I took a lot of photos in April. The majority of them were for clients, but I took a hefty amount for myself as well. I survived the busyness of April, and was ready to hit May running: editing and writing and adding to my website and blog. But so far, well, I haven’t really done much.
I read two great blogs from Austin Kleon in the last few weeks: one called “I’m not languishing, I’m dormant,” and the other a follow-up, “Wintering and dormancy.” (If you’re new here you’ll find I link to Austin’s work a lot. He’s pretty fab, and I suggest you check him out.) The basic gist of the two is that life is cyclical and filled with seasons, and that that’s ok. It’s best not to try to force something to grow in a wintering period. In the second post he refers to author Katherine May’s book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, in which she discusses lessons of wintering learned from the natural world:
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
I couldn’t agree more.
He also makes reference in the first to artist Corita Kent, who would watch a maple tree outside her apartment as it changed through the seasons. She eventually began to see the tree as a metaphor for creativity, recognizing that in the winter though the tree might look dead a great creative force was actually quietly at work deep within.
This sums up well where I feel like I am these last couple of months. While not as much has been going on on the outside, things have been happening quietly inside me. As if it wasn’t enough working through a pandemic, homeschooling the kiddos, and trying to figure out how to move back into “normal” life (and frankly, to figure out how much we even want/plan/intend to move back into it, a subject for another blog) we’ve also been considering the idea of a move that may keep us close to this area, or may move us quite far. The whole thing has had me thinking a lot about the idea of home, the complicated relationship we sometimes have with it, and the way my camera helps me define and understand them both. I suspect this subject will take up significant real estate here on my blog in the coming weeks.