Shepherd of the Dust Bowl
There are mild descriptions of animal death and grief below; skip this section if you’d like to avoid that.
A friend tells me they think death will be like Spring; I look at the cold lamb at my feet and I hope they’re right.
Sometimes when a lamb dies, the ewe will call for it for days, especially if she never sees the body. Other times, the ewe will reject the lamb in the hours before it’s actually gone; I’ve even seen ewes lay on her child, smothering it. I am angry at the mom who kills her baby, and I am gutted at the good mom whose lamb is now gone.
I learn that dogs will eat their owners as soon as a half hour after they die, always starting with the face. I learn that dogs look to a human’s face for emotion and response. I learn that dogs learn with their mouth.
I no longer think the sheep killing her lamb tells me anything about her grief.
There are mild descriptions of animal death and grief below; skip this section if you’d like to avoid that.
A friend tells me they think death will be like Spring; I look at the cold lamb at my feet and I hope they’re right.
Sometimes when a lamb dies, the ewe will call for it for days, especially if she never sees the body. Other times, the ewe will reject the lamb in the hours before it’s actually gone; I’ve even seen ewes lay on her child, smothering it. I am angry at the mom who kills her baby, and I am gutted at the good mom whose lamb is now gone.
I learn that dogs will eat their owners as soon as a half hour after they die, always starting with the face. I learn that dogs look to a human’s face for emotion and response. I learn that dogs learn with their mouth.
I no longer think the sheep killing her lamb tells me anything about her grief.
Hello everyone -
I started using this mailing list in a more casual way a little over a year ago, after I left tattooing full time to work outside, and eventually, with sheep. I feel really good about that decision now that it's played out. But a little over a year ago, I was pretty unmoored; I was doing a lambing internship at a farm that was pretty awful, weathering the winter with no cell service, spotty wifi, and spottier heat. I was needing changes and overcorrecting, following a monastic impulse in completely misguided ways. But if you read this mailing list you know that already, and you also know that I love my work now, and that I tattoo sometimes still, and am finding a happy middle on the other side. So why am I in your email talking about this again?
I’ve been writing a lot more the last few years, with some lofty plans for The Book That I Will Write That Will Say Everything I Want To Say- which is an awful way to make anything and finish it. Thankfully I was given a handmade book by a friend this year, and something about holding that beautiful thing just made me feel like I had to make something immediately. So, I unearthed this piece of writing I made last spring while I was lambing and having an awful time, sat down with it again, and in the span of a week I’d hand drawn every page. I never finish anything that fast. I realized while working on it that I was doing all this the exact same week I’d written it a year ago, everything a circle.
It’s short and simple; it doesn’t say everything. It’s a grief book, working through a very specific time when I was putting my hands on a lot of life and death. It feels put to bed now.
I’d like to make many more books, that say many more things, until maybe together they all say almost everything. But for now I have this one for you: Shepherd of the Dust Bowl. Thirty-two pages, full color printed (I promise it’s not colorful), sewn binding, hand-drawn full page spreads, and nice paper that I picked from a big book of all the nice papers. It’s like a dressed up zine.
I’m doing preorders until May 17th, which you can find here. It’s possible I’ll have some for sale after, but I can’t guarantee it, so this is the way if you want one. I’ll start shipping them in June, once they’re printed and bound.
The excerpt below gives you an idea of what’s in it, but just a slice.
In the meantime, I’m working outside again, in a much better place, still with sheep who I love very much. I’ll update this again by the fall, when I start announcing tattooing guest spots again for the winter, and maybe sooner if I finally finish the music I’ve been working on, or maybe I’ll just have something to say. Thanks for being here.
Wishing you all an easy end of spring,
Jude
the bath rings like a bell
There are days the lake is an ocean, white capped and cold. I walk at the edge of the trucked-in sand and hold myself against the wind, dodging the rolling water at my feet. What I see are seiches, standing waves that form in a contained body of water. It’s not a tide or a weather event, just movement; the physics are the same in Lake Michigan as they are in my bathtub.
There is an initial force, my hand or wind or the pressure from a storm system, which disturbs the water. They call the crest and basin that form harmonics. A high and low point in sync, the seiche maintains equilibrium in the water. It holds the energy from displacement; the lake is a system in balance.
CHICAGO
BOOKING 3/21 and 3/23
There are days the lake is an ocean, white capped and cold. I walk at the edge of the trucked-in sand and hold myself against the wind, dodging the rolling water at my feet. What I see are seiches, standing waves that form in a contained body of water. It’s not a tide or a weather event, just movement; the physics are the same in Lake Michigan as they are in my bathtub.
