Going into it

It didn’t make much sense to go back there. Not in the state that I was in. And certainly not in that gulch that started in the back of Farrah’s property that led through the back of Foley’s place. From there, into the dark wild pig run that digs deep into what used to be Miss Elizabeth’s property. The property that has now been taken over the vampires that pass themselves off as a gentle lesbian farming couple but other than stealing the tall tangerine tree ladder and claiming one of the avocados trees for their own, they don’t farm anything. And anyway it’s pouring rain. And pitch black night. And I know even the less wild parts of the property are slick with pig-gouged rich red cinder mud gone even slicker under the thick clouds pouring all the ocean’s water. And it’s not that I don’t love her, I do, I mean I have her gritty remains here in a mason jar-turned-local-brewery-pint-mug with a lid, and I’m in a rainjacket that looks like it was made for commercial fishing. I have a police flashlight and the two guys have night-vision goggles and an infrared beam for tracking heat sources in the dark. We’ve been dropped off on the side of the road under the high street lamp giving off that threatrical glow, swarming with moths and gleaming on the wet black road. And the new fence the vampires got up. Close the door softly. Slowly enough that all you hear is a muffled click, and I leave the flashlight in the car. My new sister keeps driving up the hill then loops back around, hiding at the friendly neighbour’s property. I’ll call them Malcolm and Michael. They took over a handmade mid-century modern house owned by a Japanese engineer whose three-piece suit and tie is hanging in their garage beside the hot tub he built from boards scavenged from the sugar mill shoots he designed. He used to light a fire underneath the tub and bury a sweet potato in tinfoil in the ashes to cook slowly for dinner after his soak. But their place is down the hill a bit. It’s friendly. Where we are, there are gates and locks and slightly manic handmade laminated no tresspassing signs, that is if you could see anything in this deep murk.

And now we are into it. Further and further up, and in I’m in a dream dark soft rotting guava papaya skins, orange-molded from the inside, crab spiders hunched on the beaded curtains, they run all through the branches. Lobed palms rubbery leaves, trees blue green against the jumbly murk, the softest roar from the tangles dripping. The night a cloak you can’t take off. O to be in it with you. My very skin alert to each crunch, hand on the guy’s shoulder in front of me, big brother. Even they’re scared. The bigger one, of slowed words, easy camo baseball cap, orange grizzled beard, keen bright eyes, ginger colouring but skin seared Hawaiian. He’s a big guy. Husband of the daughter of the Kumu keeper of deep Hula traditions. They carry weight here. They drive a big 4x4. He’s confident in this kind of thing. Quiet guy, but like his wife, he will come on if provoked. If you mess with his family. A good man. BBQs anything. He’s wearing full camo gear that looks more ex-military than hunting. His little eyes glitter. His beard is ginger scraggly. Our wet padded footsteps close as breath. The littler guy, local, bristly black hair, he’s family too. They call him cousin, like I’m called uncle now that I’m in the circle. Little guy at the back also full camo, and he’s got an infrared finder with him. You can see the heat, red blurry human-shaped at the window, up at tree level looking out into the night I imagine.

Sentinels.

My heart is in my throat. I wear a dark green rain slicker that goes down to my ankles. Hood up, I am covered in mist almost hot with the rain. It’s not fear, but more every nerve tensed. All senses on alert. The shape of the place is made with rain and the way it hits things and from how far away. The humming you feel in your feet. Eyes are almost useless here, only the night-vision binoculars, only the infrared looking for heat. Otherwise all shapes are sound and texture of rain on green, on black night. And smell. And memory. I know where the nutmeg tree is. I know its exhaled scent. The clove tree across from it. The slight clearing that brings you down the hill and around back. The sound of fine rain on rubbery big leaves and then the harder sound on the dryer. Dead barky bits of banana palm. Minty wiff where a scatter of drops hits the Moroccan menthol, scratches me on the way past, down the pig track, ducking ferns. Ginger cinnamon bark, a glistening of iron-rich mud kneaded cream cheese frosting smooth by the hard hooves into a rut. We go extra slowly not to fall into this. Feeling our way down to the deeper garden, the clearing where she made a donkey graveyard. I know the pink peppercorn tree is above us.

The rain slows. And for a moment the sky, which was so black that it was not even there, becomes something: a lid above us, of darkest charcoal blue. And here the ashes when I sprinkle them, still grey-ground bone minerals carbon flutter, seem to shimmer for a moment. There is no moonlight but it is a moonlit colour. The ashes are no longer a dead thing the funeral home gave me. The ashes are Lisa’s spirit laughing with us in this ridiculous quest to sneak back onto the land that she bought with love for the women who now claim it as their own and hate everyone. This bit of jungle. This tree farm. The coffee trees too high for anyone to get more than a handful of beans for a days work. This land with the macadamia nut trees that were going to make everyone a fortune, now mostly fattening the silky bristle coats of the many pig families that share the land with rogue roosters, and the wet carpet coat of the donkey full of burs, her big sad knowing eyes. This land of jade vines and pomelos and oranges and tangerines and lime and tangelos, perfect globes dotted everywhere. The avocados that fall with thud you feel rather than hear, so soft and large they are bowl for my kids to dip chips into. Better than any guacamole you could make.

Her ashes bless the night. They bless the spiders. The rosebush incongruously looking like something from an English cottage. They bless the opening where Nora’s place is tucked back into the hillside, her DIY paradise bunker. She too has been forced to leave. Elizabeth’s ashes bless our quest. The orchids tucked with wire into trees. The vines and fruits and spikes of green. Of each little carefully cultivated pocket of her land that was never hers or anyone’s land at all.

The ashes seem to hang there glittering in the plants-swimming air. And we are on our way back out of the gulch, and it’s black black again. Suddenly a light, a big spotlight comes on and my heart stops. We all freeze, caught terrified of what two old ladies who are protecting the land against the spirit of the woman who bought it for them. Except that one of the old ladies looks like Sam Sheppard and has a view of the whole property from her perch on stilts at tree level, and the other old lady has already called in the police twice, and a couple of years ago got everyone into court and wakes you up in the middle of the night making demonic hand gestures. Not the good kind of witch. Leaving unhinged magic-markered notes in the kitchen. Pad-locking gates while you are still on the property. Somehow the whole town knows that these two old women are so wildly unpredictable, so in league with some sort of dark elemental spirit, that they should never be approached directly. And other dark thoughts. It is after all, late at night in the rain and we are in hunting gear trespassing in hostile territory. And so we freeze when we see the light.

