The Summer Is Almost Over

There is an annual realization after the July 4th long weekend that often finds me, as a school administrator, still completing the academic year that finished several weeks earlier, and my delayed actual start of summer races by until it collides at the end of July in a recognition that I didn’t really do much vacationing, or complete my ambitious goals for art and restorative practices, and that the end of summer is really almost here. This upcoming school year is my thirty-fourth academic year, and this summer marks my thirty-fifth year since I was first hired to direct children’s theater at an incredible, life-changing summer at a special camp in Massachusetts. Summer has always been a transformative season for me; I have several big rites of passage milestones that are marked annually during the summer months, and I am often surfing the reminiscences and nostalgia, tugging at the ley lines of a wide personal web of memories and places. 

It has been the first sort-of-normal summer since the pandemic began, although it isn’t at all normal like it used to be – from the changed circumstances of working in education to the country’s political turmoil, but I finally have a little bit of space to start unpacking the several years of survival strategies and upheavals I shouldered through, sorting through the culmination of struggles that trampled right over the last few summers without a pause. With shadowy humor I keep comparing this year’s spring into summer to when you fall asleep on your leg in a weird way, and try to stand and walk on it, and the whole experience is painful and destabilized until you manage to get the ground back under you again. 

All that is true, but also masks the progress and the achievements that I wish I’d been able to hold and celebrate with more embodied joy, and though I’ve been able to name gratitude and sometimes tender a kind of grace in all the changes, I’m mostly managing a fairly full menu of fear, anxiety, and even some disappointments I tried my best to avoid. Despite the advances, I’m unsettled. Good news, I’m bringing it to sitting practice, personal inventory and reflection writing, and looking to see how my important relationships could be strengthened, reengaged, and deepened. I’m tending the change. 

I want to name areas in which I really see progress and growth:

• Over last school year I had a tough first time covid experience in the fall that really took a toll on me, and the winter brought some discomfort and midlife body stuff that I’m still working on better life practices to address, but I gave up coffee in January and after a pretty restrictive diet that unearthed me, I’m on a low dairy, adjusted food plan that is mostly working. 
• I taught my first college classes this year, on top of my admin position at school, and returned to Bennington, my undergrad college, as a visiting faculty member to teach two really awesome courses: I taught an advanced level Wearable Art: Intersections of Art, Activism, and Fashion with a big reunion weekend culminating fashion show event in the fall, and in the spring I taught a mixed levels Clothing Beyond Binary course with a Greer Lankton art doll-inspired tea party event for the final session. The current Bennington students amazing, and I loved the opportunities to share work and histories that are so central to my own practices and art-making. 
• I’ve had a really productive art studio summer with new projects, a return to art fashion including working on a mini-collection and making some special hats, with a great studio support team: Kim and Luciana! After a strong gallery and exhibition 2023 season, I’ve got great new sculpture, clothing, and 2D works all developing steadily!
• Home life: we bought a gorgeous stone house in Dutchess County this year, and we’ve been going back and forth from Brooklyn; the beauty of the land and the varied wildlife there has been a real inspiration. We’re getting to know the area better, starting to have visitors, and last weekend attended several of the Upstate Art Weekend’s events, connecting with artists in the region. 
• Slow reupping of social connection and engagement – this summer we’ve started to go back out to events like the Ali Forney Oasis Night fundraiser, and reconnecting with long time friends (even those long distance), and starting to make new connections, too. 
• I noticed that I’m reading again, and that in some ways revealed how long its been since I was really “myself” – currently in both houses there are several stacks of books I’m working my way through on a number of topics, a combination of research as well as fiction and poetry. 
• And finally: a blog post again after soooooooo long, I’d like to be writing more regularly, maybe starting to pull research and art viewing and into more regular sharings.