Spherical thinking in MMXXI

Our home planet and its mother star are at their closest today, a cozy 91,399,454 miles apart. In the northern hemisphere, this perihelion marks the time to prune trees, turn compost, and reconnect with friends.

Like many of you, we've spent his year honing the arts of isolation. Under the backyard redwood we've been assembling a tiny forest floor from urban mulch, beneath which a lacework of white mycelium is knotting, quietly holding up the world.

Last spring, we welcomed thousands of humans into an old theatre, where they were invited to roam in shared atmospheres and ponder Gaian systems. And just after it closed, an abrupt retreat. We joked, at the time: was speaking for the microscopic intelligences a meditation, or a summoning?

After months at home, we assembled a mobile studio and headed out on an overland study of the Great Basin, across volcanic expanses of dry sagebrush and secretive seams of water. We rolled through lands bound in razor wire, past doomed feats of engineering. We traversed territories as magnificent as their histories are tragic. Our time in these places continues to infuse our daily work.

This work is more connected than ever to what we set out to accomplish with the studio, though it often takes place backstage. It has broadened our team and deepened our explorations into ecological infrastructure, watershed governance, food policy, relational worldviews, and urban metabolism. Our mappings have even resulted in some novel surprises. It is a gift to work on transforming systems in the face of such unimaginable complexity.

Meanwhile, we've been enchanted by ambivalent yarns, lived reciprocities, and ecstatic communions.

It's rare for us to write in this way, but we miss our friends. We sat down and listed out the names of those we value most. That's you. Of course we would prefer to sit with you under the trees. Our relationships only stretch so far if untended.

We wish you and your relations love, rest, health, clean water and good food.

To our reconnections

Dawn Danby + David McConville

S P H E R I C A L