Building Community and Taking Deep Breaths

Hello! It’s been a while since we last spoke. Summer is just around the corner, but the heat has already set in here. The air is stickier and heavier. I feel more of the sun on my skin. And I’m also more tired from all of the time I’m spending plastered to the heat and plastered to my dissertation.

One of my promises to myself this year was to publish all four volumes of The Ecology of Multispecies Households, one book for each season. Something else I promised myself was no deadlines. And although my book is not beholden to any calendar, the seasons are, at least in the sense that they will come and they will go, and I will have to wait for them to come back again.

One of those promises outweighs the other. I still plan to write here and in many different places, but I’m indefinitely untying my writing from any official publishing with deadlines. I officially have less than two years to finish my dissertation, and it is feeling like it wants more attention from me, directly and to the point. My research has taken the form of paintings, poems, photos, and journal entries. And while I love my research in all of the ways it exists, it will also one day look like a dissertation, formatted, published, and assessed. That has to be created, too.

I’m excited to meet that dissertation. I’ve been cooking up plans, and I have a lot of work to do. In the meantime, I plan to share that process with you as milestones arrive, setting aside deadlines and expectations while remaining aware of what you might want and expect from me.

To my paid subscribers, for now, I will not be publishing regular zines until my dissertation is complete. I will offer freebies when I have them, but you’re free to proceed how you would like with this new information. I will always be grateful for the support I receive, but the support I receive can and does arrive in so many different ways, sometimes monetary and sometimes not.

We’ll talk again soon.

Lots of love,

Sydney

I set up a table at a market for the second time this year. This is also my first time setting up a table at a market that wasn’t affiliated with a conference I was teaching at. There’s an overgrown, empty field behind us that our tents aren’t allowed to touch because someone owns it and doesn’t want to share. But I don’t mind the overgrown field because it’s filled with Fleabane, Mullein, and Birds-Eye Speedwell.

Beyond the sound of traffic that rushes by on the state highway, birds are loud in the trees around us. So are the insects that I find bouncing across pictures of flowers on my tablecloth.

People trickle in. There aren’t any big rushes. Quiet moments grow softly loud as vendors move around, visiting one another, buying coffee, making trades. I never leave a market without doing at least one trade. If I haven’t made a trade, it means I didn’t make myself known to anyone. When I make myself known to people, I can’t help but give them things.

That’s one of the reasons why I like creating art and writing books. I want people to have them.

I barely made a profit, if any, this month or last month. But I’ll keep going back because the relationships I’ve been nurturing are more important than sales. We exchange phone numbers, emails, and things we’ve made. We ask each other to collaborate. We admire all of the amazing things we’re all doing. I really like this little market in a field next to a tattoo shop, full of people who want to share what they have.

Community building meanders. It is slow. It doesn’t always exchange information on the first encounter.

I left that market with one phone number, one email address, two collaboration invitations, two hugs, new friends, an herb-drying rack made of driftwood, earrings with holes to thread flowers through, and fabric patches stamped with incredibly cool drawings from an incredibly cool person.

I had a tarot session before I left. Tarot interests me, but it’s mostly something I’m passively curious about and only do when spontaneous opportunities arise. What I think is powerful about tarot is not the ability to predict or know, but the ability to question what is really true about one’s life. The magic happens not in the cards but in the conversation that happens between them.

Markets, Tarot readings, and exchanges of information are where community happens. They are moments when networking looks a lot like a Bumblebee bouncing from flower to flower.