Both the guys whisper it. It’s a sow. The heat-sensing camera sees it, huge, and it’s set off a motion-sensor light in one of the outbuildings. I can’t see anything once the bright beam goes off, except, finally, a huge shadow passing over the already shadowy night. It is a pig of enormous stature. Almost some great sow spirit from Miyazaki’s imagination. A thing of, and out of, this timeless nature.

After the sow, back up the path past the oldest avocado, the surinam cherry bush, the tangerine trees, the lime tree, the sleeping grass. Past the outdoor shower, the mostly empty house, the stairs up to the bedroom mosquito net, leather steamer trunk full of ancient European lace and cockroaches. Past the kitchen, past the solar generator, once the heart of the whole system. All these things known, not seen in the dark rain. Ashes in a perfect circle around the nutmeg tree wet by the endless rain. And past the main house where the heat blobs hover. Following the edge of the paved driveway. Past the gate. And the second gate and we are out by the road still crouched in the bushes. The high streetlight wavery like the moon and crackling. The pavement blue with wet. The car rolls to a stop and we leave the bushes and get in, and I am in the car with my new family, laughing, and serious, and alive. You know the kind of alive that so washed by the rain that you can see clear through to the other side.

If you are still with me, maybe you would consider becoming a subscriber. Or spreading the word. It helps.

—Jason

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Hello friends.

I am in the middle of it.

Whether in the dead of slush-locked winter, or ensnarled in the southern hemisphere’s endless summer it seems that the tasks of the year of 2026 are no longer ignorable and really we only have two choices. 1) Go back to bed 2) Get to work. Having written to you extensively about hibernation I thought this week I wanted to talk about that second option.

But let’s ease into the idea of work slowly by looking at spring fashions. Miu Miu’s Spring 2026. “I’m interested in the lives of women in general, which is why I love aprons. The apron is a recurring theme in my work because it is symbolic of women’s sufferance … It’s an emblem of women’s despair, their poverty, their passions.—Miuccia Prada

Mrs. Prada has long been interested in workwear and this year’s smock-like aprons have been coyly (re-) introduced to the runways. She cites the French films by Malle and Brunel (above) as inspirations. Meanwhile, the less fashionable among us, or the people that are working in factories rather than being inspired by the people working in factories get dressed by a different logic.

Still whatever your way into working, there is something satisfying about the way makers choose to dress themselves. There is something to be said for finding a uniform to face the day with creativity, versatility, craftsmanship, protection, materiality and spirit that might inspire you. I’m picturing Agnes Martin’s tender, fully quilted painting suit, Renoir’s smock, Georgia O’Keefe’s almost liturgical black outfits.

I should probably mention to, that the worker’s smock has its roots in women’s underclothes, moves into a simple cotton covering for farmers, and then finds its way back to women who needed some kind of alternative or at least a covering for their Victorian outfits while painting in the studio.

This is my kind of work uniform and a look I aspire to. What you choose to wear while in your most focused state is always beautiful. Always stylish. I hope this mini-photo essay points you toward your best version of getting ready to go deep. I hope you find the kind of exterior that leads you to the interior. I hope you live in genuine expression. From the heart outwards.

Bon Courage, Artiste!

—Jason

The photoessay continues for paid subscribers with a great engineering outfit, a handsome chef, and Georgia O’keefe making a smoothie. Every week (or so) I try to think up new version of seeing the world in terms of making and colour, instances of spirit and matter coming together.

To My beloved subscriber colour lab-ists. You are getting every newsletter I write and the longer fuller researches and more on making ink plus access to the archives and chat. It is slow going building an online community while working on my off-line self. All of your support in the form of subscribing, sharing, and commenting is hugely heart-warming.

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I have, as of today, written 209 letters and sent them into the world as The Colour.
After 5 years there are now 18,000 of you out there following along.

The note that follows is from just before Valentine’s Day four years ago and its one of my favourites from the Archives. Its in a round-about way about my Papa. Today the post is FREE. For all of you new readers thank you for joining this community. Subscribers have access to the full archive along with recipes and tips for making your own ink. For everyone that supports this publication thank you! For those of you who has a colourful friend you could always:

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I am also much greatfull who just want to spread the word:

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with love and squalor,

Jason

Dear Beloved reader:

I wanted to tell you a story about Valentine’s day. A story that at first I thought should begin with images of the mathematically cardioid leaves of the sacred fig worshiped in the Indus Valley Civilization, and from there, to a heart-shaped icon on silver coins from the ancient Greek city state of Cyrene that depicted an extinct giant fennel seed used as a birth control pill alluded to in Catullus. And I’d have to talk about the colour red, and how valuable that colour was up through the Middle Ages, and how the roots of Valentine’s Day still hum with the protofeminism of goat sacrifice, whips, wolf-caves, wild Roman pagan times, and the Midsommar-like rituals of suggestive milk-dipped wool for wiping off blood. The violence and passion, sex and moon-cycles of pure red, and its weird mixing with white to become pink. And then I’d go into how all that got co-opted by Christianity to become the binaries of white purity on the one side and red passion on the other (you know those delirium-induced saint visions of the-burning-thorn-wrapped Jesus heart), and later medieval stories of several saints named Valentine, one of whom may or may not of been writing from prison to someone they cured of blindness then fell in love with. From there, we could look at weirdly cynical Victorian Valentine’s cards, Civil War soldiers’ notes, the secret colour meaning of flowers, Betsey Johnson’s use of red and pink, Memphis-inflected pastel pop, Milton Glaser and that art director who decorated the most Instagrammed restaurant in London with pink velvet and may have set the undying millennial pink trend in motion. The historical section might finish with Sam Rindy leaving a lipstick smear on a $2-million work by Cy Twombly and ending up a courtroom in Avignon. “She was overcome by an emotion that she could not tame,” her lawyers, Patrick Gontard and Jean-Michel Ambrosino told the court, trying to get her out of a hefty fine. They described the kiss as an “act of love.”

(Story continues after this mini photo essay.)

