To Be Warm, archival pigment print, 42 x 56 inches, 2023
I often wish to be cold, where I am pushed to the edge and beyond the tranquil, as I yearn to feel the rush of being alive and the peace of being warm when it is cold. It is not as cold here as I wish it to be. In the terms of what I know, growing up in a place of long, cold winters, it’s a perpetual late fall here, but green. Moss hangs off bark messily but intricate as the light fades to subtle blue, the ferns tower over the ground where I hope snow would lie, and the moon rises above the steep ridge opposite of the one that hid the sun at 4. Even when I am here, in this world of green, I think of the cold. I think of its ability to awaken my body and spirit, as it cracks open my heart with its piercing wind, allowing me to feel more deeply and providing a space for the warmth to flood in. The cold is a space of processing, a harshness that calls for spaces of warmth to reconcile with what is and what I wish it to be. The cold and filling the cracks with warmth is a dance of self, of place, and of uncontrollable circumstance. When I think of the cold today, a time of earthly struggle that I feel in my bones like the frigid winter winds of home, I think of the cold that is not felt in the air, but felt in the soul. I think of the coldness of our ecological time, of our human connection to others, of our struggle to find place, and of our relationship with the unfamiliar. I want it to be cold, not cold, but I am here and not there, yearning to build warmth to fill the cracks. I am yearning to build a fire in the way that I know how, yearning to share the beauty in finding solace in the dark, yearning to be warm when it is cold.