“Let me tell you some good news,” is how I wanted to begin, because being happy about our good news seems necessary. Skip down if you want to read about Milkwood first though, which is the point of this newsletter before I got going on all the good news and not just this good news!

How to Unearth Good News

This week I heard someone say that “creativity is the opposite of anxiety” which seems like very good news.

My husband brought home a new orchid on Friday which seemed very creative. My husband bringing home an orchid felt like very good news.

“Come see the new plant I got,” he said. He placed it with the other plants who have found their way into the four apartments we’ve rented, inhabited and left in the span of 27 years. Some plants are so tall they are like Where the Wild Things Are trees. Some are hand me downs, some Ikea rescues, all hopeful, maybe the highest form of hope, maybe its just hope just for city-dwellers, just enough green to tickle our deepest ancestral memory that we too come from nature. Or that we as a species can have a sort of functioning relationship with other species, this one based on a reciprocity of breathing systems.

“They like to be hunkered down together. The lady at the plant shop told me,” as he gave me a tour of the new orchid’s graceful tilt, pinkishness, strangeness. We put it next to our old orchid who flowered for the first time in, I don’t know, 15 years, for a reason I haven’t figured out. I had forgotten what color the flower would be and so recorded its surprising reappearance like a bit of good news and the way it looked like it wanted to kiss me which was even better news.

I start to become obsessed with roots which is also good news, to be obsessed again by anything for an artist is good news, right?

And this morning I wake up very early. I like to wake up in the very early morning to see the sky shift and separate out all the subtle sounds gathering outside. I like to be alone before the world is awake too, or too awake, especially on Sundays, my lowest pressure days, so I stayed awake after the 4 am special report of my husband’s dream.

“I’m just going to stay awake,” he said after his incantatory retelling, and so we lamented the state of the world, plant roots into what we might do, sighed a lot, admit it looks very bad, admit anything could happen what if even good news? spoke consolations as offerings and I finally talk him into going back to sleep. “Maybe you can try to continue the dream so you can unravel its pictures?” Or maybe he says this to himself. Maybe he likes this idea and lays back and is asleep.

I sit up and see a new shadow on the wall, the new orchid from Friday. My husband bringing home an orchid that casts a shadow that looks like a rubber duckie talking to a bunch of leaves feels like very good news. Long early morning its-dark-outside-still moments to puzzle a shadow seems also like very good news.

Emergency lights line shine into our bedroom if we don’t close the curtain fully. They come from the back alley of neighbors whose names we don’t know which makes the shadows on the wall like puppet theater. I love puppet theaters. Loving anything at all is good news.

Also coming through the part in the curtain are stars. Actual stars in the sky. Stars in New York City! Even better great news, visible because, and my cousin Alison told me this yesterday, congestion pricing has cut down emissions in the city and voila, clean air and stars are wiggling their way back into the lives of city people. Also, for now, very good news.

I lift off, make tea and walk from room to room to say hello.

Hi Bathroom!

Hi Hot Water Kettle!

Hello soft plush high-pile rug that feels excellent on our tootsies, the first comfortable thing we’ve ever owned. (My husband once asked me if I deliberately choose uncomfortable furniture and so, wondering about this also for too long a time, I gifted him this plush rug which must have have felt like very good news to him.)

Now I pick up my computer to write rather than my paintbrush to paint, cover my feet with the dog’s suckle blanket and listen to a cat mewing outside. Now I’m at the window straining my neck to see if it was a kitten I could drag in but the mewing stopped, and the low rumble of every car in the city in operation, the sounds of those who are awake and those who are not permeate the darkness which I love and believe that this is what turns into sunrise, these kind of small symphonic movements which I wonder might be better captured in paint than in words or if either was possible at all.

Such good news this sunrise.

Normally holding the very good news with the very bad news can be difficult for bad jugglers who see and feel too much. Or who are looking to capture wordlessness with a brush or a pen or a chisel or a spade.

Unearthing Pictures

I wanted to begin with “hey there precious friends and readers I’ll be teaching a workshop all about image making at Milkwood this summer called Unearthing Pictures alongside Sophie Blackall whose brainchild this was to collaborate together and to whom I am very much looking forward to working with.

But I have to admit that I also wanted to write, SOPHIE F*CKING BLACKALL in all caps plus expletive even though I used an asterisk rather than a u but because Sophie is so so so so brilliant and talented and funny and humble and also because she runs a respectable show up in Milkwood country and so it seemed inappropriate but all this to say is I am very very very excited.

And because we’re collaborating on the innards of this what is shaping up to be a truly amazingly fun and utterly beautiful workshop I’ll get on with the goodest of very good news (also known in my house as THE BEST NEWS) but it is true!

I’ll be up at Milkwood this July 24-27th, 2025 teaching a workshop called Unearthing Pictures alongside SOPHIE (F*CKING) BLACKALL, where magic happens every single second, with baby ducks snuggling together all night and waddling and splashing together all day, where delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner smells fill the big barn where the library and guest rooms, walls and hallways (and even bathrooms) are also brimming with inspiration.

Where there is a hayloft and a studio in an old calf barn with space and sunlight and unlimited fun things with which to make all kinds of pictures looking out on fields of wildflowers and early morning mist clinging to the valley and where bunnies hop where they want and the stream trickles along where you might lie in the hammock in the grasses over the site of the Farmhouse which Sophie wrote a book about and upon which Milkwood owes part of its beautiful energy. The rest is created by Sophie and Ed and the beloved staff to make the experience complete.

Anyway, you only have less than a week to send your application for this summer’s workshops at Milkwood, mine and Sophie’s image-making workshop being one of them! Register for as many as you want which would increase your chances of course into getting into any one of them!

Now here are some of my early morning before the world woke up pictures from last Summer’s peer retreat at Milkwood where I got to meet the nicest people and paint some of funnest best news pictures.

Unearth your good news or tell how to find some more in the comments.