There is an initial force, my hand or wind or the pressure from a storm system, which disturbs the water. They call the crest and basin that form harmonics. A high and low point in sync, the seiche maintains equilibrium in the water. It holds the energy from displacement; the lake is a system in balance.
The impulse from the initial force travels across the entire lake and is then reflected back, generating interference as it travels. Repeated reflections continually produce standing waves, resonating, slowly losing height and depth, and finally dissipating.
In a lake as large as this one, you don’t see all that when you’re standing on the shore. You see the chaos of hundreds of impulses reflected, reflecting one another, bounding and pulsing. The waves are harmonics and the lake is dissonance.
The chaos maintains itself with a steadiness, ultimately showing itself to me as the gentle wave lapping on the beach, rhythmic and soft.
Seiches caused by pressure will mimic a tide. The massive wave will take the entire length of the lake, resonating over and over, slow and unmovable.
When I sit by the shore I can see the rise and fall as neutral. When the shoreline pulls away, I know it will come back. But in the thick of it, body in the water, my head rings. I hurl myself at each crest. The waves are standing, the body is vast, and all I can do is tread water.
Some days I want to hold the grief in my hand. I think if I could it would make sense, this small pool. I’d stare at it and I’d understand it, hold it, feel it, this thing born from me. Some days I get close, cupping it in my palms before it slips through my fingers, hitting the surface and spreading itself out again farther than I can follow. I don’t recognize it when it comes bounding back to me.
And then, spring comes. Warm, high pressure air systems quiet each seiche, the lake finally rocks itself still.
If I try, I can float- just barely. The top half of my body seems to hang by a thread. I clench my muscles and sink like a rock. I float, holding my breath. The water holds my weight.
A cycle begins and ends. I forget and I remember. I swim in the white capped water like it can’t hold me, like I can fight my way out of it all. Like clockwork I’m reminded, this is it. All of it.
This basin of echoes, cup of sound, these waves loud and long. I feel each seiche start to crest and fall beneath me; I let it. I know I’ll forget, become the swimmer again. The cycles are many and layered.
There’s nothing to do but let it ring.
Books are open for a few days in Chicago, for the final leg of this little winter series- more info through the booking link below.
I will only be tattooing water abstracts here. These are ideally arm and leg placements, fully wrapping, with heavy areas of black and some repeating elements. We’ll have a video consultation beforehand and I’ll come prepared with some designs for us based on that to create a piece with together. Ideally you are comfortable with freehanding. This piece, though much larger, is an inspiration and starting place for these.
You’re receiving this email because you’re on my Chicago specific mailing list from forever ago- if that no longer applies, feel free to remove yourself or rejoin the general/not-place-specific mailing list through my website! This will be my last email for a little while I think, so I promise it’s not spammy <3
-Jude
all things burn.
Not all things burn to dust.
Charcoal is formed through incomplete combustion. The air is starved of oxygen, through close quarters and high heat. This can occur naturally or by force; what matters is that all water and volatile compounds are released, risen, invisible to us except through flame. What’s left behind is nearly pure carbon. Charcoal is matter unmade, life in its earliest form.
How have you learned to be undone?
Not all things burn to dust.
Charcoal is formed through incomplete combustion. The air is starved of oxygen, through close quarters and high heat. This can occur naturally or by force; what matters is that all water and volatile compounds are released, risen, invisible to us except through flame. What’s left behind is nearly pure carbon. Charcoal is matter unmade, life in its earliest form.
How have you learned to be undone?
Some things burn just because they can, and some things are long overdue. I’ve had more of the second; I had to stand on the blackened ground a thousand times over before I started to learn not to hold so tight, that its exhausting to live with hands clutched. That less is destroyed if I let things burn when they need to.
It takes a lifetime to face the flame with open arms.
_
Charcoal isn’t the fire; it’s the moment after. Whatever you were building, chasing, or becoming is gone. There is humility in remembering you can be destroyed like that. And there’s a mania in realizing that once again, you’re still standing. There you find yourself, suspended in the empty space, called to move forward in surrender. To choose to say yes, again, to a world where everything can burn.
So we learn to be undone. We learn to love the space between, the call to do it again. We learn to watch and trust the ground and its stubborn path to life; all things burn, but even the charred land itself is temporary.
There is no return to what you were. It’s just a layer now; it will turn itself over to the subconscious, the soil more fertile than it was. But in this moment everything is quiet. All things are ash and you are flesh. Your breath catches. Your blood flows.
What we make is impermanent. As are we and the places we live, forever shifting; here we are in grief and awe.
