Good Afternoon and Welcome to Constellations No. 11 —
Today is the vernal equinox. All around the globe, our fellow residents on Earth are experiencing equal portions of day and night. Light and dark split evenly down the middle as we reenter the season of growth.
It’s understandable if you, too, are feeling split down the middle. I sure am. Spring is like this; it is messy and arrives in fits and spurts. Yesterday I was outside with no jacket feeling the giddy freedom of being unwrapped from winter’s cast. This morning my family and I awoke to three inches of snow, ice-laden streets and fallen trees.
But I mean more than just the unpredictable nature of the weather. We are living in a time of extremes and contradictions. This a tenuous political, cultural, and environmental moment, where everything we know to be true and lasting is vulnerable. It often feels that darkness, corruption and greed are usurping every corner of the world, especially our own. It is easy to feel helpless, closed-down, or paralyzed in the face of it all.
A moment like this might seem like the strangest time to focus on play, or to exercise the full power of creative autonomy. But, I would argue that to seek play amid bleak moments is to remind ourselves of what makes us human. Without it we forget how to think freely, how to hope, how to find beauty, how to calm ourselves and how to find clarity and perspective.
Play is a form of resilience. Even a minuscule moment of play can garner a powerful sense of freedom, detectable in the body and nervous system. Engaging in play is a pathway to personal autonomy, creative liberation and expansion. Play can be an opening precisely because we all get to decide how to define what it means for ourselves.
I learned this lesson when I was in graduate school, working toward my MFA in painting, and it has stayed with me since. My professor, the artist Pegan Brooke, had been making easel-side visits in our painting class. After we chatted about my painting in progress, she leaned over and wrote a succinct note on a fresh blank page in my sketchbook. It said, “Linds– Play with in parameters of your choosing.”
This simple statement turned out to be one of the most important and lasting lessons from that time. I have returned to it and its multilayered meaning over and over again, especially in challenging moments or when I feel lost.
Recently I have tried to create time for play while navigating the grief and trauma of cancer recovery and reentry, and while recommitting to my creative work – painting, drawing, and writing. Don’t get me wrong – play does not always come easily to me. In fact, being the skilled procrastinator that I am, I often come up with plenty of reasons not to do it.
But when I do succumb to the impulse I can feel a visceral, fully body unwinding. I sense my brain shift focus, my mind become more open and my breath steady. For me, this feeling comes via many different activities with varying lengths of time – reading, drawing, writing, playing cards, looking at art, teaching, turning up the music super loud in the car, writing letters, walking, laughing. Some forms of play have a direct relationship with my creative work, and others do not. But all of them help create the opening—a place where a new thought can seep in, and crucially, potentially thrive. All of them help me recenter around my sense of self, my values and goals.
Play allows me to see the good that remains, and to look at the world with generosity and kindness – not with naive blindness or to the exclusion of the many real, daunting challenges we face as citizens of the world, but rather as reinforcement to help me meet them.
I invite you to join me in experimenting with play too. You, and only you, can set the parameters.
NEWS
Middle School Art Lab
During and after graduate school I taught at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. I helped tour school groups through the galleries, facilitated discussions about art with kids, and led art classes in a special room high up in the museum’s tall observation tower, overlooking Golden Gate Park. In the museum’s school and family programs, we practiced an art curriculum called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a discussion facilitation program that emphasizes deep listening and builds collaboration, critical thinking and discussion skills. I first learned about VTS in an arts education course in college, and I loved how it upended the art historical’s hierarchical perspective, instead valuing viewer-led inquiry and insights, allowing everyone a way in to engage with art. I was excited to continue practicing it in San Francisco.
Recently, I dipped back into art education with a class I am co teaching with Tracy Smedes-Hepler called Middle School Art Lab at Leland’s Old Art Building. Our March classes focused on two-dimensional artworks with an emphasis on self portrait, expanding ideas about how the genre might be defined. We viewed and discussed the work of Alice Neel, Andrew Cranston, Jordan Casteel, Clementine Hunter, Hopie Hill, Etal Adnan, Matthew Wong, Lenora Carrington, and more. As we looked at slides, students enthusiastically and openly shared their comments and questions before sketching and drawing ideas for their own open-ended self portraits. Working with kids this age is endlessly inspiring and hopeful – they approach art instinctively, and dive into making without hesitation, experimenting with materials and encountering challenges with a sense of lightness.
Read more about Middle School Art Lab here.
A BRIGHT LIGHT
My family and I took a quick weekend trip to New York in February. The trip was an exhilarating and full mid-winter refresh. We visited MOMA on a rainy and gray Sunday morning—perfect conditions for a museum visit—or so we thought. Turns out the rest of the city had the same idea; every gallery in the building was so packed that viewing art was near impossible. We did not stay long.
As we navigated dense crowds I trailed behind my family for a moment and spotted an clearing. I took a brief pause in front of Édouard Vuillard’s Embroidery (1895-96). Vuillard’s famously adept application of color stopped me in my tracks. It was thrilling to be still and silent for a few minutes and spend time with this painting, which was conveniently tucked away toward an exit where there were not many other visitors.
My eye was drawn to the figure’s hand gently but powerfully clutching a blazing red thread – like a guarded secret held against the weight of her heavy, maroon skirt. The thread cuts a trailing diagonal across the picture, calling attention to the grace of the figure’s arm, her face and hair catching the light from the window in the background.
As we walked out of the museum back into the cold, damp city, that vermillion stroke of paint stayed with me. My tiny quiet moment in front of the 130 year-old painting had been invigorating – it reminded me, once again, how important it is to rest attention on only one thing at a time. Each time I stand in front of a piece of art and consider out how to relate to it, my mind grows. I am reminded of how the impulse to make links us indelibly to all of human history, and I am heartened by the way that art (making and viewing) elicits a highly specific human response. Despite all the virtual modes of existing and participating in our culture– AI, social media, constant news cycles, the internet—there is no substitute for this experience.
IN MY KITCHEN LATELY
Food and Cooking Newsletters to Sooth Seasonal Blahs
My winter’s end cooking slump has arrived for its annual visit. Cooking right now feels a bit like the weather–grey, muddy, uninviting. This happens seasonally when my creativity and patience for cooking cabbage, beans and parsnips begins to wane, and I’d give anything for a crisp pink radish or a juicy June strawberry. In these moments I look to the writing, reflection and cooking of others to re-engage my spirit. I always find inspiration that can be filed away for later.
I read a number of newsletters devoted to cooking and baking, food writing and food culture. Here are five of my favorites:
The Kitchen Shrink, Tamar Adler: Advice column style essays on all matters of the kitchen – from the etymology of Jimmy Nardello peppers (a recent favorite) to the emotional landscape of cooking for others. The questions from readers and Adler’s pithy responses make me feel like I’m in good company when I’m in the kitchen.
The Department of Salad, Emily Nunn: exactly what it sounds like – fresh takes on creative salad-making, with the wise insights and bold writing of Emily Nunn.
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy: Sharp-as-hell analysis and fresh writing on food culture and systems, media and politics.
Ottolenghi by Yotam Ottolenghi: Straight up goodness from a legend. Innovative recipes and helpful notes- from one of my favorite food writers/chefs, Yotam Ottolenghi.
Have your Cake by Liz Prueitt : Highly researched and tested gluten-free baking and recipes from Liz Prueitt, co-founder of Tartine.
A POEM FOR THE MOMENT
Everything is Waiting for You By David Whyte After Derek Mahon Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity. Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
