Pollinating Through Projects
Dear Reader,
I write to you from the depths of graduate school, where in the last year my studies have found a way to integrate with each other in a new and bountiful way.
What can often feel like a list of unrelated pursuits - quilting, dancing, writing, teaching - has emerged into a quiet hum of one and the same. The through line being my writing, my creative practices being the anchors. It is not a neat process but it is alive, moving, churning through space and time. The boundaries between my efforts have loosened, giving a chance for me, the pollinator, to connect the dots.
From The National Park Service :
A pollinator is anything that helps move pollen from one part of a flower to another. This movement fertilizes a plant, helping make seeds, fruits, and new plants. Some plants can pollinate themselves, and others use wind or water to move their pollen. But many plants need help from insects and animals like bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and even some small mammals.
And from one of my favorite CAConrad poems : #88: SECURITY CAMERAS AND FLOWERS DREAMING THE ELEVATION ALLEGIANCE
“I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!!” I took notes, took many notes, and the notes became a poem titled, “I WANT TO DO EVERY / THING WRONG JUST ONCE”
It isn’t just the final forms that experience a cross pollination, but the formation itself. When I am teaching writing I think of tearing fabric. When I am tearing fabric I think of keeping my feet on the foot bar of the Pilates reformer steady. When I’m walking, sentences drift in to my mind to be sent to the page.
Like my garden, my creative containers feel wild at the moment, unkempt but continuing to make way through the soil. With little contribution from my hands, my flower garden did well this year. The rain came enough, the seeds had spread, the dye garden emerged, and the things I planted last year returned as Bill at the nursery promised me they would.
Every time a new flower would pop up I would be surprised, delighted at its grand entrance toward the sky. In trusting them to return they did, and so I turn toward my own work with this same reverence. That perhaps a lighter hand is needed, less force, less rushing, less square peg in the round hole.
In committing to newsletter writing for over a decade I find that it has become my pollinator headquarters. The place I go to tie it all together. Sometimes with ease and sometimes with hardship, straining beyond my limits when what is called for is rest. To relax into the form instead of trying to shape it into something new and bold.
The essay reminds me to stay.
The quilt reminds me to transform fragments into coherence.
The dance reminds me how to move through resistance.
The teaching reminds me how to fold it all in.
So I help move the pollen, from one flower to the other. Each flower representing a different part of my practice, and I am the bee. Buzzing through my projects, containers, and work. Using my writing and reporting practice to move the resources around.
I invite self pollination in, a skill in transforming the self from the inside. Knowing that not every lesson and every ounce needs to be shared. I ask myself, where does witnessing fall short and must become action. When do I fly to the next garden? And who will fly with me?
With the bones outlined of a whole ecology, I step into the next project. With some fear and trepidation but with gratitude. Pollination becomes just as much about the movement as the attention. To notice the subtle transfer, the moment something unseen becomes generative. The bees paying exquisite attention to what is in bloom, I invite myself to do the same.
Art making is not linear, it is relational. And there is no need for me to separate out the parts to be so distinctly individual. My projects conspire behind my back, needing me less and less, requiring a lighter grip.
Everything I touch carries the trace of what came before it. The zine before the book, the scrap before the quilt, the ache before the push off. I stop trying to name which part belongs to which practice. Each gesture belonging to the same field.
Paying Attention To : → Reading : No New Things by Ashlee Piper
I’m thinking of doing a No New Things November for paid subscribers with a Discord Group and a Live Zoom Component - is there interest in this experiment?
→ Reading : Notes on Craft : Writing in the Hour of Genocide by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
→ Reading : newsletter
→ Teaching : I am teaching a class of the same name as the above essay live on zoom November 1 + 2 and I would love for you to be there.
Pollinating Through Projects is A Two-Day Workshop on Writing Across Mediums - a study in bringing together all your many forms to make what seems like a jumbled mess finally make perfect sense.
Early Bird Registration opens this week
Classifieds : Procrastinating? Focused Space is an online co-working app & community for writers, artists, entrepreneurs, and anyone who is sick of working alone.
When the world feels uncertain, clarity is power — this 90-minute strategy session helps you ground, refocus, and design what’s next in your work and life.
Meditate & Create Open House, Sun Oct 26, 10am ET. Bring a journal, a sketchbook, some knitting, and let’s meditate, make stuff, & connect! Free, ticketed event online. ALL welcome!
SIERRA: An artist residency for wild-hearted beings in Oaxaca - creative practice as ecological experiment + collective ritual. Join us in November!
Want to include a classified ad for next week? Click here to read more
→ Website
→ Pollinating Through Projects Waitlist : A Two-Day Workshop on Writing Across Mediums - a study in bringing together all your many forms to make what seems like a jumbled mess finally make perfect sense. Live on Zoom Nov 1 + 2 :)
→ Are.na
→ info@codycookparrott.com
Want access to my digital garden of pollinated projects? Become a paid subscriber to access Cody’s World : my Notion based universe of projects, archives, dance videos, writing, and more - $5/mo or $35/year
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