BELOVED STRANGERS

Feb 6

Written By Jocelyn (Jo) Mosser & Corina Dross

On behalf of the Time Travelers Union, we welcome all Beloved Strangers—you who move as strangers in a strange land, you who hold strangeness with yourself, you who feel like strangers where you grew up, you who tend your deep strangeness and let it flower like the ghost orchid or night-blooming cereus.

We are fortified by your profound contribution to the collective. You have learned to collapse time to bring together two distinct moments of encounter: the time when the other is a stranger, and the time when that stranger becomes beloved.

Time is hyper local; the only domain in which it exists at all is within orbs of intimacy. The farther we get from each other, the less meaningful it becomes to talk about time—or anything—as though it is a shared reality. But you hold the threads of what is strange and what is beloved, knowing when the time in between gives way to nearly nothing, we can live within a timespace where every stranger is beloved.

From Jo’S recent encounter

A few minutes after—somewhat jokingly—asking for a sign as to whether or not I should commit to a 2-year spiritual accompaniment program, a screech owl flew hard into my glass front door. I went outside and saw a dazed ball of brown feathers. I scooped the owl into fireglove-covered hands and reassured them that they would come to no more harm.

For a few minutes, or maybe much longer, we were silent and stared into each other’s eyes. I had no idea what this experience was like for the owl, but I was deeply impacted. Eventually, the owl’s gaze changed. They became more alert, looked around, and flew away. A week later I felt another, much gentler, thump on the window next to where I was writing and saw the same owl, unhurt this time, sitting in the snow and looking around. They seemed content to share glances with me through the window before flying off. And then, just yesterday, I heard their characteristic whinny in the broad daylight, from a tree outside my studio.

It’s hard not to draw meaning from these encounters, but that does not make the owl a symbol. This owl is an individual. Like all individuals, they are opaque and sovereign. May we remember that we are each wild, unknowable creatures who continue to risk moments of intimacy across vast differences.

About the Image

This is a vulnerable calendar. In it, we are going back and repairing our mistakes. The original image this one is based on was perhaps our biggest mistake as artists. Feeling the pressure of an impending deadline, we found a photo online that captured our imagination but could not find the photographer’s information to ask for permission to paint it. Because it showed up in so many places on the internet, all without any provenance or a breadcrumb trail back to the original artist, we assumed it was fair to use it for our source material.

We painted the owl for 2022’s Beloved Stranger calendar. Once the calendar was in print, we got a message from the photographer, Ryan Barbour, who was justifiably upset to have their photo used as a reference without credit, permission, or compensation. We apologized and worked out an arrangement with Ryan, who was incredibly generous and understanding about this situation.

It was a powerful lesson for us. That calendar was about reaching for strangers and we hadn’t fully respected the human who was behind this image floating around the internet because we didn’t know who they were. We had participated in a culture of casual theft that has now become encoded in AI models that are stealing from all of us who have ever posted our original images online.

In repainting this image, we kept the original chicory flowers we had painted from our own references, and paid for a new owl photo to paint from. And we’d still love to shout out Ryan Barbour’s incredible photography. You can find him at: @talonDNA on Twitter/x, @rypedx on Instagram, and as Ryan Barbour on Facebook.