Here at the Time Traveler’s Union, we know that time is not linear and we resist the capitalist drive towards constant productivity. And yet, we’ve managed to send you relatively timely missives for most of this year! But we don’t want you to think that this one arriving late makes it any less important. Rather, its tardiness derives from our need to spend an entire month in celebration—we needed first to live into the joyous present moment, outside of the pressure to digest and share the experience before it has fully ripened. As Earth Tenders in October, we celebrated a 20 year wedding anniversary in a holler of land that has held us for years amongst generations of elders and youngsters, coming and going. We meditated in cemeteries with long lost friends, hearing and then singing the voices of ancestors. We rejoiced. We grieved. We had so much fun.
And now we have the distinct pleasure of welcoming all you beautiful Earth Tenders to the Time Traveler’s Union; you who know how to slow down, who cook pots of stew and tend the fires, who lay your face against the damp earth and listen, who carry small seeds in cupped hands, who mend tools and collect scraps and wash dirty faces. Your devotion to what is here and now connects you far into the past and far into the future. Thank you for all your blessings.
About the creative process:
We did not change a lot about this image from how it appeared in our 2020 calendar—we just added a very lovely leafy halo around the plate. Most significantly, we changed the words. When we originally used the phrase “We got you, boo” in the first image, neither of us had done the anti-racism work we’ve done since to think about what it means to borrow words from Black vernacular, especially on artwork we make money from. While we haven’t gotten any direct feedback about it, we haven’t felt proud of it or excited to share that image again after its original calendar run. Shifting the language here feels like a small but meaningful moment of repair and recognition.
