quarterly report

I looked back at this year and realized that I’ve written basically a quarterly update, so here’s one more to round out the year.

This fall, prompted by much of the thinking that happened during my completion of 12 weeks of The Artist’s Way, I took a wheel-throwing class and took on ceramics in a major way. It was refreshing to work with a new material, first humbling, then exhilarating, then humbling, all of the new steps and stages. I really loved the challenge of learning and the tangibility of the output. I made a set of dinner plates and many little ashtray, cups, ramekins, and bowls that have been distributed to loved ones as gifts.

I have felt a small engine working inside of me to make my life and home beautiful and full of design, art, hand made things that speak to me. My enveloping altar.

I also made five sweaters this year (one for me, the rest for loved ones, one for a baby!!) and lots of tiny baby socks that are the sweetest thing to make. I had more pregnant people in my life than ever before so I anticipate a need for more tiny sweaters and socks soon, its been a good thing to get some practice now.

There is a strong creative pulse in me, that feels stoked. I have ideas, I feel driven to find time to make them come to life. The last few months I have felt a desire to turn back towards a capital A art and think beyond craft and object to integrate more concept and idea into the work that I’m making. Its all good. I just started to remember some things about art that feel poetic and brilliant, soothing to the brain, and why that is important to me.

I went recently to see a new Ragnar Kjartansson piece called Sunday Without Love, a video scene replicating a vintage postcard image of a mountain landscape with a smattering of people throughout the frame. In the video, they sing together:

You must learn to live

Live without love

Love is not good for you

Stop all this longing

Looking at stars

Stay on the ground

Hear what I say

The words are sardonic, but the delivery is mournful, romantic, pleading. How can you take in this beautiful scene and think, love is not good for you? what? But also, anyone who has been through heartbreak, or felt the twist of love through the lens of post-relationship introspection (or rumination) knows the feeling too. And the foolish resolve, oh I’ll just learn to live without love, simple. That’ll be the better path. Or, I just don’t have it (romantic love), and so that must be fine, I must go on living. This is how I hear it:

You must learn to live

Live without love (yes- sure)

Love is not good for you (mmm?)

Stop all this longing (yes)

Looking at stars (? no!)

Stay on the ground (yes!)

Hear what I say

and repeat.

Ironically, I went to go see this piece with a new friend, someone I recently met in a dating context but we decided it better to move forward in friendship. It felt funny and awkward to discuss together after - navigating different stages of longing, hopefulness about love - how this piece could land depending on your proximity to losing love or wanting distance from it, or wanting it.

I don’t think love and longing are the same thing, and maybe that’s the message I’m taking with me from this piece. Or what I needed to hear, or whatever.

“Stay on the ground” is also the thing I keep hearing, or finding. In other music too. I have a recent obsession with Joan Armatrading and have been reveling in her catalog (after a lovely weekly spinning many of her records up in a cabin upstate). She has this song Down to Zero that starts:

Oh, the feeling

When you’re reeling

You step lightly thinking you’re number one

Down to zero

With a word

Leaving

For another one

Now you walk with your feet back on the ground

Down to the ground

Down to the ground

The line about walking with your feet on the ground, it spits so quickly from her mouth, so staccato, it really satisfies, but also deflates whatever came before it - some sort of floating, or walking on air, now you have to be grounded. Have to be! Have to be in the real world.

And because this song seems to be endlessly relevant, Cameron Winter’s Love Takes Miles also touches on the grounding act of desire, of knowing what you want, or what we can provide to one another, or ourselves, when we move towards it:

You left me promising your shoes
I need your feet more than you do
I need somebody sent down from the sun
That talks to me how you used to

Lonely as hell, feet on the ground
What I want is on my mind

I am walking into 2026 wanting to stay with this feeling of creative persistence, with my feet on the ground. I’m leaving this year hoping to spend the next year loving much better, myself and others, still staying on the ground but looking at stars, too.