What is the thread of your work?
Last week, I gave myself an artist’s residency, a week of intended rest and making. Naturally, instead of sewing anything, I hid from the studio and instead spent a day doing neglected loads of laundry, another day chopping vegetables, and two days procrastiworking.
Somehow, I am always shocked when the gift of time turns itself into a void of time.
But when I finally came around to the work at hand, I spent some hours at a standing desk at a local coffee shop, finding and archiving all of my public writing since 2018 from several different corners of the internet.
I felt like a digital librarian of my own practice, digging through my old Substack, the now-defunct TinyLetter archives, even some old Word documents floating around my hard drive — not to mention the piles of screenshots (so many screenshots — like an unemptied trap of dryer lint, the digital detritus of our lives).
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What is the thread of your work?
In the trailer for her new podcast, Kening talked about “why I’m structuring the spine of my body of work” — and my own spine tingled in response. Ayana calls it the “element X,” an organizing principle of speculative fiction adapted from N. K. Jemisin’s work on worldbuilding.
I map my ecosystem and ask my oldest friends (and my therapist, obvi) to mirror back what they see in my work.
They say:
“It makes me think of very soft folded fabric piles.”
“I do think of you making bread as love, but I don’t know if you actually bake as much as I imagine you do.”
“You are naturally a weaver of story and fabric which extends both to creating new things and repairing old ones.”
“GOOD SOUP.”
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What is the thread of your work?
Mine, it turns out, is intimacy.
Intimacy is the thread behind birth work, death work, and care labor. It’s a filter into health equity practice and certainly an organizing principle behind the work of trauma-informed power and intersectional praxis. How do we offer each other the gift of accountability and invitations to intimacy, across hierarchy?
I believe that our work is built in the every day tiny actions we choose, to live, work, and play with compassion and integrity. Those everyday choices intersect and fractal throughout the whole of our lives, into a living system — a mycelial network of intimacy
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What is the thread of your work?
I’d love to hear — what do you find when you become the librarian of your own practice?
