NIGHT, HYMN, SEED

To trust the seed we cannot yet see: the hymn rising from beneath the frost-line.

Named for the god of thresholds, January is the hinge where darkness, desire, and possibility converge. It is the month in which night opens its mouth and the buried seed begins to sing through it. In this first month of the year, we will consider and study what it means to begin/become/be born again.

THE MARDI GRAS
The Great Lamentation-Celebration

February is the month where excess and elegy hold each other by the waist. It is the bright-masked portal where pleasure refuses to apologize for its grief, and grief refuses to arrive without its slutty sequins.

Within the Mardi Gras cycle, lamentation and celebration are not opposites, but twin currents that generate new forms of aliveness. This month invites us to study the charged choreography between loss and liberation.

THE ECOTONE

March inhabits a liminal field, the place where winter and spring press against one another.

In ecology, an ecotone is the charged meeting place of two distinct worlds, a contact zone of heightened vitality, tension, and invention, where improbable relations and radical new forms emerge. March asks us to stand inside this trembling seam, to feel the pressure of competing forces, and to understand transition as intensity.

This month we’ll explore the fertile unrest of border-regions and the provocative surge of becoming new to ourselves again.

THE DELUGE

April arrives as a baptism and/or an overflow. This is the month when the world exceeds itself. We are more than we have been.

This month we attend to surrender and the strange mercy of being unmoored.

THE APOTHECARY

May opens like a living apothecary: nectars, toxins, balms, bewilderments. The bursting world reveals its alchemical logic and instructs us in the art of potency, revealing where sweetness hides venom and where the cure grows beside its opposite.

This month we’ll enter the apothecary as a metaphoric chamber of correspondences where our essences, our poisons, our medicines ask to be understood anew.

THE ZENITH

In June the sun climbs to its highest note. At the zenith, illumination becomes an ordeal: clarity outlines presence, shadows sharpen, and it is hard to hide. Brilliance radicalizes the moment. The crest, the climax, the culmination.

This month we consider what it means to hold and channel our own magnitude and to risk being seen.

THE FRONT PORCH

Long slants of light stretch into honeyed dusk, and a crystalline night drops its ceiling into stars.

The front porch is heat’s favorite lounge: an inside/outside liminal sanctuary where confidences drift, glances linger, restless theatre unfolds, and you can close your eyes and find the hum tucked into the electricity of air. On the front porch nothing happens and everything happens.

This month we study the poetics of invitation, the charged space between privacy and exposure, and the erotic possibilities of just waiting around.

THE ORCHARD

August brings us into the Orchard.

An orchard is both a teacher and a living archive, a library of trees. Here fruit hangs heavy with ancestral knowledge, and the air thickens with the perfume of things that have come into themselves.

This month we attend to the mysteries of inheritance and tending, how we steward and cultivate, and how the Orchard teaches that every offering carries its lineage and the seed of its future.

THE LEDGER

September enters with the quiet gravity of a notebook opened to a fresh page.

The ledger records our slow accumulation of gestures, omissions, tremors, astonishments. It asks what we record and what we do not.

This month we will explore how notation becomes devotion, and how devotion clarifies everything.

THE DEAD

In the season of lanterns, bright altars, and procession, we practice the art of intermingling with those who came before us.

This month we enter the carnival of remembrance, celebration, and story, where the boundary between worlds dissolves into reciprocity. We will explore the tenderness possible when we companion with our well-ancestors, biological or otherwise.

THE FALLOWING

November enters as the great letting-alone.

Fields that have given themselves all year are granted reprieve, and in that reprieve, the ground can dream itself fertile again.

This month we study the art of deliberate emptiness, the sacred work of relinquishment, and the poetics of lying fallow.

THE NOCTURNE

December lowers the world into its darkest register and gathers us into the chamber of the longest night. Here, renewal begins.

This month we dwell in the nocturne as a site of reconstitution: the dark that knows the way to the light.