Same Difference
Reflecting on a year of constant change from one tiny place in the world
There’s a spot in my yard I like to look at from my kitchen window. It’s a kind of wild, overgrown, messy spot, but if you look at it just right you forget for a minute that you’re in a city and can pretend that you’re in some kind of magical fairy tale forest. (This came in handy during 2020. A lot.)
It’s a a small little patch with some ground cover, some flowers, and a whimsical little tree stump that occasionally is home to some extremely adorable mushrooms. Like I said: fairy tale shit.
Last year on winter solstice I started a photo project mostly to pass the time in winter because it is the worst season. The idea was to take a picture of this spot every morning and share it to an Instagram account dedicated just to that. I didn’t go into it with any major expectations. I just wanted to see if I could do it and maybe have a neat yearlong photoset to look at when it was all done.
There weren’t really any rules. They didn’t have to be perfect pictures, or even good in plenty of cases. Just the same spot at roughly the same time, no filters, no staging a perfect scene. Just capture what’s there in that moment. I had zero followers at first, so no audience to disappoint, or worry about, or cater to which was good practice for this blog, honestly. (I wound up with about 27 followers total, if you’re wondering, and thanks if you happened to be one of them.)
Today as I write this is the one year mark. There’s not like, some big reveal about Things I Have Learned or anything (sorry). But it was interesting to just take time to notice all the little ways that things change from day to day, month to month, season to season, and the ways they stay the same. Something that was surprising was that I stuck with it for more or less the whole year. I’m a notorious project starter but not so much a project finisher.
I did miss some days due to vacation or illness or just forgetting, so it’s not a perfect 365-day record, but instead of giving up after missing a day I just got back to it when I could. It was a project where failure — missing a day or three, or giving up if I wanted to — was an option and was perfectly fine, which is not at all how I tend to approach things generally. It was an exercise in giving myself permission to fuck up in an extremely low stakes way. (It also got me thinking about sameness, change, shared experiences, and lots of other related ideas that will have to wait for another post.)
I’m not planning on continuing the photo part, at least not now. But I will continue the practice of making time to just stop and notice little things. Getting excited about when a peony is going to pop open or finding out if today’s the day the last patch of snow will finally melt. All of that felt really good and grounding even if the rest of the day or week or world at large was a complete and utter shitshow otherwise.
If you wind up taking a look at it, you’ll see exactly where life got too busy to post regularly even though I still took pictures every day. (Why posting one little picture got to be too much is another topic for another post and by “post” I mean “a session with my therapist.”)
I don’t have an ending for this. It happens.
In the Loop
A look at the song, quote from movies or tv, or random phrase that has been stuck in my head all week in an attempt to get it out by acknowledging it publicly.
How this got in my head I have no idea, but in actually listening to it just now it turns out it is extremely apt for the mood of the last couple of weeks. Just a relentless onslaught of so much stuff that lighting off into the ether for a bit sounds pretty appealing.
I also just realized that when this record came out I definitely thought that was Divine on the cover of this record for way longer than I probably should have.
Thanks for reading & happy Solstice!
— Bex