I might go from all this into talking about how the pH-shifting anthocyanins allow the natural ink-maker to get both pink and red tones from safflower, beet, or cactus flowers. And I do think there is a story about red and white and pink that fights for a middle ground of romance. And I did once make a chocolate pod ink for a special friend in New York. And I do so much love what beets can do. And maybe I will go deeper into all of these stories in some future newsletter. But Valentine’s Day makes me think of something different. And though I am not a cynic, February almost always feels to me the way Margaret Atwood so eloquently puts it:

February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.

And so I offer you this other story: I was probably 10 years old and it was February 13th, and a note had been sent home with all the kids in my class recommending that parents send something for Valentine’s Day with their kids to school. I made sure my Papa read the note because I lived in deadly fear of being abnormal and because we moved around a lot and I knew that my classsmates would be counting the number of Valentines that I got, and I knew that my dad, caring as he was, was caring for three other young kids as a newly-widowed father, that sometimes he wasn’t exactly exacting about notes that got sent home. The next morning I was pretty excited to bring two brown paper lunch bags, one with my regular lunch, and a second one with a red heart that my dad had crayoned onto it. I remember the system of envelopes for Valentine’s cards at the front of the class, and how unstuffed my envelope was, and I remembered that it didn’t matter because I would be opening my Valentine package from my Papa at lunchtime. And then it was lunchtime. Inside the paper bag was a whole lot of red and white pink little discs of construction paper, homemade confetti that he’d made and buried in this snowy pile was… a hole punch. It was one of those hole punches that makes one hole at time. It was, I realized, the hole punch that he’d used to make all that confetti. A hole punch that was practically an antique from his tool box. A tool that had chipped red paint on the handle and was heavy duty enough that I am pretty sure was meant to punch holes in leather. I loved all my dad’s old tools and all his toolboxes. I loved my dad. But I was horrified and immediately hid this symbol of everything that made me feel weird to myself as I saw myself through the eyes of my classmates. Skewered heart.

But here’s the thing. If my dad had sent me to school with what I most wanted: a drug store Valentine card, some cinnamon hearts, and a waxy chocolate sucker in the shape of an angel, and if by these magic tokens my classmates had welcomed me into their fold of normalness, I would not be writing these words to you. I would not have an almost photographic memory of that classroom, and that old tool, and the paper bag it came in. I would not be me. It’s taken me a few years to understand the message. I have never written about it before. But I can’t think of Valentine’s Day any other way now and there really is a message. Love properly done doesn’t conform. It can’t. And so this Valentine’s note is a bit to my dad but also to the ragged, left-out, forgotten and peculiar among us. To the lonely. And I hope that if you are natural colourist who gets the idea of colour that dissolves boundaries, and if you celebrate this holiday, and if you are feeling happy and loved and safe, that you find a way to send out a little of what colour you have to someone who has none of these things. And if you are one of the lonely then this is for you. —JL

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I wanted to say one more goodbye to the old year that has felt like being inside a snake. But first, school glue.

I never ate school glue. So far as I remember anyway. What I do remember is putting a…

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—Jason

If you are able to able to subscribe to this newsletter I would be full of thanks. But also filling in a little heart or reposting or commenting always feels good. Your ongoing support never goes unnoticed and helps fuels embers of the colour revolution.

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“A gray day provides the best light.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

It started yesterday from just a few skitterings from the nothing blue-white sky. Then this wild democracy of flakes. Safely inside and watching the extreme heat of the Australian Open I am okay. Unthreatened I’m lucky to see the inspiration in this whiteout. And anyway its less the snow and more the blurring that I have been thinking about. All sorts of fogginess.

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A day where you can barely see in front of you says look harder. Haze doesn’t just cover over it also blurs hierarchy gently erasing the binaries of light and dark. Its soft invitation is the peace of not quite knowing. It is winter thick with fog. You rub your eyes, shiver, look closer. You are alive in this looking. But you won’t quite get it. Nothing is going to be illuminated in this luminous grey. This sort of dustiness has no end-state it is all becoming. Chalk with it millions years of sleeping sea-shelled creatures compacted into glittering white does this. Dusty hazy watery inks do this. A day without a skyline offers this. This gift.

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…I was above all

Waiting for your fondness, the softest punch

Of light like pushing a pill through its foil packet.

—from Brunch Shift by Amy Woolard

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Sep 27 & 28, 2025. Procession at 11am & 4pm

Location

Toronto Waterfront

Cost/Ticket

Freeee!

The sky today is complicated. Grey. …

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“Survive without ever reaching out.” —Ideal of the Medieval order of Carthusian monks (at least according to the Chartreuse website)

Lying in bed this morning, I saw through half-opened eyes a band of light slip in through the curtain’s edge, and for a moment light up one of the leaves of the leafy plant in the window and make it burn greengold. I love a colour between colours. And there is something about the radiant energy of greenish yellow or yellowish green that particularly calls to me. And of course once you start thinking about it, it seems to be everywhere.

Victoria Mboko just became Canada’s biggest tennis star going from a ranking of 333 to 24th in the world in under a year, but the other day it was I Leylah Fernandez was watching. She is the 5’5” lefty Canadian who surprised the odds-makers this summer by winning the 2025 Washington DC tennis tournament. American commentators talk about how she is small and scrappy and from Montreal, and that she really goes for everything. She was briefly famous in Canada, at least in 2021, when a day after her 19th birthday she was runner up in the US Open winning against 3 of the top 5 players in the world and finally losing to Emma Raducanu, another new teenaged star from the UK. I have noticed that the American commentators are way more likely to comment on the mistakes that top five players are making when they play against her rather than considering Fernandez as the cause of an upset. And I notice that the big servers and tall, heavy-hitting, top players that she plays seem, with the commentators, to be surprised to be having a bad day against her. She is small, does not hit particularly hard or with a crazy amount of spin or at extreme angles. She doesn’t seem to have a signature move. If I had to sum up her game, I might say that she is smart and fearless. She hits the ball early and with a kind of lightning wit that allows her to change direction and pace instantly, even returning the fastest serves. She is sometimes called fierce, but I have seen her pull out a moon ball slow and wobbly that almost seems like a mistake but then that lands in some unexpected area of the court and wins her the point on the strength of its unexpectedness alone. She is quick and versatile, but that can’t quite explain how she beats the best in the world. If she has a secret, I think it’s that she has no style of play. She is just playing. And I love a success that ducks out of definitions.

