Note: This is the third and final article in a series adapted from the transcript of my recent artist talk in support of the exhibition More-Than-Human Medicine at the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Gathering the data sets of plants and animals discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series left me with a better idea of how imbedded we actually are in the web of the world around us. My aim as an artist then, was to figure out a way to bring the research to life in some fashion that wasn’t overtly depressing or underwhelming. I needed the work to really carry the weight of all of the history and ancestral knowledge, all of the beauty and suffering and sacrifice.

Relational Craft

I generally work in craft media, with attention paid to sustainability both in sourcing of materials, and to my capabilities in my actual life and practice. I felt from the beginning of my research during my Lloyd Library residency, that time would be the resource I would center in production of the related artwork. Giving time to a specific subject, paying close attention, working slowly, is generally difficult if not impossible inside of capitalist systems. Our time is extracted, optimized for profitability, and divided up between tasks that often have little to do with our mental and physical wellbeing. In order to honor the contributions of the plants and animals I studied in a meaningful way, I decided to forgo speed and any process that required the purchase of new, industrially produced materials. This meant growing or foraging all of my colors for the project, and re-using things that I already had on hand. I wanted the art that resulted from my research to follow the same arc of reclaimed relationship to land and self-sufficiency that my collected data was quickly shaping itself into.

I chose to work in more traditional craft-based media like quilting, knitting, embroidery and crochet because those practices are often regarded with the same level of condescension-boarding-on-distain as folk medicine. While fiber art is having a moment in the contemporary artworld, good craftsmanship in general has—since the de-skilling movements of the mid 20^th century—been dismissed as passé, trivial, and domestic. In a culture obsessed with speed, productivity, and wealth, uplifting labor, tradition, and process is an act of rebellion. Fiber art and the crafts in general are therefore well allied with other traditional modes of human experience including herbalism, gardening, and foraging which have been likewise dismissed by our hyper-industrial dominant social order as archaic. The knowledge bases for these practices are in our bodies, in our communities, held in relation. Often passed down matrilineally, herbal remedies and home-spun fiber practices don’t often require us to purchase much, they encourage making use of what we already have. The products of this type of labor often can’t be sold for anything near a reasonable hourly rate of pay. Yet these practices sustain us. They regulate our nervous systems, they heal, clothe, and warm our families. We gain more from knowing how to make things than we do from purchasing our lives away at a discount rate.

An ongoing fascination with plant-based colors really helped to push my quilt projects into wilder territories. I’ve been experimenting with natural dye techniques for the better part of the past decade, so many of the colors I used in producing the first two quilts in the series have been saved from previous projects. Like most art-making processes, one can know very little about natural dying and still get decent results, but the potential for deep research in technique as well as sourcing and sustainability provides an ever-evolving aspect of discovery for me. It wasn’t as fulfilling after the first year or so of experimentation to purchase pre-collected plant material from the many online sources that exist. In a very similar way to how I now source my herbal remedies: I could buy dandelion root, but why should I when it grows for free in every neighborhood?

I want to disrupt the urge to outsource any aspect of my life that brings me joy, connects me to my ecosystem, and mitigates my participation in systems that ultimately destroy the planet.

Irresponsible sourcing, exploitative production practices, dependance on fossil fuels; so many ubiquitous “necessary evils” in procuring materials for art making can be avoided almost entirely by shifting the burden of knowledge and production back onto myself. Since my work deals with confronting exploitation of human and non-human animals and our extended ecosystems, I am inclined to decrease the hypocrisy of purchasing new, industrially produced materials for the creation of my work wherever possible.

I use recycled clothing and bedding for base fabrics and forage things like Osage orange, elderberry, goldenrod and pokeberry for pigment. I have expanded the borders of my vegetable garden each year to include a variety of dye plants like Japanese indigo, Hopi dye sunflower, Hopi Amaranth, Marigold, Madder, and Woad. Between all of these plants I was able to amass a wide enough color vocabulary to more or less accurately depict each subject illustrated on the first quilt in this series.

Despite my best efforts to reduce my dependence on extractive industries, I do not believe in purity. There are no local fiber mills left in my region, and very few locally produced supplies available at prices I can currently afford. We live in a post-industrial world where we no longer even have access to most products without engaging in systems underpinned by exploitation. We cannot live entirely outside of harm. As animals, we eat living things to continue living. Yet we are not exempt from suffering, and this fact alone should be enough to convince us that no living thing should suffer needlessly. I choose to challenge myself whenever possible to reduce unnecessary destruction in my life and my art practice because I believe that being responsible to the world around me makes my life sweeter. I strive to do more good than harm.

Past in the Future

I learned hand-stitching from my maternal grandmother as a small child. Later she had me work on her mother’s cast iron treadle sewing machine to keep me busy while she worked on larger projects. She also helped me fall in love with the world through every plant and bird in her yard and on walks and hikes. I still think about her every time I sit down to sew or weed the garden and am grateful that she modeled the importance of knowing my plants, animals, and stitches.

The crewel embroidery techniques I worked into the Arthritis Quilt would have been very recognizable to my grandmother’s generation. But these types of time-intense practices have largely fallen out of fashion as we pivot culturally away from handwork and toward content consumption and production in our spare time.

I am by no means an expert in these techniques, but after the 50^th plant, I found I had developed a language that I really enjoyed. I worked on at least one plant per day for almost three months, they became my constant companions. The immense amount of care that went into producing the Arthritis Quilt reshaped me as a human. I intimately spent time with, learned, and loved each plant I stitched. I can’t go for a walk in the woods anymore without seeing them everywhere. By taking a rigorous approach to time and labor in relation to each of them, I wove these plants into my extended presence in the world. I am re-membering myself into the landscape, one stitch, one plant at a time.

My mother showed me how to knit when I was 10. I spent the next several years unable to make anything beyond a basic scarf. During critiques in my ceramics classes in college, a friend was always knitting socks. She inspired me to branch out into the world of double point needles and turning heels. After several years and many pairs of socks and gloves I became the mother of a small child, trying to avoid plastic toys. As part of that effort, I checked out a book on knit amigurumi animals from my public library. From knitting a series of stuffed fruits, vegetables and animals from the patterns in that book, I eventually unlocked an ability to think three-dimensionally in accumulations of knots. A year later, a woman sitting near my booth at a craft fair taught me how to crochet. Several years after that I adapted these freely given knowledge gifts into a considerable aspect of my art practice. The knit skeleton suspended in the center of the Arthritis Quilt is just a series of socks in disguise. There are only two stitches: Knitting and Purling, the rest is just increases or decreases of stiches, perseverance, and trust in the process.

We coevolved alongside plants and other animals over millennia. To believe that the only way to interact with them is through extraction by an expert in a lab is a great loss of faith in ourselves as intelligent human animals. We can and do properly identify wild and cultivated plants. We can and do learn to safely engage with plant medicines that cost us nothing. That every aspect of our variable and complex bodies must be attended to only through expensive, standardized methods is nothing more than the result of living in an empire that insists you get only what you pay for. The living world is free, and we built ourselves and everything around us a cage.

Likewise, we can look to every other animal on earth for vital lessons on how to live within our means as a species. We are not uniquely independent of the boundaries of seasons, cycles, and reciprocities of the ecosystems that encircle us. We can look to our plant and animal siblings and to our human ancestors who lived in closer relationship among them, for guidance as we enter what science points to as unprecedented periods of instability. My hope in this work is to encourage curiosity, humility, and trust in ourselves and our communities of human and more-than-human neighbors in service of living healthier more meaningful lives.

Thank you for reading this adapted transcript of my artist talk: More-Than-Human Medicine, originally presented at the Lloyd Library and Museum on June 24th, 2026.

The full recording may eventually be available on the Lloyd Library YouTube Page. Until then, you can check out this wonderful recording of Brad Bolman discussing What Dogs Teach Us About Human Health, which was part of a speaker series supporting the exhibition.

Note: This is the second in a series of articles adapted from the transcript of my recent artist talk in support of the exhibition More-Than-Human Medicine at the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Animal Bodies

Once we figured out how to create and standardize medicines in a lab, we needed viable test subjects to prove efficacy and safety before scaling production. It was an easy move to test any potential medicine on “lesser” animals like mice, rats, and other small mammals that serve to this day as the model organisms1 for human biology in laboratory settings. This chapter of my research is ongoing, but my work at the Lloyd Library entailed the rather depressing but always informative task of discovering what specific animals are used for which types of testing and why.

The availability of in-depth information on how animals are used in labs is uneven. From the mid 1860’s (when synthetics were discovered) until the mid 1950s, use of animals was described in grim detail, often with pictures. The animals themselves were largely viewed as automatons, objects who were only capable of base responses and without actual feelings. This stance is convenient as no harm can be done if the object you are working with is too primitive to suffer.

But the matter-of-fact accounts of the early 20^th century begin to shift into the land of euphemism and opacity by the late 1950s. Too many families had dogs, pets of all kinds and real relationships formed with animals, to hold the lie that they didn’t have feelings. The Animal Welfare Act, which set minimum standards of care in labs and limits on redundant testing and excessive suffering, was not passed in the United States until 1966. In publicly available pharmaceutical research papers today, animal use in testing is usually mentioned in passing, or reduced to numbers on a chart. Most language around animals becomes a series of sanitized lines. Phrases like “preclinical in vivo testing in murine models” are common ways to distance a reader from the living bodies of mice and rats. Like most unpopular practices without a cheap or viable alternative, the use of animals in testing did not stop, it just moved out of sight.

It’s easy to say we use animal subjects to make our lives better or safer, but more difficult when we have to look those animals in the eye. This is a common trick of modernity at play, distancing us at all times from the realities of our lives, making it a foregone conclusion that we will benefit in perpetuity from the unexamined suffering of the “other.” I am the direct beneficiary of this suffering, and so are you. I chose the five human health concerns I studied to eliminate the possibility of neutrality in any viewer. Arthritis, lung disease, heart disease, cancer, and childbirth—the last implicates all of us and the previous four will likely touch us directly in some form if we live long enough. The procedures and medicines that diagnose and treat all of these conditions, from aspirin to x-rays, have been and are being tested on animals. These animals are making our sustained comfort and wellbeing as humans possible and we should know and honor them for their contributions.

The data on animal use in labs is simultaneously vast and difficult to exhume. In almost any book on modern pharmacology, animals underpin the bulk of the research, but it often takes looking to citations tucked away at the end of each chapter to actually see them explicitly named, if then. Lurking in the footnotes, the titles of publicly unavailable research papers are often the only place a specific type of animal might be identified, and the growing list of who, how, and why certain bodies make it into lab settings is wilder and farther reaching than one might think.

Some of the smallest “simplest” organisms are used for genetic studies, toxicology, and intial drug screenings. These include Fruit Flies, Worms, Zebra Fish (and many other fish species due to transparency of embryos) many species of Frogs, Salamanders, and Lizards (especially Anoles.) More specialized testing begins in larger reptiles and amphibians like Snakes, Crocodilians, and Turtles and in avian species; primarily domestic fowl like Chickens (especially the classic white leghorn breed) Ducks, Quail, and Songbirds. The most familiar lab mammals like Mice, Rats, Hamsters, Rabbits, and Guinea pigs become closer facsimiles for human anatomy on a smaller, rapidly reproducible scale.

It was interesting to learn why certain animals are used for a particular type of testing. As one example: we can induce asthma and other chronic lung disorders more effectively in Guinea pigs than in other small mammals, so they feature very prominently in this type of research. They are also widely used in many other types of study, hence the term “guinea pig” to describe someone trying something out first. Ferrets, Opossums, Cats, Dogs, and Monkeys (particularly Rhesus monkeys) are often used for longer-term studies or as proxies for actions on specific organs and for cancer research. Larger domestic farm animals like Sheep, Pigs, Cows, and Horses are also used in genetics, arthritis research, and long-term studies of environmental toxicology among other things. These lists are in no way comprehensive. Think of any animal that is fairly inexpensive to produce and maintain in cages or pens for a period of time, and they have likely been test subjects for our benefit at some point.

“What dystopias make my utopia possible?” -Sophie Strand

I did not conduct this research to make myself, or anyone else feel bad. I think most of the advances in medicine, made possible through animal testing, are worthwhile pursuits. I am personally grateful to all of the animals that support my health. But our continued resistance and even outright refusal to investigate the harm that we do on even this necessary and relatively justifiable scale, trains us to look away from injustice and suffering in general. If we do not have the courage to interrogate our “necessary losses” they cease to hold any meaning. Avoided discomfort never prompts us to negotiate more compassionate, responsible futures. To know, empathize with, and honor even the smallest animals to whom we owe our continued health is an exercise in healing unattended wounds left open all over our relationships to the more-than-human world.

Up Next - Part 3: Craft, Time, and Devotion

Thank you for reading!

<3

Sara

The collection of books held at the Lloyd Library and Museum is a great testament to how closely imbedded we have historically been in our lived environments, in the world of flora and fauna that surrounds us. During my 2025 residency there, I poured over dozens of volumes containing thousands of anecdotes, recipes, and directives of medicinal plant use from ancient Egypt and Greece, to Western Europe, and eventually to North America. The library holds glimpses, from numerous angles, of how our relationships with plants traveled with us through time and place. These relationships have repeatedly transformed to fit new conditions, but they have also been consistently obscured by both intentional and incidental forces for centuries. Medicine moved away from plants and toward standardization and homogenization as cultures across the world industrialized. Yet it is useful to remember that the remedies that sustained us for almost all of human history came predominantly from plants.

