Hello and Welcome to Constellations No. 17 —

September is sprinting and we have already arrived at the next turn. Tonight’s autumn equinox in the Northern Hemisphere kicks us into a slow spiral-tilt away from the sun’s warmth and light.

Looking out across Lake Michigan, I recall the clearly delineated path charted by the sun over the last few months. It sets now much farther south than where it sank below the horizon in June. Each September, when we are in this zone of equal daylight and darkness, I feel the striking pendulum swing of time speeding ahead. The light shifts and the school year begins. Even as a forty-five year old woman, I feel the buzzy back-to-school energy—as if I, too, am starting again or moving up a grade. And still, I want cling to summer as it fades.

In June, I encountered a significant milestone: two years in remission from cancer. This was a moment that was hard to even imagine when I was in the thick of treatment. I am reminded every day that cancer recently resided in my body and in my life. I have worked hard to strengthen myself, noting how even tiny incremental changes inch me closer to embodying myself fully again. But grasping the new unfolding layers of my identity continues to be a slippery and complex project.

A quote jotted down from the pages of Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein (more on the book below) feels eerily accurate right now.

“And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.”

Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937

Identity is like looking out from inside a prism, and cancer is a film on every facet. I know there is no returning to how I was before; this is an awareness that contains a peculiar mix of grief, urgency, acceptance and liberation. I find myself with one choice: to move forward into the murky bog of questions and uncertainty that define the future. Each day I get to say yes again to engaging with it — to be fully alive right now in this body, this changed body.

Gratitude seems like a dreadfully inadequate word to describe the complexity of how it feels to be alive. To be alive to dip myself into Lake Michigan’s enormous waters. To be alive in the same body that gave birth to my first-born daughter to celebrate her fourteenth birthday this week. To be alive to sit with my family on a cold night by a hot fire, watching stars emerge from the sky’s dark cloak. To be alive to read and learn and walk and make new friends. To be alive to hold a paintbrush in my hand, and to push paint around with it. To be alive to listen, to feel the embers of ambition, frustration, sorrow and curiosity all still burning in me. To be alive to understand myself growing older; to wonder about what is changing in me and how I might greet it.

This summer my family and I stayed put instead of traveling. We kept our feet in the sand and basked in our immediate surroundings, often with dear friends and family and often in just each other’s company. We swam a lot, threw rocks into the water, napped in beach chairs, and trailed fireflies through the woods. We felt big feelings, got a little bored in the best way, looked forward and looked back. We were here together, taking in the myriad small wonders that occur in one tiny corner of the world in the span of a few precious months.

Without fail, each September I grow keenly aware of the immensity of all that I want to try and all I want to do, much of it exciting, challenging and new. As daylight lessens, it’s hard to ignore the rush of time and my desire to make the most of it while I can; that voice is always there reminding me that time is not infinite. But I’m making a pact with myself to carry summer with me into the new season, like a soft stone tumbling around in my palm.

I am just so glad to be here. What a privilege.

Thanks for being here, too.

Lindsay

UPDATES FROM THE STUDIO

Preorders for 2027 Farm Club calendars benefiting The Leelanau Conservancy are available NOW through November 9th. We order based on how many preorders we receive, so please place your orders before the deadline to ensure you get what you’d like. Farm Club will also have a small number of calendars for sale.

All proceeds from calendar sales are donated to The Leelanau Conservancy’s Farmland Protection efforts, which help preserve the special farming heritage, landscape and economy in this northwest corner of Michigan. Since I started collaborating with Farm Club six years ago, calendar sales have generated more than $23K in donations to the Conservancy’s important work. Please consider helping continue this great momentum.

Each page of the monthly calendar pairs a painting of mine with a quote from the archives of farmer/writer Nic Theisen’s weekly CSA newsletter. They are printed in full color on beautiful heavy weight paper and hang from a brass clip.

If you’re local, Farm Club is hosting An Evening with The Leelanau Conservancy on Thursday, October 29, 2026. Stop by for warm soup and conversation about farmland protection work being done in Leelanau County. ⁠

A BRIGHT LIGHT

In August, I finished reading Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026). As an American literature major in college, I came to think of Gertrude Stein as a visionary of almost mythic stature. Positioning herself the center of Paris avant-garde life at the turn of the 20th century, she championed experimental artists including Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Gris, as well as writers such as Hemingway, Pound, Anderson and Fitzgerald. She avidly collected their work, creating an incubator with her famous Saturday night salons, all while developing her own radical writing.

When I heard about this book, my interest was piqued.

Cleverly, rather than writing about Stein head-on, Levy sets the story in 2024 Paris. Three characters wind us through the tale – Fanny, Eva, and the book’s nameless narrator who is visiting the city to learn about Stein for an essay she is struggling to write. The semi-aimless plot meanders gently through the trio’s search for an elusive missing cat, which becomes a symbol for the narrator’s quest to understand and know Stein.

Levy’s narrator strolls the cemetery where Stein is buried, recounting for the reader the facts of Stein’s biography–her childhood in California, her education in medical school, the misogyny she faced while pursuing a psychology degree, and finally her 1903 leap in to live with her brother, Leo, in Paris before meeting her love, Alice B. Toklas. As the three women wander the city together on their search, the narrator frustratedly tries to break through Stein’s often inscrutable writing, bemoaning her use of language as purposely “beguiling” or “risking coherence.”

Stein famously wrote in what she called “the continuous present.” (If you’re up for a thorny challenge, read her 1925 speech to the Cambridge Literary Club at Oxford, titled “Composition as Explanation”). The continuous present was Stein’s disavowal of traditional narrative structure (past, present, future), which she accomplished by removing punctuation and using repetition and rhythm, resulting in a stream of consciousness style of writing.

In Katy Hessel’s recent interview with the author on The Great Women Artists, Levy reflects,

“Composition was her subject, right? Because she was going to make work that we hadn’t seen before, structured in a way that would move across the page that was entirely new. But she began to understand what she had to lose to become modern.”

This question: what does one have to lose to become modern? is at the center of Levy’s narrator’s inquiry. Stein consciously shed rules of language and punctuation and, like the painters she showed in her salon, created conditions that allowed for the exploration of uncertainty, a tenet of modernism.

She dismissed oppressive Victorian conventions of domesticity and traditional gender roles. She leaned into pleasure and structured her life around the idea that a woman does not need to suffer to make meaningful art, or a meaningful life. Stein was the composer of her life as a queer Jewish woman, as wife to Alice B. Toklas, as a champion of modernism, as a pivotal figure ushering in the new. In her reinvention of writing, she reinvented her identity.

Though I felt myself drifting at times through the rambling and heady text, I began to catch the cadence and get carried in it. A new image of Stein took shape in my mind - one of Stein as a subjective, empowered creator of her identity in a rapidly changing world.

Levy’s kaleidoscopic and unreliable narrators mirror Stein’s own purposefully enigmatic exploration into the constructs and relationship of language and identity.

In the voice of her nameless narrator, Levy reminds us, “Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.”

POEMS FOR THE MOMENT

Misty
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer


And sometimes when I move
at the edge of a greatness—
a lake or a sea or a mountainside—

my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses 
dwindles smaller than the space

between grains of sand
and in that moment, 
knowing my place,

comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone, 
even myself.


from Hush, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (Middle Creek Publishing, 2020)

Longing
by Czeslaw Milosz


Not that I want to be a god or a hero.
Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.



from Bells in Winter, by Czeslaw Milosz (The Ecco Press, 1978)

Hello and Welcome to Constellations No. 16 —

Spring unfurled slowly in Northern Michigan, so the arrival of today’s solstice, and its corresponding long, full days, feels right on time to me. Everywhere and everything is green– trees dense with foliage, wild ferns and grasses lanky from rain.

With the help of my Mom, a dedicated, lifelong gardener, and my friend Megan Gilger of Perma Studio, a regenerative landscape creator, I am slowly learning how to tend new plants growing around our home. My evolving relationship with the garden has brought me a satisfying and palpable sense of wonder. It feels important to focus my attention on small, tender flora; my increased awareness of the multitudinous life cycles occurring here reminds me of my relative place in the intricacies of the universe, much like looking up at a sky dense with stars. There is so much to observe and notice in just a single plant, let alone a forest.

I recently read Amina Cain’s pithy novel Indelicacy. This time period-less allegory traces its female protagonist Vitória’s evolving identity as a writer, and her search for creative autonomy. When the story begins, Vitória is a cleaner in an art museum who goes home each evening to write voraciously about the paintings she observed during the day. As she writes, she begins to recognize her writing as its own, separate creative work; writing about art allows her see herself as an artist. Later on, Vitória notes, “I would look out the windows of the museum, the paintings behind me reflected in the glass. It meant something to me to see myself with them.”

Cain writes a layered story about the act of writing itself, deftly interrogating self-identity, creative autonomy, struggle and sacrifice, class, and gender via Vitória. This passage has echoed through my head since I put it down.

Asserting,“For things do charge, you must feel that too”. . .“Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room”, Cain forms a conceptual parentheses around Vitória’s written interlude that articulates the act perception itself. Perhaps Vitória is all of us in the head rush of trying to make sense of what we see, and how to express it.

This is the two-pronged sensation I feel when I notice a sprout turn into a stem turn into a branch that grows feathery leaves, and the buzzy thrill of attempting to translate the enormity of it.

This is perception laid bare, residing mysteriously as it does, at the intersection of all that we take in (“things do charge, you must feel that too”) and meaning-making (“running wildly toward it with all of its being”).

Existence is always a process of becoming. To make meaning, the boundaries of the soul will and must be ever-expanding. Perception is an infinite and continually-evolving ripple.

Happy solstice, happy summer,

Lindsay

UPCOMING

V Gallery’s Saw It In A Dream group exhibition

I am happy to share that two of my new paintings will be included in V Gallery’s upcoming Saw It In A Dream group exhibition, on view June 27 through mid-July.

V Gallery is housed in a historic clapboard building in nearby Omena, Michigan that was originally founded as a general store in the late nineteenth century. I’m honored to have my paintings on view amongst the work of friends and artists I admire. If you’re in the area for the opening on June 27, I hope you’ll stop by from 4-6 pm.

A BRIGHT LIGHT

Framing the Ephemeral, a documentary film by Gerrit Schreurs

If, like me, you are shattered that you did not get across the Atlantic to see Lois Dodd’s epic retrospective at Kunstmuseum Den Hague earlier this year, take solace. Framing the Ephemeral, the eponymous documentary film companion to the exhibition by filmmaker Gerrit Schreurs, is now available for all of us to watch.

Throughout the short film, 99-year-old Dodd sits on her porch and tells us the story of her life in her distinctive, matter-of-fact way. Guest commentators including the writers/critics Faye Hirsch and Roberta Smith, and Director Emeritus of The Whitney Museum of American Art, Adam Weinburg, punctuate the film, shedding light on how Dodd’s work was overlooked for far too long, and her enduring legacy as a key figure in the canon of American modernism.

A prolific painter, Dodd returns again and again to motifs and subject in her immediate surroundings - windows, rooflines, flowers and trees - but her observations never feel trite. In the film her longtime gallerist, Phil Alexandre, discusses her gentle refusal to defend or explain her painterly choices:

“You ask her about a painting, you ask her about a composition, about a color, something odd about the painting, and she will not go there with you. She always talked about the kind of factual reality of the painting…she could remember with absolute specificity…what she did before she made it, what she did after she made it, where she was, what the weather was like, the light was like.”. . .“What she doesn’t do; what she leaves for you to do, for me to do- is she won’t unpack it. She leaves the deeper meaning to the viewer.” (35m:22s)

Unflinchingly committed to painting what she sees, Dodd’s brushwork never betrays her unique perception and framing. As if she is seeing with the bristles of her paintbrush itself, her brushstrokes are assured, actively looking. She reflects:

“Maybe it’s like dancers and their bodies…Your hand moves a certain way, it refuses to do something else—it only will do what it will do. Each person has their own hand writing, so to speak. And mine is kinda scratchy and thin.” (28m:59s)

Some rainy night this summer, give yourself the gift of spending 45 minutes with this hero who is completely, unapologetically herself.

POEMS FOR THE MOMENT

summer solstice
by Jenny Zhang


will be significant
im going to release something
soft and radiant
and true
into the world


from My Baby First Birthday, by Jenny Zhang (Tin House Books, 2020)

ON A PINK MOON
by Ada Limón

I take out my anger
And lay its shadow

On the stone I rolled
Over what broke me.

I plant three seeds
As a spell. One

For what will grow 
Like air around us,

One for what will
Nourish and feed,

One for what will
Cling and remind me—

We are the weeds.


from The Carrying, by Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions, 2021)

A SUMMER POSTCARD

love,

1985 me

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Hello and Welcome to Constellations 15 —

Earlier this winter, I started playing the piano for the first time since I was a teenager. I tag along with my ten-year-old daughter for weekly lessons with her patient teacher. Learning to read music and play the instrument again has been admittedly vulnerable and clumsy at times. Each time I sit down to play, my brain gets exercise in a tingly new way as I work to connect the musical language on the page with what my hands are doing. What I have learned is this: being a beginner is fun.

Since I reacquainted myself with the piano, I noticed that what starts as uncomfortable becomes less and less so each time I sit down to play. Playing the piano requires a specific type of concentration and communication between my mind and body, and makes my brain and hands focus on something entirely different than what they normally do. I am not particularly skilled, and the music I make is decidedly not transcendent. But it feels exciting to be challenged and curious, and to grow my appreciation of this instrument.

Being a beginner has, notably, refreshed my sense of wonder. I recognize the huge gap between the masterful artistry of professional pianists and what I am doing when I awkwardly stretch my fingers across an octave. To practice without a particular goal or destination shifts my focus from performance to process. I am playing for myself. The more I learn, the more I understand there is to learn.

During today’s spring equinox, as I look back at the winter, I realize that this small shift in focus helped sustain me through the long, snow-capped, stormy months. The practice helped me retain hope and respect for the timeless and enduring capacity that humans have to make beautiful, wondrous pieces of art— even amid the backdrop of geo-political chaos and cruelty like we are experiencing in the world right now.