Of course I love a colour that has this quality too. A colour that wants to be explained but keeps slipping out of the confines of its definition. And for this kind of colour we don’t even need to leave the world of tennis.

Roger Federer says that tennis balls are yellow. The International Tennis Federation say that they must be yellow. The particular colour of yellow used, though, is called optic yellow, known to Pantone as electric lime. Which sounds green. A 2018 Twitter poll quoted in the Atlantic noted that, “of nearly 30,000 participants, 52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with ‘other.’ ” I have been asking people what colour a tennis ball is. I have been asking myself. I think I think it’s green but just because even a little bit of a darker colour in a lighter colour always strikes me a variety of the darker colour. Like white with any black in it at all is grey, any red in it is pink. The colour nerd or bartender’s answer might be that a tennis ball is chartreuse. Chartreuse, the colour, is named after the drink with 130 secret alpine ingredients that was made by the monks that still live in the pre-Alps. Scientifically, chartreuse is a wavelength of light that sits at 547.5 nanometers squarely between yellow and green. Weirdly, the medicinal liqueur has a green version and a yellow version kind of complicating matters further.

Did you, when you were little, call out, cry out, when you had a nightmare? I used to often wake up at night from a nightmare and almost automatically let out a long —Paaaapaaa— long enough that it would reach upstairs and when he answered, and he always answered, I would say as he was trundling downstairs: Papaaaaa?, a pause, and then, I had a bad dream, and he would meet me in the hall buck-naked and I would be wearing my old purple and navy blue striped flannel pyjama bottoms, and he’d always say, Let’s go for a pee. The two of us would go for a pee and he would ask if I felt better. He didn’t ask me about the dream, just peeing together not talking, and then he’d ask if I felt better and of course I always did. The scary feeling I had woken up to, and that felt so big and so everything, was now completely, miraculously gone.

It’s hard to separate this memory from the later ones. There would be years after that that my Papa would scare me.

Years where he was not fixing or comforting, but because being the nightmare, he couldn’t have woken me up or calmed me down, hardly could he wake himself up. Drunk. Scrawling, middle-of-the-night gibberish on wall by the phone. Stumbling downstairs. Soul askew. Undiagnosed manic depression. Brain scrambled by carbon monoxide tubed in through the window of the family truck. The police. And then the ambulance. And then the psych ward. Cheap bread and peanut-butter and Clark’s Irish beer stew slopped out of the can from the food bank. We would make this food ourselves. Four kids. When he got out of the hospital, Papa was not Papa. He trailed the sick smell of Cinzano. Trailed by the sounds of clinking bottles and crinkling big bags of potato chips. I guess he thought he was hiding all this, along with his demons, under the dirty orange winter jacket. The garbage and crumbs and fermenting dregs stuffed behind his bed. Barfing. Slurring. Getting fat. Lying. Becoming monster. Worse than my dreams. But also inside himself was inside a storm. He watched his wife die. Then his new wife left him. Then he lost his church and his pension and most of his brain. He did not understand that he was a manic depressive. He did not know a way to fight the chemical imbalance like a wild animal in his head that made him violent and that made his own father disappear for weeks and months around holidays. He did not know how to stay in the world with the heart that he had.

But what I want to tell you was before all that. I want to say I had a father. I have a father. I don’t have mixed feelings about my father. Instead I have unmixable feelings about him. Maybe you have someone like that that you love. That the pieces inside you won’t ever quite fit together in your stories of the way you love them.

Another time. The whole family piled into a tiny cranberry-coloured European station wagon. We are going over the Alps. We found the old route. My sister, the youngest, packed into the space between the back window and backseats. I wake up in the front seat and I have to pee and we have been driving all night Papa didn’t want, of course, to the take the new road tunnelled through the rock, but the old roads, switchback, tiny and taking longer to get to where we were going. Italy? It must have been. We got lost a few times and so we had to drive all night. Not that my Papa minded getting lost or taking the slow route or being late or driving all night. He was a bit wild then. A new wife. Was she his wife? They got married on a hill in upstate where I once dug up a stump with the other kids while the grownups did “The Mat Trip” in a room covered in blue velcro gym mats and a big sign that said Trust The System. In Europe they would pass the bottle of fine cheap red wine between them in the front seat, drivers yelling as they circled L’arc de Triumph trying to get out of town. The gendarmes kicked us out of fancy park. We didn’t understand that the little fences weren’t just for the small dogs and that you couldn’t tuck into a baguette and cheese on just any square of green grass. Or probably we kids did understand noticing the looks we were getting before the grownups did. That kind of wildness. We loved this part of the wildness.

I was in the front seat with Papa because the new girlfriend/wife was on Lake Geneva visiting her rich grandfather. Her grandfather, Kazimir, had made a fortune in WWII as a textile manufacturer and had gold initials on all his fine leather baggage and lived on his own floor of a hotel full of antiques overlooking the lake. You could order anything you liked from the waiters who wore all white and bowties, and we when we asked for ice cream they served it as a single scoop, perfect off-white globe centered in a high-stemmed shining silver dessert cup with silky dark chocolate. They would ask if you wanted nuts, and if you said yes, they would sprinkle fine-ground toasted hazelnuts overtop of the cooling melted chocolate with a silver spoon carried in the pocket of a silky waiter’s vest.

I’m in the passenger seat everyone sleeping folded amongst the luggage. I roll open the fogged window, lean out frosting’d bright green vineyards up the mountains and the cuttingly fresh air there on the high road over the Alps. My Papa. Roll out swim skinned, green edgeless night. Day simmering. Pythagoreanly fresh through the snow peaks, everyone else still asleep in the luggage. He was, by this time, manic, married on a hill in upstate New York on a whim to a woman with another family, a mathematician named Charlie Small was the dad, also depressive. Going around L’Arc de Triumph with a bottle of good wine on Papa’s lap, his white flares, her hair in tiny braids, freckles, also wild with this.

But out there, up there in the dream of the Alps, its crystalline breath seems almost to glitter out of the fog as soft as a dream, old stone all at the windy road’s gravelly shoulder.