Until the discovery of the first synthetic medicines in the late 1860s, we had no way of standardizing anything we used to treat any type of ailment in a lab. Our reliance on what we now call “modern medicine,” based in materialist science, has only existed for around 150 years. That’s the span of roughly two human lifetimes. For most of our history we would have known and relied on the plants that grew in our immediate environments, with every community around the world working with their local flora to treat minor ailments. People in poor and rural populations in particular, where access to doctors and healthcare is often limited, carried their knowledge of medicinal plant use up through the middle of the 20^th century, and frequently into the present.

While the Lloyd Library’s collection of books carries a dense and enduring testament to these relationships, they offer only fragments of what would have been ancestrally held, orally transmitted knowledge reservoirs passed between households and regional enclaves. The vast majority of plants used to treat illness before the 20^th century would have been commonly available, often collected at need, and easily identified by small children and grandmothers alike. It is also worth noting that this type of knowledge has been heavily and often violently suppressed throughout most of the common era, as a means of Christianization through erasure of indigenous practices—first in Europe, and then in colonized lands beyond. Continued suppression of what knowledge endures creates ongoing dependency on nation-states in populations of what would be otherwise more self-reliant, and therefore less governable people.

Industrialization within the American low-road capitalist system also created a culture of busy people trading their time for money. The increased pace of living, combined with isolation into autonomous households, no longer linked by direct commerce or cultural commons, compelled further knowledge loss. Today, most of us have neither the time nor inclination to heal ourselves within our communities, we can now individually purchase solutions to our problems. And we’ve largely forgotten how to do much else. This allows for continuous disconnection from the sources of our food, medicines, and other necessities which ultimately results in widespread cultural amnesia around our timeless relationship to the natural world of which we are a part.

The transference of healing arts from the village commons to the learned doctor (generally male) directly correlates to the rise of capitalist and patriarchal systems where knowledge is held and transferred by structures of power (church or state) to “learned men” first and later to anyone else who can prove they belong in the “learned man arena.” But the materia medicas^[1] preserved in the Lloyd’s collection of books, written primarily by men, were garnered from interactions with communities that originally held this knowledge in relation. Indigenous American, Italian, Greek, African, Anglo-Saxon, and beyond, all cultures evolved with plant medicines which sustained them for all but the smallest measure of their histories.

I focused my research at the Lloyd around plants that would grow reasonably well in the Midwest/Appalachian region in which I live, and on those surviving knowledge banks transmitted through texts detailing the plant medicines of Western Europe (the main colonizing force acting on this land) alongside Indigenous American herbalism as it can be recounted post-colonization. It is important that we consider the inherent losses in what exists of this information, as the process of colonization necessarily creates fractures in knowledge transference both intentionally and unwittingly.

This narrowing of the scope of my research served dual purposes. One: I could actually complete some level of in-depth investigation by creating parameters to work within and Two: The resulting data would apply directly to my Cincinnati community in helping to identify the potential relationships to medicinal plants growing all around us. It was important to me that each plant that made it into my visual interpretations of the research was culturally relevant, which I defined as listed at least five times in distinct sources across settler-colonist and indigenous American materia medicas. This was often difficult as many of these works are chain-linked translations of foundational texts like The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides^[2], but I made an effort to look to diverse sources in Indigenous herbal practices, African American herbalism, and recorded primary accounts of folk medicine of the Appalachian region to corroborate some type of cross-culturally relevant consensus on the efficacy of each plant I worked with. In total, I identified 142 distinct species of plants commonly used to treat arthritis, cancer, childbirth, heart disease, and/or lung disease during a one month period of research from publications across multiple cultural and temporal modalities.

I spent extra time with volumes collected during the travels of the Lloyd brothers or those written before the Eclectic Medical School^[3] was closed. I find this is an interesting moment in the history of American medicine, and left a good point of departure for exploration of subsequent animal testing which became so prevalent in pharmaceutical research during and after this pivotal time. The single model of American medical education (based on the biomedical German system) was championed in the early 1900s as the American Medical Association (AMA) looked to streamline and standardize an unruly patchwork of medical schools throughout the United States at that time. The Flexner report^[4] of 1910 ranked schools against narrow standards which promoted research and rigor in the lab and eschewed more “backward” practices like homeopathy and herbalism in education. This brought about the demise of the Eclectic School and many other early medical schools studying plants and indigenous practices for healing properties.

This report, and the subsequent consolidation of the elite medical school model in the United States was largely funded by John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie whose investments in new uses for petrochemical products formed the backbone of the modern American pharmaceutical industry. They granted huge sums of money to support allopathic^[5] education, and leveraged new laws resulting from the Flexner report findings (which they sponsored) to usher in an era of top tier research institutions as the only legitimate bastions of knowledge transfer. This further distanced the general population from solutions to common ailments, and solidified distrust of any knowledge but that held and transmitted between a singularly educated few. The vast majority of the population of this country is now completely dependent on medical and pharmaceutical industries built by and for those elite few in addressing many ailments that could be managed, at least in part, through community care and relationship to our landscape. It is only through the advent of modern medicine that we can afford to not know our plant neighbors.

I am not suggesting that we do away with modern medicine. The advances in medical research made possible by the biomedical education model are vital and have improved our quality of life and life expectancies astronomically. There are a lot of practices documented in the books I studied that would be vastly unsafe by today’s standards. Thankfully, we aren’t treating common ailments with arsenic and mercury, or eating pokeberries or poison hemlock to shrink our tumors. I am rather pointing out that we may have lost more than we bargained for in homogenizing and commodifying healthcare entirely into the hands of elite institutions. I am personally extremely lucky that I lived today, as a c-section baby, with auto-immune issues, chronic ear infections, and a degenerative lung disease, a life without antibiotics and corticosteroids would have been brief or at best very painful. I am not suggesting we stop going to the doctor, but rather that we are capable of understanding our health from more than one perspective, including in a more rooted, reciprocal relationship to our environment.

Up Next- Part 2: Animal Bodies

^{[1] Latin Meaning: Medical Material. The body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of substances used for healing. (Source: Merriam-Webster)}

^{[2] Written by Pedanius Dioscorides around 78 CE, this 5-volume Greek encyclopedic pharmacopeia was widely read for 1500 years and forms the basis of many modern texts detailing uses of plants in the treatment of disease. (Source: Wikipedia)}

^{[3] Eclectic medicine was a branch of American medicine which made use of noninvasive therapies and healing practices. The Eclectic Medical Institute (EMI) was opened in the state of Ohio in 1845. During the early 20th century, the American Medical Association’s work to establish uniform medical education requirements led to the demise of medical Eclecticism. The EMI permanently closed its doors in 1942. (Source: Lloydlibrary.org)}

^{[4] Written By Abraham Flexner and published in 1910, the report detailed the findings of his inspection of 155 medical schools across the United States and Canada, measuring each school against German standards including a preference for cutting edge laboratory equipment. Flexner was not a medical practitioner, but held a BA in Classics and was an educator. Critics of the report at the time of its release worried that it favored laboratory research above positive outcomes for both students and patients. Read the report in full here.}

^{[5] Allopathic medicine: a system of medical practice that emphasizes diagnosing and treating disease and the use of conventional, evidence-based therapeutic measures such as drugs, surgery, and radiation. What we now call “modern medicine.” (Source: Merriam-Webster)}

Thank you for reading!!

<3

Sara

It’s been a long while since I’ve checked in here. The intense period of studio time I devoted to getting an exhibition off the group this spring left me pretty emptied out of anything I might want to write about. I’d think about it, feel too overwhelmed by the thought of untangling any of the thousands of threads I was literally following into the depths of that project, then decide to wait until things made more sense. Nothing is making more sense. If anything, I think things are making less sense. But I’m finally in-between projects enough to have run out of excuses. It’s time to write about some of these things I’ve been rolling around in material and mindspace.

I spent all of this past winter and a good part of spring working on an exhibition for the Lloyd Library and Museum. The work was an initial interpretation of my research there during my 2025 residency. I went full studio-gremlin during this time. The house fell apart, I stopped seeing people outside of coworkers and family. My attention became so singular, so consumed with what I was working on and the looming deadline to be met, that I began to annoy even myself with my temporary inability to engage with anything beyond what I was doing. But I had a goal, I had a purpose. My benders don’t need drugs or alcohol, I have art.

With the show finally up and the artist talk done I’m left with a hauntingly familiar challenge: “what do I do now?” This is well worn territory for me, and most of the people I talk to about following the arc of a prolonged ambition. I got out in front of some of what I knew was coming by sitting down two days before the exhibition went up—awash in the stress of literally tying up loose threads—and frantically applying for things. Anything. A residency, a solo show, something to anchor me into another spiral of intensity to defer the quiet I knew was coming. But here I am, mid-summer; in the hot, languid, insidious quiet.

It is difficult to turn and face digestion. Because it means coming apart, being reconfigured into something new, fully stepping into the change that I’d been reflexively undergoing in the studio. I now have to sit and look at all of the freshly disjointed pieces of my mid-present-future-self, having no idea how they might all fit together into anything other than a monstrous series of questions without answers. All this amid the influx of a turbulent outer world, no longer held at bay by the blinders of a singular focal point. The feeling is one of being hollowed out only to be blasted full of new information, flooding into an unpracticed system of differentiation, a disorienting, incoherent mess of in-between.

So much of how we digest in our current social structures is attached to value judgements: this worked, that didn’t, I liked this, I didn’t like that. I’m not really enticed by this process, but I don’t think rushing forward to the next thing while avoiding a clear-eyed assessment of what transpired in crafting this body of work is effective either. I can’t outrun the inevitable creative wave-function collapse. In an odd time outside of time, unmoored from linear realities, I am fortunate to get a break after scaling this extreme creative peak. But instead of welcoming rest, I feel lost, simultaneously overwhelmed and empty. Why is this? Why can’t I bask in the glory of completion?

(Because I have no interest in being complete.)

Yet, to find myself at a crossroads of what to do next is a simultaneously sacred and unwished-for moment. It requires a sober look at myself, and a commitment to slowing down and attending to what is. Shifting into this mode off of a frenzy of activity feels insane. The visceral overwhelm of all of that energy washing over a suddenly still system is almost debilitating. It’s like swallowing a tidal wave while standing perfectly still, hoping I can absorb the force and transfer its energy into whatever happens next. But not yet. Right now, I get to hold it, filter out the biota and break down tiny particles of presence into something meaningful. I have no clue how to do it. Just like making in the studio, I almost can’t believe that it will work, that I will soothe this wave into a calm sea until I’m ready to crest and crash into the next project.

In that spirit, I’m putting together a brief series of articles addressing my research at the Lloyd Library, including excerpts from my artist talk (the closest I usually come to metabolism of my own work) and thoughts about craft. An attempt to untangle some of these threads that I’ve been carrying around in language, even though words are never my first choice. Hopefully this makes the calm between storms a bit easier to hold, and is maybe an interesting offering to send out into the interweb abyss.

A Place to Start: The Work

The gallery above is a sampling of pieces included in my solo exhibition More-Than-Human Medicine, which opened at the Lloyd Library and Museum on May 8^th and runs through September 11^th 2026. The forthcoming series of articles will discuss the process and conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition, craft in contemporary art, the fall and rise of herbal medicine in the United States, use of lab animals, and the joys and sorrows of a creative process endeavored in the midst of capitalism and empire. Stay with me, I promise to make it interesting.

Media

Things that kept me afloat during this making cycle:

Ursula K. Le Guinn. All of it. I think I just about finished her offerings available in print during the course of this project. Endless gratitude for her keen insights gently wrapped in fantastic and engaging fiction and incisive essays.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, absorbing ecohorror, such a fun read!

adrienne maree brown’s Black Dawn Trilogy, (clearly, I needed speculative fiction to get through.)

Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness, made final stitching on my largest-ever quilt project a pleasure.

The Montvale’s Path of Totality, singing spells at the end of a world.

Courtney Barnett’s Creature of Habit, a return to nostalgic CB with fresh perspective.

The Nature of Podcast: Uncovering the Holy Ordinary with Terry Tempest Williams

How to Survive the End of the World Podcast: Fractal Series on creativity Dec 2025- Jan 2026

Thank you for reading!

<3

Sara

Just a quick word from hibernation land: It’s been a really rough time. It’s been cold, it’s been dark. The news has been devastating, the collective grief of the world near unbearable. But today in Cincinnati it’s almost 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The piles of snow are melting, blades of grass pushing through crusts of ice. The birds are clearly ecstatic, and my mercifully bare arms wave the sentiment back at them as they fill the air with song. We may yet live! they sing, for spring will come!

It is not here yet. But these momentary warm winter days offer enough of a respite to remind us that the thaw is inevitable. Ice will melt. We will live and move and dance outside, flowing out of the shadowy walls that kept us alive when the weather was perilous, back into the sun. These moments steady me, I have learned so many skills to persevere when it is dark and cold in the world. I will survive my descent back into it, as it will certainly shallow us all up again. Days like today remind me that it will end. Each warm spell becomes a little longer, until the long dark melts fully into the promise of spring.

I’ve been full-time in the studio since the solstice, pulling a thousand threads and pushing tiny brush-loads of paint around. Each small movement will eventually coalesce into an exhibition this May at the Lloyd Library and Museum. Below are a few samples of that work in progress.