Yesterday we were hip-deep in snow, digging ourselves out from a wild blizzard that swept through Northern Michigan. Today’s spring equinox ushered in some sun, and the giant piles of snow that accumulated are quickly turning to slush. The season is changing erratically as always, with one step forward and two steps back, but winter’s lessons will stay with me.

-Lindsay

UPDATES FROM THE STUDIO

Since the middle of last year I have been building myself up to painting again, a desire and goal that became exquisitely, and often painfully clear, as I experienced cancer treatment and recovery throughout the last several years. I find myself in the messy thicket of learning about what my art practice looks and feels like in this (new) body, knowing everything I know now. My work is changing, and I am trying to approach that change as an opportunity, while I mine images and ideas that have been accumulating in my mind for years. It is a beginning; I have been here before and I’ll be here again.

I am painting and drawing, working in oil for the first time since graduate school, and a few other materials that are newer to me. I suddenly feel as if I have never touched a paintbrush in my life. I am swimming in a sea of questions about painting and art, and how my existence is related to it all. And I love it.

At the moment, it is my goal to stay in this feeling of newness, for when that is possible, I am curious without self-judgement, open to exploration and possibilities, and genuinely connected to figuring out what, specifically, I like and do not like as I stumble along. It is often uncomfortable, as I do not know what exactly is going to happen, or where it is going. If I get too far ahead of myself I easily become lost in questions that pull me away from working my way through it. Progress is slow, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed with worry and self-doubt. Then I remind myself that the most important thing is that I keep showing up.

Here’s a glimpse at various work in progress in my studio from the last few months.

A BRIGHT LIGHT

Martha Argerich

Not long after I started playing piano again, I learned about the life and work of classical pianist Martha Argerich. The octogenarian is regarded as one of the world’s greatest living pianists, famous for her virtuosic performances of Chopin, Schumann, Revel and Rachmaninoff.

In 1965, Argerich won the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, which quickly launched her international notoriety. Since then she has continued to astound audiences with the dextrous speed of her hands, and the emotive power she draws from the piano.

Lately, I have found myself lost in footage of her mesmerizing performances, and inspired by her long life of playing music.

Here is Argerich performing Chopin in the 1960’s:

And here she is playing Schumann, 60 years later in 2025:

And, just for kicks, here I am, fumbling my way through Chopin’s Waltz No. 19 in A minor on our wobbly keyboard:

POEMS FOR THE MOMENT

The Doorway
by Louise Glück

I wanted to stay as I was
still as the world is never still,
not in midsummer but the moment before
the first flower forms, the moment
nothing is as yet past–

not midsummer, the intoxicant,
but late spring, the grass not yet
high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips
beginning to open–

like a child hovering in a doorway, watching the others,
the ones who go first,
a tense cluster of limbs, alert to
the failures of others, the public falterings

with a child’s fierce confidence of imminent power
preparing to defeat
these weaknesses, to succumb
to nothing, the time directly

prior to flowering, the epoch of mastery

before the appearance of the gift,
before possession.

From The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück, Ecco (1993)

The Quiet Machine
by Ada Limón

I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand 
in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field 
across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from 
people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't 
answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the 
floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock.
There's daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I 
do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent 
and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that 
comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones
 and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's 
how this machine works.

From Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón, Milkweed Editions (2015)

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Hello and Welcome to Constellations 14—

Since I last wrote here, I have been looking at and thinking about trees. Trees hold my attention more distinctly in winter than in any other season, after the deciduous ones have shaken their last leaves to the ground. Each limb is revealed, all naked branches and bark.

At home I live amongst a forest of towering old oaks, poplars, hemlocks and cedars, as well as a proliferation of thin-trunked striped maples. This time of year, I like to study their curving shapes and twisting columns; they lend perspective to the other elements outside my windows. One tree’s knobby branch touches the slender reaching arm of another; mossy vertical trunks frame a slice of sky.

I marvel at the great, mysterious beasts as they lean resolutely into hail, snow, and gale force winds, their tallest limbs swaying in fierce gusts. I imagine their roots sprawling wild and entangled in the sandy soil under the foundation of our house, cradling us and all of our strange human activity above them. Sometimes I wonder if they might be equally aware of us as we are of them. Do they sense us scurrying around below their canopy, collecting their fallen foliage in neat piles, or meandering among them on walks as the seasons change?

Lately, I have felt hyper aware of how personal and collective grief are shoved closely alongside the annual preparations for year-end festivities, and the complexity of looking back and looking forward. In these moments, my arboreal neighbors seem all the more compelling. While they sleep through the dark season, trees wisely circulate their stored resources while they wait for the light to return. There is something so personal, so unambiguous in the way they survive.

I recognize something familiar in their bareness. I have known myself in my most exposed state, when dormancy was key to survival, too.

As Earth starts its turn back toward the sun, trees remind me to be patient, to have faith in my body’s resilience and my mind’s capacity for growth. I see their lanky silhouettes, stark against the inky December sky: an embodiment of promise.

NEWS

2026 Farm Club Calendars for Leelanau Conservancy

I am sending out a huge thank you to everyone who purchased a 2026 Farm Club calendar benefitting Leelanau Conservancy’s Farmland Protection programs. This year’s calendar sales will allow us to make our largest donation since I started collaborating with Farm Club on the annual project in 2021. Our cumulative donations over the past five years have now surpassed $20,000!

Making the paintings for this calendar each year is a joy and privilege. It has become one of my favorite excuses for looking closely and appreciating the remarkable parts of every season.

Reminder: if you ordered a 2026 calendar, it is available for pickup. Farm Club still has (a few) calendars available for purchase in the market. Preorders for 2027 calendars will go live in October 2026.

BRIGHT LIGHTS

A short list of some of the most inspiring art, music, travel and reading from 2025

• Experiencing David Byrne perform at Detroit’s Fox Theater in October. It was sheer collective joy and hope in music and dance form.

  Read: Amanda Petrusich on David Byrne in November’s New Yorker

• Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals at Detroit Institute of Arts

• Many hours in, around and next to Lake Michigan

• Watching snow fall on a Rodin sculpture at Grand Rapids’ Meijer Gardens in November

• A snapshot of Lois Dodd’s work table from the new book Framing the Ephemeral, published in conjunction with a retrospective of the artist’s work at Kunstmuseum Den Haag this year.

• Watching my kids’ last swim of the season in October

• Visiting Lily Stockman’s mind expanding paintings at Charles Moffett.

  Read: Stockman’s interview in Vogue with Grace Edquist about what inspired the show.

• Meandering around the Met Museum with my just-turned teenager, and a special dinner at King. The women behind King also just published a cookbook that I can’t wait to check out.

  Read: The King Cookbook

• Zadie Smith’s essays, especially this incredible one on writing essays.

• E.B. White’s “Freedom,” first published in Harper’s in 1940 shortly after Germany invaded France. Strikingly relevant today, 85 years later.

• Jumping from cliffs into the Mediterranean Sea with best friends in July

• Taking the long uphill walk on the way to visit Foundation Carmignac serenaded by cicadas

IN MY KITCHEN LATELY

Big Birthdays

Between September and December, our family’s birthdays arrive in rapid succession. This year, our daughters turned ten and thirteen and my husband Craig and I found ourselves surreally cresting into a new phase of parenthood with two kids now in double digits. Milestones for all!

Much celebrating ensued, and with it many hours of cooking. There is no doubt that festivities require a fair amount of work and effort. But I never feel an ounce of regret celebrating the people I love most, or reflecting on time and where we are in it.

For Craig’s birthday, the kids and I attempted to recreate a famed chicken dish from San Francisco’s Zuni Café–one of our favorite places to eat when we lived in the city. We spent the better part of a day tending to a bird, then roasted it to crisp-skinned perfection and served it atop bread salad with currants and arugula.

When we finally got it on the table, we were unabashedly proud of ourselves. We ate by candlelight and felt a little closer to that special place all those years earlier, the people we were then, and all the mysteries that were waiting for us. We saved room for silky Pots de Crème.

Both recipes can be found in Judy Rodgers’ beautiful book, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

POEMS FOR THE MOMENT

Tree
By Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

From: Jane Hirshfield, “Tree” from Given Sugar, Given Salt. Copyright © 2001 by Jane Hirshfield.

The Loved Ones
By Wendell Berry

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

Last week after my family had fallen asleep, I slipped through the screen door and into the quiet night to catch a view of an aurora borealis. Overhead, between lacy tree limb silhouettes, the sky subtly pulsed with swaths of moving light. I peered through my phone camera lens. Its long exposure time let me see what my eyes alone could not – the northern lights in glowing green and magenta. Beyond those soaring colors, millions of stars punctured the blackness.

Around the spring and fall equinoxes, like today’s, we have a greater chance of seeing auroras from Earth. During these shifts in season, Earth’s magnetic fields are positioned perpendicularly to the sun, creating temporary openings for the sun’s charged particles to ride solar winds toward our atmosphere. A phenomenon discovered by researchers in the 1970s (named the Russell-McPherron effect), these “equinox cracks” can be gigantic. Some span a width larger than Earth itself.

Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere help shield us from solar winds and the resulting interaction between particles and gases creates an aurora. When we are lucky, we see this solar phenomenon from the ground – sometimes while in pajamas, stepping on fallen acorns.

To stand before an aurora is to stand before unfathomable immensity; it is hard to believe it is real, and yet, it is. It seems rare to feel this kind of wonder as an adult. But I enjoy the feeling of being dwarfed by infinite space and time. It makes my own human-sized concerns feel less important; it is humbling in the best possible way.

A similar sense of grounded awe comes through in two poems I include below: Raymond Carver’s Simple and Jane Hirshfield’s Optimism.

Simplicity and optimism are words that are challenging to keep in focus when world events are relentlessly complicated and divided, and when objective truth and science—seemingly much of what we know to be true and real—is being aggressively attacked.

Perhaps that is why I continue to return to these poems—for they wrestle with the sublime while staying solidly connected to the irrefutable: dirt, sky, tree, light, shadow, raspberries, figs. These poets remind me that the real still does exist all around in magnificent, awe-inspiring specificity. They remind me that it is crucial to stop and see: a hearty oak dropping amber leaves; a perfectly ripe brown pear waiting for me on the counter; an aurora borealis casting otherworldly hues.

Maybe this is one version of hope. It’s one version of mine, anyway.

NEWS

Farm Club x Lindsay Gardner 2026 Calendars

Preorders for Farm Club 2026 Calendars benefiting Leelanau Conservancy are now available! To ensure you get the number of calendars you need, we highly recommend preordering. Farm Club will also have a small stack for sale in their market.

Each page of the monthly calendar pairs a painting of mine with a quote from the archives of Nic Theisen’s (founding farmer of Leelanau’s Loma Farm + Farm Club) CSA newsletter. The calendars are printed in full color on beautiful heavy weight, matte paper.

All proceeds go to Leelanau Conservancy’s Farmland Protection efforts, which help preserve the unique farming heritage, landscape and economy that makes the northwest corner of Michigan so special. Since I started collaborating with Farm Club and Loma on this project in 2022, calendar sales have generated $15k in donations to the Conservancy’s important work. Please consider helping continue that great momentum.

A BRIGHT LIGHT

Feeeeeelings

In my last newsletter, I wrote about Brian Eno’s interview with Amanda Petrusich. Since then I tracked down a copy of What Art Does (Faber, 2025). Eno’s writing is straightforward and clear as he delineates why art does something that nothing else can: express, investigate and elicit feelings.

Another one of my favorite artists, David Byrne is touring this fall with his new album, Who is the Sky. In October, we are taking our kids (almost ten and thirteen!) to their first concert to see him perform at Detroit’s historic Fox Theater. When I saw the album cover, I thought the costumes had surely been designed in collaboration with the visual artist Nick Cave (they bear a striking resemblance to his epic soundsuits). As it turns out, Byrne collaborated with Belgian fashion designer Tom Van der Borght on the costumes for the tour.

The suits are composed of everyday materials like neon ropes, zippers and tubes, transformed into psychedelic wearable pieces. Van der Borght plays with ideas that resound in Byrne’s music and performance such as protection, identity, protest and belonging, prioritizing emotional resonance over imbuing literal sense. I can’t wait to see them in motion in the show.

Byrne and Eno’s years-long collaborations famously resulted in some of the most influential music of our time. In Byrne’s sound and performance, elements of Eno’s theories of art unfurl in real time (Eno writes, “art engagement begins when the functional engagement ends.”). Art is play, Eno posits, and in play, “we research our feelings.” I think Byrne would agree. A 2022 show of his visual artwork at Pace Gallery displayed his sentiment on the subject. He wrote, “Both art and music seem to bypass the rational and logical parts of the mind — rather, they are understood by myriad parts of the brain that are connected to one another. It is a different kind of understanding. The effect of this interconnection is pleasurable, ecstatic even.”

There is a strong connection between Eno’s emphasis on art as avenue to and from feelings, Byrne’s exploration of art and music in accessing different parts of the brain, and film critic Richard Brody’s recent essay, “In Defense of the Traditional Review” (The New Yorker, 7.24.25). In it, Brody takes issue with the Times recent reassignment of four cultural critics in a move prioritizing “dynamic content” over the traditional review. Bemoaning the degradation of cultural criticism, he defends the traditional review as a stand-in for a crucial encounter: the individual’s experience with a work of art.

Brody argues that reviews are “the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing,” because they “advance the cause of art itself.” He writes:

“The heart of the review is emotion, the stirrings of the soul, receptiveness to the life-changing power of art (even commercial art); personality-centered formats rooted in reporting or in talk are art from the ego, more like homework or social capital. And, though criticism is obviously subjective, at another level it is resolutely objective—a form of reporting from within. As idiosyncratic as individual critics may be, they also have fundamental commonalities with readers—and, in expressing, with care and flair, their own feelings, they often awaken such feelings in readers, for whom these emotions had been latent or inchoate. Like any literary work, the individual critical voice finds its echoes in the world at large, in readers’ self-recognition, in a sense of community.”