Rolling to a stop. I woke fogged up. Even the glass fogged up, but no, he said, we were up so high this was cloud fog. We were inside a cloud. Peeing together. Shale slate grey green sounds underfoot, road grey, we too almost black jewelled, grass beside the gravel by road’s edge. Green grass, a few weeds, and then that old rock wall, an old tough simple farmer blocks chalky grey beyond it, steep rising mountain, the cloud bristling now with not quite dawn, but beginning a lightening, a silver fizz to the air. It’s silent. Me and Papa peeing. Our breath little clouds too. We are finished peeing when Papa, taller than me, sees it first.

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The Moon tonight is warm tinted and full and circled by a buttery light against the cool grey sky of the city and I am so sleepy because of strange nightmares political and violent and dark that kept waking me up early this morning and some part of me just wants a good night’s rest. And what can I tell you anyway? I promised myself I would write something that is both true and not depressing and what was really on my mind. O but there is so much for so many people that is so hard now all over the world the voice that wants me to not write anything is saying. But I have not given up.

I met two Mainecoon cats today I think they were kittens or at least teenagers and one named Moss and the other was named Chicory, siblings that roll around hugging eachother so softly that it is almost painfully joyful to watch. Almost like they don’t come from our world. We were drinking complicated loose tea kind of minty and my friend was growing a passionfruit vine which looked magical and a bit sad. We talked about how some words and plants and things of world have become demystified by the words we bind them too. Vanilla, chocolate. Invasive. We talked about the word happiness which my friend said comes from the same root as happening more like a changing set of circumstances good and bad than some final goal. My friend wondering if there is something in this idea that so many people are chasing an ideal that could be more of an action, a what’s going on rather than a good or bad. I had to run home to get a teenager to the doctor and he was late and the app to send him there want working but the idea stayed with me and the healing tea. And the idea that maybe I should just write to you about happen-ness rather than happiness. I was was going to just write that but then I found some images that fit. So I want to send you some things that make me feel like life if not exactly good is definitely on now. Good or bad I hope something I send might rock you awake for the struggle of the now.

What is making you feel alive and kicking or keeping you going or just rocking you these days?

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What is your winter palette for this new quarter century? The Colours of hibernation. Cavelike. Shadowy co-minglings. The sort of colours your mind needs to slow down to adjust to. Enter. Peripheral colours that lick the edge of nap. Stored medicinal dried flowers pounded, boiled, and then softened over weeks. Crushed colours. Mosses. Inks like poultic…

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From tiny experiences we build cathedrals.

—ORHAN PAMUK

Somehow I can’t quite commit to wrapping up this last year, it was too much and too confusing and did not come together into a clear list of things. I can’t seem to commit either to a set of resolutions for this coming year just because other people are doing it right now. Unless the resolution is starting to jog again. But still. A year has turned over, and a lot did happen. I published a children’s book. I ran a workshop at The Storm King and The Painting School and The Smithsonian institute and the Toronto Public Library. I worked with a perfume company and a Poetry Prize, an abstract composer of creek music and so many others that I love. I made ink from roses and hawthorn blight, street dust, and poinsettias. And I do believe in taking stock. I believe in recognizing that everything has a past and that a clear-eyed view of that past makes you enter the future stronger, more honestly. I also believe that we creative people ( along with almost everyone else ) might need to brace ourselves a bit in 2025. And so with all of that I am asking myself the question:

Did I learn anything last year that I can take into this year?

If I had to put the answer into words I would say that I learned that I am way weaker and way stronger than I thought I was. Or maybe more than that, that the whole world is way weaker and way stronger than I thought. But I don’t have to put it into just words and I would rather keep it open-ended because maybe my learnings will remind you of your learnings and so be less of a prescription and more of a spark.

And Lots more inspirational pictures for members of the Colour Lab including Life and Death Lessons from Guillermo del Toro….A huge Thank You to all those who support the continued inky community into the coming year.

—JL

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“His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, The Dead

The week between the worlds

Sorry its taken me so long to write to you its just that I find myself afloat in the limbo between the holidays. If All Hallow’s Eve is the time of the thinning of the veil between the spirit and earthly realms, this last week seems more like a thickening of the veil into something more like fog. A whole valley of soft grey without time or direction. C.S. Lewis calls his version of limbo, in a memorable chapter of the Magician’s Nephew, “The Woods Between The Worlds.”

Nosferatu

The latest version of which maybe not coincidentally opened on Christmas Day stars Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and a bunch of other good looking actors and is worth seeing for the costumes alone and does a pretty good job at conjuring up a place between worlds— a seasick fascination with the meeting of the otherworldly and the domestic, the pagan and the Christian, the ordered and the disordered. Christmas, if you ask me, is the real Goth holiday. Halloween is too much on the surface, too obvious and playful when compared to children singing in echoey old churches with blizzards and tiny fires outside. Dickens understood this, as did Warhol and the German Expressionists.

While the updated Nosferatu count has the moustache and chest of a lumberjack rather than the rat physique of the original, in most ways this new version seems to cleave surprisingly close to the 1922 German Expressionist version. What you first notice is the sound and colour. Interestingly the original used two coloured gels, orangey for daytime and blueish for nighttime. And interesting, too, the the new version in its most critical moments loses almost all of its colour, conjuring up a half-waking nightmare with a blueish tint. What the full-colour version does well though, is the mid-tones. For a film about blood, there are very few moments of pure, shocking red. What we get instead is a study in cool greys.

All the stills are great but there is a colour of grey that is born of purple.

Not dulled down but desaturated, soaked-in you could say. And it’s this moody, moldy grey of lichens and nordic lakes and silvery skies that I noticed in particular on the cravat of Thomas Hutter in Robert Eggers’ new version of Nosferatu.

The Cravat

The scarf is wrapped elegantly few times around the hero’s high white collar and then tied into the sort of satisfying silken bow that only regency Victorians seem capable of figuring out. The cravat becomes, with the leading man, increasingly unravelled as the film progresses. F.W. Mernau’s groundbreaking though copyright infringing1922 silent version also opens with a scene of cravat-tying that I kind of wished had gone on a little longer so that I could understand how exactly he was doing it. But that silky bow seemed to be the more typical white colour and then later a jet black one setting the tone for a film that delights in strong contrasts. The chiaroscuro effect was made most famous by the image of a ratty postured long fingernailed figure of Nosferatu’s shadow going up the stairs and into the diaphanously curtained bedroom of Mrs. Hutter. The new version plays with shadows a bit too, but is at its best, in the slightly tinted greys signalled by the cravat. And anyway the subtle muted greys suited my mood better.

