Good morning and welcome to Constellations No. 9—
At 8:44 a.m. today the Northern Hemisphere entered the autumnal equinox. During the year’s two equinoxes, the line demarcating day and night on a planet’s surface (which, I just learned, is called the terminator) runs straight up and down from the north to south pole.
While the terminator is only visible from space, we feel the equinox on Earth in the twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness that are the hallmark of our precise location in tilt and orbit. On the first day of autumn, we know our long summer days are behind us. We eye the expanse ahead: a stretch of lengthening nights, leading up to December’s solstice.
But: what of the now! Let us feast in the light we have! Gather the fruits of the year’s labor while it is in full bloom! It is true: autumn bears more than a tinge of urgency. We see what is before us and we want it all, especially because we know it will fade. There is always wisdom in the turning of the seasons. But autumn reliably gives me a sort of seasonal whiplash— in looking back, looking forward, and trying to enjoy it all while it lasts.
I feel this particularly so this year. Exactly one year and ten days ago I finished my last cycle of chemotherapy. Just shy of eleven months ago I was declared cancer-free after surgery to remove all of my breast tissue. But I still had so much more to go. In late June of this year I completed my final immunotherapy infusion, and ten days ago I had a second (planned) surgery.
Each wave of medical interventions resembles a seasonal cycle of its own: there is a ramp up; an intense present; a quiet hibernation that follows; then, ideally, recovery and growth. My concept of myself in these experiences and beginning to move away from them is constantly shifting. While the grainy detail and immediacy of each peak and valley of the last two years has started to fade, the urgency to live (live now, while you can!) that took root amongst them has not.
Art and writing are so often my pathway to the present. Making it. Looking at it. Immersing myself in it. My summer was filled with art, writing, reading, stories, travel, and time with beloved friends and family. I—ravenous for all of it— lapped it up; in return it buoyed me, refreshingly, in the present.
Of course, artists have held this secret key to the present for all of human existence. Sylvia Plath wrote “Remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
Joan Mitchell reflects a similar idea in her conversation with Yves Michaud, which appears in a just-published book on her late work (more on that below). She says, “Feeling, existing, living, I think it’s all the same, except for quality. Existing is survival; it does not mean necessarily feeling. You can say good morning, good evening. Feeling is something more: it’s feeling your existence. It’s not just survival. Painting is a means of feeling “living.”
As we traverse autumn’s gorgeous clamor and dip a toe in darkness, I plan to keep pursuing any mode of living and making that helps me do exactly this: feel my existence.
SOAKING IT UP
When I wrote Constellations No. 8 in June, my family and I were about to embark on a trip to Paris and Amsterdam. From start to finish, the trip was an utter sensory dream. Here are a few of my highlights — bright spots that filled my art-hungry eyes and my adventure-hungry soul.
Row 1: Climbing steps behind Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre; a rainbow view from our apartment in le Marais; epic book collection in the apartment; gazing at Sennelier products through a shop window; looking down in Sainte-Chapelle.
Row 2: Picasso’s handwritten poetry; my youngest, strolling through Musée Picasso; my oldest’s first look at Monet waterlilies at Musée de L’Orangerie; a sublime lunch at Mokonuts; Monet’s “Un Coin d’Apartment” at Musée d’Orsay
Row 3: Matthew Wong’s “Starry Night” at the Van Gogh Museum’s unforgettable exhibition, Painting as a Last Resort; our very own dejeuner sur l’herbe in Place des Vosges; Giacometti’s whimsical plaster chandeliers hanging in Musée Picasso; a secret garden at Merci Paris.
IN MY KITCHEN LATELY
Summer cooking at its finest
Northern Michigan summer days are luxuriously long. Our family often eats a fourth meal at ten or eleven o’clock, standing over the kitchen counter after our third swim while it’s still light outside.
I found myself cooking more spontaneously than ever this summer, relying on our hearty Loma Farm CSA (pictured above) and making frequent stops at favorite roadside farm stands. Cooking on the fly was fun and low-stress. I favored staying on the beach a little longer rather than carving out time to make my favorite ratatouille preserves for winter, slicing peaches or washing blueberries for the freezer.
But one evening, after the kids were tucked in and a thunderstorm was blowing across Lake Michigan, I roasted a huge bowl of heirloom cherry tomatoes. They perfumed the air as the sun burned low across the horizon. I let them cool and stashed them away in the back of the freezer where I will not be able to find them until deep in the winter. I know I’ll thank myself come February when I’m longing for the sweet taste of summer.
NEWS
A first time for everything
In August I participated in a special multidisciplinary art show conceived and organized by my friend, the artist Alyssa Smith. Inside of Foxglove Farm’s centennial barn, Alyssa installed a show of her latest paintings. Paul Erhard, Betsy Soukup and Yali Rivlin performed improvisational music and dance, and I read my essay “Under the Light of the Moon.”
Before I stood in front of the audience to read, I felt a bit jittery. But as soon as I got started my nerves melted away. Reading my work in front of a crowd turned out to be a moving and crucial experience; I felt supportive energy reverberating back to me through the last word. Big thanks to Alyssa for inviting me to participate, and to everyone who attended.
Farm Club 2025 Calendars
Yes, it is that time of year already! Work is underway on the 2025 Farm Club Calendar benefitting Leelanau Conservancy’s Farmland Protection programs. Farm Club’s donation to Leelanau Conservancy has increased significantly each year since we kicked off this collaborative project in 2022. Your purchases can help make this year’s donation the largest yet! Pre-orders begin in early November. Stay tuned @farmclubtc and @lindsaygardnerart for details coming soon.
A BRIGHT LIGHT
Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1979-1985 (David Zwirner Books, 2024)
David Zwirner Books' new Joan Mitchell monograph arrived on my doorstep a few weeks ago; I have looked forward to receiving it for months. With large full-color plates and personal essays written by Lily Stockman, Amy Sillman, Shinique Smith, and Jules Otsuka, it highlights the artist’s work from the early 1980’s made in Vétheuil, France after she suffered several devastating personal losses. I particularly enjoyed Stockman’s meditations on Mitchell—her singular color sense and creative kinship with poets, poetry, and music; the work’s vigor, vivacity and scale. Stockman describes a “high-blood-pressure dizziness and cellular rearrangement” when standing in front of Mitchell’s large scale paintings from this period.
The book also includes the compelling conversation I mentioned above between Michaud and Mitchell from 1986, recorded just six years before her untimely death at age 67. In reading and rereading the conversation, I keep returning to one particular remark of Mitchell’s: “Painting is a way of forgetting oneself.”
A POEM FOR THE MOMENT
Great Powers Once Raged Through Your Body By Jane Hirshfield (from Given Sugar, Given Salt (Harper Collins, 2001) Great powers once raged through your body, waking and sleeping. What remains? A few words, your own or others’. A freshened affection for silence and rest; but also for lightning and wind, Familiar to you now as your own coat or shoes. They lie on the closet floor in the scent of paint and pinewood, as if you had picked them out for yourself, as if you had carried them home. “What could have happened, has happened.” The sentence repeating itself in your ear as a pear repeats itself, each time a little altered, on every branch of the tree. Chair, table, dishcloth, bowl – each thing under your hand or your eyes you regard now as ally, as friend. And yet this hard-won composure feels already a little simple, a little meek – like a painting of yellow houses or fields, before the narrow slashes of red have been riveted in.
Wait - blueberries in the freezer? Controversial, Lindsay.
Thank you.
So much of our conditioning keeps us looking forward and out of the present. We all want to see the future. Sometimes I think that’s why we like living on a lakeshore, or a hill top: we can see what’s coming.