Hello and welcome to Constellations No. 6 —
Today is December 21, 2023: winter solstice. I find myself saying the date out loud because it seems surreal after all that this year has entailed. Today is our darkest, shortest day, but soon we’ll take a turn and edge ourselves back toward the light of longer ones. Of all the tilts and spins the earth makes throughout the year, this one always feels the most symbolic.
This year alternated between sprinting and crawling as I made my way through seven months of treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer after being diagnosed in March. In late October I underwent bilateral mastectomy surgery, then woke to incredible and hard-to-absorb news: my doctors had removed my tumor site with clear margins and tests found no remaining cancer cells. The treatment had been successful. Suddenly, I was cancer free.
A well of unfathomable gratitude washes over me.
This feeling of overwhelming gratitude is hardly straightforward, though. Riddled with complications and caveats, it is interlocked with the hard realities of this life-changing year, and the very recent, unfathomable losses of two beloved friends. Being cancer free right now does not mean my journey is over. I am adjusting to living with permanent side effects from treatment and facing possible follow up treatment and another surgery. And of course, as anyone who has faced this disease knows too well, there is always a lurking chance that cancer might recur.
An ocean of grief and pain spreads like a heavy blanket.
Sorrow and anger unfurl alongside gratitude; they are emotional poles coupled like the darkness and light of the winter solstice. As I begin to grasp the magnitude of these experiences and pick up the pieces of my life where I suddenly pressed pause ten months ago. I understand acutely the dualities of human experience—gratitude and grief, heartbreak and joy, forever entangled.
Finding my way to a new definition of steadiness, strength and relief is a slow, meandering process, with an unknown destination. This year, writing (publicly and privately) has been a salve while moving through cancer’s overwhelming landscape. My goal is to keep writing as I enter into this new amorphous phase.
I plan to share my writing with you in a new arm of this newsletter that I’m calling Pocket Change. Named after the poem I wrote in August, Pocket Change will explore my experiences with cancer, and the leftover thoughts rattling around in my brain, nagging me to write them down. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, Pocket Change will show up in your inbox just as Constellations does, and will remain free to read and subscribe. My first installation will go out in mid-January.
Until then, I wish you the space to savor this complex time of year — in the reflection that comes with today’s darkness, and in the promise of tomorrow’s growing light.
Lindsay
NEWS
Farm Club’s 2024 calendars benefitting Leelanau Conservancy’s farmland protection programs have arrived!
It is always a great honor to make the artwork for this collaborative calendar - it represents so much of what I love about the place and community I call home. Making anything during my last two months of chemo was a challenge, but these paintings brought me a lot of joy during a very rough time. Huge THANK YOU to everyone who purchased calendars and supported this project.
IN MY KITCHEN LATELY
After a long hiatus through the worst parts of treatment, surgery and recovery, I am getting reacquainted with my kitchen and my appetite. It is deeply comforting to cook for myself again, to reawaken my senses and taste buds and my love for the process. I’ve been making nourishing soups like this hearty mushroom from Sarah DiGregario, and a stewy parsnip and tomato from Abra Berens.
My family and I have also been planning our Christmas Eve dinner. Each member of our family chooses a country, then researches its holiday traditions and foods (said country does not have to have a majority population that celebrates Christmas). It is a welcome opportunity to learn what and how people around the world celebrate, and in the process we all learn something about food, culture and history. While we are still nailing down our menu, our current top choices include Finnish Christmas Porridge, Israeli citrus salad, Palestinian spiced chicken made during celebrations, and German black forest cake.
A BRIGHT LIGHT
Some time ago, my dear friend Kate suggested I follow along with musician and writer Nick Cave’s newsletter, The Red Hand Files. I have loved reading it ever since. Cave reviews hundreds of letters from strangers and fans each week, then chooses one to reply to one with soulful reserves of empathy, wisdom and the mutuality of someone who has faced tremendous loss himself. Reading the heartfelt questions and his eloquent responses is a beautiful, life-affirming reminder of how we are never really suffering alone.
When asked by a reader why he created The Red Hand Files, he writes:
“I thought of the deep, mysterious reserves of feeling we all carry around with us that are suddenly and inexplicably triggered by small recognitions of our common struggles. I thought of the intricate sorrows that are threaded through our lives, binding us all together, the shared tears that wash clear our eyes to better see the many tasks set in front of us. And I remembered…that we should go lightly among them. If we are consumed by these things then we become of little value to ourselves, each other, or the world. This is something I must learn and relearn constantly.”
A TINY, GRAND MEMORY
A little known fact about me: I taught fourth grade for two years after I finished my MFA in San Francisco. One year, our class visited SFMOMA to tour the museum’s basement storage with a student’s father who worked there. We took a freight elevator down from the museum’s buzzing main floors to the quiet basement where thousands of artworks were stowed away like gems in a giant jewelry box. It was a strange thrill to see such magnificent art affixed to rolling racks and stacked together by the thousands. I’ve always felt it was a glimpse into the other life of those artworks, and I’ll never forget it.
A POEM FOR THE MOMENT
By Mark Nepo, writer, poet, cancer survivor
Adrift Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we’ve lost face each other. It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
What a post, what a year. Hope that dinner was delicious 🫶🏻
Beautiful. Thank you.