I didn't plan to take essentially the entire summer "off" — out of the studio, away from my work, spending every minute possible outdoors and in cold water whenever possible. But that is how it shook out. I wrote last time about resistance — my resistance to work, and my attempts at granting myself the space to resist. To reset, to cold plunge, to be with loved ones, to let summer warm my heart.
And then fall arrived, and I felt renewed. Ready. And I sat down here and I started a few ideas, and began to re-engage. With making art, and trying to write about making art.
And then Oct. 7th happened, and everything afterwards. And showing back up on the internet to write about quilt making felt meaningless. Egoistic, impossible.
Let me state simply and unequivocally: Free Palestine. If you arrive here via some other internet presence of mine over the many years and iterations of so-called social media, I hope that comes as no surprise whatsoever. Palestinian Liberation and Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty (and so much more) are all parts of the same whole, and they do not stand in isolation. I am not a historian nor a geopolitical expert and I won't use my time here attempting to educate anyone; by now there are nearly infinite articles by brilliant people on the history and the making of this current moment, including by many people of Jewish heritage. I urge you not to listen to the American War Machine propaganda. This conflict is not an intractable, inevitable religious war but a manufactured political one born from colonization and state power. People are not their governments, and the struggle against state violence, occupation, internment, displacement, and colonization is not a complicated issue. I wish safety, prosperity and peace to all peoples; those things begin with decolonization, autonomy, freedom and solidarity. Interestingly — ironically? — it was an American Jewish poet who helped spark the Zionist movement who wrote: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
So then the fall, too, passed this space by. I have grown, fortunately for me, into an understanding of time as cyclical, seasonal, and spiraling. Whenever possible I try to let this wash over me like a freeing realization. As I age, as time seems to speed up, I also feel more able to remove myself from the forced perspective of "time as an arrow." This helps me — sometimes, though not always — to keep from feeling lost, awash in the idea that nothing ever improves, for anyone, that nothing ever gets better.
This, then, is the familiar place I find myself in over and over and over again. How to fully engage with, turn towards, and live my own quiet small life in the face of permanent humanitarian crises both around the world and at home. This, the question I think so many artists — and non-artists — struggle with. How to go about our days, how to find meaning in our meaning-making, when everything seems inconsequential and even wholly self-absorbed during times of global grief? When "my" government takes my money and transforms it into the missiles that destroy the hospitals and kill children.
I do not have the answers. But I feel a desire to show back up here.
So what have I done, in all this time? Since I last recorded here in July, I dove head first into renewing my knitting habit, and started an outrageous colorwork project that I've already ripped back too many times to count and who may never see the finish line. I went and stood in the room that once held my studio and now holds the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and I got to bask in the presence of the work of Marie Watt. I went south to camp in the golden fields of Oregon August, to the joint bachelor party of two new friends, and we stayed up nearly til dawn and walked in the woods at night to hear the waterfall. I read MariNaomi's I Thought You Loved Me, and wrote to Mari personally, thanking them for writing it, and they generously wrote me back. I went to northern Michigan, one of my favorite places in the world, and I swam in the lake over and over even when it was too cold to swim. I ate food that I still daydream about and I treated myself to seeing Kelly at Little Beauty Kitchen because I have been a fan of her for a long long time, and it was everything I hoped it would be and more, and if you have the chance to have your skin touched by her, you should not pass it up.
In September went to New York, alone, for three days and I stayed with friends and I saw live music and I bought an armload of books and I walked and walked and walked and I ate at least one bagel every day. I went out late, alone, dancing, and I revealed my broken heart to someone at 3am and then I sat with a friend on her birthday and we talked about grief and loss and she sent me to the American Folk Art Museum where I saw quilts that made me weep, sitting alone there on the bench in the quiet rooms. It was the most glorious three straight days of my year.
In October I made myself an outrageous costume for the first time in my life, spending far too much money and time and being handsomely rewarded by the looks and comments people gave me at the parties, and on the train, and eventually walking around downtown during the workday that was Halloween proper. I went to the beach for a weekend with a loved one and kept a fire going in the fireplace all day long through the rainy coastal day. In October, too, I finally completed sewing together the top of my most profoundly personal project of the last year.
In November I put a new quilt top up on the wall only to take it down again. I returned to Acid Vat only to take it down again, too. Loved ones came over in the evenings to listen and share new music with each other. We went to central Oregon with friends and we sat in scalding hot tubs in the freezing cold nights and we walked in the woods and we cooked and ate.
In December my crit group came back to my studio for the first time since last summer and we too talked and ate and laughed and also acknowledged the deep necessity of learning to live with the anger and disappointment that accompanies growing up. I learned to make candles from a new friend; on the solstice I gave them away to old friends. And on the 31st I stood in a circle with a group of people I admire with my whole heart, and we threw into the fire the things we had written down that we have decided not to take with us into 2024.
Throughout all of this, we protested. We called and wrote and went to our representatives offices and we stood on bridges and in roadways. We sat in each other's living rooms and talked and cried and sometimes didn't say anything at all. And there were other things in there, too, these past months. Hard things, bad nights, piss-poor days. But these are the things I'd like to remember. These are the things I'd like to record.
