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Dear friends, I’m writing to you for the very first time from my new home in Wisconsin. Tea is steeping in the kitchen and there’s a fire just starting to get going in the wood stove. I look outside and the sky is rippled like the sandy bottom of a lake. A classic October sky, like the ones I remember from my childhood. This year is the first in many that I’m experiencing a proper fall while also anticipating a very proper winter (very cold, very dark, very long, and hopefully very snowy). So long as this viral infection continues to rage through the Midwest, emotionally preparing for the season of long nights feels harder and lonelier than usual. I’ve found myself obsessively taking photos of the changing leaves, almost desperately, as if a photo can stop time. As if somehow, the phone can keep the leaves from dying, the tree-body limber, the frozen air from seeping in. Yet the days seem to be passing faster than ever. The changes that under normal circumstances feel cozy, now feel foreboding: frosty mornings, the sun setting noticeably earlier each evening. And with so much to pay attention to in the human realm, I’m spending far too much time in my head, anxious and spirally and wondering what’s coming. As a result, I feel like I’m only half here. Out of my body, rushing through the hours as if the faster I move the more of them I get to experience, or the quicker I’ll have answers and resolution…but that’s not how it works. Earlier this year, while sitting beneath a remarkably old and weathered willow tree, I developed a practice I call “radical gazing”. When I see something and feel compelled to take a photo, I deliberately choose to put the camera away. Instead, I focus on the image and let it melt into my eyes. I invite it into my space by pausing, breathing, and finding myself again. I take note of the feelings the image gives me, where and how it lands in my body—and often I’m moved to tears. I cry for the beauty found in the simplest things, but also for how much I realize I’m actually missing as I rush and scroll and peer through screens. I still take a lot of photos (I love taking photos), but I also gaze at a lot of trees (and lakes and grasses and so much more). When I do, I’m reminded that life is pushy. It can’t be paused and it doesn’t go away. It’s there in the drop and rot of leaves, the autumn die-off of insects. Even in the frigid cold and darkness of winter, life pulls us into it. Tirelessly. Demanding that we belong to it as it shifts and spirals, taking new forms and returning to old ones, expanding and folding in around itself at the same time. How are you belonging and returning to yourself in these rapid and rushing times? Rustles and leaf scrapes, Clare Ps- please see below for a few important announcements and updates. Thank you for reading!
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