Vacation season
“Glossary: for readers from elsewhere, who don’t deal very weIl with unknown words or who want to understand everything. But, perhaps to establish for ourselves, ourselves as weIl, the long list of words within us whose sense escapes or, taking this farther, to fix the syntax of this language we are babbling. The readers of here are future.”
In a coaching session this past week, I brought up my lack of desire to be so “out there.” To share so much of my personal life. To make the behind-the-scenes endlessly visible.
Some of this is temperament. I am, in certain ways, a private person. Some of it is also protection. I have had people in my life stalk, cross boundaries, and use access as a form of infiltration. Over time, it has become much more comfortable to maintain my peace through the mystery of self than through the widely expressed, widely available, widely shared self.
But the conversation brought up something larger in me, and in my work: the role of mystery. The tension between overexposure and visibility. The difference between being seen and being understood. The question of where authenticity actually lives when parts of ourselves remain intentionally obscured. The wonder and awe of the unknowable.
This opened a series of questions around creative practice, sharing, access, and opacity:
What do we want to make visible about the process, and what should stay private in order to preserve meaning?
In contact sheets, tracklists, identity expression, personal style, and creative work, what is shared, what is withheld, and why?
What does access look like as an aesthetic? What changes in the work when access is not an afterthought, but a generator? And what changes when access is not given?
How might limited access deepen creative practice? Writing in multiple languages without translation. Curating expression. Obscuring an image. Using shadow. Refusing the full reveal.
I am always interested in multidisciplinary approaches to whatever I am making. I want my work to be informed in prismatic ways, by literature, theory, ritual, image-making, music, embodiment, social context, and lived experience.
So as I was sitting with all of this, I was also simultaneously asked to consider how Wardrobe Rituals relates to Vacation Season. My first response was visceral: oh no, prescriptive mainstream trend strikes again!
Because “Vacation Season”, in the usual style-content machine, so easily becomes a set of hot tips. A packing list. A capsule wardrobe. A trend forecast. A color palette. A promise that if you bring the right linen set, the right sandal, the right raffia bag, you will become the kind of person who knows how to summer correctly.
But as I stayed with it, something else emerged.
The very nature of travel and vacation as threshold. We leave the architecture of our daily lives and step into a space that is, by definition, less known. Our routines loosen, our identities soften at the edges, and the self we have come to recognize becomes a little less fixed. In this way, vacation is also an encounter with mystery. Not only the mystery of a new place, culture, landscape, or language, but the mystery of who we are when removed from the structures that usually define us. Vacation is not only an escape. It can be an aperture. A temporary in-between where certainty relaxes, where we do not need to have everything figured out, and where we can practice expansion, rest, pleasure, humility, relation, and becoming.
For Wardrobe Rituals, this brings forward two threads.
The first is individual: Who am I here? What do I want to feel? What is available to me in this time away from my ordinary life? What am I releasing, inviting, softening, strengthening, or remembering?
The second is collective: Where am I going? Whose home, land, culture, labor, language, weather, history, and beauty am I entering? What exists here that is not for me? What exists here that I might be changed by? What can I receive without consuming? What can I witness without claiming?
This is where anti-colonial thought becomes necessary, even in something as seemingly simple as packing a suitcase.
Travel asks us to confront the Western fantasy that the world is here for our consumption. Vacation, especially when shaped by consumer culture, can easily become extractive: take the photo, buy the thing, wear the aesthetic, become the fantasy of the place. But a more relational approach asks something different of us. It asks us to enter as guests. To remain humble before what we do not know. To be touched by a place without trying to possess, control or be authority within it.
Glissant gives us a language for this. He writes against the demand to fully know, categorize, translate, and possess. He offers relation instead: a way of being in the world that does not require domination or total understanding. In his work, opacity is not a failure of communication. It is a right. A dignity. A protection. A form of complexity that does not need to be reduced in order to be real.
That feels especially alive to me in this season, bringing inquiry into the practice of being present to where we are going.
How does being here complicate or expand my understanding of the world?
What belongs to the people, and how do I honor the unknowing of it all?
What does it feel like to be an outsider and practice that with humility?
What is something new I might try?
What is something I might share?
Without appropriating, assimilating, or flattening, how do I become permeable to this time and place?
On the individual side, vacation can help us feel into what is shifting. Away from daily life, we may have more space for loved ones, books, water, meals, wandering, sleep, flirtation, creative practice, silence, or pleasure. We may visit places familiar or new. We may find ourselves more porous, more playful, more sensual, more reflective, more tired than we expected, more alive than we remembered.
And we can adorn ourselves as part of that practice.
If you want softness and rest, you might bring wider shapes, lighter materials, loose silhouettes, sun-faded colors, and the element of water into your adornment.
If you want play and social energy, you might reach for bright color, unexpected shapes, expressive accessories, something a little impractical, something that makes it easier to be approached or delighted.
If you want grounding, you might bring weight: a favorite ring, a sturdy sandal, a structured jacket, a scent, a familiar texture, something that reminds your body it belongs to itself wherever it goes.
If you want to be changed, you might leave room. Not just in the suitcase, but in the self. Room for an object found on the way. Room for a color you do not usually wear. Room for the version of you that only appears when the ordinary schedule loosens.
Vacation Season then, through the Wardrobe Rituals framework, is not about dressing for the fantasy of escape or the signaling of a particular status. It is about dressing for the threshold. It is about honoring the self in motion, while remembering that wherever we go, we are entering a web of relations that existed before us and will continue after us.
It is an invitation to resist the urge to understand everything. To center the parts of ourselves that want to be expressed. To preserve the parts of ourselves that do not need to be made available. To meet place and ourselves with humility.
And to connect deeply with what essayist Pico Iyer reminds us: “We travel not to move around, but to be moved.”