Media

I have gotten abysmally behind on my reading this season, as my hands and eyes have been busy in the studio, but here are a few things I got to mostly listen to:

The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. le Guin. Superb and sagacious, it should surprise no one who’s been paying attention here that I loved this one.

The entire second season of the Telepathy Tapes. Please listen if you haven’t so I can talk to you about this.

How to Survive the End of the World Podcast FRACTAL Series and this recent episode featuring Nnenna and Pierce Freelon

Iona Zajac’s recent album Bowls

Gwenifer Raymond’s album Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark

Amadou & Miriam’s album L’amour à la folie

Also eagerly awaiting The Montvales’ forthcoming album. I’m jamming to the pre-released singles, and loved seeing this feature in KLOFmag

News

My Solo exhibition Spanned Seperations is open now through March 20th 2026 at Doris Ulmann Galleries at Berea College, in Berea KY.

Stay safe, stay weird, we will play in the sun again soon!

Love,

Sara

Most of the time I’m pretty disconnected from the various forms that my character has morphed in and out of throughout my life. I think of myself as a fixity, but I have inhabited so many other stories, living almost unrecognizable lives. Nothing brings this into focus like watching my own child grow up. I had my daughter too young, maybe right on time. I’m not sure I would so willingly give up my sense of singular selfhood now, it would be so much more of a struggle, with so much more to lose. But at 24, I just kind of rolled into motherhood. I’d been to college but was working in retail and coffee shops. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, so taking care of an infant seemed as good a job as any at the time. That may have saved us both.

My daughter was a clingy, busy child that wanted to share my every waking (and sleeping) moment. I carried her everywhere, packing her in slings and backpacks through the woods to keep myself from going crazy, through thrift stores to find and re-sell items to put gas in the car. To keep going, I had no idea where. It was just the two of us for so many years, and it was intense and all-encompassing and often lonely. It took every bit of the first five years of her life for me to figure out a way forward. Eventually she went to school and so did I. Since moving to Cincinnati, we have weathered grade school, grad school, a global pandemic, various heartbreaks. We have grown inches and gardens and into a deep rhythm with each other that I often take for granted.

I remember the early days of wishing helplessly that she would play quietly by herself for more than five minutes. Over the past two years that tireless ball of energy and need has gradually retreated to books, music, and her room. I’ve worried that she has no drive, no direction. At nearly 13, she lounges harder than anyone I know. My busy child became the ultimate bed-rotter, completely content spending hours by herself doing next to nothing. I’ve left her a lot of space to do this, hopeful that she would escape my propensity toward hyper-vigilance and self-worth equated with competency. But I have been curious: what is this new version of my child actually interested in? What is her positive obsession1 going to be? What if she doesn’t receive the gift of purpose? When asked, she says she wants to be a musician, a singer.

This has been worrying for me, mostly because she could barely carry a tune. This is particularly painful because I can, and I have real trouble listening to people sing when they have poor pitch, or bad tone, or bad rhythm, and she had all three in spades. In what has proven to be one of the more challenging periods of my parenting to date, I have refrained entirely from discouraging her. I have listened to her yowl like a cat in heat at top volume while attempting to read or write and said nothing. I’ve worked with her on learning guitar chords, hoping that strumming would solidify a better sense of rhythm. At her request, I got an old microphone out and let her plug it into an amp. It’s been a rough time (especially for the dogs.) For months there was very little improvement. I became increasingly worried that she just couldn’t hear herself properly as she careened over Dolly Parton, singing a disjointed Jolene in a strange breathy monotone, lilting a half step below each note, lagging a half beat behind or charging ahead with no control.

Occasionally she would ask for feedback and I would do my best to try to explain how to do a thing I have no memory of learning. When she started recording herself something changed. She complained that her phone “made her sound bad” and I had to gently demonstrate by recording myself that her phone wasn’t the problem. I tried to re-assure her that she just needed to listen more closely. We practiced adjusting the way she was holding her mouth and where she was focusing her voice in her body, and she didn’t stop singing.

This past weekend we had the house to ourselves. We ate junk food dinner and joked around and I marveled that this kid had genuinely become my favorite person, not in the way a parent might feel obligated to think, but in a really deep, humbling way. She’s smart, and funny and loves hanging out with me in a way that I wish I could bottle. I’ve lost some significant relationships in the past few years, people who carried the key to decades of shared memory, to many of the previous versions of myself. It occurred to me, sitting at the table with my daughter, that she is the most vital mirror of all of my past, present, and future selves that I could ever hope to encounter. I wondered at this revelation, one that has surfaced only a few times over the course of her childhood. Fleeting moments of clarity in the sea of busy days when I am truly stunned into gratitude for the gift of being her mother. While I was lost in this sweet lucidity, I heard her singing from the other room. She sounded good. Not ready for the stage or anything, but markedly, miraculously better than she had only a few days before. It was like she suddenly made a jump to hyperspace, or maybe her frontal lobe fired a few new synapses, but she was practically matching the rhythm and tone of Dua Lipa. She went from barely following a tune, to hitting nearly every note overnight.

Perhaps puberty is a chrysalis, my child reduced to lazy ooze while she reconfigures her trajectory—and vocal cords—in a subterranean passage that requires so much energy and isolation. A painfully slow voyage with a sudden burst into the sunlight of bodily mastery. It is incredible to hear this sudden change in her capabilities. It has made me question everything: what I think is possible, how I see myself. I am reminded that I was not always who I am now, in the studio, obsessed, singularly focused. I have been in various cocoons, reduced to goo by birth, puberty, heartbreak, new motherhood, grad school. Each time I have emerged with new skills and perspectives that quickly become prosaic. I don’t remember not being able to sing, or draw, or dance, but it occurs to me now that all of our gifts come to us as slowly and suddenly as a babies’ first steps, or first words. Implausible formations of potential energy focused through practice and perseverance. We are elastic. We stretch toward new horizons only to shrink back into the shadows for a time, waiting to make the next leap.

11/11/25

Quote of the Month:

Concerning art and storytelling:

I am not a scientist. I play the game where the rules keep changing.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, Is Gender Necessary, Redux, found in Dancing at the Edge of the World, Grove Press, NY 1989.

Also:

Thoughts are events, and they cause events as ceaseless and countless as a teeming anthill— Thoughts projected; thought projects. Some people come together and turn their shared thoughts into social ideals. They project their thoughts into the world with so much force that the world is forever altered.

-Miranda Mellis, Crocosmia, Nightboat Books NY, 2025.

Media:

Crocosmia by Melinda Mellis. I loved this parable which imagines an artful way out of the modern ecocidal machine and into a more response-able way of living on earth.

City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin. This one, like all of Le Guin’s fiction is timely and timeless.

Mama’s Broke: Tiny Desk Concert. We saw these two play live this month and it was magic.

Dancing at the Edge of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin. This collection of essays and talks Le Guin wrote between 1967 and 1988 is stunning, humble, and funny all at this same time.

Kate Marvel on the Nature of Podcast This interview with the brilliant and vivid climate scientist is enlightening and affirming for those of us struggling to keep it together in the face of climate change.

News:

Summerfair Select opens this Friday November 21st from 6-8pm at the Weston Gallery in Cincinnati OH. I have a few pieces on view, including the vultures!

It’s finally starting to feel like fall in the Ohio River Valley. Leaves are turning slowly and the air is crisping up in the mornings. The slant of the sun brings forth memories of autumn in the various places that I’ve lived. The amber light holds a direct line to memory, calling back the smells and emotions of days long past. It is said that we are closer to our ancestors, to the dead, during this season. I feel not only them, but long-gone versions of myself surfacing in protracted rays of light slanting in and out of another time and place. The world always seems more alive to me in long sunshine, a glistening prism of overlaid realities, dazzling the senses.

I’ve been in the studio a lot this season and—even though our family schedule is mostly chaos—there is a marked slowness setting in during my time alone, working in thousands of tiny stitches through gigantic projects. Moving microscopic sand-grains amid mountains of things to do. I’m trying to pause to give attention to the glimmering horizon, catching new teachers and calling in new worlds for exploration. In this practice I’ve watched hawks hunting, deer foraging, leaves drifting, and earthworms moving patiently through loamy soil, breaking down the riches left in the wake of each harvest. One character that has suddenly and persistently showed up in my life is Mugwort.

I honestly hadn’t paid much attention to Mugwort. She’s been on the periphery of my consciousness through years of foraging and herbalism studies, but I have to admit I’ve avoided her. She seemed almost too obvious. Artemisia vulgaris, felon herb, wild wormwood, Cronewort, St. John’s Herb—Mugwort goes by all these names and more. Her association with the occult, mostly a product of the medieval witch hunts but also through modern dream and divination work somehow made me take her less seriously, as if she was dressed up in a phony sheet parading as a powerful spirit. It’s not Mugwort’s fault she’s garnered such a flashy reputation. But I tend toward studying milder, less bombastic herbs and I just figured I’d get around to her eventually, it seemed inevitable.

During my hours at the Lloyd Library Mugwort appeared again and again, for almost every ailment I studied. She was celebrated across cultures as a powerful medicine, long before she became linked to witchcraft, when plant magic was the medicine of the day and “witches” were the village healers. I started to let her take up more space in my awareness. I sculpted Mugwort as part of my first exploration of the data I was collecting. I later made a carved wall relief as an example in an evening ceramics class I was teaching. I got to know the grooved leaves and sprays of tiny flowers through modeling in clay, but always from pictures, never from life. In truth I don’t think I’d ever knowingly seen her out in the world, I’d spent so much time not looking.

The ancient Greeks and Romans revered Mugwort for her protective properties, she gave them endurance during long walks, aided fertility and childbirth, and regulated sleep.1 The ancient Chinese believed Mugwort blessed the home and warded off disease and evil spirits, while the Anglo-Saxons regarded Mugwort as one of the nine sacred herbs, also used to ward off evil and illness.2 My Italian ancestors held her in a similar regard. She was called on to purify both the spirit and the body and was used in healing concoctions for pain relief, disinfection, and fertility.3 Even on the North American continent, where Mugwort is a naturalized visitor (sometimes considered invasive,) numerous tribes including the Miwok, Kiowa, Paiute and Tlingit worked with her as a protective amulet, cold and rheumatic remedy and childbirth aid.4 With such a pervasive cross-cultural influence, where disparate peoples all over the world had come to rely on Mugwort for the same purposes, it became clear that she was more than worthy of her mythic status. I resolved to keep a lookout in waste places and roadsides, areas I’d learned she’d likely turn up.

On the first truly cold morning of the season, I went out early to help unload the maiden firing of a new wood kiln at Queen City Clay. My Mugwort relief carving I’d made as a teaching example had come out of the kiln in one piece, in spite of a rather reckless design, and I collected it and laid it aside. Waiting outside with everyone while the pots poured out of the kiln, I happened to look at the wood-rack just beyond it. There was a familiar sharp-lobed leaf waiving in the frigid breeze. Even from several feet away, Mugwort was abruptly obvious to me. A whole mess of Mugwort, within a few yards of the kiln Jon and I built, a place I have spent countless hours over the past 4 years, and I never even noticed her. Yet there she was, as if a broken enchantment allowed me to suddenly see what had been previously hidden from view. In that moment, no amount of coincidence could explain her serendipitous appearance right after I collected my finished ceramic ode to Mugwort.

I picked a few sprigs to dry and tincture along with some Mullein growing nearby. I was excited to work with this new friend who’d made such a magnificent and startling entrance. The next day I sat down to a random YouTube video highlighting Edward Lee’s new restaurant Shia and halfway through they were making—Mugwort noodles. We certainly see what we are ready to look at, but it felt comical at that point. Now entirely impossible to ignore, I’m giving Mugwort her due. I’m drinking tea, researching, and writing about this magical plant that clearly deserves—and demands—my attention.

10/22/25

Media

New Episodes of The Nature of Podcast start this week! Listen to the first episode of the new season here.

Why Rebel by Jay Griffiths. I loved every essay in this book and will be re-reading it.

On Being Podcast, Jane Goodall, In Memoriam – What It Means to be Human

The Almanac of Ireland Podcast, Manchán Magan interviews Dorothy Cross

I’ve been revisiting Tracy Chapman, mostly for comfort. I’m forever in awe of her and feel like I’ve been held by her voice throughout my life. Her music is among my earliest memories and every album is a spell that deepens in complexity as I age. Today I’m listening to Let it Rain.

News

Not a whole lot outside of studio and teaching this month. I’ve been working on a pair of vultures for an upcoming show at the Weston Gallery in Cincinnati next month. They are true labors of love and I’m learning a lot working with them.

Thanks for reading!

-Sara

It’s October as you’re reading this, I know. September was, as ever, an absolute blur. This was exacerbated astronomically by the appearance of a stray dog right at the onset of the month. He has—in the midst of a truly crushing schedule for the entire family— become a central character in the month’s narrative.

We have a magically well-behaved, angel of a dog that we got as a tiny puppy a little over three years ago. Tillie was supposed to be a German shepherd mix, but has turned out to look more like a min-pin meets cattle dog. She’s the perfect mid-sized, well-mannered shadow. We take her to the community garden with us most Saturdays, and it was on the return walk early last month that we encountered our new friend. This scraggly, bone thin animal walked up to us, visibly crawling with fleas. He fell into step next to Tillie, so we clipped him onto the other end of her leash and started walking him around, vaguely hoping someone would claim him. Surprise: no luck there. After several baths, a trip to the vet, and multiple flea and worm treatments, we had a pretty near exact physical match to Tillie in a dappled white color-way to complement her black and tan.