I will only be tattooing charcoal abstracts at these locations. I will have a book of predesigned abstracts for us to choose from. From there, we can tattoo one as is, or use it as a basis for freehand expansion.
Charcoal abstractions can take many forms. They can be oriented more as a barren landscape, circular shapes, long and sprawling, dark and dense. I’ve assembled a few examples here, but I hope to expand beyond these with you.. We can discuss as many specifics of size and placement as you’d like beforehand, or leave it open.
I realize most of my mailing list may be located on the east coast, so I apologize if this is irrelevant to you. I don’t actually know, but regardless, I thought it might be nice to send each from this winter series (this is 2 of 3) over email since they’re somewhat writing oriented. I won’t have much for you during the warm seasons, so I promise I won't be spamming you.
Booking and all other information can be found via the links below.
-Jude
f e c u n d i t y
Crane flies metamorphose like any butterfly: egg, larva, pupa, sky.
As larvae, they live near water. They feed on rotting plant matter in the soil of the bank. They chew the wet ground into oblivion, releasing it once it becomes small enough for soil microbes to finish off. They consume and excrete, tiny engines of decomposition in the fecund earth. A crane fly larva, the leatherjacket, may live like this for as long as three years.
Then, in the lazy heat of late August, they burst forth from their pupa and emerge as crane flies. There may be thousands at a time fleeing the ground.
They have ten days to find a mate, lay all their eggs, and die.
BALTIMORE
12/12 and 12/15
NEW HAVEN
12/19 to 12/22
Crane flies metamorphose like any butterfly: egg, larva, pupa, sky.
As larvae, they live near water. They feed on rotting plant matter in the soil of the bank. They chew the wet ground into oblivion, releasing it once it becomes small enough for soil microbes to finish off. They consume and excrete, tiny engines of decomposition in the fecund earth. A crane fly larva, the leatherjacket, may live like this for as long as three years.
Then, in the lazy heat of late August, they burst forth from their pupa and emerge as crane flies. There may be thousands at a time fleeing the ground.
They have ten days to find a mate, lay all their eggs, and die.
It's a frenzy; adult crane flies don’t eat, they don’t even have mouths to try. All they have is the energy that was carefully stored by their larval body; there against the clock they meet.
The mating rituals are clumsy and gorgeous. Male crane flies will link legs to form a lace-like cloud in midair, hoping to catch the attention of a mate. Their long bodies join and break, an infinite kaleidoscope of legs and wings. Twigs and glass.
The female will go on to lay as many as four hundred eggs in a single day. And then, once their work is through, the entire surviving remains of the generation may seem to die nearly at once, littering the ground, strewn.
When I find myself caught in cycles I am a larva. My shame is wet and rotting; I churn it through my body, breaking it down in the hope that when it becomes so small that I can no longer see it, it may become the burden of the ground. But there is always more work to be done. What looks like forever is a square foot of ground and my routine is rote and sunken. That’s what I can’t stomach; take me to the sky.
I envy the crane fly for being born not once but three times. I do my best when I know something new is coming. They used to think a metamorphosing insect’s brain turned to soup in the pupa. In this theory the old body would die. The pupa would completely digest its carcass in order to form the new adult insect, retaining nothing of what it was before. But it’s not true- they started shocking butterflies, and we learned that they remember pain. The nervous system remains, and some things don’t change.
There’s a heaven in taking flight and throwing a body to the wind. There’s something to the hurried frenzy of it all. Yes, it says, you never have to come back down. You’re floating to the ceiling light, fucking on the window screen, running a body until it quits. You are sky and legs, built to tumble, silent and so free.
But there is no mouth to feed that kind of pleasure.
I am told when you dream of an airplane that it denotes the spiritual realm; it’s unnatural for us to be above it all. When I dream I’m on a plane it always ends crashing back to earth. I’m bruised but never harmed, just returned, shocked and terrified. I always think the flight will last, never ready for the landing. I think of the crane fly caught in my window screen, flying until it wasn’t. I think of the littered ground.
I imagine myself as the crane fly and I am looking at the ground for the first time from the sky- I see the fertile earth, the milkweed and the water plantain. I see the beaver and the trout. I see the river bank where the eggs are lain and the earth is broken. I see the river run. I wonder why I spent all those years looking up.
The crane fly is a moment, ten days in a long life of dirt and toil. What is it to let the mundane be enough? To savor the slow decay and my place in it, to settle into the years. To keep the show running just for the sake of it. To know that I may serve that which I can’t see.
In the end, a larva doesn’t leave behind a body, it is risen. I cannot earn or demand the sky.
