Napa Cabbage Miracles

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ― James Baldwin

The inside of each purple napa cabbage leaf is such a beautiful color that I involuntarily gasp when I pull back the first one, and then again with the second. This is the color I associate most with winter, which is why we used the exact same watery magenta to print our solstice cards years ago: hand-cut rubylith snowflakes and speckletone offcuts. It’s everywhere once you start to look. In the sweet ends of turnips and streaked across the sidewalk near the stands of buckthorn. In the late season shoots surrounding the cut branch scars on the trees of heaven. It’s just outside of your vision when the sun sets at 4:22 in the afternoon. 

I love this time of year, and am determined to revel in it. I’m not naive or feigning ignorance- for those of us marginalized by our country’s political system this election outcome is a high-speed continuation of the last decade’s steady march towards making life harder and, for some, untenable. With that in mind I refuse to let this election have all of November, just as I refuse to give short bangs to TERFs or the color blue to cops. If I can’t escape into the dusty stems of the well established purple kale, or the pumpkin stained toes of the squirrels this month then December will be too hard, and January unbearable. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to pry the beauty of the world from my cold, dead hands. It will be there long after we are.

The pandemic, the militant crackdown on the 2020 uprisings, the close-to-home mass shootings, the destruction and pestilence of climate change- all of these recent moments in our lives have been followed by reminders from those more versed in the struggle to keep making art. That phrase has been so lovingly repeated to me that I hear it internally now, loud and clear. I believe it too- that horrible times are made better with art. That change can be made possible by it. Now especially it is helpful to have something to return to. Despair is howling in the pines but there is work to be done, a world to be remade each day. If I can’t imagine it, I can’t strive for it. Imagining takes creative practice. 

Grief is not much of a catalyst for creativity but there is a recklessness to it that can be contorted into artistic bravery if you don’t let yourself get too distracted. I’m at about a 50% success rate right now. Something about this moment is making me feel like a very young version of myself and I’m letting it, feeding it, and saying yes to anything anyone wants to show me. I’m drawing again, too, in a sketchbook that I fill with dates and words and tentative drawings. I hadn’t drawn a single thing in this house until now. I’m so rusty, my lines are stiff and pressed hard into the paper. I want to be fast and accurate so I draw the things I know come easy. Each recognizable image feels like a small miracle.

Some things:

Faith in the Grand Re-Seeding

Trans Quilts

Two Zines from the Feminist Center for Creative Work to help us through:

Artists and Hopelessness

Making Art During Fascism

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Grace