

It will pass through hands whose names and faces I will never know—

The last hand hasn’t held it yet, and it always comes and goes.

FINAL CHORUS

Fistful of change, fistful of change,

Keep it closed inside your anger or you lose it in the rain.

Same cold weight of silver—but the open hand is holy—

I’ll come around empty-handed, then I’ll fill it up again.

Fistful of change, 

You can lock it in your anger

let loose into the rain

let loose into the rain

let loose into the rain

Fistful of change...

You’ve got to let it go...

Fistful of change...

And it  comes back around again.

back around again.

back around again.

Fistful of change...

The Backyard Dogleg

Growing up a couple of miles from Bob-O-Link Golf Club in Orchard Park, we never really thought of ourselves as golfers. That word felt too formal, too country-club. We were just a handful of kids who always seemed to have golf clubs leaning against the garage wall or tossed in the corner of the basement. My friends and I—three or four of us around the same age—treated those clubs the way other kids treated baseball bats or skateboards. They were simply part of the landscape, as ordinary and necessary as the bikes we rode or the streetlights that came on at dusk.

We didn’t have matching bags. The clubs were mismatched hand-me-downs: wooden-shafted woods with cracked grips, irons with dents from years of garage-sale abuse, a putter that had clearly lived several previous lives. The equipment itself told the story. Golf here wasn’t about status. It was something you did with whatever was lying around.

One of us liked to repeat the old story that golf began in Scotland with people hitting rocks at English soldiers. It’s a great story, even if historians don’t think it’s true. Like a lot of good golf tales, it says more about Scottish humor than Scottish history. We didn’t care either way. We just kept swinging.

THE FREE PILE a novel for the ones the record left out

The Four Blocked Flows: An Exhibition of Buried Circulation in Shelburne Falls

The Four Blocked Flows

An Exhibition of Buried Circulation in Shelburne Falls

©2026 John F. Sendelbach

Curatorial Introduction

The acquisition of the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract marks the first official, paid accession of the Mohawk Repair Institute. Purchased from an online antiquarian picker who recovered the document from an anonymous estate clearing in Maine, this deed is far more than a fragment of local ephemera. It provides a contractual snapshot of a town systematically re-engineered in the mid-19th century—a landscape where the same elite hands that dammed the river, channeled municipal capital, and constructed new civic spaces also signed off on the physical relocation of the dead.

Exhibition Overview: “The Four Blocked Flows” is an archival and topographical exhibition that uses the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract as a lens to analyze the systematic interruption of four interwoven systems of circulation in Shelburne Falls during the mid-19th century: biological (salmon), hydrological (streams), social (labor and capital), and memorial (the dead). The Mohawk Repair Institute presents this material not as antique nostalgia but as the evidentiary basis for design-driven interventions aimed at daylighting buried streams, re-marking forgotten graves, and restoring the town’s open circulation between past and present.

Mechanic Street Brook Daylighting & Village Greenway

UnErase Mechanic Street Brook

A Daylighting, Greenway, Watershed Learning, and Community Repair Proposal

Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

© 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

NOTE: This document evolves as field investigation continues. Current version: May 2026.

OVERVIEW

Core Project Vision: Restore baseflow to historic Mechanic Street Brook. Primary location: Ghost Hollow, a steep-sided, ten-foot-deep former stream channel behind the historic barn at the town-owned 49 Mechanic Street parcel. Three main technical interventions: install a Dutch-Door Weir (self-regulating passive flow-control structure) at the existing diversion; decommission and physically remove the 1961 Rat Tunnel (the diagonal 3-by-4-foot box culvert that is the root cause of sixty years of flooding); and daylight the brook through the restored Otter Way corridor on the town parcel.

Expected Results: Natural meandering channel with pools, riffles, and bioengineered banks. Primary construction material: approximately 200 tons of local glacial stone sourced from Beaver Picchu™ property less than a mile away. New public greenway and watershed learning corridor connecting Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School to the Deerfield River waterfront. Elimination of stagnant mosquito-breeding ditch, replaced by continuously moving water and a functional natural predatory ecosystem. First accurate stormwater map of the Mechanic Street corridor — solving a documented DPW infrastructure crisis that recently produced a drilling incident when a contractor struck an unmapped concrete pipe on Bridge Street.

The Geographic Loop: The restored brook physically reopens the historic water corridor that once connected the Arms Cemetery — now the Beaver Picchu™ upper watershed — to the Pratt Memorial (Arms) Library, whose foundation sits within twenty feet of where the brook once cascaded to the Deerfield River below Salmon Falls. One block south of that cascade point, at the corner of Bridge Street and Deerfield Avenue, is the Pocumtuck State Park heart site at Salmon Crossing, where the Sachem Salmon sculpture and the Sixty Square Sphere will be installed above the glacial potholes where Shelly still waits. The brook restoration and the PSP heart site are not adjacent proposals. They are one connected argument, written in the landscape by two centuries of erasure and now being corrected in the same generation.

