Field notes from the studio. Not finished thoughts — thoughts in the process of becoming something.
Carl Sagan wrote that we are made of starstuff — that the iron in our blood was forged in the cores of dying stars billions of years before the Earth existed. I have been thinking about this for about fifteen years and I am not finished thinking about it yet.
There is a particular comfort in deep time that took me a long time to find. It used to feel annihilating — the scale of the universe, the brevity of a human life measured against it. Thirteen-point-eight billion years. One hundred years, if we're lucky and stubborn. The math seemed cruel.
Then something shifted. I started to understand that the scale isn't the point. The fact that I am here at all — that the universe arranged itself into a configuration capable of noticing itself — that is the astonishing thing. Not a tragedy. A miracle wearing the costume of statistics...
Continue reading →I have been working with bones for years now and I still don't fully understand why they feel the way they feel in the hand. Not morbid. Not heavy. Something more like — honest. A bone is what remains when everything that was impermanent has departed. What's left is structure. The thing that held the shape.
Continue reading →When I was finally diagnosed as autistic in my late thirties, the first thing I felt wasn't grief or relief. It was recognition. Like finding a name for a country I had always lived in but could never locate on a map. The second thing I felt was the urge to go home and look at my collection...
Continue reading →A spell assumes the world can be made to do what you want. A ritual assumes nothing about outcome — it is simply an act performed with intention, a way of marking that this moment is different from the one that came before. I have been thinking about why one of those feels honest to me and the other doesn't...
Continue reading →Rivers branch like roots — roots branch like neurons — neurons branch like galaxies. I keep a list of these. Shapes the universe returns to regardless of scale. There is something here that feels important and I haven't been able to articulate it completely but I am going to try...
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