A Year of New
After what feels like several years, I find myself outside, in the snow, building snowmen with my five year old (who is going on thirty). So much has happened since I left school last March, packed an armful of supplies, and waved goodbye to peers. A new world has been birthed, in the meantime.
Here, on the other side of that growth, and waist deep in all that is forthcoming, I feel lonely, more full, less certain, but content with all I have been offered. I live in the forest now, daily visited by deer and blue jays. My social circle has been quartered, and the quartered again. My commute is a memory, and my coffee intake is.. similar. I woke, early on New Years morning, as is my practice, as scribed a few words that I sent off to my dear friend and Haiku master (mistress?) Terry Ann Carter:
New year knocks, old one leaves
With a cold shoulder. Empty beds, empty chests
Where the virus or selfishness prospered.
I took time to get here, through the woods, walking.
I can’t remember, anymore, why I left;
Slipped beneath boulders, never (I thought) to be
Welcomed back. Who was I to imagine shoulders of marble,
Back straightened by weight that once curved me.
A sense of self unburdened by lack?
It felt right to start the year off with gratitude for the artists in my life. Along the way, I have rounded the bend on a manuscript that has helped me to see myself, and commemorate growth that has followed me through decades (often, in spite of myself). Some of you heard several of the poems at last years production of The Shimmering Verge, a run of Molly Peacock’s celebrated one woman show. I am looking forward to completing that project early in the New Year, and getting it sent out.
I am also art consulting for Jennifer Long‘s incredible Caesura project, which explores the liminal relationships between identity and motherhood and memory. Thrilled to note a portrait from Caesura was recently included in Portraits in COVID Time: Documenting a Nation in Change, at Harbourfront Centre and that the project has been selected for the 2020-2021 Research and Creation support from Canada Council for the Arts.
I will continue to be consulting as the project evolves, and am looking forward to many developments in the next few months. If you are in need of consulting support for any area of an arts project, whether thematic development or written, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
In the meantime, Happy New Year.
May 2021 bring us all a reason to sing.
LB