We tried every name we could. He didn’t answer to the name registered with his non-serviceable microchip (Buster??) or really anything else. Those first few days all he did was eat and sleep, so we started calling him Remi or Rem-Cycle. Of course, after a near-continuous nap week and a regular meal regimen he started to perk up. It became clear that Remi didn’t really care what we called him, or about anything else we had to say. His general attitude was “why should I?” He tried to bolt every chance he got (not ideal as we have an un-fenced yard.) He seemed pretty convinced he wasn’t sticking around long. And he barked, a lot. Any time he was hungry or wanted a walk (quickly notable as his favorite activity) he laid into us with a series of sharp, unremitting yaps. Yet somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to take this aged, sad-looking little dog to the pound, probably to live out the rest of his days in a cage.

We decided we were just fostering him until someone with a fence and maybe some kids (another obvious favorite) came along. I took the project on from a new angle. I resolved not to try to make this dog “mine” but instead to try to understand him on his own terms. It is difficult to come into the life of an animal that has been clearly wronged by people. Remi didn’t trust us, he bore us no allegiance whatsoever, and I couldn’t really blame him. I have spent the past month thinking a lot about how this strange animal might experience the world, and it has been pretty fascinating.

Jon and I have talked a lot about what makes Tillie such a great family dog. She is completely enmeshed in our program. From the start we forged a contract with Tillie, a system of reciprocity where she can be her best dog-self and we can be our best human-selves and we are all better together. She has been effectively “blue-toothed” to us and is part of a collective effort in our household. This wasn’t difficult, we just met her needs and treated her fairly and well. We set reasonable, enforceable boundaries for what we expected of her and what she could expect from us. Tillie trusts us, we trust her, and that is the basis for a kind of deep inter-species love and connection that is the greatest reward of living with a dog.

Without that bond, that trust, my work with Remi has been entirely different, but no less rewarding. He came as a pre-formed entity, with his own strong opinions about what he was into, and it wasn’t doing anything close to what I—a mere human—asked. All of the decolonial, anti-carceral reading and rhetoric I have absorbed over the years came ringing in around me pretty quickly as I realized this dog didn’t want to behave as I wished. It felt wrong to expect anything other than his nature from him. He wasn’t ‘mine’ in the way that my daughter or Tillie, who have grown up within my sphere, are family, are kin.

So, I just started to watch him. To dial my frequency away from ‘human’ and nearer to ‘dog:’ this specific dog. He clearly has his own language, his own calibration to life. He only pees lifting his right leg, arched so far forward that he looks like a mid-leap figure skater. He likes his chest rubbed and wants to be close, but also prefers to sleep alone. He won’t come to words, but he’s started to respond to claps. He will sit on command, but only when I point at the ground with a certain type of insistence. He likes soft treats but not biscuits. He likes cheese but not eggs. The observations go on. Over time I’ve become less of a dispassionate observer and more of an intrepid translator of a new dog-human language.

Because we taught Tillie the language we share with her, we rarely have to guess what she means, but this new animal was a complete mystery. We’ve had ups and downs with him. Some days I’ll find myself telling people how easy he’s getting, how he seems to be more comfortable with us, less mouthy, maybe even happy. Then he’ll spend the night barking and try to escape in the morning. Finally one Saturday, rudely howled awake at 6am after very little sleep, I just let him out without clipping him to the lead Jon rigged to keep him in the yard. He went out, looked back at me, and ran. I kind of shrugged and put the kettle on, resolved that I wasn’t going to hold this animal hostage if he didn’t want to be here. Not five minutes later he was back on the front porch, bounding in through the front door with the biggest grin on his face.

I think that was a turning point in my relationship with Remi. While it isn’t safe in the neighborhood to just let him roam at will, I think he truly needs to ‘choose’ to be with us. Now I can let him out before meals without the lead and he comes right back in (although I’ve learned not to let him out free of a leash midday as he will almost certainly wander.) He’s warmed up and is increasingly cuddly, he barks less as routine has set in. He seems to be slowly coming to the realization that his needs and wishes will be (mostly) met to his specifications, even if he has to be patient with us sometimes.

I didn’t teach Remi to be a better dog-with-human any more or less than he taught me how to be a better human-with-dog. We’ve both created different articulations, which have allowed us to talk (or to make each other talk) differently.1 Remi has reinforced my growing belief that the rest of the living world is as intelligent and (often rightly) wary of us as we are of it. Learning to communicate with a dog is perhaps one of our oldest and easiest ways of practicing post-anthropocentric ideals.

We’ve resolved that Remi can stay as long as he likes, even if we haven’t completely given up hope that someone with a fenced yard will appear for him. The process of giving this animal my attention without making demands on his conformation to my will has led to something bordering on love, even if it still needs regular translation. There is nothing quite like being greeted at the end of a long day by the unbridled joy of an animal that has come to like you, in spite of all his reservations.

Media

I’ve been almost too busy to take anything in this month, but here’s a tiny list of things I enjoyed:

Andor, - Jon and I loved this show. I don’t get obsessed with television series often, but this imagining of tiny, disparate revolutions converging to form the organized rebellion of the Star Wars saga really hit some meaningful notes.

Museum of Color – Stephanie Krywonos (listen)

Becoming Earth: An Experimental Theology – Robin Wall Kimmerer (listen)

I’m about halfway through adrienne maree brown’s Black Dawn series and am thoroughly engrossed.

News

The Ribbon is open at Antler Gallery in Portland, Oregon. I’ve got a piece I’m really happy with on view through October.

Crafting Tomorrow opens October 10^th and runs through Nov 2^nd at LA Artcore. I have a few fiber sculptures on view and am very excited to be in such good company for this show organized by Surface Design Association.

Thanks for Reading!!

-Sara

It’s late summer, and it’s been really hot. We got an incredible thunderstorm late yesterday that cracked the sky open all around the house, rattling the foundations and dumping necessary water on parched ground. The storm gave way quickly to the most marvelous sunset, a fire pink that spread across the entire sky, pressed up into passing thunder-caps. As we came up the crest of the hill, a huge stag stood out in the open field by the house, wrapped in uncanny warm light. It was a pretty significant evening and it stuck with me all through today. Things this time of year have an extra residue, a thick presence that can feel dizzying. Even walking the residential streets after lunch today felt charged with a surreal quality amid the hum of cicadas and humid breeze.

The world around me has burst open in waves since early spring, culminating in this unruly overabundance bordering on rot. As if we stand on the edge of the compost heap, ready to be dumped in with others that have sat out too long. This season offers the gift of letting go alongside the struggle of holding on, the trick is to figure out what and when. I wonder if the trees feel this same tension. The sweetness of free-flowing sugar and abundant sunlight must feel impossible to part with as the days plainly diminish. Is that why the air feels so thick? Maybe it is rife with a thousand individual struggles against inevitable change. Or does everyone else just relax and flow into autumn? Some days it feels easy, others I want to bottle up these moments of bounty and hold them. But to do so would be to rob them of their aliveness, which eternally necessitates death. Light is the left hand of darkness1, and darkness is always coming in turn.

This summer has seen a lot of shifts. I’ve read more than ever, often 3-4 books at once (saving a singular honor for fiction in the mix) and, like the din of the outside world, the swell of words in my head has left me almost unmoored at times. Articulating thoughts has been difficult as the pressure crests the expanse of summer at the edge of fall. The swirl of so many thoughts and sensations into an unwieldly mass of feeling without focus.

With too much to do to ever get anything done, I’ve opted often to sit and escape into the brilliant words of others. I am almost constantly amazed at the human capacity for understanding, and the layers of nourishment hidden in the transference of knowledge through language. It is humbling to read the work of authors that build worlds of words so vast they leave me in awe. The ability to work with language as a medium as I might with clay or paint is truly spectacular to me. I don’t really aspire to tell stories in verse, but I find that reading has become a fundamental answer to my endeavors as an artist. The medium of the written word mediates the medium of visual representation in kind. Very much like speaking half of a language that requires conjugation with the other to be fully embodied. Words give us a human mouth; art gives us human eyes.

Stories in any language are most intriguing to me when they re-weave the world in ways that allow us to experience it afresh. I hope the buzzing disorientation of this season can move through my hands with luminous care when the time is right. Condensing down the swell of a summer, through decay and disintegration, into lush substrates where new seeds can sprout, synapses fire and connections form. When summer ebbs fully into decomposition, I will be ready to drop into the compost heap of these stories, waiting for the transformed clarity hiding in the dark. For now, I’ll just keep throwing things on the pile, hoping that it will all make sense later.

8/20/25

Quote of the Month

“We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.2”

-Maria Popova

Media

Semiosis, by Sue Burke. This was a fun read. I’ve never read a book told through both plant and human perspective, it gave me a lot to think about.

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin. No surprise here, as I’ve been working through Le Guin’s sweeping catalogue (an absolute delight and right on time for me.) This one is overall not my favorite, but is also haunting in ways that I know make it an exceptional story. It is still working on me.

On Being with Krista Tippett: Joanna Macy, In Memorium – Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us. This one got me.

How to Survive the End of the World Podcast: The Revolution Will Be Incremental with Rebecca Solnit. Loved this conversation. I’m going to write an essay about “the value of building your own burrito” very soon.

The Marginalian by Maria Popova is worth following in general, but I really enjoyed this short article about Wonder, Play, and How to Be More Alive.

News!

-It’s officially dye season! I’ve got my first few projects through the process and managed to get a pink as wild as the brightest sunset out of Hopi dye amaranth and poke berries:

-I’ve got work headed to The Ribbon, an exhibition at Antler and Talon Gallery in Portland, Oregon. More about this next month, but here is a sneak peak of the work:

Thank you for reading!!

-Sara

It’s been hard to parse out what to focus writing on this month. It feels strange to recount all of the sweetness (and there has been a lot) in my daily life against a backdrop of intense suffering across the world and growing unrest here at home. I think a lot right now about how grateful I am for our little house, for its amazing yard full of trees and birds and garden. For still (mostly) predictable seasons and attainable comforts. We have not had to flee or been forcibly removed from our home. We have what we need, but I reel daily in the knowledge that our circumstances could easily be very different.

We’re creeping into peak harvest season. Days are still long, but the sun has shifted ever so slightly, casting a pale sorbet into every sunset. Evening fireflies are beginning to wane, but still blinking out their lovely calls to one another. It’s been the wettest July I can remember since moving to Ohio well over a decade ago. Generally, summer sees a shift toward drought conditions after a typical wet spring season. This summer, so far, has been different. I’ve barely had to water the garden at all. It has been raining almost daily. True to many predictions, this area of the Ohio River Valley seems to be turning into a temperate rainforest.

Having left a temperate rainforest in Humboldt County for this place, the irony of this new reality is never lost on me. While Humboldt dries out, Ohio becomes a bog. These are the visible realities of climate change, remarkably obvious to a gardener. That isn’t to say that things will stay this way, there have always been seasonal variations, but the steady trend toward a wetter climate in Southwest Ohio is conspicuous.

My tomatoes have struggled a bit more than usual (recalling my early failed attempts at growing them in Eureka, CA) but the fruit trees, sunflowers (and weeds) are flourishing. Individuals that have always limped along under my conservative watering practices are showing me what they are capable of. The hydrangea, planted on the far side of the house (where I never water) actually bloomed after four years of sterility. Watching the yard under shifting conditions has taught me a lot about what many of the plants really need to thrive, and I’m taking notes.

The sunflowers are an area of accidental delight this year. The seeds were scattered by goldfinches from a handful of Akira cultivars grown last year. With a head start in the ground, and an abundance of water, these second-generation volunteers have become giants. I readily recognize a sunflower sprout, and I resolved to let them grow where they came up, not realizing they would crest 10 feet tall and expand to cover the entire footprint of the 8’x4’ garden bed.

The beets and peppers I planted nearby are not happy, but the pollinators are ecstatic. I’ve never seen so many bumblebees, honeybees, flies, gnats, spiders, whole ecosystems of insects taking up residence in these flowery high-rises. The finches followed. First fiery-red house finches and now the ubiquitous goldfinch—sunflower farmer-extraordinaires. The yard is teeming with sparrows, wrens, woodpeckers and other insectivores lured by the last of the fireflies and the abundance of bugs and larvae inhabiting the flowers.

The lengthening summer boon is upon us and it seems necessary to mark these moments of sweetness before the rush of fall harvests in diminishing sunlight. I’ve been lucky this season to be home more often, to get to watch many relationships play out: plants calling in pollination and predation alike which in turn attracts larger pollinators and predators. Everyone fits into a dynamic push and pull of collaboration, competition, and everything in between. The longer I watch, the more I become convinced that we humans, who have spent the past 300 plus years distancing ourselves from these systems and denigrating the intelligence of every other living organism, are the silliest animals. The finches are far better gardeners than I am.

7/23/25

Word of the Month:

Gestalt (noun) ge-‘stält: something that is made up of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts.