That grey again

And what better time to get into the purply pewter-grey of Victorian vampires than now. Forget Christmas’ red and green, or the flashy sparkles of New Year’s Eve, we are still in the dim out-of-time dreamscape of late December and what can you do but stumble into it. You know the crepuscular tones of a sky going soft and grainy into evening. Silken grey, between times grey, Liminal floating grey.

What makes the membrane between the material world and the spirit sometimes thin to almost transparency? It sounds romantic but it is scary. The feeling of not being quite sure where feelings and things overlap.

Back when I was living in a single apartment on the high spot above the city. I was living alone except for my black scruffy farmdog in the little apartment at the top of the hill past the park where I once got mugged for my wallet and then called the cops on the kid who was just a kid thrown on the hood of the car probably for the colour of his skin and because I was white. And later in the police station, I refused to press charges, refused the police lineup, but I brought back the little white cards of the bad men. Suspects wanted for every imaginable crime, all of them looking a bit like a version of Santa Claus that had done time.

I remember Judah and I were smoking then and drank giant 7-11 coffees for Christmas day, and he made me, on his patched together PC, a website full of all my bad men drawings which kind of wobbled on the computer screen while the song All by Myself played at full volume. It was beautifully unhinged. Probably this was before he moved in with me because I was living alone and writing about vampires.

All during that time I was thinking of vampires. That I might be one. I’d been suffering from the after effects of a big breakup and things were a bit fuzzy around the edges. I wrote a suite of poems I called The Vampire Poems. Where are they now? I found one that Shary illustrated for me a year later for my birthday after the vampire period. But then. O life was so lonely then, and I feeling like I was verging on being undead. Finding the sunlight painful. Worrying that my bed was a kind of coffin. Noticing the flutterings of black wings. Loving the word hover. Wearing a lot of black.

But how to make that grey?

Anyway those are all just memories and while in the limbo not writing to you, I have been busy. I would like to say that I was like a Victorian putting my personal affairs in order in this deadzone between Christmas and New Year’s, but instead I find myself pulverizing a plant into ink.

A Christmas plant

Its petals are not petals but a kind of leaf called bract gone bright, bloodred with the dying of the light. Pointed like pikes or batwings the leaves wilt into a kind of pleated cocoon darkening to the purple of dried blood. It is the goth of flowers.

Pluck the red bracts off and a white latex drips out. This milky substance may be a bit of an irritant and is a bit disturbing, but despite the rumours, no part of this plant is out to poison your cats, dogs, or children.

Forget the name

Poinsettia’s were cultivated in Mexico by the Aztecs for a long time. They were used as a dye, as a medicine, maybe as a symbol of blood sacrifice and were later coopted into Christian missionary mythology, heavily marketed by a single Californian ranching family, embraced by Andy Warhol’s vampiric love of kitch, and all this before finally ending up at your local bodega wrapped in pleated red foil and left by some random relative on your sink to eventually wither to nothing.

They are, and of course, like all plants, kind of amazing. When inked (a recipe is available to colour lab members only) they pulse with the bright red of a finger cut while slicing bread and quickly go royal purple then blueish purple, and finally, and this is sometimes after a few days on slightly alkaline watercolour paper, turning the perfect vampire grey I have been after. A colour like dead lilacs, like wintery skies glimpsed through branches, like a bruise that is the memory of blood below the surface changing slowly but inexorably towards something like healing. Like a medicine for the new year.

Yours,

Jason

A recipe for changeable Vampire ink

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Happy Solstice Everyone. Summer if you are Australian, winter if you are Canadian. As it turns out, we are all spinning on an angled axis facing and unfacing the sun in what we call a day, in a wide circle around the sun we call a year, the sun also spinning, looping around the Milky Way. And the Milky Way itself orbiting its own black hole’d center. Galaxies churn too in their own light-year-sized circles. But, it is not the turning and looping that makes our seasons, it’s the tilt. Normally a sphere would, when spinning, stay pretty much straight up and down, but our sphere sits on an angle toward or away from the sun depending on where it is in its orbit and where you are on the globe. Now. Here. Tonight. In the Northern Hemisphere, the top of the globe is at its most angled away from the sun and so we are all in the middle of the darkest days and here at this cusp we are about to turn back towards the light.

And maybe you can feel it. The pull. The soundless listing of the big boat of this planet, the cold, the icy shimmering sleet at night on the boughs of trees. The psych wards filling up. Candy coloured RGB garlands slung over the trees gone runny in the wet city nightscape. The candles in the window. The skittering white flakes in the grainy night. The sun now big and and glinting off the telephone wires and through the prism and through the plant and finally, its faint rainbow on the back wall. Only for a moment someone in a puffy jacket walking the little fairytale dog with the velvety shambling gait of some old wizard returning from the forest and the sun streams though the steam from the dog-walker’s mouth and another tiny puff from the breath of the tufty black wizard-dog. His name, the dog is inky. Only for a second we see this, the sun just right but sinking, sinking fast.

But why are is our planet tilted at that 23 degree angle that makes a 365 day cycle of seasons? Why the tilt that we are feeling now at the edge of the wintery-ist night? The answer is kind of bonkers. A head on collision between the proto-earth and an ancient theoretical Mars-sized planet called Theia. Theia was, in Greek mythology, a Titan giant, mother of the sun and moon. She was a goddess of glittering. Theia the planet burst through earth spewed out a few lumps of molten magma that coalesced into our moon and knocked the earth on its side at the angle that made the seasons we are now feeling so fully. As strange and dramatic as this event seems, evidence for the scenario just keeps mounting. Not only does the moon seem to be made up of mostly earth-like material, but scientists keep finding bits of some other alien material that is also found in sheets way below the earth’s crust. Evidence of this other planet.

I made for you tonight, on this longest (or shortest) night a mood board of tilted glittering light and dark fighting it out. And at the end of the visual stream of consciousness-moodboard-fever-dream there is a really good video I found of the giant collision hypothesis.

And what would colour be, what would the feeling of being here on earth be? What would making your own materials be without the unstoppable violent crashing and then soft cycling of light and love,

yours,

—Jason

Undated.

Light. I know not a single word fine enough for Light. Its currents pour, but it is a heavy material word not applicable to holy, beamless, bodiless, inaudible floods of Light.

