UNEXPECTED SEASONS
To be swept out to sea
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Some feelings feel like they happened a whole lifetime ago, a whole world ago, a whole season ago. Welcome spring, welcome Aries season, happy new year to every new age queer and freak who celebrates this change into the fire realm. This knowing of the melting snow, even as we trust it will return here in the North we also trust it can’t be much longer. I look at this picture and think wow they really didn’t know what was coming, they sat here in fear and breakdown and loss but didn’t know how swiftly this corner would no longer be their corner. How winter hadn’t even begun to blow in as only the coldest blizzard knows how.
My practice feels a bit out to sea, a bit out to shore right now. It is both so close to me yet so far, and I am floating in the in between of knowing that stable housing and a spacious studio might bring comfort and flow, and a seasonal rental with a porch corner studio and waves for a front yard until the end of May will also suit me until what is next is known. How a Christmas card and a lease and plans of the future can’t keep even the tidiest corners.
Is what is next ever really known? Pants off in my Colorado sewing studio I certainly thought, this is stability. This must be what it feels like. My insides were melting and churning and nothing could regulate and nothing felt trustworthy but this corner, I could trust this corner and this chair with the disintegrating wheels. You can only trust a wheel that’s breaking for so long.
It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair - Joan Didion
Seasons are planned on a calendar or god made them or Earth made them or perhaps come collaborative team created them but every year on the same day it is the last day of Pisces season, the first day of spring, and Billy’s birthday. I know this because being friends with Bill and listening to Bill’s songs is like feeling the end and the beginning all at once. It’s a reminder that seasons change but your true huns stay true.
As winter rolled in this year and took me out I found that every single thing that has happened was to be expected. There was nothing unexpected about the end of my relationship, who showed up, who disappeared, everyone played their part exactly as would be expected. An unexpected season often rushes in quickly but when we pause to look at the consistency of action, perhaps it wasn’t so unexpected after all.
Hermiting away in a cottage in winter felt true and now emerging into spring feels true. I was so proud of myself for filing my taxes and now as I chip away in an effort to pay them to zero so I can get a home loan and buy a house all by May 27 I feel both frantic and slow. I feel calm and steady, and also expansive and ready to transform. Filing seven years of taxes in a few months is a very tornado person thing to do and also trying to pay off those taxes in swift precision and vision a home is also a tornado person to thing to do. But that is expected of me, to tornado my way to the next thing.
I also trust perhaps the next season is something else. Another storage unit, riding the waves with June to the next place, accepting the fact that as fast as I can move isn’t always fast enough and knowing fast enough isn’t real - everything is on time.
The corner of my studio I thought would fix everything. If I just have my own space then I will feel like an artist and stop questioning myself. If I just have this chair and the chair is the right color then it will be right. I thought if I just finally have this space, outside of my house, to make my lists and sew and lay on the couch. If I just get the right couch and keep my mess separate, then I will be loved the way I want to be loved.
The thing about thrifting the right couch though is it doesn’t change other people’s willingness to put in the work. The thing about having your own little corner is it won’t make other people talk slower or listen better. The thing about taking your pants off and looking into the camera and thinking … look maybe this is the corner that fixes everything, is that nothing can fix what has been broken for so long with so little effort to pivot. So little effort to save the bigness of what was and could be.
Let Spring be kept for one thing and one thing only : to save ourselves. May this season of survival shift into prosperity. Into acceptance of all the times I thought if I got my corner just right everything else would fall into place. I am the only thing that needs to fall into my place. And my place is right under me. Wherever I am right now in this exact moment. My eyes are closed in the coffee shop while Mary’s harp sounds fill my ears. I’m so glad the corner didn’t save me or give me what I thought I wanted.
What a gift to be swept out to sea
Grateful to see Avery Williamson’s show Between Seasons at Cedar North
This Thursday! Up from the Archives #2: W.I.N.G.S.
Order The Sound of The Afterglows cassette
Pre Orders for Care Manual by kamra sadia hakim from Flower Press are back in stock
Carole Harris: Bright Moments quilt show at The Grand Rapids Art Museum - ALSO exhibited right now is the work of Carrie Mae Weems - run don’t walk!
Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Playing harmonica) (1990) Up North Pride call for artists due April 1- have your own little June art exhibit in a shipping container!
Really committed and lit up by my morning + evening skincare routine
Catherine Cohen’s Netflix special THE TWIST? SHES GORGEOUS is going to be one of the best hours of your life I laughed so hard and was reborn
The swan, the swan continues to go in and out of the water at its own pace
xo mar
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