what comes next
go to Trader Joe’s, pick a color palette, buy three bunches for $3 each, arrange in a pitcher, and put them in a sunny window.
In the aftermath of a rupture, time goes quietly slow. The fire burns out; the land is left windswept. Here, in the depths of winter, ice and rain cling to the berries by my window, the last few brown leaves in the garden. Bereft gives way to bleak, and it’s easy — too easy, sometimes — to stay here, cold and alone. What comes next?
I’ve wept over the barrenness left behind, to be sure. But I’ve also found myself clutching a little bag of seeds that made it through the fire — the answers I know to be true, the questions I keep asking. Deep winter is a frozen time, but it is also the time to sort the seeds, to dream out the garden, to start asking ourselves better questions.
On Saturday, I asked one of my teachers, When do you know that the part that needed to experience a death has actually completed the cycle? She said: I don’t.
It wasn’t a good question. Certainty doesn’t exist here, in the space betwixt and between. The Magician holds both; many answers are true at once. So, the renewal lies in the playful experimentation that comes next. What if?
On Sunday, another one of my teachers asked me, How will your quilt be of service?
That is a better question.
Creativity and fertility spring from here, from the remnants of winter and bare earth. We put down a layer of groundcover, feed the starter with flour and water, press the fiddly seams with a hot steam iron, give another month or two for the roots to burrow before the first thaw. I am building the foundation, stewarding the ground I am on, finding familiar third spaces, playing with different answers and new questions. The crocuses always poke their way through the ice, in the end.
My teacher’s teacher said: Everything is sacred; nothing is precious. Cut into the fabric, stop hoarding the seeds, dab perfume on a Monday, burrow down to burst forth recklessly. Ask yourself better questions.
a note:
Enrollment for HOW TO RECOVER, my online class on building a personal practice of restoration and care, closes this week! We start on Saturday, January 28, and we’ll explore better questions in module 4. If you’ve already registered, please forward to a friend who might love class, or share the link on social media. If you haven’t yet, reply to this email to ask me any questions about class.
a few medicines:
histories of trauma and resilience embedded in fabric and portraits.
dreaming of planting by perusing seed catalogs and local artists.
the sound of steel and brass scissors slicing through scraps of linen.
until next time.