Quote of the Month:

Rationalists, who have long attacked the concept of intelligence and awareness in nature as antirational romantic projection, have themselves been merely looking at and for their own reflection in the world around them—and, of course, finding the world wanting.1 -Stephen Harrod Buhner

Media:

Note: I’m trying Tidal after breaking up with Spotify for their longtime underpayment of artists and recent choice to use profits to fund AI Military research. But dang, I miss it like an abusive ex, tempting me with all the good times we used to have. It’s hard not getting so much of my media in one place anymore, but I’m trying to make it work by piecing it all together elsewhere. I’ve got Libby and Overcast and maybe I’ll forget how easy it was to give my money to something I knew was bad for us all, but which lured me with familiarity and simplicity. This month I enjoyed:

The Telling, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin is quickly becoming my favorite writer and this one is a particularly poetic novel that feels very prescient and timely.

Plant Intelligence in the Imaginal Realm by Stephen Harrod Buhner- ok hear me out, I know the Gaians are weirdos, and even five years ago I might have rolled my eyes if someone suggested this one to me, but it is a compelling, engaging, well-researched read for hippy non-fiction. The consideration of how bacteria and viruses behave is particularly fascinating.

A stampede of life-sized animal puppets! This article has me excited about this traveling project.

Album: Cosmic Selector Vol 1 by Lord Huron- I loved a few of these songs immediately, many of them have been looping in my head for days especially this one.

News:

I’m back in the studio working on a lot of projects simultaneously. Jon and I have a wood-firing this weekend and I’m excited to fire this series of medicinal plant mugs I’ve been working on.

I’m also working on some quilted sculptural ideas for an upcoming show at the Lloyd Library and Museum scheduled for May 2026:

Thank you for reading!!!

I’m sitting in Chicago O’Hare Airport. What should have been a quick layover on the way to my hometown has turned into a 12-hour detour, thanks to a technical difficulty (how does one pump 2000 extra pounds of fuel into a commuter jet tank???) It took the ground crew over an hour to figure out how to extract the ton of fuel that rendered our flight overweight. By the time we made it into the sky, we were already doomed to miss our connection. So here we sit, my 12-year-old daughter and I, somehow revisiting this circle of hell. We spent the entirety of her second birthday similarly stranded in this same airport, barely making the last flight out before the airport shut down. I thought a decade was enough. Maybe it was finally safe to book a connection through O’Hare. Famous last words: “What could go wrong?” Well, here we are. The good news is I now have plenty of time to write another late edition of this newsletter, and—thanks be to all things green and good—the kiddo is no longer two. It could have been a much, much longer day.

I’ve been thinking about connections, or rather missed or missing connections. Things that should go right that just don’t or things that start going wrong—moments where we don’t meet each other where we could. The teeming web of associations that make ecosystems possible are still vastly mysterious to science. For most of the materialist era, scientific thought has followed an individualist paradigm: isolate, dissect, record and rank. Up until fairly recently, natural sciences were primarily concerned with classification of species into phyla, a great tree that was built on the idea of steady evolution toward complexity. Prokaryote to eukaryote—a family tree of all life (with Homo sapiens at an outermost branch, distinct and distant from the more “primitive” trunk.) This is the default blueprint for human interaction with the rest of natural world. Over the years, the attempt to pin everyone down with a name and a place on the phylogenetic tree proved tricker than expected. Some scientists are turning to study the elastic relationships between seemingly distinct organisms to tell more interesting stories about what, and who they are or may become.

I don’t think this is really news for humans. It’s like remembering something we’ve forgotten. Everyone that grows food outside of the agro-industrial complex comes to understand the interdependence among a wide range of organisms that make the magic of flower and fruit possible. This knowledge would have been intrinsic to just about every human from which we are descended. Microbes and mycorrhiza in the soil, pollinators, companion plants to ease the pressures of predators or assist in nutrient uptake. One need only pay attention to see it all unfold. Our ingestion of food is just one stop in the long line of linked occurrences that have to happen for life to continue. Our insistence that human consumption of the bounties of this process is “the end point” is merely a vain attempt to deny our own eventual death and decay, back into the soil and the microbes. A cycle. But what happens when the cycle is broken?

We planted a plum tree last fall, and this spring it was covered with beautiful blossoms. But as the season progressed, it became clear that there would be no fruit. I’d seen dozens of bees and other pollinators buzzing among the blossoms, I’d fed all of the fruit trees rich compost and organic fertilizers, but alas—not a single fruit. Talking with my dad soon after this realization, he was likewise lamenting the lack of fruit on his own plum tree, far across the country (where I will eventually get—today—even if it’s dark by then!) We discussed that they probably weren’t getting cross-pollination from any other plum trees. This is fruit tree cultivation 101. Some trees can self-pollinate, but others require a neighboring tree to successfully produce fruit. Apparently, there are no nearby neighbors growing plum trees. A disastrous missed connection.

Considering this new reality, I was instantly transported to the plum tree of my youth, in a the backyard of a house my mother rented across the street from my Gobby. That plum tree was huge. I could climb it and sit among the branches. It yielded the most delicious, deep purple-black skinned plums with blood-red flesh I have ever had. I spent the few summers we lived in the house joyfully collecting and eating fruits, juice running down my arms. It was like magic.

Now I realize the tree had a long-distance lover, maybe a whole host of them. They never saw each other, they were probably planted several blocks or even miles away, but they sent love notes back and forth across the expanse for decades. Was my family’s brief enjoyment of that plum tree and its wonderful fruit merely playing a bit part in the longer narrative arc of an arboreal love story? We were certainly entangled in its sweetness during the years that we lived where it grew.

Modern living is hyper-individualist. We get property surveys and build fences. Ownership and isolation is the norm. Gardening within this pattern can be exhausting and unsustainable. Without strong relationships with our neighbors, we have to do everything ourselves. What would happen if we thought more communally, particularly in regards to oft-lonely perennials in need of co-conspirators? I wonder if that huge plum tree of my youth was planted at the same time as another knowingly. Maybe it came to be in that yard as a coordinated project of distant human neighbors. Did they know they were kindling a life-long, multi-species love affair?

But what happens when the humans move on? When one of the trees is cut down to make way for a cleaner landscape, a more perfect lawn, the love notes of the remaining tree are left unanswered. Little pollen airplanes circling in vain, without a place to land. We forget our promises, our extra-species kinships quickly, often within a single generational shift. I don’t think most of us think of our surroundings as alive and in the throes of complex relationships we may not see or understand. I’ve only recently begun to wonder about the efficacy of plopping various fruit trees in the ground where they may not really want to be—what if they don’t have any friends to talk to?

It strikes me that this is one important way to build and sustain inter-species communities that we often don’t think about, but that would have been absolutely necessary only a few generations ago. Our ancestors would have known how to leverage community planting across arbitrary human boundaries intimately, because their survival depended on a diversity and range of potential food sources. A steady shift in scientific and cultural thinking may help us remember that we are part of the landscape, not prevailing over it. Tending to long-lived plants like fruit trees traverses time and space, becoming multi-generational, distance-defying endeavors that offer abundance to everyone involved. Creating opportunities for those connections to thrive offers a sense of purpose and stability to human communities and our extended web of relations.

As I sit in the airport, surrounded by the rush of humanity off to make their own connections far afield, I resolve to await re-entry in a storyline of adapted expectations. The love on the other side of all this space will still be there. I can only assume that we will eventually take off and be received by my native soil, as surely as a pollen promise on a bee’s wing. Just maybe not as soon as I would like.

Quote of the month:

“It is the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives in crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on”

-Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Media:

• The Light Eaters, by Zoë Schlanger – almost done with this exquisitely researched and often mind-bending book on plant intelligence, I’ve been listening to the audiobook version on Spotify. It is changing the way I look at the world.

• The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin – I love this book so much, it feels more important now than ever.

• Another excellent episode of How to Survive the End of the World Podcast: I’m the Hell

News!

• I helped a couple of my favorite people install solo shows this month at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Both Hannah Parrett and Clive Moloney produced truly killer installations, if you’re in the area please go see them.

• I have two pieces in the Art in Action exhibition at Off-Ludlow Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Both are for sale to raise money for The Mill Creek Alliance, a local non-profit that supports rejuvenation of the Mill Creek Watershed, a tributary of the Ohio River that was once one of the most polluted waterways in the nation.

• We have quail eggs! and had our first entirely yard-derived quail meal!

Thank you for reading!!

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I’ve started this newsletter about a dozen times in my head over the past two weeks. repeatedly I ended up just jotting down a few notes and putting it off for tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. Now it’s tomorrow I guess, or at least I don’t feel like I can put it off anymore. There is kind of too much to talk about, but I’ll start with the birds.

I’m sitting, writing for the first time in my new studio space—which still feels like the most incredible luxury. I’m in a little attic room in a three-story building, overlooking a mixed industrial area of Cincinnati’s Camp Washington neighborhood. I’m set up in a corner of my studio that is the upper south-west corner of the building. Right on the other side of the brick and plaster wall from my head, tucked into an exterior crack, is a Starling nest. I can hear the tiny chirps of babies as their parents fly in with food and little scrapes of feet and excited movements. There is an almost rhythmic trilling audible through the brick. It is an added sweetness to this space that I’m already absolutely in love with.

I’ve spent more time than usual with birds this month. The arrival of late spring means the early morning hours have become a cacophony of birdsong. Impossible to sleep through, Cardinals, Robins and Wrens dominate, joined by migrating visitors of all colors and sizes. I ended up giving up on sleep a few mornings in a row to sit up before dawn with them. During the first few years of living in my house I was embarrassingly ignorant about the vast complexities of these songs. I say embarrassing, because I have studied birds. I helped find nests and band baby Plover and Tern chicks as a teenager, I did field work observing endangered Rails and went on to college still focused on ornithology. But my midwestern backyard many years later was merely full of a ubiquitous “bird” noise with a few soloists noticeable now and then.

Until something shifted a couple of years ago. I noticed that the song I’d thought was a Cardinal was actually coming from the mouth of a tiny, and very pissed off Carolina Wren in the yew tree next to the deck, telling me I was too close to her nest. This sudden correction to my glassy dismissal of detail in the sounds around the yard brought up a sudden epiphany for me. It feels silly, because I certainly knew this in theory: every bird has its own song. These songs were becoming more interesting, more practically discernable to me personally, like being suddenly able to pick out individual voices in a choir.

Sometime after the Wren encounter I downloaded the Meriln app and completely transformed my relationship to birdsong. Turning theory into practice has been life altering. After a couple of years of paying attention, I was absolutely overjoyed to hear the first Common Nighthawk return a few weeks ago. Then last week the first Eastern Wood Pewee called out its amusingly sweet Peee-oooo-weeeee into the morning and I burst outside with the enthusiasm of a kid running out to meet a visiting loved one who’d been gone too long. These are my neighbors, and I’m learning to know and love them, to depend on them to shake me out of the darkness of these times.

Which brings me back to the little Starlings behind the wall. Murmurations of Starlings are some of the most amazing ecological phenomena and a growing symbol among movement work. Each Starling adapts to the seven birds around it, forming amazing synchronous movements often of thousands of individuals. The visual of murmuration came up over and over this month. From installing a film adaptation of Dani McClain’s short story Homing Instinct at the Weston, and a visit from adrienne maree brown which coincided with that opening, to Cincinnati’s Anti-Despair Earth Fair and days at the community garden, the topic just keeps coming up. The Starlings are everywhere, trying to teach me how to murmurate.

I am decidedly not a good murmurator, or at least I’m still fledgling and clumsy at it. I’m a private person, and I’ve made some choices about my public presence around that identity. As others have stood up on social media against every injustice, I’ve often avoided re-posting news or calls to action. I’ve justified this choice in a few ways. Generally, I look at my engagement with platforms like Instagram with trepidation at best. Empire is clearly in control of these spaces and has been for some time. It is increasingly difficult to know what is real, so I often chose to stay out of public discussion in favor of not accidentally decimating false information. I decided years ago to forgo most types of personal posts in favor of promotion of my artmaking. I further justified my relative quiet online concerning issues I feel strongly about in my actual life because I don’t have what I would consider to be that far of a reach. But, like my birdsong epiphanies, my feelings about this have been steadily shifting. I recently listened to an interview with Steph Speirs of the Sierra Club Foundation that again, in an almost comical way, made me reconsider the obvious. While it is an impossible undertaking for one person to change the world, one person—like a Starling—can help change the behavior and direction of the people around them. Our sphere of influence may be small, but each person standing near us may send ripple effects out into their own unique spheres, beyond our wildest imaginings.

“A voice can change a room, and that is the unit of change that matters.” -Steph Speirs

I am not new to this theory. Even before listening to Speirs’ eloquent re-frame, I was often talking about these ideas with close friends. Yet somehow I had never really thought through the full scope of what shifting individual behavior to inspire collective change could mean in practice. It has always felt scary for me to say things out loud, to show up authentically in unfamiliar spaces. I’ve never aspired to be an influencer. I fancied myself as more of a Great Blue Heron type: stoic, aloof, doing my own thing, not bothering anyone. But as circumstances get undeniably rougher for the vast majority of all beings trying to survive on this planet, it seems well past time to learn how to move together.

I’m still figuring out what that looks like for me, but some of it is tied up in my choice to start this newsletter project. Writing what I’m thinking about out in public still feels very tender and uncomfortable, but it has been incredibly rewarding. My relationship to other platforms is also changing, becoming less gated and more community-centered. My practice of murmuration is also more offline than ever. I’m in the garden, I’m having dinner with beloved friends and family, I’m (gasp) meeting new people and finding delight in expanding my social circles. I’m trying to carve out more time for my human and non-human neighbors in a world of insidious domination and social media anesthesia. If behavior is contagious, I am resolved to think more intentionally about what I want to spread.

