Making Art in the "Long Now"

An endless intimacy

Heavyweight cotton in a cochineal dyebath—electric!

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m thinking about the “long now” and our brief human lives that exist within it. Compared to the age of the mountains that surround me, I’m a momentary firefly, a teensy heartbeat within the endless buzz of a larger pulsing miracle that stretches across galaxies.

I find this thought relaxing.

It puts my to-ing and fro-ing into perspective and reinforces my connection to everything. Because like a firefly, I matter in a massively big picture that is a gigantic interwoven relationship I only dimly understand.

The Joy of Paying Attention

As my obsession with my natural dye project ebbs into a more normalish level of thinking and doing, I marvel at the nuances of the learning process and how much satisfaction I get from the smallest of changes in my understanding and perception.

For instance, I am mordanting wool on my stove as I write this. The water temperature needs to slowly rise to around 190°F, and the slowly part matters. When I put the wool into the water at 120°, I can sink my hands into the water. Once we reach 130°, I need gloves.

I use a thermometer throughout this process now because I’m still learning. But I’m trying to notice how 125° feels in my fingers, or what 190° looks like to my eyes—what kind of bubbling happens or doesn’t happen around the edges. How much steam rises above the pot.

Internalizing process in this way creates competence, which gives me a feeling of agency. But it also offers so much more than the satisfaction of simply getting good at something.

For instance, when I use two dyes to color a fabric, I can literally see the pink cochineal “underneath” the yellow marigold or “inside” the purple logwood—a combination that creates a subtle depth and richness that makes a visual harmony among the samples that share the “underneath” pink cochineal color. As I stare and stare at these beautiful fabric swatches lying carelessly on my worktable, when I witness this intrinsic harmony among the colors, I experience a direct expression of the idea of harmony in all its forms.

And this is a pleasure.

Intimacy and Belonging

This pleasure is an intimacy with the physical world around me that I’ve slowly earned through the act of creating, and it fills me.

Intimacy through creation. Creation through intimacy. This feels like the most essential element of being alive. The “a priori” nature of the universe.

And like all intimacy—all love—the more I experience it, the more I see what’s possible and how much I’ve just skimmed the surface. That a generous opportunity is constantly being offered to me through the act of being creative, and I feel so….comforted.

What also amazes me is the sense of belonging to the earth that creating and paying attention give me. A feeling of togetherness with the physical world that feeds my soul. It’s somehow an inwardness that isn’t an away-ness. The image that keeps coming into my head is a deep-rootedness—through my feet into the depths of the ground below.

2025

I’ve been seeking a more loving, life-affirming way to face the coming political climate than the reactive approach I had in 2016. And frankly, in some ways, I’m more worried about what might unfold in the coming days than I was back then, so a shift in my spiritual perception feels more urgent.

Seeking intimacy with the physical world through creating feels like a good way to commit to the planet, to being and becoming a good partner to Gaia. Of feeling “found” rather than “lost.” Of feeling anchored in belonging, of always being home.

When I think about the year ahead, embracing my art and creativity as a practice of intimacy with the physical world, with the earth, feels essential to guide me in whatever social justice actions I might take, whatever “resistance” I might include myself in. By doing so, I root myself in a fractal cosmic structure of “mattering” that puts all my micro-actions into the largest context there is.

And as I write that, I realize that this is the definition of sacredness.

So I’m going to start there.

How about you? Does this align with your big picture understanding of creativity? Or do you perceive it another way? Please leave a comment; I’d love to know.