Or, as Eno writes in What Art Does, “Art changes how we feel about our feelings – how we notice them, how we respond to them, how we compare them, how we make use of them.” In championing the pivotal relationship between art, feeling, and connection, Brody finds commonality with Byrne and Eno.

IN MY KITCHEN LATELY

Ratatouille Ritual

I am not one to spend my days canning preserves in the height of summer. I might make small attempts to put up fruit here and there– a bag of sliced peaches, or hulled strawberries in the freezer. Years ago, when I read Laurie Colwin describe her learning curve with canning and the anxiety the process it induced, I could identify. There is too much that I love to do outside during the summer, and not enough time to do it as it is.

But I do have one annual summer cooking ritual. Sometime toward the end of August I head to the farmer’s market for eggplants, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic to make ratatouille. The haul sits on my counter, taunting me and attracting fruit flies while I procrastinate or go swimming. Finally when the late summer sun is fading around nine or ten p.m., I chop and chop until my wrists hurt; sometimes—as was the case this summer—still in my wet bathing suit, dripping from the evening’s last swim.

I layer the vegetables into a heavy pot, and cook them slowly to give the stew ample for time to simmer and reduce. I let it linger probably longer than some might, but at this point I know what I like.

This year, my ratatouille cooked until long after darkness fell. I left the pot on the counter to cool overnight. In the morning I scooped it into glass jars. Now they line the door of the freezer; they are a gift for my winter self.

POEMS FOR THE MOMENT

Simple
By Raymond Carver

A break in the clouds. The blue
outline of the mountains.
Dark yellow of the fields.
Black river. What am I doing here,
lonely and filled with remorse?

I go on casually eating from the bowl
of raspberries. If I were dead,
I remind myself, I wouldn’t
be eating them. It’s not so simple.
It is that simple.

Optimism
By Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience. 
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked one side, 
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, 
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Hello and welcome to Constellations No. 12–

Amidst the summer sun’s apex today, I ask myself: what does this wide dose of light allow? What becomes visible? What grows? Energy rises with the sun, and with it a sense of wide open potential. Even so, right now a sense of urgency prevails.

This same energy is currently heightened by a overwhelming feeling of rising oppression in the United States and abroad. Fascism is growing here in America with untethered injustices occurring daily; our justice system is being put to the test in countless ways; many thousands of people are suffering and wars rage on across the world. Amidst the madness and cruelty of these dark storms, it is hard to feel summer’s sun.

Like nearly everyone I know I have felt a heaviness weighing on my daily life for the last six months, especially as I recognize in this moment the stinging familiarity of other critical moments in history when the deranged logic of fascism rose to prominence. I am incredulous that as life seems to go on normally in some ways, institutions and tenets of democracy are rapidly crumbling beneath our feet. The overwhelm that results is a tactic inflicted purposefully to keep us paralyzed in the surreal nature of it all.

Recently, I learned that here is a term for this feeling: hypernormalization, or the juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and the mundane, leading to a sense of paralysis, overwhelm and inaction.

Hypernormalization arises in me with a swift double-edged sword: exigency and futility. Urgency and grief become complexly intertwined, both in the big picture ways that we are navigating communally, and in deeply personal ways as I explore questions of goals and identity while I get to know myself again in recovery from cancer.

It has been one year since my last cancer treatment, and nine months since my last major surgery. Certain aspects of the experience feel far away, and others feel as if they occurred only seconds ago. My sense of loss, and the lost time that I cannot, nor will not get back is coupled with a burning desire to live as fully and sincerely as I can while I get to be here. The feeling is intensified by the pervasive sense of corruption and destruction all around us, and the question so many are asking in this atmosphere: how do I show up most effectively in this chaotic moment?.

I find that the foil to urgency’s bubbling freneticism is the attempt to ground myself in the present. For me, the fastest path to the present is creating art. I try to make at least one solid fresh observation a day. Sometimes it is a note jotted or a quick sketch; Other times it is a longer session in the studio. Continuing to invest in noticing in this way helps slow down and be permeable to the inherent beauty and good that does exist in people, relationships, communities and the natural world.

Even when my actions feel ridiculously small in comparison to the scale of the problems we collectively face, I try to remember that art and art-making are absolutely crucial to human existence. Without art, where would we be?

Art is the realization of individual uniqueness in the world. At its core, it declares: “I am here. I exist,” and therefor there is, crucially, a place for everyone in art. If we allow our work as artists to be arrested, we become compliant; we give away our most powerful human rights to belong, to self-express, to feel, to question, to create something that did not exist before, to think unique, individual thoughts. By creating, artists actively resist forces that wish to homogenize, reduce, dehumanize, and commodify.

Below, I share the work of a few artists and writers who are inspiring me to keep going right now, through the bright light of summer and beyond. I hope their illuminations will help you stay the course, too.

NEWS

Farm Club Panel

In May I participated in an artists’ conversation at Farm Club led by Sarah Bearup Neal with artists Katherine Corden, Alyssa Smith and Alexa Grambush. I’m grateful to be part of a community here in Northern Michigan that celebrates and supports artists, writers, thinkers and makers. Big thank you to the folks at Farm Club for creating this engaging evening.

Middle School Art Lab

Tracy Smedes-Hepler and I wrapped up our final session of Middle School Art Lab at Leland’s Old Art Building last week with a session devoted to assemblage, looking at the art of Joseph Cornell as inspiration. Teaching these talented young artists over the last six months has been a balm— I have learned so much from them. Thank you Old Art Building for helping support this course. If you have a middle school-aged artist stay tuned for upcoming offerings.

BRIGHT LIGHTS

Artist’s Roles in the World Right Now

Lately I have filled my ears and eyes with the words of artists and thinkers that I admire. Here, I share a few highlights from three essays and an interview that have formed a pithy, imaginary conversation with each other in my head. I highly encourage you to read and listen to each one in their entirety.

Poet and essayist Jane Hirshfield, recently started publishing on Substack. Her two newest pieces, Poems in a Time of Crisis, Part 1 (April) and Part 2 (June), are a resounding call to artists, poets, writers, and thinkers everywhere, via exploration of four qualities in poetry that “work against despair”: tenderness, courage, humility and resilience (her essays on the last three qualities are forthcoming).

In Poems in a Time of Crisis, Part One of Several: We Think by Feeling, Hirshfield writes:

“Poems think – we think – by feeling. Feelings are a life’s substrate: the flickering-ember-sense that reminds us, if we notice, what luck it is — what brief and quickly-passing luck — to partake of existence-awareness at all. Emotions are also instructions in survival, indispensable instruments of information.”

In his interview with Amanda Petrusich on New Yorker Radio Hour, musician, writer and activist Brian Eno reflects a similar understanding of how art taps into our universal humanity:

“Nearly all of the things that humans regard as peak experiences…being bowled over by a piece of music, being knocked out by a sculpture of a dance or something like that… all those things are situations where we willingly let something happen to us that is slightly beyond our ability to comprehend and control. We surrender. I think a lot of the art experience is surrendering. And that’s the point, you know, the whole point is being moved, having feelings.”

Likewise, in Poems in a Time of Crisis, Part Two: Tenderness Hirshfield reflects on poetry’s role in shedding light on tenderness, especially amidst a violently divisive time:

"Tenderness as a feeling falls into what are called the “complex” emotions, those that hold more than a single dimension at once. Complex emotions are always also relational: they arise in the conversation between our own lives and the lives of others…

At the core of emotional tenderness is, first, the awareness that what we feel tender toward is beloved; then also, the urge to protect it. We feel tenderness for what is fragile, perishable, at risk, which we want to survive…

“Tenderness is unselfish. It wants to preserve what is loved for its own sake, not ours. Part of tenderness, too, is the penumbra-awareness of transience. To feel tenderness is to remember that all lives are mortal.”

And, in her essay Be An Art Kid, artist Anna Brones expounds on this idea, reminding us that tenderness honed by artists can be found at the root of generative action:

“As the world crumbles, artists are often the ones calling things out before others dare, helping to put words and visuals to movements. They are the ones to speak their minds through their creativity. They push progress, envisioning different worlds and ways of being.”

These, and others like them are the voices I am heeding most right now. I am indebted to other artists—for in persisting with their work they make me feel less alone in mine. They remind me that each one of our unique contributions matters in the larger voice of the collective resistance.

A POEM FOR THE MOMENT

Mathematics
By Jane Hirshfield

I have envied those   
who make something   
useful, sturdy—
a chair, a pair of boots.

Even a soup,
rich with potatoes and cream.

Or those who fix, perhaps,
a leaking window:
strip out the old cracked putty,
lay down cleanly the line of the new.

You could learn,
the mirror tells me, late at night,   
but lacks conviction.
One reflected eyebrow quivers a little.

I look at this
borrowed apartment—
everywhere I question it,
the wallpaper’s pattern matches.

Yesterday a woman
showed me
a building shaped
like the overturned hull of a ship,

its roof trusses, under the plaster,
lashed with soaked rawhide,
the columns’ marble
painted to seem like wood.
Though possibly it was the other way around?

I look at my unhandy hand,
innocent,
shaped as the hands of others are shaped.   
Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really.

Rawhide, it writes,   
and chair, and marble.
Eyebrow.

Later the woman asked me—
I recognized her then,
my sister, my own young self—

Does a poem enlarge the world,   
or only our idea of the world?

How do you take one from the other,   
I lied, or did not lie,   
in answer.

© Jane Hirshfield, “Mathematics” from Given Sugar, Given Salt. Copyright © 2001 

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.

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Two years ago, on March 17, 2023, I learned that I had Triple Negative Breast Cancer. The diagnosis came to me via a digitally scanned lab result after a torturous three weeks of testing and waiting. I had obsessively refreshed my inbox for days until finally, at 5:01 p.m. on a Friday, it was there.

When it arrived, I left the house and drove to a muddy trailhead where I often hike. Alone in my car, I logged into my medical portal, and waited for the pdf that would determine my fate to download. When it appeared on my screen, the letters seemed jumbled into words I could not understand. I read them over and over, in stunned, paralyzed quiet. I kept thinking about the lab tech or radiologist who had, minutes earlier, had the job of uploading the results—the person who had to send such news to a person they did not know. I shivered with my seatbelt on. On the other side of the windshield tree limbs shuddered in drippy, harsh wind. Nothing was familiar.

Today, I run my fingers through strange, fledgling hair. I experience each day in a body that is still strange to me, too—this body, my body, that incomprehensibly withstood so much all those months. It survived. It is here, healed, healing; changed forever.

This is a hard day to memorialize. In honor of the many things I do not and will not ever know, I am sharing a poem with you. I wrote it four months into treatment, in July 2023.

EIGHT WINGS 
Lindsay Gardner

Today I saw four butterflies. 

The first was dead —
fragile body
tumbled in waves, 
against an old, hard stone


The second lay prone —
soaked and tender
blinking, 
for the sun to dry its fancy wings


The third flew —
ecstatic triumph
bowing 
before the waterline


The fourth, I nearly crushed — 
crouching as it was
aside my clumsy feet

low
paused
it clung to a rock

filament legs
wings whipping 
fickle wind
waiting 

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At the end of the summer of 2023, I was nearly six months into a grueling chemotherapy schedule, waiting for my battered white blood cells to rebound so I might receive one or two more infusions of medicine. One of cancer’s twisted pranks is how it makes you long for things you never would have dreamed of wanting, such as another round of chemo.

Since the spring of that year, I had haltingly progressed from phase one of my planned treatments–relentless weekly infusions, to phase two-less frequent infusions of an even more potent drug, ominously nicknamed “the red devil.” I remember hesitating to ask my infusion nurses why the medicine had earned such a nickname, unsure if I really wanted to know the answer. The name, they told me, came from the medicine’s syrupy crimson hue, and its particular, well-known veracity.

The red devil took on the shape and exaggerated features of a deranged cartoon monster in my mind as I anticipated the first treatment. Here was another dark joke brought to me by cancer: a tool meant to eradicate my body’s misbehaving cells was strong enough to be threatening itself. The disease had a knack for keeping me pinned squarely between difficult options, often without any choice.

By late August I had completed the second of four red devil treatments. These two infusions completely and utterly leveled me. In the days following treatment, I existed mostly in my bed, weighed down by the medicine as it moved through my body. Luckily, from my bedroom window, I have a view of Lake Michigan, framed by gently arched boughs of cedar, hemlock, oak and birch.

Through the lacy aperture of those old trees whose mighty roots grasp at the bluff’s edge, I watched the big, open water every day with ardor and fascination. From there, I could see rosy light shift across the backyard, turning velvety olive moss into dappled pools of neon green. My doctors forbade swimming, but from the bedroom, I could take in my daughters’ free laughter as they jumped into the lake, floating and diving. I could hear their giddy shrieking cut through the waves’ pulse, and my husband’s voice calling them in for bedtime. I could watch hunting gulls shoot high across skies uninterrupted by clouds. And when the sun finally started to dip low late in the summer evening, I could hear the kids’ voices draw closer to the house. I could imagine them standing by the porch, wet hair licking their backs, holding their beach towels as they rinsed sand from their feet with the old green hose.

The bedroom’s interior likewise became intimately, grotesquely familiar. I knew the dented spot in the drywall directly across from the foot of the bed. Dust gathered in visible fuzz on the philodendron’s leaves. A quadrilateral swath of pink light hit the outer edge of the dresser just before dusk bled the sky each evening, casting Mattisian plant-shaped shadows up the wall. When I blinked, the knobby legs of a vintage desk in the corner that we had collected at an estate sale two years earlier was burned into the back of my eyelids. Even the most mundane parts of life were heightened and dulled in an inexplicable, confounding way.

