slow sauntering with the summer’s last gifts
our excess, evidence of life lived to its limits
we keep driving, slow cooking and sharing tea
chemically rearranging our fears over dinner
i ask for a real hug and you invite me into plein air
we remind each other, it can all be gone so quickly
so we’re left with the fullness of the now
we nestle into tangents
meet in the metal
steeping time like a whale who moves
between hot and cold waters
opposite the direction the world turns, against the tides
doing all that it can
to move us to a halt
their outbreath a reminder for us to breathe
as they place clouds into the sky with their warm exhales,
a lingering fog to nurse the trees,
bridging histories bonded by all our much ness, laid out on the table
We have all lost something. The earth reminds us of our mortality daily. As the season shifts, we approach darker months, the colors around get painted anew through natural abscission. Many of us return to art and poetry to grapple with the immense grief, because answering to, How are you? Without pause, is beyond one. So we attempt to elaborate those caverns in our connections, collaborating with the earth, touching clay, shapeshifting and code switching to new worlds.
Perhaps a natural death does not mean a long life, only a life lived in coexistence and in honor of each other and all things living deep within the planet. Immense grief means there was immense love. Choosing to love again after we grieve is one of the greatest gifts we can give to each other. There is not enough language to communicate what catastrophic loss feels like in the body and no perfect word to describe the ones we lose and continue to hold space for. Perhaps, they become a part of us, always in a state of becoming. Like the whale, we emit them back into the world around us, an exhalation of divine love.
Natural Death is a story, threaded together through the work of 13 artists: Noura Alhariri, Anne Beck, Dan Clauson, Cirilo Domine, Rosemary Hall, Cat Lauigan, Jas Lin, Jules Pierce, yétúndé ọlágbajú, taisha paggett, Laurie Palmer, Grace Potter and Sarita Doe. Each artist looks deeply into the aliveness of the world’s fissures, through its entanglements, rearrangements, beauty, and persistence to keep going.
Rino & Dav