“…the wheeling seasons brought the year around…”
—Homer, The Odyssey
3 years ago I built a little widget for the sidebar of this blog that displays other posts that were posted “on this date.” I love checking it periodically, and I find that certain times of year I become obsessed with certain topics and certain days in the year are “hot spots” with especially good posts.
Today is one of them:
An online trend at the moment is posting 2016 photos as a kind of “lost decade” nostalgia. The year that 2026 feels the most like so far is 2018. On this day in that year I was writing about soup.
A year after that I was writing about what we do with good teachings by people who do bad things.
A year after that I was posting my favorite D.W. Winnicott quote about hide and seek:
The full quote is actually this:
“It is a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek in which it is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found.”
—D.W. Winnicott
He’s actually describing childhood development, but I think the sentence could describe the life of an artist.
I wanted so badly to write a book about it called Hide & Seek, but it just wasn’t right. Still, I couldn’t let it go. The first time I tried to write it, the result was Keep Going. Then the second time I tried to write it, the result was Don’t Call It Art.
I don’t think I’ll try to write it again. (A rare thing for me upon releasing a book: I actually know the two books I want to attempt next.) But I’m still really interested in this question: How do I hide and still be found?
Skip forward for years, and I was writing about gardening metaphors, which, in a way, contain the answer to the hide & seek question: we have planting seasons and we have harvesting seasons.
And to wheel back to just one ago, I was posting about a new mix, “Nurturing Your Inner Child.” I love that mix and just listened to it the other day. I’m currently working on a followup, the first mixtape of 2026.
And back to it I go now…