Small Harvests

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1. A small harvest of weaving knowledge every week

2. Saying goodbye again to the lovely cottonwood

3. Studio shelf, Joy Road deer

4. Snapdragons seeding themselves

5. Tools and swatches

6. Admiring Mary Nohl’s workshop (and friend)

7. Beautiful kale

8. Some of our purple potatoes

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As we reach the end of our first year in this space I am at peace with the pace of the garden. Yellow locust leaves cover the carpet of flattened perennials in the front yard like spent confetti. Towering above the wind-tattered and sun-faded greenery the kale and only the kale is still booming sunward. The raspberries are overripe and shrinking back on their seeds. When I consider the seasons of soil remediation, nurturing, and watching that stretch ahead of us it fills me with a calmness like no other. I spend hours out there doing nothing much. The only urgency I feel is to be present. It’s more than patience- it’s an understanding born from witnessing without judgment. The plants, the animals and the soil all come as they are and within that is an invitation for us to do the same. Despite knowing, very well, that I am just as affected by the weather and the angle of sun as the plants for whom I have infinite grace I do not afford myself the same understanding. 

Over the last decade my personal artistic expectations got caught up in the riptide of social media. After prolonged exposure I began to expect myself to produce work at a steady clip, I thought I should be endlessly happy about what I create, and I considered it a given that I would always be able to speak about my work from a place of confidence. Expectations like that are void of forgiveness and understanding, two crucial factors in keeping my practice and mind aligned. Luckily, my practice has paid such expectations little heed. It moves to its own tides in the deep, barely conscious of the chaos at the shore. When I extracted myself from social media I very much exited the water on the sandy side. It happens that way sometimes, especially when you’re tired from other parts of living. From this dry and sunny vantage point I can see that my mind needs shifting before I dive back into the depths, but my practice, the act of putting stitches in fabric and marks on paper, is doing just fine. 

I wish I could pick up the whole relationship I have with the land and transplant it into the studio. Sow ease and patience into the gaps in the floorboards. Seed my work with uncomplicated forgiveness. In a way that’s what I’ve been trying to do all year. I learned that minute changes can feel miraculous in the garden and nearly imperceptible in the studio. For a whole month this year I shut the door on my clutter and indecision and took myself outside to squat, study the soil, and put things in it. In the early summer I planted 5 gallon buckets carefully with knobby red potatoes, yukon golds, and a stunning purple variety from the local seed potato store (Trader Joe’s). Come fall I upended the buckets and every one tumbled out a small avalanche of purple. Next to the mounds of loamy soil and its dingy, white plastic origins the pile of tubers glistened like jewels. Treasure in a grain bucket. This year’s potato yield fed us, fed my parents, fed neighbor Mike who supplied the buckets and that good good soil, and then it was gone. It was, by all accounts, quite small. Two brief weeks of awe and amazement at each crisp, waxy slice and then… back to buying potatoes. There was no feast to celebrate our yield and my efforts contributed nothing to our winter stores, but the act of planting and then harvesting those potatoes satiated more than my physical hunger. 

One year of living in this apartment and I finally have a functional studio. My work calls to me from its open door once again. I hear it from the garden where the leggy snapdragons are heaving with grinning seed pods and falling over themselves. The ground bees are getting sluggish and even the young squirrels are quieting. Just as the garden slows down the work is picking up, and I’m only grateful for the timing. A year in the garden has taught me to be amazed by small harvests. Each one, no matter how humble, brings that deep, momentary sense of alignment with the world. The need I am trying to meet in the studio and the garden is not the size of my hunger or anyone else’s. It’s something separate, a small but unignorable need to be engaged completely, mind and body. When I extract that experience from some self-imposed quota of productivity it feels like the sun shines a little brighter.

<3
Grace