In those days, I was mystified by a new kind of total depletion pulling me down. The contrast between interior and exterior worlds was harsh and painful. Inside, my own dreadful state was fused with the room’s static physicality; outside was freedom, light, and summer’s flaunting vitality. Inside, my thoughts reverberated off the walls and back at me. Outside, playing on repeat, was the film and soundtrack that made me want to try to stay alive.

About a week or so after each treatment, the muddle slowly dissipated. I sensed the air in contact with my skin again, as if the cells in my body were hazily awakening from the assault they had weathered. Each time this happened, I understood that the window of relative clarity would be short. There was no way to know how long these periods would last. In a journal from this time, I wrote that I felt “a little glimpse of my former self,” and wanted “to sprint to catch her.” I knew that I would soon be back on the other side, and with all luck, advancing to the next looming cycle of medicine.

My existence was inextricable from this unrelenting pendulum swing and the constant location and dislocation of self that came with it. I was saturated with an acute sense of my impermanence, and everyone else’s. This, perhaps, is the most obvious part of enduring cancer or any life-threatening or chronic disease, and the part that is most painful and surreal to try to reconcile. It is the cold reality of life’s inescapable ephemerality made perceptible, naked and glaring; it is the window I have written about before. I was constantly, terrifyingly aware of it. And then, months later, I was terrified that I would forget it.

Shortly after my diagnosis, I had worried about how the disease would demarcate clear “before” and “after” segments of my life. Worse, I feared the very real possibility that there would be no after. When I was in the middle of it, I understood with eerie consciousness that there was no way to control the way the experience was shaping me. Every prior held notion was vulnerable to redefinition; everything was up for grabs.

As I became lost in the endless, dimly lit hallways of my illness, my compulsion to write grew. In moments of both clarity and confusion, I wrote – on bits of paper tucked into the creases of books, on my phone’s notes app in the still-dark hours of the morning, and in invisible ink in my mind. Eventually, some of these idiosyncratic spurts accumulated into shapes on paper. I honed them, sunk myself into the satisfying precision of words when I could do nothing else, and gave them names. I had never before written poems. Sometimes I shared them, and sometimes I kept them to myself.

At the end of August, a poem crystalized. I named it “Pocket Change.”

POCKET CHANGE

When there is no sound
except, of course
the song of muffled waves
through old window screens,
a slow drip from the kitchen sink,
breeze in cedar branches

sirens whistle in my ear
gusts move
through my sighing center,
erratic
as a moth’s stop-motion
quiver to a bulb

in a day’s time
I wind my hand
from position nine to twelve
a quarter turn
rights this horizon

a vertical seam
knitting sky to water,
now seesaws to sprawl
across the great periphery

as I come ashore
to mine,
tender and unruly,
it waits for me
papers piled
lists unmarked
books left open
feathery remnants

I spend these days
like pocket change
they burn a hole,
impossible to
save for someday

write these words
make these hands
beat this heart
hear these songs

turn this pocket inside out,
scrape along its gritty seam
in case there might be
just one more-

it can’t be empty yet

By the following winter, I had finished my remaining treatments and undergone bilateral mastectomy surgery. My doctors declared me cancer free. I was shell-shocked.

My ongoing treatment regimen still locked me into regular immunotherapy infusions at my local cancer center, but my hair had started to grow again and my blood cells were recovering. Two or three hours outside of the house started to feel increasingly doable, but frustratingly exhausting. Much of my life as I had known it before cancer still felt distant and unreachable, even though I was on my way to recovery.

During this time, I made a promise to myself to keep writing, even if all I could muster was fragmented observations. My pervasive sense of urgency needed to be channeled. I had the sense that just as important as the writing itself, was the habit of extracting rapid-fire thoughts from my brain and doing something with them, rather than letting them evaporate.

In a particular bout of restless boldness (and perhaps, to double down on my promise), I decided to go one step further – to share my work in an offshoot of my newsletter, Constellations. In the process, I reread my poems, including “Pocket Change,” for the first time in months. The poem struck me as enduringly emblematic of my experience, and how it felt to be thrust back into life’s rushing stream after being violently plucked from it. Pocket Change seemed like an apt name for this new place for my writing.

In this phase, questions were swirling. What new shape has my identity taken? I am alive, but how do I live again? How much time might I have? What have I lost? What if this was the last thing I ever make? How will my children and my loved ones know me from these artifacts I leave behind? Writing was a crack where I could find my way into these immense, existential questions. I remembered how the practice had bolstered my courage, especially when the process felt pointless, strange or dark. The attempt to put words on my experiences felt like a smidgen of agency retained and guarded for myself, locked away from cancer’s greedy claws. And for the first time, possibly ever, I did not look away.

In writing I could pose my many questions. How would all the former versions of myself meet this new, shifting one? What was I knowingly or unknowingly omitting? I worried about writing about cancer too much, and not writing about it enough. Would this illness singularly shape my perspective from now on? And anyway, do we choose which parts of our identity to include in our stories of ourselves or are they just there, indelibly part of us and what we make?

The questions found resolution in the act of writing itself, regardless of whether I tried to answer them literally. Writing became one place that was still mine, where I could try to find the scattered pieces of myself. The fact that essays and poems emerged from the darkest time in my life—and that they kept coming—surprised me. I felt like an imposter, and nearly always still do when I write.

In my cruel, self-loathing moments, I mock myself. The voice of a condescending reporter emerges in my consciousness, announcing with sarcasm, “middle aged cancer patient finds poetry and writing therapeutic.” In my more generous moments, I understand that this impulse, filtered through the sieve of my experience, connects me to the same swell of human experience that has inspired creative expression since the beginning of time. I remind myself that nothing is more human than the instinct to locate oneself; the search for meaning amid chaos and suffering; the attempt to link language, image, color or sound to all the mysteries of existence.

When I started Pocket Change, the only conscious decision I made was to open the door to keep going. Creating space for the unknown possibility of it all was essential to recovering my purpose. Allowing it to unfold was a palpable antidote to grief and despair.

I was writing to find out what cancer had opened and broken in me, how it had changed how I see, well—practically everything. Louise Glück wrote in her 2022 essay “Writing as Transformation,” “In the great physical events, extreme bodily pleasure and extreme bodily suffering, the self disappears completely or is lost. Either way, an involuntary act, unlike the struggle to be, to exist, that underlies the need to write.” Perhaps, I was writing to find out if I still existed.

Giving myself permission to write translated to other forms of permission that I am just beginning to understand. I sense a new capacity to take my questions into the process instead of trying to answer them with it. For the first time in fifteen years I have an intense desire to paint the images that have been playing in my mind for so long. Writing helps me look directly into the hard, weird, surprising, surreal, unanswerable aspects of my life; it makes sense that I might look at painting, drawing and making things with my hands differently now, too.

My instinct tells me that writing and painting are opening a gateway to one another. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship that, with all good fortune, will continue to provide me with a long lifetime of exploration.

I am, most thankfully, free now from cancer’s most acute grip. I am getting stronger with each passing day. There is no way to know how long this will last for me, or for any of us – a reality that is as true now as it was when I wrote the poem “Pocket Change.” My hope is that with growing distance from the storm, I will still be able to dial into the same frequency I heard so clearly when I was in its apex.

I want more than anything to sharply heed the parts of me that gather words and images–to write them, draw them, and uncover them from shadows. It appears there is no turning back.

Here we are again, at the dawn of the year’s shortest day. This time of year always feels like it is holding a great secret; there is a quiet power in the murky collision of endings and beginnings. I suspect it is this that poet and writer Maggie Smith refers to as the good dark in her poem “How Dark the Beginning” (below).

The good dark.

When I read “How Dark the Beginning” a few weeks ago, I let these words roll around in my mouth for a while. They gave a name to this precise moment in time that is laden with meaning and significance personally, metaphorically, seasonally and culturally.

If we could think of the good dark as a place, I would confidently say I am in it, looking backward and forward as I take steps toward a new beginning. My autumn entailed surgery and a longer-than-anticipated recovery, as well as stepping back into aspects of life that felt like a distant dream only a short time ago — like frequenting my studio, and dipping back into work. I am (still pinching myself) finally back: standing here in my own body after a hellish two year sojourn. The acute steps of cancer treatment are now behind me, and my energy is slowly reemerging. Before me is an open road. And along side it, tremendous questions.

I am familiar with beginnings – I have a fair amount of practice with them at this point in my life. But now I am more comfortable than ever in the unknowns inherent in them. I feel a new ease when I say out loud that I am reconsidering everything about where I want to exert my energy; what shape it might take and just how I want to express it. I am examining my own ambition, and asking what it means to me now – here, on the other side of what I just faced.

In the darkness of these long winter days, I feel at home swirling in my thoughts without seeking a necessary resolution. Instead of pushing them away to clear a path for certainty I am enjoying the way they cloud together and tug at one another, creating new questions, desires and goals.

There is freedom in the good dark. In it lies the liberating reminder that there is no one right way to move forward, and that every day – the shortest of winter or the longest of summer– brings with it an inevitable amount of vulnerability and unpredictability. I like to think that while I was traversing the perpetual darkness of the last few years, a bright lantern within me remained constantly lit, patiently waiting for me to return to it.

The good dark is full of gifts–solitude and rumination, quiet and mystery. I do not wish it away. Rather, I attempt to bathe in its shadows because they are necessary for reinvention. Winter’s low light is a resting place to reinvest in curiosity and drive; a chance to reconnect with my creative purpose and this healthy body that allows me to realize it; a time to show up for myself, my family and my friends. It is the important, beautiful space of anything could happen. As Smith writes, let us talk more of how dark the beginning of the day is.

In reflecting on my year of writing, making and healing, I am profoundly grateful that you have chosen to join me here. In a complex world of newsletters and fragmented attention, your readership is a huge gift that I do not take for granted.

Thank you for encouraging me to keep writing and sharing. It means more to me than you’ll ever know.

NEWS

2025 Farm Club Calendars have arrived!

This my fourth year collaborating with Farm Club to support Leelanau Conservancy’s Farmland Protection efforts to preserve the rich farming history in Leelanau County. Over the last four years, calendar sales have allowed us to donate more than $15k to the Conservancy’s important work! Thank you for your support!

Reminder: if you ordered a 2025calendar, it is available now for pickup. Farm Club still has (a very few) calendars available for purchase in the market if you did not order in advance. Preorders for 2026 calendars will go live in November 2025.

Middle School Art Lab at Leland’s Old Art Building

I’m thrilled to announce I am joining uber-talented art educator, Tracy Smedes-Hepler at Leland's Old Art Building to co-teach an art class for middle school students, beginning in January, 2025. Read more about the class and register your 6th, 7th or 8th grader HERE.

A BRIGHT LIGHT

Letters to a Young Artist

While rearranging my studio, I rediscovered this gem that has been tucked away in my bookshelf for 20 years. Letters To A Young Artist (2006) was the only thing I could afford to buy the first time I visited Crown Point Press when I was in graduate school in SanFrancisco. I had spent the afternoon by myself at SFMOMA, and wandered over to Crown Point afterwards. The revered space, site of monumental print collaborations with scores of artists over the years, was as silent as a chapel. I remember being self conscious of my footsteps, which echoed as I walked around looking at first editions on the walls. I wanted to take home a souvenir, and this book was it.

In its pages are letters from artists such as John Baldessari, Kerry James Marshall, Jessica Stockholder and many more - responding to a fictional “young artist” seeking advice on their career. The replies range from wonky to heartfelt to practical. I still refer to it and find new useful tidbits.

Here’s a solid gold excerpt from Elizabeth Murray:

“The art world seems to conjure up a lot of nonsense right now and seems to be only about trends, money, and fame. Try to stay focused and centered in what you want in your work, keeping in mind that your art is about describing your spirit and your life force makes the work better.”

And another from Mierle Laderman Ukeles:

“I believe that art is the articulation of human freedom. Remember, above all, you are the boss, The Boss, of your freedom. No one else. Your art, if it is original and worth something, expands all human freedom.

Art, after it comes through you, will be different. Art comes from you, you all by yourself, unique among anyone who has ever lived in the history of the world; AND, art comes from you in your world with the choices you make as free being, and the glue, even, with the relationships that you create and stick to; AND art comes from you as a citizen in the world; AND you within history and in nature.”

Letters to a Young Artist is out of print but used copies can be found here and here.

A POEM FOR THE MOMENT

HOW DARK THE BEGINNING (from Goldenrod, 2021)
By Maggie Smith


All we ever talk of is light—
let there be light, there was light then,

good light—but what I consider
dawn is darker than all that.

So many hours between the day
receding and what we recognize

as morning, the sun cresting
like a wave that won’t break

over us—as if light were protective, 
as if no hearts were flayed,

no bodies broken on a day
like today. In any film,

the sunrise tells us everything
will be alright. Danger wouldn’t

dare show up now, dragging
its shadow across the screen.

We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf

of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark 

the beginning of a day is.

MOOD FOR 2025

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Good morning and welcome to Constellations No. 9—

At 8:44 a.m. today the Northern Hemisphere entered the autumnal equinox. During the year’s two equinoxes, the line demarcating day and night on a planet’s surface (which, I just learned, is called the terminator) runs straight up and down from the north to south pole. 

While the terminator is only visible from space, we feel the equinox on Earth in the twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness that are the hallmark of our precise location in tilt and orbit. On the first day of autumn, we know our long summer days are behind us. We eye the expanse ahead: a stretch of lengthening nights, leading up to December’s solstice. 

But: what of the now! Let us feast in the light we have! Gather the fruits of the year’s labor while it is in full bloom! It is true: autumn bears more than a tinge of urgency. We see what is before us and we want it all, especially because we know it will fade. There is always wisdom in the turning of the seasons. But autumn reliably gives me a sort of seasonal whiplash— in looking back, looking forward, and trying to enjoy it all while it lasts.

I feel this particularly so this year. Exactly one year and ten days ago I finished my last cycle of chemotherapy. Just shy of eleven months ago I was declared cancer-free after surgery to remove all of my breast tissue. But I still had so much more to go. In late June of this year I completed my final immunotherapy infusion, and ten days ago I had a second (planned) surgery. 