5/20/25

Word of the Month

Apotropaic : a-pe-trō-‘pā-ik : adjective

definition: designed to avert evil

Apotropaic motifs can be found throughout history, from carvings of Greek Gorgons to charms worn to repel the evil eye. The word apotropaic comes from the Greek verb apotrépein, meaning “to turn away from, avert,” combining apo- (“away”) with trépein (“to turn”). The magic of apo- doesn’t end there: its influence is evident in many English words, including apology, apostrophe, apostle, and apocalypse.1

Media

The Nature Of Podcast - Every interview is wonderful, I hope you listen if you haven’t already.

Octavia’s Brood - I’ve read so many adjacent books but somehow not this one until now. Entertaining and thought-provoking, the short-story format makes this a quick but profound read.

News!

-I have a new studio space for quilting and dry media! It’s beautiful and I love it. Here’s a picture of me setting up work for the opening last weekend:

-If you are in or near Cincinnati, please go see the show at the Weston Art Gallery which includes the work of James Pate, Bing Davis, and Dani McClain/Lydia Pilcher’s film collaboration linked above. I really loved helping with this installation.

-We have quail! More birds! Babies hatched in late April and should be laying tiny eggs soon!

Thank you for reading!!

It’s spring! Redbuds and honeysuckle are turning the hillsides neon pink and green. The river is flooding, swelling over 25 feet in some places for all the rain we’ve had. It’s swallowed up huge sections of low-lying areas, shifting sediment and depositing mud, uprooted trees, and river rocks higher and higher along the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries. When I moved to Ohio in 2010, I was delighted to discover the seemingly endless Ordovician fossils scattered along every creek and riverbed. Many years before the move, I spent a summer working at the tiny Arcata California Natural History Museum illustrating trilobites for an exhibition. I had no idea I would end up in the very place that almost all of those specimens were found. But after 15 years of combing creeks and cliff faces, finding hundreds of crystalized horn corals and brachiopods, the coveted trilobite still eluded me.

Spring is a time of tangles for me, too many things I want to do, not enough hours in each day. After well over a decade of living through seasonal shifts, the sudden lurches out of hibernation still disorient me. March and April are always cast in various shades of exuberance and intense frustration as I integrate the thaw of land and body into the bursting energy of buds and birdsong. Foraging hikes are necessary pivot points in the uncomfortable moments. I go out with a goal: find the latest eruption of seasonal bounty. Ramps, morels, bloodroot, fiddleheads, trillium—the faithful return of the stars of spring’s forest floor-show. Focus on the present moment.

On a day of nebulous grumpiness, feeling stuck and out-of-time, Jon asked me to come along while he fished the Little Miami (a choice exercise in stabilizing his own nervous system.) I grudgingly came along, unsure whether it would actually make me feel better to be outside or just piss me off that I got even less done by ignoring the studio or the yard for another day. I started skirting the upper banks and surrounding forest for mushrooms that I figured were probably still sleeping, but you never know, timing is stranger every year. I struck out, gave up pretty quickly, and wandered down to the swollen river bank. I sat in a big paper maple for a while watching turkey vultures ride the thermals and smelling the damp soil mixed with the marshy undertones of decay and musky brine. The roots of the giant tree had been half excavated by increasing flooding, fresh detritus caught up in branches 12 feet overhead, a measure of the most recent surge of rain water. The rains are sweeping away more and more every year, re-carving riverbeds and threatening livelihoods. They are also continually re-shuffling the distant past.

Walking the shore, breathing in spring in all of its devastating glory, I followed the recent tracks of a hunting heron. After a while I couldn’t ignore the rocks anymore, I started scanning for pretty colors, hag-stones, and heart shapes. The usual cast of fossil characters immediately emerged, many pummeled into smooth gemstones by the current. And suddenly there it was, a beautiful little trilobite, years after I had (almost) completely given up.

My home was once an ocean. The myriad fossilized exoskeletons that whisper stories of an inland sea are crunched into gravel, underfoot and out of mind. Until the waters start to rise. Then I go to the river banks and can’t help but feel the weight of their losses. Trillions of calcified casualties of the earths first mass extinction event, when their oceans froze and ultimately receded into the rolling hills that seem so unconditional—sturdy enough to build whole civilizations into. The histories of this place are etched in stone, and in some other time I am plainly already underwater.

The conditions that have given rise to human dominance of this landscape are not certain, they are not a perpetual promise. Pulled between the simultaneous urge for the stillness of winter and the productivity of spring, my body is a future fossil. The trilobites and horn corals demand that I consider a longer narrative arc, one that re-situates humanity firmly amid trillions of other lifeforms in a processual shift, a pendulum swing. A slip between seasons on the dial of deep time. I didn’t find mushrooms, but I took some comfort in the quiet insistence of once-living rock that I am part of a larger story, my cells fed by the minerals of ancient lives only to be sloughed off in service of an unknown future.

4/8/2024

“And if I die, let it not be seen as a failure. And if I live, may it not be mistaken for success.” -Sophie Strand, The Body is a Doorway

Word of the Month

Attrition - at×tri×tion

1: sorrow for one's sins that arises from a motive other than that of the love of God

2 : the act of rubbing together : of wearing or grinding down by friction

3 : the act of weakening or exhausting by constant harassment, abuse, or attack

4 : a reduction in numbers usually as a result of resignation, retirement, or death

Media

-The Wildlife Homestead channel on Youtube. Wonderful short videos on increasing diversity of backyard flora and fauna through fun projects like this one.

-One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix- A beautiful screen adaptation of the classic book.

-The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (highly recommend the audiobook read by Dominic Hoffman who does a brilliant job of bringing a fantastic story to life)

-We saw a great set by Willie Carlisle a couple of weeks ago, but opener Jordan Smart really stole the show with some amazing new songs that are hard to find, so here’s a YouTube clip of a crowd favorite.

-I know I already listed it last month, but I finished Sophie Strand’s The Body is a Doorway and it was worth the slower read. I absolutely love this author and there are so many really resonant and magically genius moments in her memoir. I will read it again. Here’s a fun interview where she talks about the book and other interesting things.

News

I saw a bald eagle driving down the hill from my house twice last month! Other than that I’ve been in the garden, and the studio. I finally planted asparagus which I feel is peak commitment.

Thanks for reading!

I’m finally getting around to some actual artwork based on my research! This is a hand painted Elderberry on cotton quilt inspired by the illustrations of Elizabeth Blackwell from the collection of the Lloyd Library & Museum.

3/11/25

I know I’m joining a chorus here, but it’s been a long winter. The grip of empire has tightened so hard and so fast, even around those of us that previously barely noticed it. It’s been dark, and heavy. But the sun is returning in spite of us all. Every day is a little lighter, prompting my yard (and my hibernation brain) to thaw. I’m holding the idea of being fluid, slippery, finding niches suddenly opening in the ecosystem of a fracturing capitalist culture.

I’ve been hiding in the library, buried in books on plants, scanning the Lloyd’s vast knowledge base of recipes and remedies. As the weather outside turns toward spring, I can feel myself also leaning into the sun, ready to let the steeped collection of new information seep out into lived practice. I’m already greeting the trout lilies, daffodils and small eruptions of green everywhere I look. The faithful return of so many old friends leaves me rejoicing, as I always do this time of year, that I live through winter to see the spring again. The sun keeps its promise, even if we humans can’t seem to get our shit together.

I feel like I’ve been planting seeds all winter. I have endless spreadsheets, word documents, lists and list of remedies and notes. I’ve been burying little knowledge acorns for later inspection and digestion. With the sun calling me outdoors, I’ve cut back on library hours to prepare for the coming upsurge of all of my page-bound seeds into new projects in the studio and garden.

Tentative analysis of this carefully collected data is starting to yield a more tangible web of knowledge around how we humans have come to know and collaborate with our plant neighbors. Certain plants appear over and over again, across time and place from the ancient Greeks, to Indigenous and settler colonist Americans. They also appear across ailments—living panaceas born through diverse cultures that have treated everything from childbirth and arthritis, to cancer and heart disease. I am most excited about these homo-sapiens-supporting super plants. Lobelia, Bloodroot, and Elderberry, Dandelion, Burdock, Garlic and Juniper. These are some of our most valuable allies in the fight against disease throughout human history, and they are generally abundant, (and free!) currently coming out of dormancy in the Ohio River Valley, just like me.

Often these plants are considered weeds. In fact, the most prolifically engaged anti-cancer herbs are Red Clover, Yellow Dock, Burdock, Poke and Poison Hemlock—plants we go well out of our way to irradicate from our modern landscapes. These medicines grow in waste places and are barely known to most of us as having any potential beyond their noxious status. Yet early humans learned to safely use and rely on them. Even in the midst of our fast-paced ecocidal culture, where “real” medicines are controlled and profited on by bloated and impersonal corporations, plant medicine is still accessible either through family lore, research, or relationships formed with the plants themselves.

I’m so interested in how these relationships between plants and humans came to be. It’s not a simple puzzle to put together. Some shrug and chalk it up to millennia of trial and error, others think we may have largely lost our ability to listen to other-than-human language and teachings. A recent article about “bear medicine” that Indigenous North Americans learned by watching what bears eat for inflammation, indicates a delightful multi-species educational effort.

Beyond the individual plant characters hiding just below the surface of my data sets are also unique and largely anecdotal ethnobotanical accounts that have preserved much of this knowledge in writing. Starting with the Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, first illustrated in 512 AD, what was once a nimble oral history of plant materia medica has been slowly crystallized in print. Works like this and The Trotula of 12^th century Italian midwifery are some of the earliest extant texts detailing herbal medicine. Many of these practices have endured while others have been lost to time or plant species extinctions.

The transfer of oral knowledge into print and the growing literacy of the global population have given rise to a myriad of resources on herbalism, but the primary texts of early American settlers among Indigenous peoples are where some of the most remarkable accounts of plant relationships occur. The adventures of early ethnographers in North America are often laced with the pursuit of a local materia medica that mirrored the already standardized Linnean systems informing European botanic medicine.

This culture clash invites more careful investigation. Indigenous words for each plant tend toward direct description or embodied use. Tribal words for Lobelia often translate to “puke weed,” indicating common use as an emetic. The Chippewa word for Tansy—o’ckinigi’kweäni’bīc—translates to “young woman’s leaf.”1 Accounts of non-endemic plants interweaving with Indigenous herbalism tell more nuanced stories of survival amid genocide than we typically summon. Non-native plants like Plantain and Mugwort were adopted by tribes and used extensively to treat disease, connecting Indigenous North American herbalists all the way back to Dioscorides and beyond. Settler reliance on Indigenous knowledge of North American flora cannot be overstated, and Europeans quickly co-opted and employed these remedies alongside those they carried with them across the Atlantic.

This layered knowledge was then directly transferred into the development of a new American pharmacopeia, based on both enduring European and Indigenous plant use. This is evident in Beach’s Family Physician and Home Guide originally published in Cincinnati in 1842. In it, Wooster Beach describes hundreds of remedies including this one for chronic rheumatism:

“Make a beer of the following articles: Spruce, sage, sarsaparilla, hackmetac (Tamarac), garden rhubarb, elder roots, bark of burdock root, wintergreen root and water cresses. For common drink.”2

This illustrates the melding of plants native to different continents into a burgeoning pharmaceutical canon unique to a shifting American medical culture. Most of these plant medicines have since been distilled into individual active compounds which are now lab-synthesized for standardization. This is the well-known case for Willow (Salix spp.) used traditionally for pain relief (even by bears!) The isolation of salicin from willow forms the active compound in Aspirin. The Yew tree (Taxus baccata) whose isolate taxol was discovered by the Lloyd brothers, is a common cancer treatment still in use today. That discovery was made possible due to their extensive collection of the books I’m now reading through. I have found multiple accounts of Indigenous and traditional European use of Yew bark as a poultice on cancerous growths.

When we take these isolated compounds away from their plant origins, we quickly lose our connection to history and ecosystem. We also lose the cross-cultural, inter-species stories that follow these plants through time and place. The most valuable surprises hidden in my research are found in retracing those threads, moving past the knowledge that has been condensed for ease and utility to where larger, more meaningful stories are still visible. When we separate individuals from community (human and otherwise), we lose a similar depth and situated understanding of self and place. As spring’s thaw brings the vast, cacophonous abundance of entangled stories back to life around me, I’m grateful to be able to share some of my sequestered winter musings with all of you while I prepare to stream out into the sun!

Favorite off-topic library find of the month: traditional birch bark crafts. Created by Chippewa women who folded and bit patterns into birch bark with their front teeth!

From Uses of Plants be the Chippewa Indians by Frances Densmore

Media

It’s been a rough month for reading and listening for pleasure, but here are a few recommendations:

The Body is a Doorway, by Sophie Strand. It’s finally out and I’m enjoying a slow digestion of so many resonant thoughts in this memoir.

Favorite modern herbalist materia medica for ease of use:

• 300 Herbs, Their Indications and Contraindications, by Matthew Alfs

• Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Rocky Mountains and Neighboring Territories, by Terry Willard

• Native American Medicinal Plants, An Ethnobotanical Dictionary by Daniel Moerman

News!

