#4 decembrance 2020

I do my decembrance project each year as a way to stave off my seasonal depression. In my fear of the darkening days I focus on the light. For years as I anticipate the shifting cycle of light I have been trying to find change in how I express myself. I aim to find new things to photograph. I make new backgrounds and alter how I approach my dread of the long nights.

This year I have accepted that there are things I revisit like the Osage-orange or the cardoon, the magnolia leaf and the oak. This is my harvest. This is when I count the seeds, notice the cold and find ways to enjoy it. By writing and photographing I have learned that I no longer need to huddle on a cold November rock. I can count down the days until the shortest day of the year. It comes fast and then I can breath a little easier because I know we are building up day-by-day again. And through all this I have found that what I most love are the months when day and night are even.

Everything tends towards its own circumference, it seems — the world, This life, and no doubt the next,
dependence and dear dread,
Even the universe in its spare parts.
As for me,
I’m ringed like a tree, stealthily, year by year, moving outward.

— Charles Wright, from Buffalo Yoga in Oblivion Banjo, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019; originally in China Trace, 1977