Each wave of medical interventions resembles a seasonal cycle of its own: there is a ramp up; an intense present; a quiet hibernation that follows; then, ideally, recovery and growth. My concept of myself in these experiences and beginning to move away from them is constantly shifting. While the grainy detail and immediacy of each peak and valley of the last two years has started to fade, the urgency to live (live now, while you can!) that took root amongst them has not.

Art and writing are so often my pathway to the present. Making it. Looking at it. Immersing myself in it. My summer was filled with art, writing, reading, stories, travel, and time with beloved friends and family. I—ravenous for all of it— lapped it up; in return it buoyed me, refreshingly, in the present.

Of course, artists have held this secret key to the present for all of human existence. Sylvia Plath wrote “Remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”

Joan Mitchell reflects a similar idea in her conversation with Yves Michaud, which appears in a just-published book on her late work (more on that below). She says, “Feeling, existing, living, I think it’s all the same, except for quality. Existing is survival; it does not mean necessarily feeling. You can say good morning, good evening. Feeling is something more: it’s feeling your existence. It’s not just survival. Painting is a means of feeling “living.” 

As we traverse autumn’s gorgeous clamor and dip a toe in darkness, I plan to keep pursuing any mode of living and making that helps me do exactly this: feel my existence.

SOAKING IT UP

When I wrote Constellations No. 8 in June, my family and I were about to embark on a trip to Paris and Amsterdam. From start to finish, the trip was an utter sensory dream. Here are a few of my highlights — bright spots that filled my art-hungry eyes and my adventure-hungry soul.

Row 1: Climbing steps behind Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre; a rainbow view from our apartment in le Marais; epic book collection in the apartment; gazing at Sennelier products through a shop window; looking down in Sainte-Chapelle.

Row 2: Picasso’s handwritten poetry; my youngest, strolling through Musée Picasso; my oldest’s first look at Monet waterlilies at Musée de L’Orangerie; a sublime lunch at Mokonuts; Monet’s “Un Coin d’Apartment” at Musée d’Orsay

Row 3: Matthew Wong’s “Starry Night” at the Van Gogh Museum’s unforgettable exhibition, Painting as a Last Resort; our very own dejeuner sur l’herbe in Place des Vosges; Giacometti’s whimsical plaster chandeliers hanging in Musée Picasso; a secret garden at Merci Paris.

IN MY KITCHEN LATELY

Summer cooking at its finest

Northern Michigan summer days are luxuriously long. Our family often eats a fourth meal at ten or eleven o’clock, standing over the kitchen counter after our third swim while it’s still light outside.

I found myself cooking more spontaneously than ever this summer, relying on our hearty Loma Farm CSA (pictured above) and making frequent stops at favorite roadside farm stands. Cooking on the fly was fun and low-stress. I favored staying on the beach a little longer rather than carving out time to make my favorite ratatouille preserves for winter, slicing peaches or washing blueberries for the freezer.

But one evening, after the kids were tucked in and a thunderstorm was blowing across Lake Michigan, I roasted a huge bowl of heirloom cherry tomatoes. They perfumed the air as the sun burned low across the horizon. I let them cool and stashed them away in the back of the freezer where I will not be able to find them until deep in the winter. I know I’ll thank myself come February when I’m longing for the sweet taste of summer.

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NEWS

A first time for everything

In August I participated in a special multidisciplinary art show conceived and organized by my friend, the artist Alyssa Smith. Inside of Foxglove Farm’s centennial barn, Alyssa installed a show of her latest paintings. Paul Erhard, Betsy Soukup and Yali Rivlin performed improvisational music and dance, and I read my essay “Under the Light of the Moon.” 

Before I stood in front of the audience to read, I felt a bit jittery. But as soon as I got started my nerves melted away. Reading my work in front of a crowd turned out to be a moving and crucial experience; I felt supportive energy reverberating back to me through the last word. Big thanks to Alyssa for inviting me to participate, and to everyone who attended.

Farm Club 2025 Calendars

Yes, it is that time of year already! Work is underway on the 2025 Farm Club Calendar benefitting Leelanau Conservancy’s Farmland Protection programs. Farm Club’s donation to Leelanau Conservancy has increased significantly each year since we kicked off this collaborative project in 2022. Your purchases can help make this year’s donation the largest yet! Pre-orders begin in early November. Stay tuned @farmclubtc and @lindsaygardnerart for details coming soon.

A BRIGHT LIGHT

Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1979-1985 (David Zwirner Books, 2024)

David Zwirner Books' new Joan Mitchell monograph arrived on my doorstep a few weeks ago; I have looked forward to receiving it for months. With large full-color plates and personal essays written by Lily Stockman, Amy Sillman, Shinique Smith, and Jules Otsuka, it highlights the artist’s work from the early 1980’s made in Vétheuil, France after she suffered several devastating personal losses. I particularly enjoyed Stockman’s meditations on Mitchell—her singular color sense and creative kinship with poets, poetry, and music; the work’s vigor, vivacity and scale. Stockman describes a “high-blood-pressure dizziness and cellular rearrangement” when standing in front of Mitchell’s large scale paintings from this period.

The book also includes the compelling conversation I mentioned above between Michaud and Mitchell from 1986, recorded just six years before her untimely death at age 67. In reading and rereading the conversation, I keep returning to one particular remark of Mitchell’s: “Painting is a way of forgetting oneself.”

A POEM FOR THE MOMENT

Great Powers Once Raged
Through Your Body
By Jane Hirshfield (from Given Sugar, Given Salt  (Harper Collins, 2001)


Great powers once raged
through your body, waking and sleeping. 
What remains?

A few words, your own or others’.
A freshened affection for silence and rest; 
but also for lightning and wind, 
Familiar to you now as your own coat or shoes.

They lie on the closet floor
in the scent of paint and pinewood, 
as if you had picked them out for yourself, 
as if you had carried them home.

“What could have happened, has happened.”
The sentence repeating itself in your ear
as a pear repeats itself, each time a little altered, 
on every branch of the tree. 

Chair, table, dishcloth, bowl –
each thing under your hand or your eyes
you regard now as ally, as friend. 

And yet this hard-won composure
feels already a little simple, a little meek – 
like a painting
of yellow houses or fields, before
the narrow slashes of red have been riveted in. 

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I recently read an interview with Joan Mitchell in the outstanding new book, Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1979-1985 (David Zwirner Books, 2024). In her conversation with the French Philosopher Yves Michaud, Mitchell makes the assertion that painting is the only art form that is without time.

“[Painting] never ends,” she says. “It is both continuous and still.”

Her statement has confounded and intrigued me since I read it. Mitchell wants us to consider time as contained in and emitted by art works, rather than time as mere context or content. The concept feels familiar in my experience of both making and looking at art—that is that, in the best scenario, a painted image stays with us in an indelible way, out past the capabilities of language, beyond the boundaries of time. It can be of the moment that it is made and of the moment it is viewed, and it can transcend both.

However, I have also wondered, what if painting is not the only art form that is without time? Can the same be said of poetry? After all— language, in both the way it is intended and the way it is read, can also be both “continuous and still.”

And so, here is my poem, “Letters to Our Daughters,” to read while you chew on Mitchell’s concept of time in art. I began writing this poem in June 2023, several months after I started down a treacherous road of cancer treatment. The poem has evolved since then as I have returned to it, trimming and word-shifting every so often. It changed with the ebbs and flows of the last 15 months; through my last chemotherapy treatment exactly one year ago today; through the surgery that came after it; through my recovery and months of further infusions. And it changed with the other manifold, dynamic and vital aspects of my life outside of the the realm of cancer: my treasured relationships, my art, my self.

And to me that feels just right. Maybe this has become a poem that spans time; it is of the time it was made, and of the present moment, where it will remain for you to read now, even as now continues to move in to the future as it always tends to do.

Now.

And now.

And now.

LETTERS TO OUR DAUGHTERS
by Lindsay Gardner


People are made of the same thing as stars, 
she wrote 
with a bright yellow number two pencil

a giant revelation
on a tiny scrap 

words that play 
like lyrics in my head 
when I wake, sweating  

where we lay, 
unmoored,
even the moon has vanished


Noiselessly
I chase the stories
of their boundless souls–
a desperate quest
for adequate language

until daylight
clear and callous
devours me


No–
I can name more precisely
in the weightless, lightless
murk of two to four am

hair skin nails baby teeth hip bone big toe knee cap ear lobe thumb wrist eyes palm nostril hand on my hand

the exact unnamable hue of their eyes
(your eyes, my eyes)

freckle below wispy lash
(we named it)

the smell of baking bread while she slept
(we named it)

her silken flesh
against this wicked breast
(unnamable)

ache too tender for this world
(unspeakable)


Again and again in the dark 
I burn just to be here 
to meet the sun when it rises 
again over the gray hill

to make myself a mirror 
for them to blow their breath on;
to feel them fog it up 
with their hot 
aliveness 

to write all the letters 
I did not write for them
across the years 

to yield to this thirst to trace 
the everything of their existence  

to make apparent 
infinity

to map
our impossible galaxies–
the absurd thickets–
of all we cannot,
will not 
know 

to listen to them to ask their millions of unasked questions 
as they keep answering mine

I had started to lose my hair several weeks earlier after my first few chemotherapy treatments. First, I noticed it clumped in my hairbrush. A few days later it lay, oily and lifeless and left behind on my pillowcase in the morning when I woke up. In May, my husband Craig, stood behind me while I sat in a creaky chair in our bathroom. I watched in the mirror as he tenderly shaved my head, and what remained of my straight, wheat-colored hair fell to the white tiles below. 

Though continually horrified by the physical reminder of what was happening to me, as the months went on I grew more accustomed to the shape of my naked head and the place on my face where my eyebrows used to be. Being hairless was simultaneously the most monumental and the most inconsequential fact about my life.

I had suddenly been confronted with a breakneck pace of medical appointments, weekly infusions, shots to boost my dwindling white blood cells; a litany of side effects that sounded like a pharmaceutical company’s late night advertising; a new lexicon of forboding onomatopoeic words that described my aggressive disease, and the medicines that would try to rid my body of it –  paclitaxol, carboplatin, neupogen. And, of course, the haunting knowledge of cancer cells attempting to multiply in my body.

That is to say, there were bigger fish to fry then my hair problem. And yet, I mourned it and the pre-cancer person that went with it. Without my hair I was exposed. There was no hiding from what was happening.

In those months, in the few moments that I felt well enough to venture out on my own to do an errand, pick up my kids from school, or see friends, I tried not to glance at my eyes in the rearview mirror. If I did look, I did not see them, but rather looked through them. There, on the rectangular reflector six inches to the right of my head, was an image of the eyes I knew, but behind the image there was nothing of the self I had recognized just weeks earlier.

When I dressed in the morning, I looked in the mirror, but instead of a feeling of familiar perception, I felt as if I had been split in two. There was a body standing there, a woman with the same eyes looking back in my direction. But I was sure I was not still in it. I didn’t see even a remnant of the woman I knew to be me – the person I knew I was on the inside. 

Eventually I began dressing in the dark closet in our bedroom, where there was nary a mirror in sight. The act of not looking at myself seemed to fit perfectly in the upside down logic of the nightmare scenario unfolding. Every glance in the mirror meant visual evidence of the disease now inhabiting my body.

You, the woman in the mirror said to me.

Yeah, you– the one looking back at me with the same hands, the same scar on your forehead and the same freckle under your left eye. You are a cancer patient now.

My relationship with myself and my physical body was growing obscured, distanced and dislocated with every passing week. The experience of estrangement from myself was so vivid, so omnipresent, I felt as if I might entirely float away. Sometimes I found myself searching for my own shadow.

If it was there, I’d think to myself, ok then I must still be here. Here. With cells and molecules, and specific DNA, forming a solid physical human shape, carrying around the soul of a person that used to know herself. A person who once embodied herself, her body, her life. 

The recognition of a shadow was comforting and alarming. 

I used to know how to locate myself, I thought. Or, at least, I used to be in a position to try. 

In the many months spanning treatment I often thought about a trip our family had taken in early 2022 to the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural History to see a planetarium show. Our daughters, six and nine at the time, were obsessed with space. It was January, and a biting wind whipped around campus as we made our way to the building.

Inside, we sat cuddled together, in the warmth of the theater’s glowing dome. We bent our heads back to look at the ceiling as a student narrator guided us through the Milky Way, then Andromeda, our nearest neighboring galaxy. Our tour guide continued to widen the image on the glittering screen above us, to show us the Virgo Supercluster, and its neighboring Taurus Void.

Further out still, was the Laniakea Supercluster, which encompasses 100,000 galaxies including ours. Laniakea and other superclusters are themselves encompassed by a giant cosmic abyss called the KBC Void, that is estimated to be roughly two billion light years in diameter. Somewhere in the middle of that cosmic abyss is our galaxy, the Milky Way.

The universe, as it turns out, is much bigger than we once comprehended. Scientists hypothesize that even the KBC Void is just a barely noticeable dot within the broader observable universe’s diameter of about 92 billion lightyears. And that’s just what we know right now.

The memory of sitting together in the dark womb of that planetarium stayed with me through my most disoriented moments. The twenty minute show had exploded my understanding of my own location in the universe. I replayed the image of the Milky Way spiraling against a widening span of darkness and space in my mind. I remembered what the student narrator had said - that our galaxy alone contains up to four billion stars. That when we look up at it from this planet (just one of the estimated one billion planets in our galaxy alone) many of those stars are faint or invisible. That for every star we can see with the naked eye, there are 20 million more we can’t.

These staggering facts were in my head each time I avoided my ghost reflection in the mirror all those months. The sheer magnitude of the universe compared to our human scale was strangely comforting. Cancer loomed malignant and all-consuming in my life, and yet there was something much, much bigger than myself and all of the nearly eight billion humans living on Earth. 