The crane fly is to be born when you least expect it. It’s finding yourself on the plane. It’s remembering pain. It’s continuing the cycle, crashing to the ground, grinning ear to ear.
How sweet it is to be returned.
As you may have guessed, I will only be tattooing crane flies in these locations, and minimally as I am just doing a few small guest spots this winter. They will be freehanded with you the day of your appointment, with as many specifics discussed beforehand as needed. As always, this is a collaborative design process- while we are working within a limited motif, you can consider form, size, and placement fair game.
Booking and all other information can be found via the links below.
Thank you. I am so glad to be back in this way.
-Jude
Out Like a Lamb
Hi everyone,
We are once again finding ourselves in Spring, which feels like the right occasion to finally dust off this mailing list and put it to use. I hope you are feeling born too.
I can say that word more honestly now, in all its beautiful and disgusting truth. I’ve spent the beginning of this year at a seasonal lambing job, helping lambs be born, and trying to keep the born lambs alive. I talk about this a bit below, so content advisory for brief mentions of animal death- nothing graphic.
Hi everyone,
We are once again finding ourselves in Spring, which feels like the right occasion to finally dust off this mailing list and put it to use. I hope you are feeling born too.
I can say that word more honestly now, in all its beautiful and disgusting truth. I’ve spent the beginning of this year at a seasonal lambing job, helping lambs be born, and trying to keep the born lambs alive. I talk about this a bit below, so content advisory for brief mentions of animal death- nothing graphic.
Much of the work I’ve made in the last few years has been working through birth and death as inextricable. I find comfort in thinking of them as the same process, occurring simultaneously and constantly; being created always feels like dying, and endings feed new birth with all they were before.
I decided that if I were taking outdoor seasonal jobs now, to lamb would be honest; I’ve only ever been a passive observer of death, and never birth. I understood both processes so deeply as they worked in my own head, through spirituality and suicidality and wonder and grief. Death of old selves and birth of others. But I’d never witnessed in their whole truth the actual physical experiences that are depicted in much of the visual art I make.
So, I went to the mountains. I’ve been feeling fiercely private about it all, partially because I cherish being able to do that, but mostly because it's been deeply exhausting and often full of grief. To work with animals assisting in birth is the most beautiful and intimate thing, and to do so in capitalism can be the most gruesome twist. I haven’t felt ready to talk about it, especially not online. So for now, it’s just me and the lambs, and now you and this newsletter.
I still believe birth is death; it’s the most fragile shuddering thing. It’s disgusting and so incredibly wet and none of it makes sense, but then it works and you’re holding this small and sneezing thing. Or it doesn’t work; sometimes they die, there for a second, and then not.
And there’s a larger in-between space than I realized. Yesterday I found a lamb that I was sure was dead, and after pressing on his tiny chest in an imitation of CPR he sputtered back to life, breathy and surprised. I don’t know what it means yet to be the hand in the grey, pulling them back. But I find myself trying to wake in the morning with the same awe and fervor, surprised and pulled.
In its whole, my life right now is a mirror; after each long workday I find myself returning to dead and abandoned music and writing projects, ever grateful for the process of revival.
This is a long newsletter; I really didn’t know how to begin without explaining what the hell I’ve been doing and give some kind of context for my life outside of tattooing now. I’m sending it to both Chicago and Northeast mailing lists, since I figure it’s not anything place based and its possible many people think I moved to Chicago (not quite yet, and not off the table). But future emails will be shorter, infrequent, and ideally more writing rather than updates; I look to geniuses Seven and Rex, for the beautiful things they write each month in their booking emails, as something to aspire to.
My one actual work related update is that I also made a new set of prints, which you can find here. I have a hard time with all of the logistics involved in selling and actually shipping prints, so I’m excited to say all of that will be done by someone else who is good at it. They’re made with archival ink on really nice rag paper, which is also much better than I could manage at home with my current setup. I’m deeply proud of these as a diptych.
Anyways, sometimes birth doesn’t stick, and death can fool you. I’ve been reflecting, having put tattooing work to rest for now to build a different kind of life, and finding acceptance that I’ll reach my hand into the grey later when its time. Only on a guest spot basis and very infrequently, different from how I’ve ever done it, but it's something I look forward to. I’m excited to live this life more slowly, in years instead of minutes.
For now, I’ll be returning to western mass this season to work as a shepherd, grazing sheep at solar arrays (it is the funniest job I could think of having been raised Catholic, and much less intense/more restorative than lambing). I’ll work toward finishing a fuller and more multidisciplinary body of work, and I’ll be continuing to build this life.
All my best as we thaw,
Briar
letters
This is an archive of letters I’ve sent through my mailing list. You can join that here.