The Sun on our Faces

February is still frozen, but the days are getting longer ...

It might be gloomy, but there’s an eagle soaring across this sky.

February. The gloomiest, windiest month of the year. It’s a tough month to live in the northern-tier states, but I have to say, this February, I find myself coming back to the surface, breathing deep, turning my face to the sunshine that has come back to us. The days go on past five o’clock again. There have been whole days at a time in my greenhouse shed addition at the back of the house where I feel like I’m working inside one of those lamps people use for seasonal affective disorder. On a sunny day with snow on the ground, it’s glorious out there. Warm. Bright. And most important for Livingston, protected from the wind.

Days-old baby with his momma in the bottom field.

The babies are back in the bottom field. Alvin, our rancher neighbor has been calving. He takes them back over to his home place for the actual calving, and then they start showing back up in the bottom field. Two or three cow-calf pairs. Then ten. Then the whole herd. The calves are so funny as babies — they’re not really cows yet. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” The idea that the development of individual organisms (ontogeny) follows  the same phases of the evolution of the organism itself (phylogeny). Baby cows kicking up their heels, racing one another around the field, bold calves trying to stare down my car as I drive out from the cabin, only to skitter away at the sound of the automatic window going down. Cows with a little wild left in them. 

My Himself and I have been through a grim winter this year, but we’ve been through it together, and even though our families handle these things in very different ways, I’d venture to say we’ve done pretty well together. We’ve given one another space. We’ve been there when the tears come. We’ve kept one another company, and held space for each other through a big life transition, losing our mothers. It’s been a lot, but I think we’re each grateful to have had the other through this big life event. 

Coming to the end of this story with my mother feels for me like coming out of a long walk through a difficult landscape. There were swamps, and dark woods, and soaring vistas along the way, but I’m deeply glad this journey is over. I hadn’t realized how it had been weighing on me until I could feel my creative impulses coming back. There’s this book I’ve been working on forever, which seems to be housed in stacks of notebooks that are currently open all over my house. There are notes I want to find about Derek Jarman, and gardens, and ideas I’ve been working on for decades about nature and wilderness and gardens and Zen concepts of non-dualism. They’re in those notebooks. Threads of ideas. And so now I’m doing that part of the writing where I go back in and try to collate them. Try to see what I have. Try to figure out how to say what I want to say. 

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But creativity is mysterious. Creativity has something to do with craft, but it also has more to do with life. Creativity is something that is a steady stream, in the subconscious realm, in the realm of the spirit. And if you tap into it and you’re blessed enough to have something come from that stream into reality and manifest on your desk, it’s not because of anything other than that’s what God wanted to be so. Jon Batiste to Suleika Jaouad

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The office in summertime, during a previous bout of notebook excavation.

Part of this upwelling that’s happening is not just collating piles of notebooks, but thinking about sewing again. I’ve mostly done utility sewing all winter. Some tops — I have one I’ve turned into a kind of uniform. I’ve made it in probably a dozen different fabrics. I also made a bunch of slightly-austere wool vests/waistcoats, a Japanese pattern. Very plain. With the wide-sleeved shirt, and a pair of corduroy pants, that’s been the winter uniform. Warm. Nice looking. Comfy. 

But I’ve had a jacket in my head for a couple of weeks now. I bought some beautiful tweeds last fall off eBay from a company in the UK. There’s a blue tweed with bright pink and periwinkle flecks in it, and there’s a floral lawn I bought last spring that will be perfect for a lining. I want a light, soft, slightly-structured jacket for these days when the house is cool, or as the weather warms up — something lightweight but warm. I can see this jacket in my head. Yesterday afternoon I cut the wool, and today I’ll probably go cut out the lining. Maybe I’ll get it sewed up today, I’m not sure. 

Because this is the problem when the creativity genie shows back up. There are so many things to make. There is the book, but there’s wanting to make things to wear that make me as happy as my winter uniform has this year. There’s cooking too — my bread mojo appears to be back, which is pretty great. We finally have a real bakery in town, but I still like my own bread better than anyone else’s. 

Sourdough hamburger buns, right out of the oven.

Every once in a while I go into a tailspin about the writing career I didn’t pursue. In part it was because, without a real mentor I had no idea that my tiny book, and the offers I was getting for conferences and to teach a few workshops — I had no idea that *was* the career. The beginnings of it. And part of it is that I really didn’t love that. People who teach workshops and who really love being a part of a creative community are so important. But that wasn’t for me. Writing was always so personal, so interior, that I felt weirdly exposed doing those events. I didn’t like it.

And of course none of it pays. And I had to make a living. 

But when I get into one of those spin cycles about having wasted my life and squandered my talent and all the rest — it’s like meditation, when you’re on the cushion and your brain spins out — all you can do is return it gently to the task at hand. Breathing. Counting. Living in this moment. Here. Right now. 

I love the life I built. I love my wee house, and my garden, and my basement sewing room where I can cook up projects, and my greenhouse room where I can sit on a sunny winter day and feel the energy of the sun concentrating and bouncing into my space. I love the cats and the dog and the chickens and Himself. I love my little town, and my community (even though since pandemic I’ve been even more hermity than ever). 

It’s all good. I did what I wanted to do. I found myself a safe space, and I built a life in which about 80% of my days are taken up with doing something creative. Even my job, which most people wouldn’t see as such, is creative. I write little stories about internet security, which go out into the world, and even though it’s capitalism and marketing — I’m shilling safety, and security. With nice people who are also trying to figure out how we can do this work in a creative way. 

And so on a February morning when the sun is trying to break through the snow flurries, I write to you from my little creative ark of a house, where I have a glorious plethora of creative projects spinning up, where I’m making things with my hands and my brain, bringing stuff into the world that wasn’t here before. May you too start feeling the surge of spring, even if it’s buried deep in the still-frozen earth. There are days when we’ve got the sunshine on our faces again. The earth still turns, the sun is coming back …