SEASONAL SYLLABUS
This series of self-directed courses are for emotional and literal weather you might be moving through, the organizing principle being attention rather than subject matter. They are meant to serve as springboards for inspiration and exploration—field guides, if you will.
***I am continually adding to these syllabi, so they are constantly growing and evolving.
Come study being alive with me.
★ SEASONAL SYLLABUS: ORDINARY GHOSTS
for ancestors, apparitions, inherited objects, and the thinning veil . . . examining how the dead remain embedded in ordinary life: in tables, recipes, handwriting, houses, landscapes, family habits, and objects no one can quite discard.
THEMES: falltime, studying our past and lineage, Ghosts embedded in domestic life, inherited objects, family archives, old houses, rituals, gothic, with more room for lineage, inherited knowledge and remembrance, thinning veil, liminal spaces, Halloween, pumpkins and gourds, skeletons, what remains hidden, ghosts, haunted houses, communication from the other side, ancestor practices, cemetery culture, Victorian mourning objects, spirit photography, family archives, memento mori, Día de los Muertos, Samhain, decomposition, fungi, first frost, the annual dying-back of the natural world, the afterlife.
🌵 SEASONAL SYLLABUS: DESERT WEATHER
the desert as imagined emptiness vs. the desert as intensely inhabited, alive, storied, and volatile … weather shapes what can grow, what can be seen, and how a body moves through the land.
THEMES: sun and exposure, shade, thirst, mirages, adobe, water scarcity, monsoons, arroyos and flash floods, the smell of creosote in the rain, wind and dust, erosion, the wide view, starry skies, desert flora and fauna, the subdued desert palette, Indigenous homelands, borderlands, nuclear testing, land art, New Mexico land and culture, sopapillas, Hatch chiles, the myth of the “empty” desert, hot springs, resilient flowers.
★ SEASONAL SYLLABUS: WINTER SURVIVAL
for the cold, dark days and long winter nights
★ SEASONAL SYLLABUS: NEW YEAR
resolutions + thinking to start a new year, a fresh slate, goal-setting, customs, rituals