Thinking about our relationship to the vast universe provided a salient metaphor for my experience in cancer. Unlike the relatively minor illnesses and setbacks I had previously experienced, the further into cancer treatment I went, the more submerged I was in a tremendous web of unknowns. I was enveloped in a kind of palpable darkness where there was no solid ground.

As an artist and a writer, I have dedicated much of my life to the perpetual pursuit of locating myself – in time, space, physical environment, community; with actions, words, research, paint and pictures. Considering the ways we locate ourselves metaphorically, historically, environmentally, and spatially have kept my brain, body, and hands busy in one way or another for most of my adult life. After all, at its very essence the creative impulse is an attempt to record one’s own existence; to make a mark that says: I am here. 

In this darkness, though, surrender was a daily, if not hourly or constant experience. First I surrendered my sense of security to the cruel fact of my diagnosis. Then I surrendered control. Then I surrendered my body to the care of other people, some intimately close and some strangers. I surrendered many primary responsibilities and capacities of motherhood to gracious helpers all around me; much of the fulfilling expression of being an artist; and the joy and meaning of being a present and capable spouse and friend. 

My concept of myself began to take the shape of a chain of cut out paper dolls. If each paper cutout along the chain was a layer of identity, cancer had flattened me to the one thin layer at the end of the chain.

I wanted to reach out and grab the fragments - all those truncated pieces that were floating away– and stuff them in the pocket of my chemo sweatpants—my 33 year old self learning how to run again after the birth of our first daughter, up and down San Francisco’s steep hills; my 28 year old self counting seconds to Friday to head to the California Sierras to ski all weekend; my 20 year old self painting in lavender fields outside of Aix en Provence; my 17 year old self angsty to trade the security of home for college independence; my 9 year old self hiding out in the hull of my family’s sailboat, making friendship bracelets and eating sandwiches while they raced through the northerly waters of Lake Michigan.

Even as I recalled them, they slipped away. A disease that threatened to extinguish me had redefined my sense of myself and how I related to every aspect of my life and the larger world. No corner of my identity remained unturned. I wondered if those distant aspects of myself would vaporize forever.  

Submerged in the magnitude of the unknown, a new question arose:  how does a person locate themselves in total darkness? How does one orient when neither here nor there? I was not the person I was before, nor was I moving into the future. I was suspended; gravityless in a pause where a future was not guaranteed. How could I square my reality within the absurd vastness of it all (one tiny person out of billions on a single planet –  a spec of dust in the span of the universe)? 

I learned of the Celtic idea of Thin Places – which are described as places where the distance or separation between the real and transcendental is imperceptible. A thin place is where one becomes aware of existing in two worlds simultaneously. 

As the self I had known disappeared, I gravitated to the wisdom of the concrete physical world around me. Left with seemingly no other option, I allowed myself to feel the wonder and terror of the unknown, and it reciprocated by unveiling itself everywhere I looked. It was there in Lake Michigan’s ever changing waters; in the sudden storms that clawed across the horizon; on the shifting shoreline; in the wateriness of the water slipping through my fingers; in a dead herring gull laying on the sand with wings akimbo; in the cobalt night; in a fistful of spindly wildflowers; in twilight’s crushing glow; in the petrichor in spring. The natural world showed me its border places, its thin places, its wild unknown.

The night, when I laid in bed in total darkness, became another Thin Place. Awash in uncertainty, my ease with the night grew, as much as my discomfort did in the day. In the night I could let my body drift away and try to find my way back to my self. In dreams I could disassociate with the physical weight of my body. I could feel tiny moments of freedom from medical intervention. The night became a doorway to my most terrifying thoughts and my most loving ones.

I became friends with the night because there was no escaping it. Eventually I found myself sitting up at two or three am, urgently tapping words into my phone. Writing poetry was a balm to my otherwise total void of creative expression. Words - especially the most disparate, nonsensical ones- helped me begin to locate myself.

Middle-of-the-night poetry was the only creative act I could muster; it was a way to meet the chaos of the moment and to tangle with the grief. In writing down four, ten or thirty words I started to resist erasure. I am here.

I am convinced that artist and writer Tové Jansson, a sagacious interpreter of the natural world, must have known about Thin Places, too. She once said, “August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land…The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.”

Concepts of day and night, light and dark, known and unknown, being and not being, became my guideposts, embodied in the physical world around me as they were, and as they are. I located them in the shadows of the forest, in the depth and expanse of the lake, and in the changing of the seasons. In the very fact that all around me in nature, death and life and change are intimately, infinitely symbiotic. Interlocked and entwined, like grief and gratitude, one made the other grow and make itself known. 

Now it is August again, and I am returning to the night on my own, because I like it there. A few days ago I woke to the loon’s melancholy serenade. Last night I stepped outside and stood in the driveway to bathe in the mystery of those billions of stars. 

It is in the night that I recognize myself most.

In her cogent and moving book, The Summer Book, Jansson describes the unique relationship of a Grandmother and her granddaughter Sophia who spend summer in their cottage on a remote island off the coast of Finland. In the book’s last chapter, aptly named “August,” Jansson describes Grandmother waking in the middle of the night:

When she woke up she lay for a long time and wondered if she should go out or not. It felt as if the night had come right up to the walls and was waiting outside, and her legs ached. The stairs were badly constructed. The steps were too high and too narrow, and then came the rock, which was slippery down toward the woodyard, and then you had to come all the way back again. No sense in lighting a light; it only makes you lose your sense of direction and distance, and the darkness comes closer. Swing your legs over the edge of the bed and wait for your balance to come right. Four steps to the door and open the latch and wait again, then five steps down, holding the handrail. 

Grandmother wasn’t afraid of falling or losing her way, but she knew the darkness was absolute, and she knew what it was like when you lose your hold and there’s nothing left to go by. All to the same, she said to herself, I know perfectly well what everything looks like. I don’t have to see it. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and waited for a moment. She took the four careful steps to the door and opened the latch. The night was black, but no longer so warm; there was a fine, sharp chill. She went down the stairs very slowly, turned away from the house, and let go of the railing. It wasn’t as hard as she’d expected. As she crouched in the woodyard, she knew exactly where she was, and where the house and the sea and the woods were. From far off in the channel came the thump of a boat sailing past, but she couldn’t see the channel lights. 

Grandmother sat down on the chopping stump to wait for her balance. It came quickly, but she stayed where she was. The coast freighter was headed east to Kotka. The sound of its diesel motors gradually died, and the night was as quiet as before. It smelled of fall. A new boat approached, a small boat, probably running on gasoline. It might be a herring boat with an automobile engine–but not this late at night. They always went out right after sunset. In any case, it wasn’t in the channel but heading straight out to sea. Its slow thumping passed the island and continued out, farther and farther away, but never stopping. 

“Isn’t that funny,” Grandmother said. “It’s only my heart, it's not a herring boat at all.” 

For a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She guessed she would stay for a while.

Tonight we are gathered together on the evening of a supermoon, a blue moon and a sturgeon moon—a rare convergence of celestial events that is said to represent abundance, transformation, introspection and resilience. What seems most powerful to me about the moon when it circles this near though, is how it tells us–at least for a moment–where we are in space, in time. It is one reliable, albeit transient, marker of our location. 

Tomorrow both earth and the moon will begin to shift as they continually do. Over the coming days the moon will travel on in its ever-varying orbit back toward the sun. Our bright view of it will diminish, and the sky will fade to darkness.

We are constantly moving close to and away from the unknown; swaying in and out of darkness. Perhaps, as our sharpest fears would have us believe, the darkness will engulf us. 

Or perhaps it might give rise to the chance to see more clearly. 

Perhaps we will find ourselves with a fierce, surprising capacity to stand amid it all; to mingle with it in ways we never imagined.

Maybe all we need to do is wait for our eyes to adjust.

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When artist and author Anna Brones recently interviewed me for her newsletter and podcast Creative Fuel she asked me what shape my art practice had taken throughout cancer treatment. I explained how I began waking in the middle of the night with poems pulsing through my veins. I woke often around three a.m., to sit in bed in total darkness, typing words into the glaring light of my phone.

Writing poetry seemed to fill in the cracks where my visual art practice fell to the wayside while I was ill. Words helped me locate myself during the most dislocated time in my forty three years of life. Writing poetry – even naively, nonsensically, and without context – became the only creative act I could muster, or that made kind of sense amid the chaos I felt everywhere else in my body and mind. It was one way I felt I might resist the erasure engulfing me. 

Since then I have shared only a few of the many poems I wrote during that time. When we spoke Anna gently encouraged me to share one with the interview, which was published Saturday, June 29. I agreed and sent her “August Apex,” a poem I started writing in last July then edited until the end of August 2023. Like many others, I wrote it on my phone while laying in bed. 

AUGUST APEX 
by Lindsay Gardner

In the evening
I fix my eyes on the place where they swim
shadows in the blue

this theater is contained by 
a window’s meager frame

I want to claw it 
from the drywall 
keep it all 
still and stolen

I hear their laughter 
bounce
out in the deep where they cannot touch 

ravenous for this
quicksand summer

shrieks punctuate
waves applaud

tender bodies
bold in its rush

powerful enough
to slow time
they emerge, 
dripping liquid sun,
stumbling on stones,
calling my name

Saturday, the day Anna published our conversion, was heavy with humidity. The house was quiet for a moment while our kids were outside playing. I reread the conversation and my poem and decided that it was finally time for a swim. After rummaging around in the back of the closet, I slipped on my black one-piece for the first time in almost two years. This was the longest gap of time between Lake Michigan swims in my life, and definitely the longest lapse between swims with my children. 

I looked in the mirror hanging above the dresser at the person standing in front of me. My eyes met themselves in the reflection, then drifted down to the scars on my chest and underarms, and up to the fledgling hair growing back curly and wild on top of my head, where once it had been pin straight. I noticed the faint bruise on my forearm where my infusion nurse had connected the IV for my final treatment three days earlier.

On the dresser below the mirror were all the tiny objects - talismans - sent by friends and family in the first month of chemo. A tiny black whale pin given to my friend from her grandmother when she was a child, then given to me. The white feather from an owl found by my daughter. A palm sized black crystal. A lake fossil in the shape of a heart, and a shell from the Pacific coast. I took off my rings and bracelet and laid them there beside them all. 

I walked to the beach barefoot, over acorns and chartreuse moss until I reached the water. The edge of Lake Michigan is an absolute location in the geography of my life; standing there is an embodied metaphor every time. Toes dig into the sand, ancient mineral remnants of rocks– the dust of the concrete world; eyes reach out across azure water, its undulating horizon–the sprawling unknown. I had stood on the edge in the exact same place a thousand times since my last swim 22 months earlier. I stood there when I feared for my life; when I was weak and brokenhearted; when I grasped for hope; when overcome with gratitude, astounded by the depth of the night sky and the luminosity of the stars. This time I stood breathing in cedar-perfumed wind carried by the waves and the familiar smell of sun-baked sand.

I left my towel where I stood and walked until the water came to my chest. It lapped the scar where my medi port had recently been–the ghost site of suffering and its antidote. I stood firmly on the sandbar below me and let a wave lap my shoulder, then my neck. With a breath, I slipped into its cool, blissful silence. My body was suddenly, impossibly light. All the heaviness of monitoring, slow incremental steps, medicine, scans, tubes, needles, tests, invasive intrusions and interventions it had withstood slid away for a singular moment. A cacophony of noise hushed. 

Suspended under water I felt my weary limbs lift with each wave. When I came up for air, I saw my daughter swimming a few yards away, splashing around and gleefully attempting wobbly handstands against the rising waves. Our eyes met, and we both laughed. There we were, in the water together again.

Hello and welcome to Constellations No. 8—

The sun will shine its longest today. The solstice will tip the scales toward daylight, keeping the night at bay. Just look at all that midsummer daylight pouring in. What a marvel! Summer is the sweetest return. This one, especially so.

As I wrote in Constellations No. 7, the last six months have encompassed progress and patience with continued infusions and recovery. By the time you read this, I will have only one remaining treatment to complete - a fact that even as I write seems surreal. 

My doctors outlined this possible completion sixteen months ago. They presented a plan with the most sincere hope but no promises—a plan that meant: here is how we will try to save your life.

At that time the end of treatment was a distant horizon. I had been unmoored from life as I knew it and plunged into a gaping alternate reality. My cancer did not seem real— let alone embarking on months of chemotherapy, or surviving it to completion.

Cycle is a word that arises frequently in the world of cancer treatment. When I meet with my oncologist, he reminds me of the number of cycles remaining in my plan. The infusion nurses repeat which cycle I am on before they connect my IV. Loved ones familiar with the details ask me how many I have left. These cycles and their subsequent impacts on my body, usurped every other reference to become the predominant organizing principle of my life, and a way of locating myself in time.

Now, I am at the near-culmination of the strange sequence I have lived by for fifteen months. I picture myself on a highway onramp—leaving my triweekly pattern behind to merge again with our seasonal cycles. 

With summer’s brilliance in sight, I mind the contradictions of this junction. The urgency to live as fully as I can is piercing, but I desire a slower and steady pace. I grieve the version of my life before cancer but I recognize that even this horrible experience may eventually bear fruit. I remind myself of the opportunity to re-enter with intention - to choose to realize exactly what I want in my life; to let go of what I do not. 

Here on the brink of summer, I am both returning to myself and I am changed. I reckon with the fact that, astonishingly, I am one of the lucky ones, at least for now, in this singular moment.

Right now I am alive to witness June fern boughs unfurl little by little in the dappled light at the forest’s edge. Right now I am alive to swim in the deep blue lake. Right now I am alive to revel in the love of my family and friends, and to fiercely love them back.

I am alive to embrace myself as I was before, as I am now, and as I might be. Summer is here, and I am alive. 

TRAVELOGUE

New York Flashback

Last January, my husband Craig (what a gem!) surprised me with tickets to see Alex Katz’s retrospective, Gathering, at the Guggenheim Museum. We ate gorgeous food, spent leisurely hours immersed in Katz’s life work, and criss-crossed the city from 90th to 1st. I returned home to our little village by the lake, refreshed and invigorated by everything I’d seen and tasted, and ready to dive into my art practice with renewed spirit. Six weeks later I was diagnosed with breast cancer. 