Works up at:

• Feathers, Fins, and Fur at Queen City Clay in Cincinnati, Open until April 10th

• Connection: Artaxis National Juried Exhibition at Northwest Missouri State University from March 24^th-April18th

Thanks for reading!!

Mullein illustration by Elizabeth Blackwell, A Curious Herbal, 1737

2/9/25

It’s been a crazy time. Our collective experience continues to absorb more chaos, more bad news, more fear. It feels like a weird moment to write about small joys, but I’m hoping to hold onto them, to enumerate them out loud. It seems like the most minimal form of resistance, but one I can practice every day.

There have been a lot of delights this month. I put up a new bird feeder in the coffee nook and have watched many chickadees, woodpeckers, starlings and other neighbors swooping in and out of view. The cats have probably been the greatest beneficiaries of this new development. I’ve sat for many cold mornings with our dog melting into my lap, reading good books and really loving on the house. I’ve spent time with family and friends. I’ve enjoyed wonderful music and been in community.

I started an artist residency at the Lloyd Library and Museum last week. It’s an amazing place and I’m so grateful I actually get to explore the stacks and look at the rows and rows of beautiful books in the collection, some dating back to the 1490’s. I’ve spent the majority of my time in a corner of the library, sifting through dozens of books on folk medicine and herbalism, looking for common plant remedies for a small number of human health issues. The smell of old books has permeated my skin at this point. I’ve sat in almost complete silence for hours each day and it’s done a lot to regulate my nervous system.

I’ve looked through a number of books on traditional medicine in the Cincinnati area circa the early-mid 1800’s situated alongside books on indigenous and folk medicine of Appalachia and surrounding regions, collecting common threads. This isn’t a particularly efficient process. I am often manually scanning entire multi-volume publications. There is certainly an A.I. assistant that could give me several easy answers to my questions. Yet the depth, the stories, the things I wasn’t necessarily looking for seeping into my consciousness are where I am finding the most interest, and the most joy.

Working closely with the librarians, who have such a vast knowledge of the history of these books, is one place random anecdotes add complexity and texture to my research. I was told a story about Elizabeth Blackwell, whose beautifully illustrated A Curious Herbal was the first book I chose. The book is amazing. Published in 1737 with full color plates of painstakingly rendered botanical illustrations and corresponding hand-written accounts of the habits and medicinal uses of each plant.

Elizabeth’s husband was essentially a con man. He continually got himself into trouble, first practicing medicine without credentials, then starting a printing business without joining the English printing guild, which landed him in a debtor’s prison. Elizabeth compiled this incredible set of books while selling her illustrations to survive, and they became wildly successful. The books became so successful in fact, that she was able to buy her husband out of prison. Unfortunately, he squandered a good amount of her money and fled to Sweden where he became the court physician to Fredrick I and was later beheaded for conspiracy.

Such a wild and dramatic creation story behind this meticulously organized, lovely book! Getting to read through this entire volume, with ghosts of each plate bleeding through the pages, while knowing its origins was a treat. The book is a living thing, its history spreading like the ink shifting into the weave of the paper.

Yellow Asphodel Illustration by Elizabeth Blackwell, A Curious Herbal, 1737

Another favorite moment was stumbling upon a recipe for a tonic for arthritis via Beach’s Family Physician and Home Guide published in Cincinnati in 1861: “Take spikenard, comfrey, white Solomon’s seal, St John’s wort, sweet agrimony, prince’s feather, swamp break roots, one-pound raisins, two ounces saffron. Put all in an earthen pot, adding a layer of sugar between each layer of roots and herbs; cover the pot with rye dough or paste, put it in a hot oven and when cooked down wring out the liquor; add one third rum or brandy, Take a wineglass full two to three times per day.”

The whole book reads like a cross between a medical manual by and for an educated male elite and actual witchcraft, but this was the medicine of the time. Some of it is clearly informed by indigenous and folk herbalist practices, some seems like a shot in the dark and likely more harm than good—so much arsenic and mercury!—but it’s all incredibly interesting.

This is what we stand to lose in the AI moderated world of convenient answers. We learn so much from the vast periphery of information we have to wade through if we search within multiple situated sources. Optimum ease does not facilitate deep knowledge. I don’t think we’re getting the most out of a life lived only on surface answers to our questions. Some of the best moments of my life have occurred in cul-de-sacs, places that didn’t have a direct path through, where I had to back track and course correct. I’ve learned a lot from dead-ends, and I refuse to believe that time spent lost in interesting places we aren’t looking for is time wasted.

My greatest joy so far in the early days of this residency is the realization that I have time to get lost. I can, and by the nature of my unique set of circumstances, should follow whatever random subject or strange detail catches my attention. This loosening of structure around my questions invites me to approach the world with more wonder, lost in a forest or a field of inquiry without such a rigid idea of what I’m looking for. The things I’m finding are infinitely more enriching than straight answers.

Word of the Month

Transmogrify -verb-

1. To transform in a surprising or magical manner.

2. To change or alter greatly, often with grotesque or humorous effect.

Monthly Media

Reading:

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin - I absolutely loved this little book and will definitely read it over and over.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer – A must read! Short and sweet and full of important thoughts on alternative economies. ( listened to her read the audiobook which was wonderful!)

Stand and Fight by Madeline Ffitch- finally read it, I’m still thinking about it.

Becoming Animal by David Abram - in the middle of this one and really enjoying the perspective shifts.

Music/Podcasts:

The Montvales - Born Strangers: we got to see a killer live performance by these amazing humans last month.

Dead Gowns -Renter Not a Buyer: this song sunk in quick and keeps coming back up.

The Telepathy Tapes- really interesting research on the nature of connection and communication beyond language.

News!

• Press Release for Lloyd Library Residency

• I’ll have work in this year’s Earth and Fire exhibition at the Stifel Fine Art Center in Wheeling, WV. Open February 22nd-March 29th 2025.

• It’s garden planning season! Stay tuned for adventures in quail hatching and seed starting.

Thanks for reading! Stay safe out there!

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January 10th, 2025

I’ve pretty much quit everything. This time two years ago I had five part-time jobs strung together into a quagmire of overcommitment held together with sheer force of will and no small amount luck. It’s been a slow process of shedding. First the fancy private high school I was teaching at, then one college, then another, finally the museum art handling job. I’ve left just about all of them. Now I’m teaching an online course on Appalachian and Rural Artforms and a ceramics class one night a week. This is, of course, not financially sustainable. But neither was what I was doing before and it was making me mentally and physically unwell. I’m jokingly calling this my sabbatical.

Attempting to carve out a living working in the arts (and I suspect, just about anything else people actually want to do with their time) is demoralizing. All of the jobs I left had a common theme: I was an easily replaceable commodity. Over the past few years, I initiated several meetings with directors and department chairs addressing the abysmal pay and resources available to adjunct faculty (which in my city is typically well below poverty level.) I was met with the same non-answer every time: that their hands were tied, that the money came from some place on-high that they could neither access nor properly advocate for. Part of that probably feels true for them, most of it is apathy or cowardice.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. I’m not here to write a manifesto on the effects of late-stage capitalism on liberal arts education, although I could and maybe someday I will. Today I want to focus on the unknown, because that’s what we’re all really facing.

Collapse, at this point, is evident. Government, climate, our societal and personal lives, it’s happened, it’s happening, it will continue to happen. I’ve lived through several personal apocalypses— who I thought I was, what I believed my life to be about, my relationships, my career, all have cracked open when terrain suddenly shifted. I’ve had my world turned upside down enough times to know it will happen again, that the destruction and regeneration of my story is always in progress.

My first truly earth-shattering personal catastrophe plunged me into a version of myself I barely recognized, and I ran from it for years. I left California, tried to bury myself in traditional roles of marriage and parenthood. It didn’t work. My denial made for a slow decade of digging myself out of the holes I tried to hide in. I ultimately ended up writing a different story. One I’ve become pretty attached to. Now it's 2025 and I feel like I’m shedding storylines again, this time with more purpose, more faith in the process, even if it’s still messy.

The trouble is, I am in love with the idea of myself as a hyper-capable, productive, busy person. I like feeling like a well-oiled machine doing a good job. And so maybe in the end, it is truly a blessing that none of my many jobs really valued me, because I could have gotten caught up in that feedback loop for a long time. I wouldn’t have spent so much of the last few years wondering why nothing made sense while poking at the rotten roots of all of the institutions I was working for. adrienne maree brown would say that when there’s no logic in our societal structures we are “living inside someone else’s dream.”1 The dead dream of profit and extraction, the siren’s song of very late-stage capitalism doesn’t leave room for our humanity, and it is time to imagine something different. So…I’m taking this moment to try that “something different” on the microscopic scale of my own relationship to work, money, and community.

I should say this is possible, in no small part, due to finally being in a safe, stable partnership, and my recently acquired skills in grant writing. I’ve saved enough, and have enough support from my family and community that I don’t feel absolutely petrified by my sudden shift into relative unemployment. This is new territory for me, but I don’t feel alone. This leaves me wondering almost daily: how much would be possible if we all had more support, more time? How do we slow down enough to really feel anything? Can we stop fixating on problems too big for a single human to ever contend with and focus on holding each other through the small hard work of necessary change?

Watching in horror as more of my beloved home state burns, feeling powerless as more and more money is siphoned off of our tax dollars to kill people across the world, praying that my family can just stay healthy so we don’t lose everything…the anxieties of this time are endless and can be all-consuming. Global catastrophe is no longer far-off, happening to a faceless other, it is increasingly at our doorsteps. The fires in LA hit me very very close to home. I grew up with fire, but this era of extremes brings new levels of devastation we ultimately may not be equipped to repair. The compounding crises we can scroll through at all times coupled with our natural tendency to shut down when overstimulated often feels like a freefall into the abyss.

Urgency is everywhere. Distraction is the most effective oppression tactic, and in a world of increasing chaos we barely stand a chance. It is easy to feel powerless, but I believe practicing transformation in small ways with the people we love, with our neighbors, with our relationship to labor, may at least anchor us to a reality we can endure.

 “The times are urgent, we must slow down”
                -Báyò Akómólafé, Yoruba proverb

As a species attempting to control a world faced with unprecedented uncertainty, we may need to commit to the discomfort of coming undone more deliberately. What needs to die so something else can come to life? There are no easy answers on a global scale, but practicing on an individual level may give us more fortitude, more tools, to move collectively towards a more sustainable future. We are in unknown territory. I am choosing to strategically face shedding the outdated stories in my own life, knowing that practice is power.

What if we are wrong about everything?
What a relief
As the days get dark
To be wrong

Word of the month: Foment | fō’ment |

1) To instigate or stir up (generally with a negative connotation applied by structures of power)

2) archaic to bathe (a part of the body) with warm or medicated lotions

Monthly Media

Podcasts:

How to Survive the End of the World: Tactical Disobedience with Daniel Hunter

Sounds of Sand - #110 Navigating Liminal Times with Mythic Wisdom: Michael Meade

On Being - Remembering Nikki Giovanni –“We Go Forward With a Sanity and a Love.”

Things to Watch:

Our Oceans – documentary series available on Netflix (I will watch this again and again!)

The Secret World of Sound with David Attenborough – Documentary series available on Netflix

The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar—Wes Anderson directed short story written by Roald Dahl

Music:

Willie Carlisle – The Magnolia Sessions

Without Eyes— (Brookes Neilson Feat. Sierra Ferrell)

STRFKR – Parallel Realms

News:

• Exhibition: Family Dinner Opens January 10^th at Queen City Clay in Cincinnati, OH. This group show features work a group of my favorite people and I made last summer at Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana.

  -Opening Reception rescheduled for January 16th 5-8pm!

• Exhibition: Penny for Your Pocket runs January 3^rd- February 1^st at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN. I have a small piece in this incredible show.

• I’m the February/March Resident Artist at the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, OH. More on this next month, I’m very excited!

Me and Gobbie, Christmas 1987

I haven’t written much this month. I thought I might parse out some meaningful thoughts, condense them into another essay, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen.

In the gathering darkness of early winter, counting down the days to the darkest one, I feel kind of compressed and scattered at the same time. It’s been a dark month. Both collectively and personally, and I’ve found integrating all of it to be a greater challenge than I had anticipated. I let old habits creep in. Found ruts I thought I’d jumped. Fell back on old stories I had resolved not to tell anymore- in so much uncertainty they felt safe and familiar. Tore off every one of my fingernails. Failed to communicate my feelings, stopped seeing myself clearly.

It’s work. All the time work to stay present when the world feels like continual chaos, injustice, horror. I’ve been reading, and it’s been helpful. I’ve had conversations that anchored me back into myself. I’ve resolved to stay in community rather than self-isolate, but it has been challenging. More work than normal.

One conversation that has resonated:

Around Memory

I often struggle to remember my student’s names outside of school. Not because I don’t know and love them, but because the linguistic cue is somehow imbedded in the classroom. I recently walked to the community garden, worrying the entire way that I couldn’t remember anyone’s name. Yet as soon as I crested the hill and saw the garden gate, I suddenly remembered all of them. Before that moment I could see their faces, remember multiple conversations, but couldn’t access that crucial piece of information that would make greeting them fully possible. The shift was so abrupt it stuck with me.

