Midwinter Picnic
Packing a Feast
The theme for my post today is very much rooted in the season of winter, which, for me, is a time of deep rest and creative contemplation, where I try to set aside time to examine the underlying sources of my vision, including nature and the relationships in my life. And I decided that I would write today about the idea of packing for a midwinter picnic. Midsummer picnic, of course, is a very popular idea, because you see pictures of young people in fancy dress, drowsing on blankets by the lake, in French paintings, but a midwinter feast. That’s what you pack in your backpack before you strap on your skis and head deep into the forest, to settle down on a rock, and watch some rabbits.
Packing this picnic basket is important to me because I’m about to head to our little old house in Nebraska, which is off grid. It has electricity, but we don’t have internet there, and the cell phone reception is very poor. So I really can think of it almost like my own little forest clearing where I can contemplate undisturbed.
I like to think about my approach to consumption. It’s an anti-consumption, it’s practical consumption. When am I going to use this thing that I’m buying? I’m not just buying it for the hit now. I can use it some other time. And this makes me think of this fat bear metaphor, right? Grazing all summer on those berries, dragging salmon out of the stream. This consumption is all with the intention of living out a happy winter in my “hibernation den”. So I’ve been spending all year making small and occasional purchases with the specific intention of packing my basket for this midwinter feast.
I very much enjoy this thoughtful or practical approach to consumption, which has meant that I’m not in any kind of frantic, last-minute buying to prepare for a trip kind of position. Of course, it’s in part because I’ve done the trip many times. But in part, it’s because I have been thinking ahead.
I have been loading up my Boox Palma, which is my Kindle alternative. I really prefer to use book delivery systems that allow me to own the books. This is one reason that I like Kobo, because without any fuss at all, a book that I purchased directly from an author, such as books by Joanna Penn, one of my favorite authors on writing, I can have delivered directly to the Kobo app and read them there. Kindle does not make it so easy to read non-Amazon books in. My Boox Palma is essentially an E Ink Android tablet, and so one little task I’ve been doing the first couple weeks of winter is ensuring that my Boox Palma has all of the different books that I’m looking forward to reading.
Of course, if I’m going to enjoy the main course of my delicious midwinter feast, which is The Secret Commonwealth, the last in the Book of Dust trilogy by Philip Pullman, then I need to reread the first two in the series. And so I have made sure that those are packed in both audio and digital form.
I won’t be borrowing any books from my library in San Marcos, except on my Libby app. Having libraries in two places, Nebraska and Texas, means that I have twice the Libby librarians thinking of me when they select books for availability in the Libby app. And so I will be selecting and downloading some books and looking forward to stopping by the library for the fancy high speed internet, which, to everybody else in the world, is just regular internet, in order to get access to refreshes on my books.
I am looking forward to browsing the small library, which is down the street from our little 100-year-old house, and the library is the source of truth in town, mainly because it’s the one place where the fiber internet has reached, and it means that you can get access to the internet faster than on the dial-up. The librarian is kind, and although she has to cater to a large and happy horde of children in the town, as well as serious romance novel readers, and Western history buffs, she is absolutely open to keeping a special client like me in mind. And so I look forward to browsing through what I might find there.
Gathering content ahead of time means that I’m less tempted to do kind of the endless browsing. What I have is what I have, and I picked it for myself for a reason. So I can really settle in and enjoy. I think an example of that is a book by John Cowper Powys, called Porius, which I have tried to read again several times and have never quite managed. The first time I read it, my library purchased it. It was mind blowing, so amazing. I just had such an amazing experience with that book. I wanted to relive that experience, but for whatever reason, could just never get past the scene where the main character, Porius, is sleeping in the tent with the sister of—not sleeping, but hanging out in the tent with the sister of Merlin and her attendants. And I’ve just never been able to get past that into some of the exciting battle scenes and other things that I know the book promises. So, maybe, if I pack that in my midwinter basket, I can get myself to use that.
I have some art supplies, stamps specifically, and some junk journaling materials that I have accumulated over the year that I have not actually had time to use. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time? And I can have the satisfaction of knowing that my past self was thinking kindly of my winter self in making that particular purchase.