Since then, the trip has dangled in my memory like a bright light in a dusty attic. My imagination spun it into a sort of epic last stop - the full moment before an all consuming cloud of uncertainty settled into every nook of my life. I am working on an essay about the show and the experience that I will share soon on Pocket Change. In the meantime here are the drawings I made way back then—a year and a lifetime ago. 

Adventure Again

When you get this, my family and I will be in the midst of a much-anticipated trip to Paris and Amsterdam that we had originally planned for last year. A few months ago we rebooked the trip with the fervent hope that we would be able to make it happen, and now we are actually doing it. It feels like a wild privilege to be healthy enough to travel, and to adventure again with my beloved family. 

While planning and preparing I shared a few memories with our daughters from my first visit to France with my mom in 1993. As a young teen I was completely spellbound when I saw the art in real life that I had only before seen in books (I was particularly obsessed with Degas’ pastel drawings), walked through Monet’s gardens at Giverny, and gazed at the Eiffel Tower from Pont Neuf. Luckily my mom had photo albums at the ready - proof to back up my tales. 

NEWS

New Work for Farm Club

I just started to dip back into freelance illustration - and what a joy it was to work on a project recently with Farm Club. This illustrated map postcard will help share Farm Club’s guiding principles and abundant, multifold operation with everyone who visits. Look for it the next time you stop by! 

IN MY KITCHEN LATELY

Health Nut by Jess Damuck

Jess Damuck’s book Health Nut has been a staple on my kitchen counter for the last few months. I’m convinced the green juice recipe kept my kids from spring colds. We’ve devoured the salmon bowls with quick pickles, crunchy peanut butter granola and especially the low-effort, high-reward tahini chocolate dates recipe, tucked into the back pages of the sweets chapter.

A BRIGHT LIGHT

Talking with Anna Brones

Artist, writer and educator Anna Brones (Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break and Culinary Cyclist) recently reached out to interview me for her newsletter and podcast Creative Fuel. I’ve long admired Anna’s intricate paper cut art and evocative writing. It was an honor to chat with her about creative practice and much more - we chatted about perfectionism and ambition in the face of life-altering events, patience and urgency, creative multiplicity, and leaning into what feels good.

Subscribe to Creative Fuel to learn more about Anna’s work and workshops. And stay tuned @annabrones @lindsaygardnerart for the whole interview when it is published soon.

A POEM FOR THE MOMENT

by James Baldwin

PARADISE

Let this be my summertime
Of azure sky and rolling sea,
And smiling clouds, and wind-kissed laughter,
And just myself entranced with thee.
And children playing in the glory
Of a carefree, youthful day,
And sunshine shining from the heavens,
And tears and sighing fled away.
Let this be my happiness
'Midst the earth's swift-flowing woe.
Let this be my only solace-
Just to know you love me so.
Just to know that we'll go winging,
Far above this earthy clime,
Hand in hand through laughing meadows.
Let this be my summertime.

Hello and welcome to Constellations No. 7-

I am sure I have never looked forward to spring with such ardor as I have this year. As I wrote about recently in Pocket Change, a new arm of this newsletter, time seems to be revolving around the moment exactly one year and two days ago when I became a cancer patient. The experience was like being plucked from Earth and spun around in another planet’s orbit. I am returning now to spring where I departed from its cusp last year, and still unpacking the inscrutable distance I traveled.

Adding to the disorientation, winter here in northern Michigan has been unpredictable and dramatically warmer than usual, like so many places experiencing the alarming impacts of climate change. Little ice formed on the Great Lakes through the winter, and snowfall was far below the annual average in most parts of the state. A few weeks back, in late February, my kids and I lingered outside in tee shirts one afternoon, only to burrow inside by the fire the next morning during a blizzard. We are not experiencing a linear path through the seasons, or any reassurance of what is to come. 

This volatility is deeply unsettling - there is no guarantee that anything is going to happen the same way it has in the past. What is happening outside feels strikingly parallel to my experience of cancer recovery so far. One day there is forward momentum and growth; the next day sheltering and stillness; I never know exactly what I am going to get. I am reckoning with a body that will not be the same as it was before. The natural world, once again, provides a striking metaphor.  

With growing distance from the most wrenching moments of cancer treatment, I am aware of both the striking good fortune of my outcome as well as the residual grief of it lingering in every part of me. I find myself still in the uneasy zone of unfinished business. I check off my ongoing infusion treatments one by one, and cross my fingers that no new side effects will show up. I tinker with my daily medications. I wonder if I am safe now, or when, if ever I’ll be free of worry that my cancer will return. I relish boring days, when there is no need to rush to the ER or wait in medical offices. I bow to my body and my mind for the hell it traversed. Cancer, with its multifold repercussions and implications, continues to humble me.

Spring, too, is a model of messy transition. Subtle processes and crucial growth are rumbling under the dirt, and within the tree trunk–in ways mostly invisible to us. Tiny increments of change happen inside the branches so that we may finally see a burst of green materialize. These massive transformations only sometimes progress on the timeline we hope they will.

And so, I look to this season for patience. I take small steps each day, reminding myself that there is growth happening even when it is invisible and slow. I make choices to fortify my well being: strengthening my body, cooking and eating well, keeping my stress level low, and nurturing my mental health by getting outside, seeking beauty and humor, spending slow weekends with my family, and time with friends.

As you’ll read below, I’ve been settling into a new studio space and investing time in developing my writing practice. For the first time in 15 years, I have the itch to oil paint again. In these increments I engage with an important contract with myself: to invest in the work that feels most genuine to me, I must begin to let go of irrelevant self-imposed categories and boundaries. To remain open to what might come, I let myself give in to the messy unfolding, whether I agree with its pace or not. So much has changed in me - why wouldn’t the things I make change too? 

Even when replete with doubt, I attempt to trust that the next season will be all the sweeter because of these muddy months of prelude. I hope that as the earth turns farther toward the sun, we will gradually cross a threshold leaving this winter firmly behind. Birdsong will become louder. Light and shadow will begin to shift and soften.

Impossibly, we will edge toward summer. 

Lindsay

NEWS

My New Studio

For just more than a decade, I have made a studio space in every one of our homes. First it was a creaky kitchen table in our small San Francisco apartment where I drew during my first daughter’s newborn naps. Then it was a desk in a basement room in our slightly more grown-up apartment. After that, I crammed my art supplies into a small sun porch in our first home in Oakland. Most recently in northern Michigan, I took over an extra bedroom that looks out at the lake. I have loved and appreciated these spaces over the years. None of them were perfect, but crucially, they were mine.

But after a year that kept me home for long stretches, I felt ready to shake it up. At the start of 2024 I made a promise to myself to start looking for studio space, and as luck would have it, I found one just a few days later in a building full of other artists in nearby Traverse City. As a bonus, I’m just across the hall from amazing artist friends Katherine Corden, Brianne Farley and Alyssa Smith.  Renewing my investment in myself and my work feels like a big deal, and so far I’m proud of myself for not turning my commitment into undue pressure.

2024 Farm Club Calendars

Sales of the 2024 Farm Club calendar benefitting Leelanau Conservancy totaled more than $5,000! Thank you for your support and enthusiasm for this annual collaborative project. Preorders for the 2025 calendar will begin in November 2024 - so (wink) mark your calendars.

IN MY KITCHEN LATELY

A few weeks ago Farm Club hosted writer Tamar Adler in conversation with Nic Theisen. Adler’s latest book, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: leftovers A-Z, is a love letter to the scraps and bits that remain after cooking and eating is done. Her gorgeous 2011 book The Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, set the stage for this one, which offers an encyclopedic array of ideas and recipes for the leftovers you have put away with good intentions but don’t know what to do with. 

Adler’s scrappy cooking ethos is rooted in the idea of love and respect for the food we eat, and using our resources with care and intention. I enjoyed listening to her speak about finding inspiration in her mother’s cooking and travel; making her way cooking at Prune, Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Chez Panisse; and her few unsuccessful attempts to pull away from her passion for cooking and writing. She spoke eloquently about collaborating with artist Caitlin Winner who created the book’s oil painting illustrations that celebrate the beauty in mundane moments of cooking - an orange peel, a broccoli stem, a broken egg. Read more about the book on NPR and Vogue.

A BRIGHT LIGHT

At the start of February, I began a year-long writing workshop with the writer Summer Brennan, called A Year of Writing Dangerously centered on the commitment to a daily writing practice. I have written nearly every day since the beginning of February, showing up to write a few lines even when I think I have nothing to say. Brennan aids this process by providing optional prompts and guidelines and, most importantly, by supplying permission to write about topics one might otherwise shy away from for fear of being mundane. The practice has helped me stop to notice, become more aware of my daily observations, and develop the courage and habit to do something with them- writing them down, pushing myself to look more closely, or connecting one thought to another. Looking back on the pages I’ve written in the last six weeks is an encouraging testament to doing a little bit of something everyday, and having faith in the creative process.

POEMS FOR THE MOMENT

Ada Limón
Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Jane Hirshfield
Da Capo

Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.

Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.

Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.

Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.

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Fairly early on, I knew that mine was an aggressive type of breast cancer that occurs in only ten to twenty percent of breast cancer patients. But further tests over the course of the coming month would determine just how bad it was– its size, stage, whether it had spread into my lymph nodes, or worse. Even now, almost a year later, I can feel the absolute free fall of those days, the way I was plummeting in panic with no foreseeable place to land. A smooth lump filled my throat, an ache rose from my sternum, and perpetual nausea took over my stomach. My muscles spontaneously quaked as I carried out normal activities like slipping a shirt over my head, brushing my teeth, or writing with a pen on paper. When I laid in bed at night, or sometimes during the day, I curled my body into a tight ball, like an animal does to protect its organs–as if I could hide from the nightmare that was unfolding. 

Everything I had known to be true–my identity; my concept of time; the indelibility of my relationships with my children, husband, family and friends; my physicality and the good health I had worked hard to maintain – was suddenly, impossibly tissue-thin, on the verge of crumbling and floating away.

Even the most mundane parts of everyday life seemed to reveal tiny graces that were painfully vulnerable. I watched intently as my mom, who had driven north to be with us while I was waiting for my biopsy results, taught our seven year-old daughter Maggie how to knit. I caught myself staring at our ten year-old daughter Lucy’s profile, trying to record her laugh in my mind to replay later. I lingered by the kids’ bedsides while they dozed off, wondering how many more times I would be able to tuck them in. I listened to my husband Craig read books to the kids in the evenings, took comfort in how he comforted them, how he lost himself in being their dad. I tried to etch every detail into my memory and worried about who would carry along its contents if I was gone. The days were as steep as cliffs. 

Two weeks earlier I had readied myself for a diagnostic mammogram - a specific scan meant to get a better look at the dense mass buried in the flesh of my left breast, that I had felt and inquired about when I’d seen my doctor in January. The day of the mammogram, I wore a soft grass-green cardigan, black jeans, warm winter boots, and my husband’s wooly scarf wrapped around my neck. I remember taking each article of clothing off in the cubicle changing room, and trading them for a crisp, gigantic plum-colored gown, well-worn by countless women before me.

I looked into the mirror and scanned my naked body- the circles under my eyes; the stretch marks on my belly left by my two pregnancies; the old nail polish chipping off of my toenails; the wonky knitted bracelet Lucy had slipped around my wrist that morning; and the bulbous form jutting out along the side of my breast. I met my eyes in the mirror, and acknowledged the feeling creeping along my spine that after the scan everything might be different.

And then it was, and, stunningly, we were in the wholly surreal reality of my diagnosis, fumbling about in darkness. 

Two days after I learned I had cancer, Craig and I decided that we would almost immediately tell the kids. Our desire to protect them from the awful truth of it was so strong, but we knew they could already sense a strangeness settling in amongst us. When we worked up the courage to have the conversation, it was Sunday. Three days later, we were scheduled to depart for a vacation to Paris and Amsterdam, a trip we had been planning and talking about for months. The girls were begging us to help them lay out their clothes, and giggling while they tried on their matching tomato-red berets we had given them for Christmas.

Instead of helping the kids pack their new suitcases, we all sat in the den together so I could tell them I had cancer. Craig and I had debated that morning about whether to use the word cancer at all. It was incomprehensible to be using it in relation to me, but then, there was no way around it. Our goal was to be honest without terrifying them. Was that even possible? The fuzzy line between truth and trepidation was one we had only just started to negotiate ourselves.

First, we told them that we could not go on our much-anticipated trip. The room felt cold, and my mouth went dry. The reason we had to stay home, we continued, was that I had bad cells in my body that were misbehaving and multiplying, and that it was crucial I start taking medicine right away to get rid of them. Lucy immediately recognized the word we were obviously avoiding.

 “I know what it is,” she said, with the kind of adult worry one never wants to see in their child’s eyes. “It’s cancer.” 

“Yes,” I whispered, trembling. 

The words were astonishing as they tumbled out of my mouth. It seemed that they had the power to shake our children out of their childhoods in a matter of seconds. 

Maggie and Lucy cuddled into a blanket with their arms around each other as we told them the strange facts that would alter each of our lives. We explained that cancer was a word that meant many different diseases, and that there were strong medicines to help people with the type I had. I would take the medicines for a long time, and they would probably make me feel horrible. Many months later there would be a surgery. We did not know exactly what was going to happen, but my doctors (who I did not yet know) were going to do everything they could to help me fight the bad cells, we said.

As we huddled closer together, we prepared them for the riot of feelings and questions they might encounter, and reassured them as best we could that all of them were ok. I told them I was scared, and it was normal if they felt scared, too. Lucy asked questions (Does it hurt? What will happen when they do surgery? Do you feel sick right now? When will it be over?), many of which I could not answer. Maggie hardly spoke a word. I made only one promise: that we would be honest and clear with them as each step of the process unfolded. We would never hide information from them. When we said goodnight and tucked them in that night, I was terrified of what monsters would unleash themselves in their dreams. 

