ABOUT SOARING PIG STUDIOS
A business and a home bar
Soaring Pig is not only in the name of my business. It is the name of my home bar, The Soaring Pig.
Why Soaring Pig?
The name comes from Pigs on the Wing, Parts 1 and 2, the two brief songs that open and close Pink Floyd’s Animals. Between them is an album filled with cynicism about power, greed, status, conformity and the ways people can use one another.
What always interested me was what those two songs did to the album around them. They put something human at either end of all that ugliness. The idea, at least as I have always taken it, is that having another person who matters to you changes how you experience the world and helps you find some clarity and purpose within it.
My copy of Animals hangs in The Soaring Pig.
That is also what tied the name to the bar for me. The songs offer a kind of shelter from everything happening around them, and that is what a good bar can be. Not an escape from life so much as a place where the noise gets turned down for a while and the people you are with become more important than whatever is happening outside the room.
When I built a bar in my house, The Soaring Pig seemed like the right name for it.
Applying the name to my work was simple
There is no shortage of noise in the world. The same is true inside organizations. There is always more information, more background, more opinion, more process and more that somebody would like to say.
Figuring out what actually matters, who needs to understand it and what is getting in the way of that understanding is the key to good communication. Once you know those things, the job becomes much clearer.
That is true in my personal and professional life. It is the same energy and effort whether I am writing something, taking a photograph, producing a video, helping an organization explain a complicated decision or having a conversation with a friend.
The work changes. The underlying idea really does not.
And then there is the other meaning
There is another reason the name has always worked for me: pigs are not supposed to fly.
Most of the interesting things I have done in my life came from taking an opportunity, trying something I had not done before or stepping into something without knowing exactly where it would lead. Some worked. Some did not. But a surprising amount of my life exists because I was willing, every once in a while, to believe that something unlikely might actually be possible.
Soaring Pig Studios has never been tied to one kind of work because neither have I.
Maybe that is because the two ideas behind it still make sense to me: pay attention to the people and things that actually matter, and do not become so practical that you stop leaving room for the improbable.
A lot of the life I have had would never have happened if I had not occasionally believed pigs could fly.