For my art supplies, I’m very excited that I saved up and purchased as a Christmas gift for myself the Zig Clean Color Real Brush pens. These were recommended during a workshop that I heard about these during a virtual painting workshop with “teaching duo” Jennifer Orkin Lewis (@augustwren) and Gayle Kabaker (@gaylekabaker) last July, and I have been purchasing one or two different kinds of brush pens at a time in order to explore. I love watercolor. Don’t get me wrong. But there are just times when it is inconvenient to whip out your little, tiny palette and your little, tiny brush pan and go to town with the watercolor, in part because you can’t just cap your palette closed and expect that you’re not gonna have a little painty mess inside if you have to stop suddenly. So, the brush pens seem to me like a great sort of “jot on the go” kind of option that I could transition into my Galen A5 expandable folio. But, of course, there’s a difference between having supplies and actually figuring out what they can do.
So I have bunches of washi sticker paper in the form of off-cuts and I will be painting my own little washi paper stickers. I’ve been working on a motif a day challenge for my own kind of little advent calendar using trend forecasted motifs. And so, I’ve really been enjoying things I don’t normally draw, like antique kittens and puffy cushions that are forecasted as popular motifs. And so, I will love testing out some of my new art supplies with those materials.
Another thing that I have packed into my midwinter feast picnic basket are episodes of podcasts. Videos are more challenging, because although I love the Play app as a way to save YouTube content to watch later on all of my Apple devices, including Apple TV, you can’t download those, and in a place without data, you have to plan ahead. So, I have downloaded all of the various movies and show episodes that I purchased through to year to enjoy during my midwinter feast. I have a whole season of Babylon 5 that I need to finish, for example. And, of course, the Christmas classics that we enjoy every year. We do plan ahead and purchase different things to watch on DVD. There are some shows, such as the original Roy Marsden version of the Richard Jury detective series that just aren’t available streaming anywhere. Those I already packed and took to our little house a while ago, but it will be fun to revisit some of the things that we stocked away in our little “root cellar” there.
The crazy frenzy of holiday consumption needs to be balanced with a time where you can actually sit back and digest what you’ve taken on board. I think the metaphor, or the philosophy that I like to focus on, is eating what you kill, right? Growing up in the Colorado mountains we lived on game and my mom had a rule. My dad had to eat what he shot. The only exception was for bears and raccoons. Although I’ve heard from people that she may have been mistaken about the bears, my dad has reported she was definitely mistaken about the porcupine. He should not have had to eat that.
However, if you’re gonna buy something, then you need to make time and space in your life to actually use it. The richness, the feeling of being wealthy, doesn’t come from looking at your bottles and bottles of ink, right? The feeling of being wealthy comes from watching the ink spread across the page, from the constant use, from the digestion, rather than merely the hunt, and the acquisition.
So, no Amazon deliveries, no new purchases, working within the constraints of a digital-free zone. This post was written prior to my arrival, and will be uploaded before I even get to Nebraska. I’ll make a post in a couple of weeks, which will be predominantly thoughts and photos, and I will drive to the nearby town and upload it from there.
What happens when you stop buying, right? When you can actually consume what you have, and or make what you intend to consume. This can feed my own creative production, the time that I spend digesting all of the different ideas or sources, going through my DEVONthink folders, and finding everything that I have made available offline to think through why I collected these things, looking back through sketchbooks, making notes, right? This digestion phase is incredibly important.
A small town winter, that really is a wonderful way to enjoy the best that life has to offer. I know many people think of a big city as the chance to have everything at your fingertips, but having everything at your fingertips that you chose yourself, being the curator of your experience, that’s the benefit of this little winter den.
In my personal aquifer cosmology, the season of winter begins at the end of November, and so includes the month of December, and then part of January, when here in Texas, spring will actually begin. And during this time, I like to think of myself as going down into my creative labyrinth and letting my mind go soft, and embracing the darkness of the midwinter season, and really allowing that rest for my eyes to let me see with a clearer vision what might be coming in the year ahead.
So I invite you to pack your own midwinter feast. Look around at what you’ve already gathered, all the things that you purchased this year. Is there something, a book that you’ve been saving to savor? Are there art supplies? A method that you’ve been waiting to try? What could you actually feast on at this moment without buying anything? Stop. Don’t buy anything else. What could you actually make or do right now that would be so satisfying? When the spring comes, you will be replete from your feasting on all of your acquisitions. And so let’s think of this time for deep work as the time when we look at what we already have and the time when we celebrate the wealth of our lives as they are.
Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.
Gwendolyn