Learning to Surrender to the Cycles

The seasons have never felt like separate things to me.

They feel like different states of the same life.

The earth does not ask itself to bloom all year. It withdraws, it sheds and rests, then gathers strength in the dark.

And when the time comes, something begins to move again. A seed opens. The ground becomes wet and juicy and full of nutrients.

And so life returns. Changed by the past cycles.

I have been thinking about how much this resembles being a woman.

Our bodies move through cycles of their own, whether we welcome them or not. its part of our nature.

There are days of immense energy, sensuality and openness and days when everything turns inward.

There are times when I feel completely connected to the world and full of ideas and inspiration and then there are times when I need to be quiet and introspective, by myself. to let certain things fall away.

I used to think I had to keep going at the same pace all the time. To stay productive, available and certain. But the longer I listen and the older i get the more I understand that surrender is not the same as giving up.

It is allowing myself to be where I am, instead of forcing every season to look like spring. This has also changed the way I make art.

I don’t think of creativity as something I can summon on demand and keep under control. Sometimes an idea arrives with a kind of urgency that is overwhelming.

Sometimes it stays quiet for months, asking to be left alone.

A song might begin as a small fragment, then grows into something on its own, it might need some time to sit and linger until it grows into a whole world in its very own timing.

A sculpture might need to be turned over, broken open, or left unfinished for a bit while I figure out what it is becoming.

The work follows its own rhythm. Always.
and so do I.

More and more, I want my practice to stay in conversation with the world around me. The sounds I have recorded outside over the years, the colours I’m learning to make from pigments, the feel of earth and other materials in my hands: these things remind me that making is not only an inner process. It is a way of listening.

The wind, the ground, the waters, the changing light and the materials themselves all take part.

There is meaning in rest, in endings, in the parts of us that cannot be hurried into bloom.

I want to make work that has room for all of this.

I think this is one of the things femininity and being a feminist artist means to me: a closeness to change and an inner knowing.

A recognition that life can be powerful while it is becoming, flowing, dissolving and beginning again.

Women are instinctual beings.