—John Muir from the journals of John Muir

"I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing - their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling - their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights - then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought."

- Why I adore the night, by Jeanette Winterson

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I have been working with rosemary all week. And it feels medieval or medicinal or storied. And maybe the Egyptians threw it into graves, a sprig for memory or love or green that did not go away. But everything everywhere was vague. Apocryphal. And anyway, even among legends there was not much to say other than that it grows everywhere and is part of the sage family and kind of vaguely associated with death, with Shakespearean references thrown in here and there in ways that are not particularly fascinating. I have always wanted to work with it because it is so easy to get ahold of, and Sasha Duerr gets so many beautiful colours out of it. I keep seeing silk dipped into a bath of rosemary, it sometimes going purple or yellow or teal or khaki green, and maybe together this would be a holiday palette (I have been writing an article for CBC about holiday palettes) and I figured it looks and smells festive, and it did fill the whole house with a piney bitter-warm high note. A hint of turkey stuffing and smokey breakfast potatoes. And I think after a few frosts, the rosemary plant has a warmer sweeter almost mesquite smell, and a full sprig on the yellowy fingerling potatoes dusted with coarse beach-evaporated salt and good olive oil at high heat in a blackened cast iron pan and then taken out after the potatoes are done, is especially delicious these days. But the colour was not that. Not smokey. Or hinting at medieval stories. Or particularly deliciously complex.

I asked my editor when I wrote Make Ink if we could have a chapter dedicated to failures and it just never made it into the final edit. Maybe because the dream of colour, the surprises of colour are a better sell than the weak, watery, tea-stain colours that are not different enough from each other to do much that shows up on paper, or explains the amazing place where the colour came from. So what to do. Keep going? Go back to sleep? Keep stirring? Try changing the pH, or adding some sort of alum salt. Or Copper (I tried that, it got a little more interesting). Or iron (I tried that it got a little sadder, darker but not a rich dark green that I was hoping for). What is the problem? Should I lower my expectations? Expect less? Move on? Or except this. The warm living room with the cold milky light pouring in from the cold day outside, scraps of paper and a pinkish stain inside the microwave and the plant outside full of broken braches and the faint faraway scent rosemary. Which is the faint scent of my trying. Again and again.

There is something about embracing failure that always feels like some silicon investor bro type that has the privilege of failing again and again while everyone else suffers from his experiments. But still, there is sometimes something I love about those bottles of ink, sometimes whole pots of ink that I have made that never felt quite right. Something beloved about these gentle let downs. Not because they would lead to future success but just because of the trying that keeps trying without ever getting there.

In the Colour Lab today I will show you what I tried and what kind of worked and maybe you will have ideas. Maybe you have worked with rosemary in some different way. Maybe you would like to join the conversation about the beautiful losers of ink.

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You begin always with wide open places. Climb if you can to a high place where you can turn in a circle but loosely, almost without an idea or purpose, only attention of the most still, opening kind. Carry only a backpack full of ziplock bags and a notebook and your roaming eyes. Here the landscape is huge and complicated and complete, falling loose in front and all around you. And then the choosing begins: a narrowing of idea. Look out now in a particular place for a particular plant’s particular way of being itself. Bring it back to your smaller protected place. Separate berries from twigs, richer colours from dried up old pieces. Only the yellowest or the most almost-black purple petals from the flower or the juiciest berries or the reddest under-bark. Find the best bits. Reduce these. Boil up this chosen handful, all natural particles flying a whirlwind in the big old pot, only for inkmaking. Water and pigment dance here. A commingling. Slowly, slowly the clear water boils off and the richer colour thickens what’s left. And then another culling. Sieve the bits out. Only the smallest most integrated particles of colour are left now. The mixture is getting finer, but also smaller more intensified, more a oneness. There is a moving circular action but always downward, always compressing. A narrowing, a binding of water’s linked hydrogen and oxygen working with binders and pigments to become something crystaline and perfect. One liquid dark bundled line of ink. A big and wide outstretch arms and opened eye to the small, the purposeful, the place-infused, deep-coloured, possibility-saturated poem that is a single drop. Consider that all of this is a kind of funnelling.

Consider the funnel. A piece of molded plastic that costs 99 cents at IKEA and lives in the drawer with the measuring cups is, in its simple everydayness, barely noticed. The funnel deserves our attention. Our praise. And once it did. An iconic shape that does what its called. A funnel funnels. So practical and and obvious is the shape that it’s hard to picture the funnel as the magical invention for moving channelling fine stuffs from one container to another.

Maybe the first funnel was some leaf wrapped into that shape, or the hollow horn of some now extinct beast with a tiny hole at its pointy end. It’s a shape found in some of the oldest caves of China, where remnants of the world’s oldest beer recipe still cling to the insides of a funnel-like pottery device. Funnels have been dug up by archeologists all over the world and made of copper and steel, glass, ceramics, and horn. There is even a whole period of archeological European history called the funnel-beaker culture named for the perfect taper of their distinctive crockery. Following the funnel back to its roots, I see that it is a ritual tool. A machine of gravity, of slowed time, of bringing a flow together, down and down into ever smaller tunnelings. A tool of meaning-making, of investiture. A funnel is the shape that aches.

I made a visual essay for you on the funnel. A thing that is also a becoming. I found something in the pictures that was under my love of the funnel’s shape and spirit. Follow this downward spiral with me.

As always I hope that you will consider membership.

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The capacity to forget, lay aside, suspend. But not abandon. To have the mode you remember return. The deer on the shoulder holds memory of dew. The drone assumes a hopeful tenor.

—from Ghost Extraction Laurie D. Graham’s Substack Crop Circles

My Mother in the hospital

Just after my birth my mother noticed a maple leaf land on her windowsill. She was left alone for some time even falling asleep and dreaming and I in my incubator breathing. The last leaf sculptural, slightly marred, resting there on the other side of the window, on the sill, her eyes streaming with tears. And the tears like a lens making that one leaf crystal clear. Her own leaf. I read this in a page photocopied from her handwritten diary my Papa dug up about the morning of my birth. Years later she was in a different hospital and again she watched a leaf. A single leaf fall from a tree and become itself. “I had finally seen a leaf,” she says in the documentary made by the NFB and her best friend Bronwyn Wallace. When she says this, she somehow laughs while looking reverent. Closing her eyes for a second to make you feel what she felt. Remembering a moment again, alone in a hospital bed, now not giving birth but recovering from radiation that would never fully kill the cells moving through her blood. The leaf was so red. So singular, that the whole world around it blurred to make it known.

