“Sisyphus”

2005-2022 • 49.5” x 74” x 5” • Salvaged Steel from Fisher Body No. 21, Cast Iron, Paint, Wood and Ink • Scott Hocking

In This Issue: Practices of Renewal, Care, What’s Possible, and Post-Industrial Art

Standing in Cold Water: A Handful of Practices for Feeling Alive Again

by Taylor Reed || 1,257 words (5 minute read)

Hope is not a soft bed, a place to lie down and rest indefinitely. Hope is a form of inertia, an animating force, found where mind and spirit align with a vision in the world, and, ideally, become embodied through good work. It doesn’t come passively.

I found myself needing to nurture hope after reading some difficult writings on current affairs. One focused on the scarcity of certain metals and minerals deemed necessary for forms of energy transition, while the other was about the supposed low levels of plankton in the Atlantic ocean. Neither of the pieces were day brighteners. I don’t vouch for either of them—here’s a rebuttal of sorts to the second. Simply spending time with them affected me.

At that point, I had been living in a stretch of gray, with a lot of commotion in my head, most of it unhelpful. Because of this, I decided to slightly alter my morning routine, which tends to consist of waking and diving into a mental and physical task list. I happened to have a relatively open morning, so I woke early and aimed for inefficiency. To be clear, this is the opposite of how I normally do things. My first thought upon waking tends to be— “Okay, what needs to be done?” That morning when I woke, I asked that question, let all of the things come to mind and then forced myself to let them go.

Then I sat. In silence. I made some coffee. I listened to some music, drank some water, stepped into the shower (cold water), hopped out, breathed warm dry air and repeated the process for about an hour and a half.

Silence, coffee, music, a drink of water, showering in cold water, breathing warm dry air. Repeat.

Silence…

Listen to this essay

The Warp — Ideas and Inspiration

|| 1 || LM Sacasas recently wrote on care and activities of renewal in his newsletter, The Convivial Society. I’m a little irked when I schedule a writing, and find someone else sharing something similar just before I do, especially when they express it much better than I do. I got over myself (this time), and loved Sacasa’s thoughtful words—they deserve thoughtful reading. Here’s a tiny snippet:

”…One way to approach the matter is to simply ask ourselves what we get for our troubles if we should learn to attend to the world with care.

What we get, simply put, is nothing short of the world itself.”

Care is one of Crosshatch’s tenets that I find most unique amongst organizational traits. It requires long-term commitment, frequent revisitation and energy to implement. That’s generally not the easiest route.

I spoke to a friend today (often seen in a yellow Stormy Kromer, jumping into frigid waters himself) about easy routes and cold water immersion. He described how everything in a lower part of you says “no—it’s not worth going in,” but if you can push that aside and do it anyway, you’ll likely encounter something life-giving. And it’s not just icy dips—it’s anything worth doing that’s easy to put off. I’ve been intending to keep a physical calendar with folks birthdays, and actually send letters like I used to. I haven’t made it happen yet. This is a good reminder.

”What we get, simply put, is nothing short of the world itself.”

|| 2 || Krista Tippett is known for her radio show, On Being, which centers upon creating space for reflective dialogue related to faith, spirituality and other existential matters. Right now, the project is being reworked largely as an effort to sustain its long run and uphold the ideals and vision that brought it about in the first place. It’s had a two decade run—I don’t know if Krista expected that.

In this interview, a departure from her normal role on the opposite side of the questions, she shared a bit of her background that had shaped a certain humility and hope with regard to predicting what’s possible and what can be lived out. I’ll just leave a piece of that here; it speaks for itself:

”I have this life that people know, with On Being—and then I had this past life in Cold War Berlin. It was a really defining thing to live through. I had all these different visas—for being a journalist, and dating a British journalist who lived in East Berlin, then when I went to work with the State Department, I had a diplomatic visa. As much as anybody I knew, I lived on both sides of the wall. So I inhabited a world that utterly and completely changed. The East Berlin I knew vanished. Right up until the wall came down, it was inconceivable that that could happen. It started shifting, but that was not within our imagination. What really imprinted on me afterwards was how we couldn't think big enough to take in reality, to take in what was possible. Our imaginations are constricted by what we could see. It gave me this deep, embodied understanding that there's more to reality than we can see, and more change possible than we can imagine.”

|| 3 || This particular newsletter’s visual spotlight comes from Scott Hocking, a Detroit-based sculptor, photographer, and participant in Crosshatch’s artist residency program, the Hill House. He’s known for finding, reworking and re-presenting the materials of the post-industrial Midwestern landscape.

“Sisyphus,” the work at the top of this email, hints at some of the thrust behind his art. The collections encourage consideration of our recent rust-belt past, and then—one step further—consideration in the context of how we view the ruins and existing pieces of more ancient civilizations on a universal scale. If you want to explore more of his work, consider visiting the Cranbrook Art Museum, which is hosting his retrospective Detroit Stories until March 19th. There’s a teaser for it here.

The Weft — News and Events

|| 1 || The 2023 Food and Farm Microloan Application window is now open. Applications are due February 7th. More information is available here.

|| 2 || While attending college here in Michigan, I ended up farming in Alaska, while learning about self-built cabins, sauna etiquette, ecological design and scale, and traditional skills, and I was able to get undergraduate credit for it. A similar interdisciplinary opportunity in the form of a three month food systems fellowship, entitled Nourishing An Unraveling World, is being offered by Colorado’s Groundwork. Applications for the program are due on February 15th. Closer to home, the Savanna Institute will soon be accepting applications for their agroforestry apprenticeship program. Here’s a list of potential host farm/mentorship opportunities.

|| 3 || MOFFA Organic Intensives 2023. Join the Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance tomorrow, Saturday, January 7th, at MSU’s Plant and Soil Sciences building in East Lansing. This year’s intensives are: Keeping Outside the Box: A Comprehensive Understanding of Sustainable Beekeeping in Today’s Declining Environment; High Costs and Supply Scares of Nutrients: Overcoming Organic Crop Fertility Challenges; and Diverse, Vigorous, and Hardy Fruits and Nuts—Native and Beyond. Find more information here and register online or at the door.

|| 4 || The MIFFS Michigan Family Farms Conference is coming up in late February. If you have interest in sponsoring or exhibiting, find more information here. And if you’re interested in attending, save the date—Saturday, February 25th—and stay tuned for more details.

|| 5 ||A Slew of Farm Opportunities:
A.) Grant applications open until January 13th at 3pm ET for the Young Farmer Grantfor $5,000.
B.) Grant from FACT for livestock farmers: grants of up to $3,000 are available, applications due January 10th.
C.) Consider filling out the ag census! As long as you earn over $1,000 per year of farm income you are eligible.
D.) Funding Your Farm: Selling Your Story in a Business Plan, hosted by CRFS, MSUE, and GreenStone Farm Credit Services, The online sessions will be held on Thursdays throughout February, 6:30 – 7:30 PM.

Many thanks to the Michigan Arts & Culture Council and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support of this work.