Later Jon and I sat down for the evening and I brought it up. We turned the thought around a few different ways, bouncing it back and forth and concluded that it is entirely possible that we leave parts of ourselves out in the world all the time. Maybe we thread into our environment, like Hansel and Gretel, trailing breadcrumbs back to former versions of ourselves. We leave the shapes we have held in places, with people. Our sensory life becomes a vault to versions of us that only exist situated in time and place. Maybe this is why we miss loved ones so urgently after a death or break-up. We mourn not only the loss of the other, but the parts of ourselves that endure only in their presence.

I know someone much smarter than me has thought of this and I intend to do some research, but it’s come up again and again this month so I decided to write it down cold. In struggling my way out of a lot of confusion this week I was graciously reflected by a dear friend who helped me find one of those versions of myself. I stored it with her. I hesitated to reach out, knowing that she was the one to talk to, but not wanting to bother anyone. When I finally did, mostly because she texted to check on me, it was like coming home. I don’t know how to articulate the enormity of that gift, but damn we really need each other, and I am so grateful.

Being snapped back into frame, shifted ever so slightly until we can see ourselves clearly again, being lovingly corrected. We are lucky to have each other and these strange, leaky, sprawling body-brains sewing traces into the world around us, crumbs everywhere leading us home.

-Many of these thoughts seem related to my reading, specifically adrienne maree brown in this conversation and in her book: Loving Corrections which I am thoroughly enjoying. Also Sophie Strand in this conversation and many of her writing samples from her forthcoming book: The Body is a Doorway, which I am so excited about.

Books and Media:

Loving Corrections -amb (obviously)

Sophie Strand- Excerpt from the Body is a Doorway, Ecological Story Telling

Della Medicina- Lisa Fazio. A really fascinating compendium of Southern Italian history, folk healing traditions, and herbalism.

Hidden Brain, Emotions 2.0: When I Feel What You Feel

Practicing New Worlds – Andrea J. Ritchie

“May our wonder outmatch our wounds. May our listening reach back so far it generates a future we will only recognize when we return to it.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Excerpt from forward to Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, Emergent Strategy Series No. 9, Andrea J. Ritchie

Thank you for reading!

I’ve had the absolute privilege of stepping into spooky season alongside some excellent co-conspirators. I found these companions at home, at the community garden, in the yard, and even online. Connecting on the interwebs can feel odd and disjointed, but one of the highlights of the past month certainly capitalized on this phenomenon in the most productive ways. I was fortunate to be able to participate in the Becoming Monster Festival alongside The Emergence Network. This online consortium of workshops, messy thought experiments, and collective grieving gave greater depth to the writings below, which were started before the festival and finished during its close.

October 30th - Jumping Spiders

Three already today. One: in the dish rack. I swear she looked right at me as I picked up the bowl she perched on. Her body light brown with little flecks, her eyes iridescent, blue and purple. I took her outside and let her jump onto the deck, she fell a long way and disappeared. I hope she landed well. Two: in the car, on the drive to teach. I little dark morph, almost black, blending in and running along the dash. I didn’t get a chance to bail him out, running myself- late to work. Maybe on my lunch break he’ll re-appear and I can usher him out into the sunshine. Maybe he doesn’t need my help, he certainly got in all on his own. Three: in my email, a big picture of a jumping spider, striped and leggy, accompanying a message about an upcoming meet-up of the Institute on Research in Sensing. The topic is “Nociception and the Experience of Pain.” I should plan to go. The spider is nestled below the main body of the email, a celebratory announcement of a you-tube video on jumping spider color vision reaching millions of viewers. The spider in the picture gazes back at the camera with the same oil spot blue and purple intensity - The world through spider’s eyes. I’ll have to watch it later. Three messengers in one morning are enough to pique my interest.

(I went home and watched it, and it’s great! Check it out!)

~Essay~

The Tree

A Tree lay down in Peffer park this week. Or maybe last, it’s hard to know for sure. Today I noticed it in a sideways glance driving by. A long pine splayed out in a far-off clearing on the park lawn, late October light hitting it just right – or I never would have noticed it.

On a break between classes I stopped at the park for the Tree, sitting first under a burr oak to eat. Dull thuds surrounded me, missiles of the most massive acorns I’ve ever seen, ringed in toothy eyelash cups. Crinkling waves of falling leaves called through golden maples across the parking lot. Walking across the bridge and over the vast lawn at the center of the park, the Tree is in a small stand of four pines (three still standing.) One of the standing pines is brown, needles completely crisp, the upright sheath of its trunk ominously reaching up, but clearly nearing a fall. Death hangs around it as it stands. A contrast to its downed companion.

The Tree –still green needled— looks almost silly lying down; a few roots contorted, grasping at the earth around it. Seeing it sideways, caught in space between alive and dead, out of place, seems a monstrous opening. The prostrate tree is a crack in the quiet clearing that allows a slip into another dimension where things no longer make sense.

            Walking around the circumference of the sprawling branches, I circle it twice, wondering if the tree knows its life is ending. It must, but it doesn’t show in the billions of needles still reaching for the sun. There are hundreds of pinecones. Large chocolate-brown female cones with woody bracts, tiny dusty male cones no bigger than the tip of a pinky. Some are still clinging to branches; many have tumbled onto the grass. The Tree is mid-reproduction, ushering in a future it won’t see. The air smells of rosin. Every part of the Tree- cones, needles, and broken branches ooze out lingering syrupy heartbeats.

There is a split halfway up the trunk which would have been a saddle to perch in 20 feet in the air unknown days ago. Perspective shifts often create monsters, where we see ourselves from the “wrong” angle. But they also allow us to experience things anew. No longer hidden high beyond sight or consideration, this fork becomes an inviting chaise lounge at its new incline, a human-sized nest among soft needles and sunshine.

I settle in the crook and sink into the coarse bark and sweet smell of warm sap. I marvel at the suddenly discoverable textures of lichen and wrinkles surrounding eruptions of small branches, so much like human skin turned to wood. The resolution of my attention shifts into this oblique universe, magnified vision, intensified interest. Maybe this is a function of the monstrous, of unsettling and inexplicable circumstances. This outlandishly prone, undead Tree offers de-familiarization— observation from a different angle until it finally becomes visible again.^a

After several minutes my vision downshifts further, falling into the cracks of the Tree’s bark. Tiny emerald green mites wander among the interstices, seeking shadows, crawling across and under my fingers. Glistening crystals of sap like minuscule diamonds bubble up everywhere. Beautiful smells, colors, and textures previously obscured in my straightforward address of this wonderous organism, secretly harboring multifarious worlds. This Tree is a crossroads, a place where identity collapses, where bodies misbehave, where reality is too dense for the individual.^b A trickster lives here, at the threshold between life and death.

I am not the same, and I will never sit in this particular orientation again. I observe and bleed into a sympoetic embrace of decay, carried out by a symphony of mostly microscopic organisms assisting the death dance of the Tree. I watch countless tiny doulas wander in and out, across membrane and dimension, living at the end—or the beginning— of their world. I sit for a long time, blending into spiced air and toothed texture, trying to commit them to bodily memory. Trying to feel the weight of the mass re-organization of life taking place beneath me.

The pine beetles and other sap suckers that likely had a hand in the Tree’s current predicament –evident in minute alien graffiti traced gracefully under bark— are undoubtedly fleeing, or at least packing their bags. Meanwhile, mites and mycelial wanderers are moving in to begin the process of disassembly and compost in earnest. Sudden awareness of these unseeable exoduses, migrations, deaths and births creates a perfect fractal overlay of my human anxieties about shifting climate, war and the de-stabilizing world around us. This long, wordless conversation with the Tree and its inhabitants offers guidance, or at least comfort, in uncertain times.

For a brief afternoon, the ecosystem of the sideways Tree re-naturalizes my senses.^c Sitting with it, I feel the world and humans as processual. I am de-territorialized in relation to the Tree, its unknowable trillions of shifting inhabitants, and the park beyond. In the long rays of a fading sun on a perfect afternoon, I am temporarily braided back into the all-encompassing. Days later, there is still sap in my hair.

November 4th, 2024

^a Viktor Shklovsky‘s theory of De-familiarization, Art, as Device, Shklovsky, V.

^b Báyò Akómoláfé, quotation from workshop, Becoming Monster Festival

^c Political theory of Baruch Spinoza- Politics of Re-Naturalization, Hasana, S.

Favorite Thoughts of the Week:

Báyò Akómoláfé’s words about Care:

• “Care is in a process of becoming- to re-situate care is to notice that it is processual and that there are forms of care that can become carceral.”

• “We need small c care, emergence among strange attractions and dependencies that exceed both control and resistance.”

• “What passes for care is the violence of inclusion- how bodies are maintained within troubling paradigms of value. When care preforms as a normopathy we need to investigate other forms of care.”

Books and Media:

• Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer. I’m slowly digging through this one and always happy to pause and read her beautiful essays on moss and life.

• The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand. Jon and I are both enjoying talking about this series of re-rooted mythologies and reclamation of the sacred masculine.

• Will and Harper, documentary featuring Will Ferrell and Harper Steele. Super heartwarming roadtrip buddy-movie examining post-transition friendship.

Where to see my artwork this month:

• Off Ludlow Gallery, Cincinnati, OH: Stitching Stories, now open!

• Richmond Art Museum, Richmond, VA: 126th Annual Exhibition by Ohio and Indiana Artists, opening Nov 7th.

• The Appalachian Center for Craft, Smithville, TN: SHEEPSHIFTING, solo exhibition, closes Nov 17th.

Studio Happenings:

I’m painting! Here’s a progress pic:

That’s it y’all.

No matter what happens tomorrow, I hope we all find just, adaptive, meaningful ways to care for one another.

Thanks for reading!

Sara

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I’m sitting in my backyard with a rock, a hammer, and bucket full of black walnuts. The walnuts used to hang high in the two trees at the edge of the yard, now they’re being dumped by the hammock-full onto the grass and the forest beyond. I look up to watch the squirrels rejoicing in the abundant branches. Barking and scampering up and down in the midst of their own mini gold-rush.

Last year there were hardly any walnuts. I worried absently about climate change, but the squirrels weren’t bothered. The bur oak that stands close to the house had a mast year and showered down millions of acorns onto the back porch. Maybe the trees work it out amongst themselves and take turns. The squirrels strike it rich either way.

         I tried dyeing with acorns last year, and it was a fun experiment, but nothing like the warm browns I get from the walnuts. I probably mourned their absence more than the squirrels did. But this year they’re back at it, nuts rolling around the yard in bunches, too many to count. The long drought we had didn’t slow them down in producing the large green, pungent fruits covering shells so tough and thick you have to really want to get at the nutmeats inside. I’ll work on that later, after they’ve dried for a while. Today I’m after the green husk, full of juglone- a tannin that will stain anything it touches a deep brown. I learned that the hard way the first year I harvested them, my fingers –especially my cuticles—a dead dirt color for days.

         I lay each walnut on my chosen rock: a random amalgamation of Ordovician fossils. I can dig these rocks up within the first few inches of soil anywhere in the yard. I hit the walnuts with a hammer, a small one that my ex-husband once patronizingly labeled in Sharpie: “Sara’s Wittle Hammer.” I love it, in spite of or maybe even because of his now-distant dig, long worn away. It’s not heavy, it fits well in my hand, perfect for this type of repetitive work. Each walnut gets a hammer in four turns around until the husk bursts and starts to fall away and I can slip them off with (gloved) fingers. Then into a big pot they all go, a mess of spicy sweet-smelling husks, their brilliant yellow-green juice oxidizing quickly to brown.

         Yesterday I let my daughter play with a friend at the park across from her school after picking her up. They’re just about too old for the park, almost too big, almost 12. But they ran around and laughed wildly anyway. I sat with her friend’s mom and her younger son. He’s only just seven and was happily playing in the sandbox. We added leaves and water and anything interesting we could find to his “soup” and I remembered so acutely not only my own child making sand soup, but a young me, gathering items in the yard to mix together into some concoction that my mother or Gobby would faithfully feign sipping and declare “delicious!”

         Looking out at the yard, husking walnuts, making some glorified variation on sand soup –now I actually get to cook it!— I’m grateful that I get to return to this place often. Playing with the world around me, adding a little of this and a little of that, hoping for bountiful trees and good weather enough to savor them. I dip skeins of wool yarn into my black walnut soup, lifting each out after a few minutes, long looped strands stained a deep rich golden brown. It’s been a busy season of squirreling away my dyed treasures for winter projects. The frenzy in the branches above chatters along in a sympathetic tune: harvest is here, let us rejoice in the ever-turning year! In these moments spent cracking husks and stirring vats on my back porch, I share small joys with my younger self and, of course, the squirrels.

10/8/2024

Favorite Books this Month:

The Madonna Secret, Sophie Strand -absolutely beautiful re-rooting of the life of Mary Magdalene.

The Book of Delights, Ross Gay -short essays about small delights and life, a little frenetic but a really lovely quick read.

Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Marie Brown -magical non-fiction for personal growth and movement work/transformational politics.

Podcasts/Music:

On Being: On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life w/ Adrienne Marie Brown -

Sounds of Sand #6: New Gods at the End of the World w/ Bayo Akomolafe and Sophie Strand

You’re Going to Die, the Podcast: Death is the Problem Solver w/ Sophie Strand

Waxahatchee- new(ish) album Tiger’s Blood

Andrew Bird & Madison Cunningham- new single Crying in the Night

Other News:

My solo show SHEEPSHIFTING is open at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, TN now through November 17th. Here are a few pics from install:

Thanks for reading!