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Video Games, Tom Cruise

Years later I met a guy who designs arcade-style video games. These games were experimental, made by artists and I thought I would love to commission him to do something wildly creative but I couldn’t think of anything until I saw the trailer for Mission Impossible 2. I was going to a lot of movies by myself in those days and there was something about that trailer. Firs, the extremes of the Grand Canyon and the camera skating over it, tight in on the beautiful reds carved deep deep and curving and then a speck is moving along the cliff, and we zoom in and it is Tom Cruise free climbing, pulling his whole body up with the force of his will gripping with toes and abs and his whole body, but he slips in a little puff of sandstone dust and now it is just his fingers holding rock. He is wearing sunglasses of course and the sunglasses kind of bleep red and it is a message from headquarters and the British guy on the other end says sorry to bother you on your vacation and you realize that Tom Cruise’s death defying climbing up the sheerest part of the Grand Canyon in just a little pair of shorts with no safety equipment or spotter is his version of a vacation. And after registering the message, he whips the sunglasses off and they self destruct in a satisfying explosion with the message somewhere high above the Colorado River and then the music comes on. Or something like that.

Immersive Life and Death

Anyway I decided that I wanted to make a sort of immersive video game that starts off like how that first the camera wheels over the landscape, blue sky, red rocks, tiny river way down below, no humans for miles around but you can look down at your hands which are holding onto a little crack in the sheer rockface. Or maybe you are dangling from an old wizened tree growing out of a crack in the cliff. Either way you, the player of this game is looking down thousands of feet of sheer drop and looking up there is more cliff and empty landscape and sky going on forever and it is clear that there is no way out of this situation. The game controller has two buttons. One says HOLD ON, the other says LET GO. You might, in keeping with the usual goal of staying alive in games, keep pressing the hold button for quite a long time. A few buzzards way above you in the sky and a few below you might come into view. The river way down below glints, the clouds move slightly but nothing else happens. Eventually, you, the player, will try the other button and LET GO. Because it is immersive, you will feel your grip loosen and then the feeling of falling. Terrifying, flailing, but also an inevitable feeling, a feeling of letting yourself unclench and just giving yourself up the elements. The feeling of free falling. The feeling of the wind and the rushing. Maybe finally, a feeling of release. The good feeling that you do not have to keep trying so hard. That what is happening is happening.

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But I wrote a book instead

I thought this game would be good for people in the big cities who are tightly holding onto their life. A way to safely let go of it all. I even thought after you died at the bottom of the cliff you would get to re-experience that feeling of falling in other configurations. Other ways of hanging on and letting go when the hanging on seemed just impossible or unnecessary or that hanging on was just prolonging the fear and stuckness. I never made this arcade game. But I did, around this same time, make a book called If We Ever Break Up This is My Book which was an illustrated break-up book, and on the first page after the dedication and publishing notes it looked like this:

Buy Something for the Holidays

I occasionally also have copied myself and made artwork for people getting married that has these two buttons floating on an otherwise blank page. And this weekend I made about maybe 50 ink tests, all 6 inches x 6 inches, with either the words HOLD ON or LET GO scratched across the bottom using my own homemade black ink. If you get a subscription or a gift subscription for a friend this week, I will send you one. If you buy two I will send you the set. Its less than $60 a year which is a low price to pay for original art. You can also see them in person at Horses Atelier on Walnut Street if you are in Toronto. They also have beautiful clothes.

Meanwhile back in nature

Everything seems poised in the fulcrum of hold on, let go. The buds are just showing themselves containing all the spring’s hopings. You can see the buds now that the leaves are mostly fallen. The air goes so chill and seems to clench a whole snowstorm somewhere up there in the roiling grey sky. It’s the last leaves that I am noticing most though. Leaves that hold early December’s tensions. A clinging. Especially the young beech trees and some of the oaks are still holding their leaves. O! those crinkly last last leaves frozen in this moment. Almost cast in bronze. And their sounds! A kind of rattle in a silent forrest in winter. First the wind from far away sounding like distant waves, and then something still muted but with a rolling crackle not quite musical, not quite beautiful, softly brittle, like slowly pulling the plastic tines on a comb. Why when the snow covers everything does just this one small sapling its shivery fleet of bleached ribbed boats keep holding on?

A Botany of Hanging On

"Deciduous" means "the dropping of a part that is no longer needed or useful" and the "falling away after its purpose is finished." Deciduous trees actually do quite a bit of work to form a protective layer where the leaf will fall off, and the moment of letting go involves a whole series of cellular, hydration, light, temperature, and chemical cues. But some deciduous trees do not drop their leaves until they are pushed out by the new leaves of spring. It has a name of course:

Marcescence

Ultimately from Latin marcēscō (“I wither”). The most common trees with marcescence in my part of the world are oak, beech, hop hornbeam maybe also witchhazel. But lately I have been seeing all sorts of trees with leaves still clinging waiting for that one last windy rainy day to signal going to sleep and then just give it all up until spring. Botanists are satisfyingly divided about why marcescence happens. In younger trees and in lower branches the leaves may hide the living buds (I wrote about this last year) protecting the lower branches from deer and other herbivores. It may be that holding onto leaves acts as a timed fertilizer for plants that need the un-decayed nutrients of leaves after the winter. It may be that these trees are a hold-over from some earlier phase in the tree’s evolution. Or there may be, and I hope this is true, that there is some other balancing act going on here that we are not meant to know.

Whatever marcesence is exactly, I wonder if you can feel its soft pull. The holding. The letting go. The not quite deciding moment of the year. The not quite decided moment of human history. The very air seems poised with a bristling of your unanswerable questions. This in between-times. This non-binary becoming. This now. November. December.

—Jason

More of the Clingings Moodboard

and a sweet video of the beech tree by my house. all below for Subscribers. I Love you all. Your support continues to support the writings, the research, the slow coming together of a community who like you feels something that could use re-grounding, colouring-in and colourful co-mingling of matter and spirit, plus maybe some Canadian sense of balance.

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