Immediate Municipal Actions Required:

• Direct DPW and Conservation Commission to cease and remediate illegal brush/leaf dumping in Ghost Hollow
• Authorize Water Department and DPW to release all available drainage records
• Retain the 49 Mechanic Street parcel permanently in public ownership
• Approve submission of the MassDEP Ecological Restoration Pre-Design Grant

Key Partners: Shelburne Conservation Commission · Shelburne Water Department · Shelburne DPW · Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School · Connecticut River Watershed Council · Mass Audubon · Franklin Land Trust · UMass Amherst LARP Department · Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association

fish tour

The Fish Tour

The Culinary Institute of America ~ Hyde Park, New York

A Culinary Sculpture Series for the Hudson River Watershed Proposal ~ May 2026

John F. Sendelbach  Sculptor & Landscape Designer. Shelburne Falls, MA 

The Idea in Plain TermsOne sculpture already lives on the CIA campus: a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon made entirely from salvaged culinary cutlery. “Old Diamondsides” stands near the entrance plaza, overlooking the Hudson River that once teemed with its living namesakes. It was installed in 2015 as the first node of a larger idea. The Fish Tour completes that idea.
Eight site-specific sculptures, each fabricated primarily from recycled stainless steel kitchen tools and equipment, trace a deliberate pedestrian route across the Hyde Park campus. Each piece represents a signature species of the Hudson River estuary — ecologically, historically, and culinarily significant. Interpretive signage at every stop weaves together river science, watershed restoration, culinary tradition, and the deeper interdependence of healthy waters and healthy kitchens. The tour begins at the academic core and descends toward the riverside, turning underutilized spaces into moments of surprise, recognition, reflection, and quiet delight.It is a walking conversation between the kitchen and the river.

7 AM Knock

The 7 AM Knock: A Ledger of Silence and Revelation

Thinking about Omi’s life on the day of her birth got me reflecting on the rest of the bloodline. If Omi’s deafness created the "inherited acoustics" of our house—the need to project and launch words across weather—then my father’s silence created the deeper infrastructure of our history.
By the fall before COVID hit, the family rhythm had shifted to a hospice rotation. My brother, my sister, and I—the three of us left after losing our brother Alan—took turns traveling from Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to sit vigil in Lancaster, New York. My parents were in their final landing place: a modest apartment at Greenfields. Three weeks prior, during our last real conversation, my mother had drifted into a hallucination, calling me Jeff, my childhood best friend. My father and I didn’t correct her; we just shared a quiet glance of acceptance, watching the blurred lines of a long life softening at the edges. When I arrived that final Friday, she was unconscious in the medical wing—just hours from death.
Everyone knows you don’t knock on a door at seven in the morning unless the world has shifted. I was kneeling on the white carpet of that small living room, surrounded by the vintage transit schedules and victorian papers I had brought to photograph for my eBay shop, trying to keep my hands busy while my heart waited. When the knock finally came, my father and I shared a look of absolute knowing. I opened the door to a Black nurse who had come to tell us that Nancy Ann (Sahs) Sendelbach born in 1929, was gone.
Later that afternoon, in the strange hollow quiet that follows a death, I drew one final entry out of my father’s internal ledger. I brought up the derogatory language I had pushed back against in my teens. At 94, he finally explained the root of it. He told me about the late 1930s in Buffalo—walking to technical high school through neighborhoods carved up by redlining, where he and his friends were regularly chased and harassed by Black kids. That unspoken trauma became the silent engine behind the “white flight” that carried my parents to the rural safety of Orchard Park in the 1960s.
The irony is layered and thick. They had moved us onto land founded in the early 1800s by Quakers like David Eddy (who arrived from Vermont in 1804 and claimed hundreds of acres around what became the Four Corners) and Obadiah Baker (who settled in 1807 and opened his home for the first sanctioned Quaker meetings). This was ground soaked in reformist ideals: a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Quaker families helped fugitives heading north to Canada. The Baker homestead on East Quaker Road still carries that marker today.
Yet that same Quaker “plainness” and moral clarity rested on prior displacement. The Haudenosaunee—particularly the Seneca Nation—had long stewarded this territory. By the 1820s–1830s, through treaties, pressure, and the gradual sale of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the Seneca presence was largely removed from the immediate area, even as Quaker settlers built meeting houses, aided escaped slaves, and championed the oppressed. We grew up running through fields and playing in Smokes Creek, a landscape shaped by both the Friends’ quiet testimony and the later hand-crafted integrity of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft movement nearby. We were products of a retreat from urban friction, raised in a cradle built on layered displacements.
Sitting there at 94, my father didn’t need to be forced into reconciliation—he was ready. I coaxed the story out, and he spoke clearly: he had no problem with Black people. He had reached a place of transcendence, cared for in his final years by a diverse staff at Greenfields and delivered the hardest news of his life by a Black woman. He didn’t die carrying the secret or the old fear. When he handed me my mother’s gold wedding band that afternoon, the inherited acoustics of our house finally harmonized.
The fields of Orchard Park are mostly cookie-cutter subdivisions now. But on that white carpet in Lancaster, a much older and more complicated landscape was finally cleared.