I’m not too sure where 2024 has run off to. It has been the speediest of years and one with deep tectonic shifts imperceptible to the naked eye. Homeland connections, deep shakes and shapes.
This INKLINGS vocal offering is a guided pause in honour of all we are, all there is, and all there is to come. But not now. Not before a pause. I guide us through a gentle embodiment practice of pausing and then I lead us into some guided journal prompts. I say us because doing this has made me do it too. Not just think about doing it.
If you would like to follow along in real time gather a cuppa, pen and paper and listen in. You can also pause the recording and continue writing inbetween prompts if you would longer to reflect and journal.
At this winter solstice time, here in the Northern Hemisphere, where daylight hours are short and often overcast I welcome you, as I sit here with a wool blanket around my shoulders, decaf coffee hot in the pot and post-lunch chocolate pumping through my veins.
Bringing this INKLINGS together is the last thing I am enjoyably doing before putting the email autoresponder on and heading off for a couple of weeks.
Journal Prompts
For every season:
What are we celebrating that has passed in the season gone by?
What have you noticed growing in you since last season?
What are we letting go of?
What are we taking forward from this time?
What are you noticing about your energy levels?
What are you feeling more inclined to do?
What are you feeling less inclined to do?
What plants are you noticing are in abundance at this time of year?
What places in the landscape are you feeling drawn to at this time of year?
How can you plan a trip to this place? What support might you need to make this happen?
Winter Solstice Reflection prompts:
If you are busy with others are there ways you can weave in rest and time outdoors in the natural light and elements?
Can you ask others to take on something from your to do list and retreat for a while away from busy demands?
How can you support yourself to be at peace with the middle of winter?
This is a time for warm, wholesome food and sweet, spicy drinks. What sensory experiences is your body longing for? Where are you feeling most at ease, with who and doing what?
What places in the landscape are you feeling drawn to at this time of year?
How can you plan a trip to this place? What support might you need to make this happen?
WRITING TIPS
Remember that there are no right or wrong ways of answering any of these questions. Let yourself write crap and see what gold emerges.
Make a list, or write long form - whatever feels good.
These prompts are about noticing and tending to self-knowledge. They are not about finding more things to give ourselves shit about. And if we do give ourselves shit, we notice that too. Kindness all the way.
We don’t necessarily have to do anything after writing, unless we want to. The power is in the act of pausing and writing.
Let me know how you go.
The next INKLINGS seasonal offering of this kind will be landing at IMBOLC at the beginning of February.
Current Practice + Queering Grief
As I have mentioned before, I am currently bringing together work for the exhibition ‘Tir Cwiar//Queer Land’ opening in February with On Your Face Collective at Elysium Gallery, Swansea. The seasonal timing of this exhibition has dictated that I focus on the theme and experience of grief. Many of us, in our 10-strong cohort, are weaving this into our work. All of us connected to the land, to the body, to our experience of living and working in Wales. All exploring queerness through different processes and practices.
Below are some images from my practice over the last few weeks and the two places I work in: the indoor nook in the eves and the recently cleared-out garden shed for rock work.
I am bringing together pigment and plant image-making into an installation called ‘adverse camber’. This work explores my relationship to a place through deep-mapping using rock; a particular valley, where my dad was born, where he worked when I was born and where a dearly loved friend died.
Deep Mapping is about doing things differently from ordinary cartography, shifting away from large ex- panses of territory. Rather, it is about the small, the subjective, the embodied, the thick, and the porous. It is about digging deeply rather than gazing widely.
Deep Mapping can be adapted to fit very differ- ent situations and is based on the premise that each person has the right to know her surroundings, to unpack clandestine and dense characteristics of a place, and shape this landscape directly.
I am hanging out with rocks blasted from the valley to build a bypass.
Sandstone. Deep time. Cairn building. Printmaking.
Returning to gathered Hawthorn. A plant ally of the heart.
The human, the cyclic, the fallible, the grieving, the loving.
Layers of land and time and story.
These two quotes, and pieces of writing on queering and grieving and queering grief, are with me a lot in these days. Thank you to
for the queering grief pointers:Like queerness itself, grief takes myriad forms. In a blog post on taking a more inclusive approach to grief and loss, Ontario-based grief educators Michelle Williams and Rachelle Bensoussan define grief as an “involuntary response to loss,” one that happens in our bodies and affects us on “all levels of our being and personhood—physically, emotionally, cognitively, socially, sexually and existentially.” Queering grief asks us to honour the many ways grief might show up in our lives, recognize forms of loss that often go unacknowledged and show up for each other in all our messy glory. It’s an invitation to create or reclaim mourning practices that enable us to be collectively held in our grief and to conceptualize grief as a force of transformative social change.
Zena Sharman - Queering grief means showing up in all our messy glory
When I realized that queerness could be limited to sex and sexuality, that to choose queer expressed something more profound about who and how we are, I had to shift my worldview to one that seems beyond binary truths handed to us to yoke ourselves into a system of control. To hold queerness as a practice is to be in active radical acceptance of everyone and all things as they are.
Rev. angel Kyodo williams - Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation.
Oof.
Such deep, strong, welcoming, wise and care-full practitioners and practices. I endeavour to welcome the messiness in self and other. The creative edges and hinterlands and vulnerabilities.
A few days ago, as the COLD FULL MOON rose through December’s long night, I stood in my studio breaking up a Hawthorn branch to make ink. I have not worked with Hawthorn outside of Spring, Summer or Autumn before.
I was tired and in a distracted state, wanting to leave the bark and branches soaking overnight before working with the ink the following day. As I snapped a particularly strong piece of branch one of the Hawthorn’s thorns punctured the soft skin on my wrist making way for bright blood and near fainting. Several days later the bruise is yellowing under the skin across my wrist and thumb.
I had been pricked and entered. A shock and reminder of the power of the plant. As much as allyship can be an experience narrativised by us thinking humans, this does not mean a smooth ride. I was careless in my engagement. I was brought back to earth with a jolt. This is not the first time that this has happened.
How often do we become stuck in our idea of how we and others and things should be? How often do we resist the pain and struggle of something because it takes us away from the idea we had about how things ought to go or how we think they are?
I am partly bringing together this real-time solstice journalling podcast - i.e. I answer the prompts as I go as timed exercises - so that I do the thing too. It is so easy for me to think about doing a thing, and think I know what it will be like, rather than doing the thing. Particularly when there are other more important and practical things I think I ought to be doing. But there is something in the act of writing for self-knowledge and leaning gently into the moment, with the foot off the gas, that can bring insight and renewal and rest in those minutes.
I am writing this before I record the thing. I’ll let you know how I get on…
…well that chilled me right out.
I’m now off for a dusk wander about the village and I will send this on it’s way to you when I return.
A hearty and warm thank you for all of the INKLINGS connection this last year. I look forward to more in the 2025.
Nadolig Llawen. Blwyddyn Newydd Dda.
Karn
I have had a name change. Cut a few letters out. ‘Carn’ is the Welsh for ‘cairn’. Added K because I love the ‘kicking k’. Buried in my name lies the deep time of the earth. Rock and memorial. It came to me in the night. Something I have been playing with for some years. A shift from the femme to the fluid. Enjoying the deep aaaaaaah of it. Playing with language and ideas of identity. Embracing shifting after 40.
✺ g e n t l e a t t e n t i o n ✺
✺ I cannot get enough of Doechii and her Tiny Desk Concert this week.
✺ Ellie Ewart’s natural pigment screen-printing experiments.
✺ Free to access workshops at Crymlyn Bog in January for LGBTQIA+ folks with artist Vivian Ross Smith.
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