The next morning, I sat with them while they ate toaster waffles at the kitchen counter before school. I watched them hawkishly. I was strung out from sleepless nights and anxious about how they would carry the heaviness through their days.

Craig packed their backpacks and drove them to school, then returned to huddle around phones and computers with me and my mom. Time slowed, and the feeling of waiting was tenacious. We were desperate for a doctor to call us, to explain exactly how we would make it go away. When a doctor or hospital administrator did call, we frantically scribbled notes on yellow legal pads, but every answer led to more questions.

Our mouths formed words that felt like jagged rocks–their ferocity seemingly encased in dense syllables: neoadjuvant, immunotherapy, carboplatin, paclitaxel. I arranged myself at the table each day in my sweatpants, my eyes hollowed out from crying, my limbs shaking and my nervous system sprinting to hold on, as I listened to well meaning people explain how to try to shrink and excavate the cancer in order to save my life. We repeated words back to the doctors, mimicking their plan in our own voices as if this would allow us to keep pace with their strange lexicon. In our new reality we stood at the threshold of an unfamiliar world. 

My family and I live on the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan, where winters are windy, snowy and gray, and can last nearly half of the year. It is not uncommon to see snowfall as late as April or May. But that streak of days in March were unusually clear, snowless, sunny and blue-skied. The bright light streaming in our windows felt at odds with the wobbly, murky tenor inside. At the end of each day, I dragged myself outside to suck in the frigid, twilight air before the sun went down. The sharp cold numbed my hands and face, and brought a soothing pause, like someone holding an ice compress against the whole of me. As I walked to the water’s edge, I felt a delicate film of ice crack with each footstep, letting the soft sand give way beneath it. 

Sometimes my mom walked with me quietly with her hand on my shoulder, trying her best to comfort me, or perhaps just to hold on to me. Other times the girls rambled down the stairs to the beach to chase the dog, shrieking and chasing the waves in the waning light. I watched them run ahead of me, resisting the urge to call them back to cocoon them in my heavy jacket and feel their warm breath against my neck. Often, Craig and I went together. We walked, or stood still, bracing our shivering bodies against each other, shock washing over us, dread lapping at our toes. 

At the edge of the lake, where time and distance seem to span beyond the finite, I stood face to face with my looming mortality. It was the only place or time in that endless string of days when anything that felt like clarity was within reach. I watched the waves rise, settle, and vanish into the sand. I allowed myself to follow my thoughts to their very bitter ends. I envisioned Craig living a life without me; my daughters growing up without their mom; my parents mourning their youngest child; all the immensity that I would leave behind. And I saw my life as I had already lived it, laid out in front of me- a glimmering array of love and friendship, wonder, experience and growth, playing out against the smooth unceasing sweep of water, and the long horizon behind it.

My heart cracked open and the sky, it seemed, cracked open with it. I stood at the lake’s edge watching the sun sink down. Its fluorescent luminosity bled all over the sky. I felt myself tiny against the magnitude of the universe, and the terror and fragility of being alive in it. 

It was during those evenings under the vivid sky, that I felt myself begin to split in two. Half of me stood there, boots firmly dug into the sand on this planet while it made its daily turn away from the sun. The other half floated above witnessing the sublime pierce straight through the temporal world that I knew. 

I saw my life and its precariousness flooding me with the sun’s last light. A curtain whisked open radiating shades of cerulean, amber and vermilion. And as all that color faded to ultramarine into jet black and the first stars came out, I imagined my death. 

And all of it–my life and my death–felt equally, unfathomably real.

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Hello and welcome to Constellations No. 6 —

Today is December 21, 2023: winter solstice. I find myself saying the date out loud because it seems surreal after all that this year has entailed. Today is our darkest, shortest day, but soon we’ll take a turn and edge ourselves back toward the light of longer ones. Of all the tilts and spins the earth makes throughout the year, this one always feels the most symbolic.

This year alternated between sprinting and crawling as I made my way through seven months of treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer after being diagnosed in March. In late October I underwent bilateral mastectomy surgery, then woke to incredible and hard-to-absorb news: my doctors had removed my tumor site with clear margins and tests found no remaining cancer cells. The treatment had been successful. Suddenly, I was cancer free.

A well of unfathomable gratitude washes over me.

This feeling of overwhelming gratitude is hardly straightforward, though. Riddled with complications and caveats, it is interlocked with the hard realities of this life-changing year, and the very recent, unfathomable losses of two beloved friends. Being cancer free right now does not mean my journey is over. I am adjusting to living with permanent side effects from treatment and facing possible follow up treatment and another surgery. And of course, as anyone who has faced this disease knows too well, there is always a lurking chance that cancer might recur.

An ocean of grief and pain spreads like a heavy blanket.

Sorrow and anger unfurl alongside gratitude; they are emotional poles coupled like the darkness and light of the winter solstice. As I begin to grasp the magnitude of these experiences and pick up the pieces of my life where I suddenly pressed pause ten months ago. I understand acutely the dualities of human experience—gratitude and grief, heartbreak and joy, forever entangled. 

Finding my way to a new definition of steadiness, strength and relief is a slow, meandering process, with an unknown destination. This year, writing (publicly and privately) has been a salve while moving through cancer’s overwhelming landscape. My goal is to keep writing as I enter into this new amorphous phase. 

I plan to share my writing with you in a new arm of this newsletter that I’m calling Pocket Change. Named after the poem I wrote in August, Pocket Change will explore my experiences with cancer, and the leftover thoughts rattling around in my brain, nagging me to write them down. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, Pocket Change will show up in your inbox just as Constellations does, and will remain free to read and subscribe. My first installation will go out in mid-January.  

Until then, I wish you the space to savor this complex time of year — in the reflection that comes with today’s darkness, and in the promise of tomorrow’s growing light. 

Lindsay

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NEWS 

Farm Club’s 2024 calendars benefitting Leelanau Conservancy’s farmland protection programs have arrived! 

It is always a great honor to make the artwork for this collaborative calendar - it represents so much of what I love about the place and community I call home. Making anything during my last two months of chemo was a challenge, but these paintings brought me a lot of joy during a very rough time. Huge THANK YOU to everyone who purchased calendars and supported this project.

IN MY KITCHEN LATELY 

After a long hiatus through the worst parts of treatment, surgery and recovery, I am getting reacquainted with my kitchen and my appetite. It is deeply comforting to cook for myself again, to reawaken my senses and taste buds and my love for the process. I’ve been making nourishing soups like this hearty mushroom from Sarah DiGregario, and a stewy parsnip and tomato from Abra Berens. 

My family and I have also been planning our Christmas Eve dinner. Each member of our family chooses a country, then researches its holiday traditions and foods (said country does not have to have a majority population that celebrates Christmas). It is a welcome opportunity to learn what and how people around the world celebrate, and in the process we all learn something about food, culture and history. While we are still nailing down our menu, our current top choices include Finnish Christmas Porridge, Israeli citrus salad, Palestinian spiced chicken made during celebrations, and German black forest cake.

A BRIGHT LIGHT

Some time ago, my dear friend Kate suggested I follow along with musician and writer Nick Cave’s newsletter, The Red Hand Files. I have loved reading it ever since. Cave reviews hundreds of letters from strangers and fans each week, then chooses one to reply to one with soulful reserves of empathy, wisdom and the mutuality of someone who has faced tremendous loss himself. Reading the heartfelt questions and his eloquent responses is a beautiful, life-affirming reminder of how we are never really suffering alone. 

When asked by a reader why he created The Red Hand Files, he writes: 

“I thought of the deep, mysterious reserves of feeling we all carry around with us that are suddenly and inexplicably triggered by small recognitions of our common struggles. I thought of the intricate sorrows that are threaded through our lives, binding us all together, the shared tears that wash clear our eyes to better see the many tasks set in front of us. And I remembered…that we should go lightly among them. If we are consumed by these things then we become of little value to ourselves, each other, or the world. This is something I must learn and relearn constantly.”

A TINY, GRAND MEMORY

A little known fact about me: I taught fourth grade for two years after I finished my MFA in San Francisco. One year, our class visited SFMOMA to tour the museum’s basement storage with a student’s father who worked there. We took a freight elevator down from the museum’s buzzing main floors to the quiet basement where thousands of artworks were stowed away like gems in a giant jewelry box. It was a strange thrill to see such magnificent art affixed to rolling racks and stacked together by the thousands.  I’ve always felt it was a glimpse into the other life of those artworks, and I’ll never forget it.

A POEM FOR THE MOMENT

By Mark Nepo, writer, poet, cancer survivor

Adrift

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

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Hello and Welcome to Constellations No. 5 —

This newsletter should have made its way to you seven months ago, but life had other ideas. As you might know, I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer in March of this year (I wrote about it in June). Since then, time, along with every other aspect of my life as I knew it before, has moved in disorienting and unpredictable ways. So, here we are.

When not in the grips of a chemo fog in the last six months, I have thought often about how one frames a creative life; about what is changing in me while my body does the difficult work of being treated for cancer; and of course, what my world will look like in the years to come. This experience comes with a new reality–the one that we all live with all the time, but until we are forced to, try to give little heed. Anything can happen at any moment. We have control over nothing. 

When I started treatment in April I remember thinking in terms of before and after (before cancer/after cancer, before chemo/after chemo, etc). But now that I’ve been in it for months, a new metaphor feels more apt: the window. I once lived and looked out of the other side of the window; now I live and look from this side. At times I worry I won’t be able to go back to that lovely other side where I resided for so long. My best guess is that from now on, I live in and look through both sides of the window at once. 

For that reason, the new logo for Constellations is my illustration of the window (above). You’ll see it associated with the newsletter on its new home on Substack, and in your inbox when it arrives throughout the year (more on that below).

Today is Autumn’s equinox, and my first newsletter of 2023. This day contains equal parts daylight and darkness. Holding these extremes alongside of one another is another way of looking through both sides of the window. I hope you’ll join me in the paradox.

Thanks for being here, friends.

NEWS

Constellations is now on Substack!

If you’re a current subscriber, nothing changes - Constellations will remain a free quarterly newsletter and will continue to go straight to your inbox. To make sure it does not end up in your spam folder, please add this address to your contacts. I also recommend downloading the nifty Substack app to your devices. I’ve been testing it out this summer and really enjoying it.

If you’re new, welcome! Read about what Constellations is and subscribe to continue to receive it in the future. 

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UPCOMING

I am collaborating with Farm Club again on their annual illustrated calendar benefitting Leelanau Conservancy’s Farmland Preservation Program! This project is near and dear to my heart, and directly supports the Conservancy’s crucial work in Leelanau County. Stay tuned here and on Instagram for 2024 calendar pre-order details, coming soon. 

RECENTLY

WILDSAM’S NORTHERN MICHIGAN PURSUITS BOOK

An illustration project I worked on for the first part of 2023 came into fruition in June with the release of  Wildsam’s Northern Michigan Pursuits book. I loved having the opportunity to illustrate this book about the area where I now live. It gave me ample excuse to learn about parts of Northern Michigan life that were new to me. I admire Wildsam’s approach to making travel guides which includes asking thoughtful questions about current issues in each location and including honest responses from local contributors. Check out/purchase the Northern Michigan pursuits book right here. 

THE BOARDMAN REVIEW

Earlier this year I was invited to contribute an essay to The Boardman Review’s Spring 2023 issue. I wrote about the many ways I have come to define home, and how my family and I landed in Northern Michigan a few years ago in the midst of the release of my book, Why We Cook: Women on Food, Identity, and Connection. It was an honor to reflect in writing on this monumental period of my life and share it. Back issues can be purchased right here.

IN MY KITCHEN LATELY

The extent of my cooking this summer was arranging a lush summer fruit plate, and making a big batch of ratatouille preserves for the freezer. But, by far the best things happening in my kitchen lately have been the beautiful, bountiful meals made for my family by friends and family in the last seven months. These meals have fueled our survival through this dark time, lending more meaning than I have ever known to food and cooking as a conduit of friendship, community, love and shelter.

While not cooking, I have been enjoying reading Alicia Kennedy’s book, No Meat Required, which came out in August. The book is everywhere I look right now, and for good reason. Kennedy covers the history and cultural context of veganism and vegetarianism from various angles including its radical history, gender politics, and its shift into mainstream culture and capitalism. She explores each thread of the topic with killer research, and prescient questions that made me think hard about the choices I make every day in consuming and eating. Highly recommend!

A BRIGHT LIGHT

While paging through a deep backlog of New Yorker magazines, I got hooked on a lovely essay, originally published in 1948 by Vladimir Nabokov, about his infatuation with butterflies and moths. Of his childhood passion turned lifelong obsession, he writes, “I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.” Nabokov also lent his vast knowledge and collection to the American Museum of Natural history, where he volunteered as an etymologist. His letters and specimens remain in the care of the museum to this day. (Take a peek at his collection in this video from the AMNH). 

The essay is magnificent, but its final paragraph reads differently than the rest; it is gentler than the rest of his maximalist detailing of species and biographical fact. Since reading it, I haven’t been able to shake his description of memory’s way of traversing time into crystalline transcendental present: 

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness–in a landscape selected at random–is when I stand among rare butterflies, and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love, a sense of oneness with the sun and stone, a thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern, perhaps to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to the tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.” 

You can read the whole essay right here.

A POEM FOR THE PRECIPICE OF AUTUMN

Contradictions: Tracking Poems, XXVIII 
by Adrienne Rich

This high summer we love will pour its light
the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment
then before we’re ready will crash into autumn
with a violence we can’t accept
a bounty we can’t forgive
Night frost will strike when the noons are warm
the pumpkins wildly growing     the green tomatoes
straining huge on the vines
queene anne and blackeyed susan will straggle rusty
as milkweed stakes her claim
she who will stand at last        dark sticks barely rising
up through the snow     her testament of continuation
We’ll dream of a longer summer
but this is the one we have: 
I lay my sunburnt hand
on your table:    this is the time we have