Over-Wintering

 
 Of course we love the sunlit afternoons, brilliant, dazzling, reassuring; and yet this morning’s slowdown drizzle carries an integrity calling: look closely, appreciate, care for the lichened branches in the muted pastels, too. 

The crow caws overhead into the chimes, and the raindrops patter, and nothing’s so important as it was.

Rain falling on garlic bed

We’re thankful for the blessing on the one-hundred forty-four garlic cloves nestled under two inches of amended mulched soil in yesterday’s planting. Seasoning. Medicinal. Over-wintering.

Maria Popova (BrainPickings) quotes from Ann Hamilton’s essay titled “Making Not Knowing,” adapted from her 2005 commencement address at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Our culture has beheld with suspicion unproductive time, things not utilitarian, and daydreaming in general, but we live in a time when it is especially challenging to articulate the importance of experiences that don’t produce anything obvious, aren’t easily quantifiable, resist measurement, aren’t easily named, are categorically in-between. . .It is the task of the artist to make material form, to give it presence, to make it social; it is the task of the artist to lead the leaders by staying at the threshold; to be an unsettler . . . "