On cycles, creation, and the practice of becoming.
Nothing exists in isolation.
Nothing returns unchanged.
The end of 2026 is fermenting. We break down. We release. Something is decomposing, and something else is being born. The ooze of life surrounds us, and the darkness creeps ever present to hold us. There is a birth just around the corner. Perhaps many births, happening all at once.
I'm curious about this cycle. About life as a continuous process of becoming. Its relentless and tender insistence that we begin again and again and again. We do not arrive. We do not depart. And yet, we are always moving.
There is excavation and momentum. Decay and emergence. We turn with the wheel of the year, moving through space and time, carrying what came before us while reaching toward what has yet to take form. We are never entirely new. We are never entirely the same.
I've been thinking about this a lot in Wardrobe Rituals. About the rituals we create amongst the mundane, the ways we move through change, and the strange familiarity of returning to what appears to be the beginning.
We often begin with memory. With what we carry. The objects, textures, stories, and sensations that connect us to who we have been. We reach backward, not to remain there, but to understand the material from which we are made. Our past, present, and future selves are not separate beings. They are in conversation, constantly informing and reshaping one another.
And when we reach the end of a workshop, a ritual, or a season together, we return. We meet the selves who first arrived. We witness what has moved, what has softened, what has emerged. We greet the parts of ourselves still in process, still reaching, still becoming. The beginning is no longer the beginning.
I think about a piece of clothing that has sat untouched in my closet for years. One day, I rediscover it. Perhaps I have changed enough to see it differently. Perhaps it finally meets a version of me that didn't exist when I first brought it home. Or perhaps it leaves me. It passes into another person's hands, onto another body. Its fabric stretched by my shape, its fibers carrying traces of my skin, my movement, my life. Now it becomes part of someone else's story. The material continues, transformed by each encounter. There is a threshold in this exchange. A passing between bodies, histories, and possibilities.
The material world and me. Me as part of the material world. Nothing exists in isolation.
Lately, the ouroboros keeps finding me. The serpent consuming its own tail, endlessly creating and uncreating itself. I've been thinking about it alongside the golden spiral, mycelium, and now, the rings of a tree. Each offers a different way of understanding our interconnectedness, our capacity for growth, and the continuous process of becoming.
Perhaps becoming is less like walking a path and more like the rings of a tree. We do not leave ourselves behind as we grow. We accumulate. We expand. We carry the marks of seasons, of abundance and scarcity, of injury and repair. Each ring holds what came before, while making room for what comes next.
We are not becoming in order to arrive somewhere. We are becoming because we are alive.
I think this is what Wardrobe Rituals is reaching toward. Style is our medium. The material and physical reality of our lives is our playground. Our bodies, our clothing, the objects we carry, the daily practice of getting dressed. These are places where memory, identity, desire, and possibility meet.
I'm working on a model to articulate these interconnected aspects of Wardrobe Rituals. Not a linear path or a prescribed journey, but something living. A way of understanding the relationship between memory, creation, movement, and return. A practice of noticing, tending, and participating in our own growth.
As I reflect on the distance between 2025 and now, I can feel how much has changed, and how much has circled back. Ideas I thought I'd left behind have returned in different forms. Things once impossible have become ordinary. Things once inevitable have dissolved. I am beginning again, but not from nothing.
We carry it all. The decay, the emergence, the experiments, the memories. The clothing that no longer fits and the pieces we can't bear to release. The selves we have been, the ones we are, and the ones still taking shape.
We are material. We are makers. We are the process. We remember. We imagine. We create. We return to do it again. But nothing returns unchanged.