moving towards life

a rallying cry, a comic, and world-building.

Jul 22, 2024

A butter-inspired barn quilt I painted for Butterfest–more on that below.

Greetings, earthlings.

Getting my newsletter out is feeling hard these days and I think it has everything to do with this summer being weird: I’m only home for two months. I got back on June 1st and I feel like I’ve been getting my feet under me ever since. I just got back into a good rhythm… and now I’m gearing up to leave again.

On August 1st, I’m heading down to Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park in Woodstock, VT for a two-week artist residency.

On August 18th, I’ll head to Bethlehem, NH for a two-week residency at Directangle Press.

In September I’ll be back in Burlington–but I rented my house out for both August and September, so I’ll be house-sitting, couch-hopping, traveling, maybe hiking a section of the Long Trail… piecing things together while someone else pays my mortgage, because I love Burlington so much but WOOF being a single homeowner in a HCOL area is a biyatch.

Anyway, here are three things I’m thinking about this week:

1. A song my friend texted me: All You Fascists Bound to Lose

They are.

2. An Instagram post in my Saved folder:

Thank god for friends.

3. A concept I can’t stop thinking about: world-building.

A week ago I shared this post on Instagram and it went Vermont-viral (which is to say: not viral at all, but a lot more people than usual shared this post in their stories and it traveled further than most things I’ve shared on the app, and I received a modest cascade of new followers including Mia Birdsong and an ex whose handle I was surprised to see pop up in my notifications.)

From what I can tell, the concept of world-building made its way into social change discourse via afrofuturists like Octavia Butler. In science fiction, world-building refers to creating a rich, imaginary setting for a story to unfold. Afrofuturists have applied this to our real world, inviting people to unleash their imaginations and envision the world we want to move toward, because… how can we build that world if we don’t know what it looks, feels, smells, and sounds like?

Imagination is one of our most precious resources in the movement towards a more livable future, and we don’t have nearly enough of it.

The following podcasts got me into my feels about Vermont’s most recent round of flooding, systems change, and world-building:

Last week my friend Grace published this on her Substack called here we are: so what now? on strategic rigor and spiritual release; grief as portal to transformation, which synthesizes everything in my post and everything that inspired it.

What I wrote in that Instagram post poured out of me. It felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders and I returned to my normal self again. Writing is good.

I’m working on many things, but let’s talk about this shipping container on my friend’s farm that I painted to look like a giant stick of butter:

Before/During/After but not complete quite yet

This was for the third annual Butterfest–a celebration of the fat of the land and the richness of being together.

This is a big annual party that friends throw for their friends, friends-of-friends, family, and neighbors. It’s the best.

Preparation for this celebration involves transforming everything possible into a stick of butter: cakes, pinatas, jewelry, costumes. There are jars of cream being passed around all day, people collectively churning butter. There’s a called dance in the barn–the Butter Ball–where everyone wears yellow and gold and eats homemade ice cream and dances together.

I don’t typically love parties or large events, but I love this one.

So when this text went out it sent me into a tailspin. I felt it in my bones: I have to make this happen.

Lately I’ve been hungry for more physical work (read: less time at a computer) which includes murals. Painting this stick of butter felt like a low-stakes opportunity to get a feel for the technical aspects of painting a mural: what paint to use, how to transfer a design from the computer screen to the wall, etc. The design was simple, but it’s iconic, and getting the lettering just right took some experimentation, lots of touch-ups, and so many extra hours of work. I also learned that trying to paint a shipping container that’s been baking in the sun for hours is silly, both because it means I’m baking in the sun, and also because the paint practically coderizes on contact, gunking up my paint brush instantly. This led to early morning painting, a 2-3 hour midday break for lunch and dipping in the river, and early evening painting. So basically: a perfect day.

I know what I’d do differently next time, and that was the whole point! That, and bringing the people driving on route 100 through Warren, Vermont a little something to smile about.

It instantly became a roadside attraction. I wasn’t even done painting before people were pulling into the farm and asking me to take their picture in front of it.

Here are my friends Sophie and Nathan cheesing: