it's january! (🌲/🎤/💌/☃️)

in which I finally learn how to properly split firewood, singing your heart out is encouraged, and the darkest days of midwinter take their leave

🌲 I ASK EMILY TO TEACH ME HOW TO SPLIT LOGS » After three years living in the woods and with a ~winter storm warning~ fast approaching, it’s time. My housemate Emily and I go out to the barn to rummage through the rounds of maple and Doug fir that have been curing there since the ice storm almost exactly two years ago brought down tree after tree. It’s amazing how light and brittle they become in this state; it’s amazing how much of a living tree is, much like ourselves, only water.

Our splitting maul — not an axe, she explains — is a little too long for me, its added leverage reaching diminishing returns in my short-armed grip. We play with adjustments: choking up on the handle, measuring my swing from the top of the round or the foot of it, finding the right distance to pivot my stance as the heavy arc of the maul comes down. The motions are familiar; my feet think I’m playing tennis, automatically pawing at the ground with my left foot and then my right like I’m in high school and preparing to return a serve. My arms remember too, the sideways preparation to forward follow-through that lines up a solid shot. As I relearn these familiar relationships with the new weight of the maul, Emily talks about how a golf ball is not the endpoint of a swing, just a single, almost incidental point along the arcing curve of its path. It is both comforting and humbling to once again be made aware that the rules of physics are the rules of physics no matter what.

There is so much to pay attention to, and like all things with momentum, at some point you have to kind of just stop thinking and try, and trust (and usually try again). Tracking the processes of feet, arms, eyes, swing separately collapses their power and you can hear it in the impact to the round, a dull, tentative thwack that only sinks the blade edge a few centimeters into the surface. It reminds me of the same spread awareness of a partner dance, of Viewpoints training, a jam where the notes you need feel like they just appear under your fingers. And like in all of those contexts, the full expansion of it comes and it goes, always possible even in the moments it slips out of reach.

Sight the maul going up, feel the strange and temporary weightlessness as it aligns to apex, step into the swing. Bent knees, bent elbows. Pull the blade from the air, and through the round. The dried bark splits and scatters around us, unhulling the secret, tunneled mazes of beetles. Don’t aim for the heartwood, it does not want to break. Aim for the pale outer ring, the egg white to the heartwood’s yolk, and with enough precisely aimed force, the round will split itself for you.

It’s one of those experiences that already feels like a poem, so complete it almost seems foolish to try writing anything down. Yet here I am a day later, writing to all of you, back aching and hands still relearning their grip, rummaging through all these moments. The thin, dark vein of deadened pith at the center of each round. The little golden drops of sap at the ends, still beading after two years dissected and stacked to dry. The fuzzy scrawl of insect trails, the cold-hot-cold of exertion in winter air, the gentle sway of trees above us. The smooth flight of a perfect swing, and the satisfying crack as a log cleaves cleanly along its own faultlines. I don’t have a tidy conclusion here, or a single, resonant frequency to tune it all to. Some of these images may yet surface in some future poem, or maybe it will be the metaphors springing up in their wake that survive. Or maybe it was just beautiful in its ordinary way, and that also feels like enough.

(We are PREPARED!)

🎤 JUKEBOX » I’m very excited to be a part of a crack team of stretch goal writers for the upcoming Jukebox: The Karaoke Musical Tabletop Roleplaying Game by Lyla McBeath Fujiwara! It was recently featured in Dicebreaker as one of their 2024 games you should play this year, and there’s a pre-launch page up now if you’re interested in signing up for project updates. You can also learn more about the game here!

💌 THE UNDERSTUDY, THE BOWERBIRD, THE STRATEGIST, and THE MIRROR » One of my final projects of last year was creating four new character playbooks for Kay Marlow Allen’s lovely epistolary game Your Friend In Witchcraft as a part of the YFiW Game Jam! The jam will run through Feb. 8, and you can check out my playbooks + the other submissions so far here.

☃️ THE LEAVES & OTHER CAROLS » I also wrote a bunch of (largely non-denominational) carols this winter! The first one, the leaves, is up over on my Instagram, and Workshop-level Patreon members got two additional carols in the mail last month. What started as a mostly silly songwriting exercise turned into something really special, the beginnings of an evolving collection I hope to continue in the years to come.

until next time —

❤️ devan