Pockets of Beauty
A neon pink sun in a wildfire sky, felled trees on a trail, and the incremental and momentous shifts that make up our lives.
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There’s a forest trail not too far from my house that is good for morning bike rides. The land is owned by the Department of Natural Resources and managed by our local parks department. A timber harvest has been in the cards for months now.
They have been good about communicating that it was coming and I’ve seen the indicators: pink tape that hangs from huckleberry bushes and branches, boundary signs posted on tree trunks, tracks of big machinery. It feels like we’ve been counting the days.
Last weekend we went for an early Saturday morning ride, and there they were: enormous Douglas fir trees felled across the trail.
Since it was Saturday there wasn’t any machinery or logging happening, and we explored a little further. A single track trail where your legs are usually scratched by huckleberry bushes and protruding blackberry vines was now a dusty logging road, made to welcome enormous timber trucks.
Where usually I’m noting gradual shifts—how tall the ferns have gotten, what stages the foxgloves are in, how the wild honeysuckle twists and winds—this overnight change felt like a shock to my system.
I knew the logging was going to come, but that didn’t make the fallen trees any less alarming.
Our lives are defined by gradual and incremental shifts, one constant, ongoing cycle of change, but these extreme and drastic shifts are jarring because they remind us of how fragile and precarious things really are.
We age day by day, hour by hour, second by second. We settle into a gradualness that’s slow enough it’s hard to see it in the immediate moments. We require perspective, acquired through time, or sometimes by other means, more momentous, life-altering changes where an enormous shift takes place in the tiniest of moments. The kind that delineates a before and after.
This week marked yet another “hottest day ever” record. Only to be beaten the next day, and most likely, probably to be beaten out by some other day later this month. Every day it feels like there is yet another drastic shift: a fire, a storm, a heatwave. These “once-in-a-lifetime” occurrences start to feel oddly commonplace. In some places in the world, these things that shock us—air quality, for example—have been ongoing realities for quite some time.
Walking home from the studio the other night in the early evening, the sunlight looked different. I didn’t even need to see the haze in the sky, or the sun on the horizon—the color of the light shining through the alder and maple leaves told me everything I needed to know.
There’s a deeper, darker, orange hue to this light, certainly not the kind you’re used to getting at 6pm on an early summer day. This light feels like it’s coming from low in the sky, almost like a winter sun. Even the shadows are different. It’s oppressive in some sense.
Around sunset I walked down to the beach, the neon pink sun hovering over the hazy blue ridgeline of the Olympic mountains to the west. I know exactly what that fiery neon pink sun means—the visual symbol of wildfires afar.
Just like the logging, I knew that sun would come this summer. But an expected arrival doesn’t make it any less alarming.
I have a photo on my phone from August 1, 2017, a neon pink sun setting against a smoggy, grayish, looking sky. It’s the first photo that I remember taking of a sky like that. Of course, now my phone is filled with many of these.
Certainly, there were wildfires when I grew up, but that summer was the first time that I remember numerous days of not really seeing the sky. Just haze and more haze.
Now this feels normal, expected. We wonder not “will there be fires this summer?” but instead, “how bad will it be?” When the neon pink sunset appeared the other night my first thought was simply, “ok, it’s here now.” “It” being the smoke that has come to define west coast summers, the heavy reality of climate change suspended in the sky.
On the morning of July 4th, the haze hung in the air. The fireworks went off regardless. All day long.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
At sunset, an intensity of pinks and oranges were plastered across the sky. As if the clouds were on fire too. The fireworks continued despite the drought, despite the fire danger.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
I thought of the seals and the bats and the fish and the owls and all the other creatures that must wonder what was happening. The people who will never be able to hear an explosion without being thrown back into a world of trauma.
The booms extended late into the night, rumbling our house. My energy was agitated, it was hard to sleep. I put myself to sleep by imagining a world with a firework ban.
It's like this every fourth of July. Just because it’s expected, doesn’t make it any less alarming.
