Field notes, October 2025

1. October 12, 2025: Had one of those days where you do one hundred little things: running errands, mending a dress, casting off a knitting project, hanging the marjoram up to dry. At the end I felt all the loose ends in my mind had been tied off. I call it closing tabs, like on a computer, exiting out of things you’ve finished or no longer need.

2. This poem by Marilyn Dumont:

3. I’m trying to get better at acknowledging my achievements, so here’s a word count update for you. Last Thursday, I finished the first draft of my novel! It’s in rough shape, and I had the audacity to add another main character when I was almost done, so the next draft will be a lot of writing and rewriting. But the main story is done! 

4. These quotes by Françoise Gilot:

“You’re trying to swim upstream against the current. What is there about the natural flow of the river of life that has shocked you so strongly that you should want to swim against the current, even against time? You ought to know you’re lost even before you begin. I don’t understand you but I love you and I suppose you are obeying the law of your being.”

― Life with Picasso

“I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers.”

― Life with Picasso

5. This photo I took on October 13, 2025:

6. A conversation with a friend recently, where we were talking about our art process, turned into a conversation around creating in general. Through our conversation, I came to understand (again) that social media has skewed how I create in that, no matter what it is I’m doing—sewing, knitting, drawing—I feel like I need to share it online. But I don’t want to! There’s just the little gremlin voice in my head that tells me I should. I’m working quite hard to silence this voice, and slowly, I think it’s working.

7. October 19, 2025: Received a few rugs that my great-great-grandmother made; one sits in front of our side door, the other at my altar. Evening was a belated Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and roasted carrots. Finished knitting the red scarf that’s been haunting me all of October.

8. These sculptures by Louise Bourgeois:

9. This weekend we had the most rain we’ve had since last spring. I’m the kind of person who loves autumn and all that comes with it, so I had a lovely weekend knitting on the couch, listening to the rain on the roof. I find that the older I get, the more time I spend appreciating different weather patterns—I’m beginning to think I may actually be a ninety-year-old man in disguise. If only I had a porch to sit on.

10. This note I wrote myself on October 17, 2025:

11. Something that happened: we were at my grandparents’ home, drinking coffee after bringing the rest of the pumpkins in from the field. We were talking about ancestors, and what they leave behind, and my grandma showed me a burial shroud my great-great-grandma sewed for herself. On it was a handwritten note: “For my imminent burial.” You can guess from the fact that the shroud is still in my grandma’s possession that it did not, in fact, get used. Which is sad, but I can also see some humour in it.

12. This month’s bibliomancy: a line from Recovering by May Sarton, flipped open at random:

“We are such intricate machines and treat the machine badly because we expect too much of ourselves. Machines, even complex machines, do one thing at a time, and the answer to fatigue may often be to settle for that.”

—Catherine

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