After the summer of 2020 when the wildfires across the west coast were really bad, I bought a watercolor from Case for Making called Climate Change is Real. A hazy, orangish color to match the sky.
The color is oddly beautiful. Sometimes I use it to just paint stripes of color, as if with every brush stroke the paint is calling out:
Climate change is real.
Climate change is real.
Climate change is real.
When it comes to our lives in this modern, capitalist culture, we’re so often looking for something momentous, some revelation, some grandiose idea, something big. We forget that we’re living in the momentous change every single day.
I was working on a larger papercut this past month, an abstract of land and sea. Classic silhouettes and forms that I cut very often. When I started I thought to myself, “really, more of this?” because on some level it felt so similar to what I have made before. But cutting those rocks and headlands, feeling the blade slice through the paper to create the flow of water—that’s what I love to do, it’s what offers me a sense of calm and clarity.
When I finished, I stepped back to take a look. It wasn’t radically different from what I made the previous month or the one before. But compare it to several years ago? That incremental, gradual change had grown into something bigger.
Those gradual, minute changes within our art forms is what we need when things around us are changing drastically on a daily basis. The incremental shifts we make in the creation of a word, the mixture of color, the formation of a song, the movement of a dance, the cooking of a meal all become our way to combat that sense of fear, of hopelessness, of despair.
We take control over the small gestures. We create the pockets of beauty.
Art is a protective force and a generative force. It is there when all else seems to be failing. It has the potential to renew us. It gives us a grounding place. It becomes a way that we stay attune to the world around us.
It’s why we tell and listen to stories. It’s why we draw. It’s why we write. It’s why we’re moved to tears by a certain song. It’s why a color catches our eye. It’s why we have an urge to use our hands, to say something, to connect.
It’s why we play. It’s why we imagine.
Because somewhere within all of that we find ourselves. The art in our everyday offers us the ongoing beauty to accompany all the tiny, incremental shifts that define our lives.
I read a poem by Ada Límon that
shared this week, Oranges & The Ocean, and hung on the last few lines, wondering myself what would be “something worthy of the sea.”The night the fireworks were going off and the sky was painted a fiery color with a haze-induced sunset, I couldn’t stop looking at the water. The dark reflections of the trees, the ripples that opened up space for the pinks and oranges of the sky.
Being sensitive to the world around us is what cracks our hearts open when we see it burning, but it’s also what makes us seek out the beautiful.
“Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.” – Rebecca Solnit
That is the call to infuse art into our everyday. We continue to make our lives, we continue to shift and to change, and these acts don’t just make life a little more beautiful, a little more bearable—they tether us.
Art and creativity do not have to be momentous acts. Our ideas and our creations do not have to be shocking or awe-inspiring. They can be small, they can be slow, they can be gentle, they can be mundane, they can be intimate.
We’re so often looking for something big. We want things to be remarkable. But what if that has us missing the beauty of the ordinary?
We can create what we know, what we love. A recipe we come to time and time again, a color palette that feels like an expression of our true selves, a book that we’ve read more times than we can count, a silhouette line of a landscape that’s embedded onto our heart.
Just because it’s expected, doesn’t make it any less powerful, any less beautiful.
-Anna
IN THE SHOP
There are a few new things in the shop including this “wild blooms” print, “keep it wild” stickers, and some fun “creative reminders” postcards.
THE ISLES OF CURIOSITY AND WONDER
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Midsummer Creative Retreat on the Isles of Curiosity and Wonder. Trust me: imaginary places often offer the best respite from the real world. I’m going to be putting this retreat behind the paywall soon, so now is the time to take advantage!
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This is beyond beautiful. Thank you for sharing yourself through art, writing and being your amazing self.
So lovely. So important. All of it-- including the imaginary respites. I wrote about one a few days ago on my Substack ( the Gusset)-- and it felt so good to be transported even as I wrote and drew. Change is so hard. Imagination helps so very much. Thanks for all you do.