The Cosmos Has Seasons
The Cosmos Has Seasons
Mycelial Sankofa, Seasonal Ecology + the Creative Year
The first draft of The Afroscape is done.
I wrote it in about ninety days.
Not because books should be written quickly. Not because speed proves anything about the quality of the work. But because when I finally sat down to write it, there was already so much there. Years of doing hair. Years of being inside Black hair systems. Cosmetology. My own Afro. Other people’s crowns. The body. Texture. Water. Survival. What I knew had somewhere to go, and for that season, the book moved fast.
But a first draft is not a finished book.
Books have seasons too.
They move through drafts and returns. Tings get cut. Tings get expanded. Language changes because the person writing it has changed. Sometimes you discover that what you understood when you wrote the first sentence has become much larger by the time you return to it.
That is where The Afroscape is now.
The last time I really worked inside the manuscript was Hom(e)ie Summer Camp. Since then, I have been within the Cosmos.
The Afro ABCs.
Mycelial Sankofa.
Cannabis.
Water.
Hair.
Movement.
Material practice.
The body.
The website.
The archive.
The infrastructure holding all of it.
And none of this is separate from the book.
The Afro ABCs are literally becoming a flash-card companion to The Afroscape Cartography: A Field Guide to Afro Hair as Communal Practice. Mycelial Sankofa has given me language for relationships I was already tracing but had not yet named this precisely. The Cosmos has become capable of holding connections that were only fragments when I wrote that first draft.
So the book has not stopped growing.
It has been growing everywhere except inside its own file.
That distinction matters.
Because I had started asking myself why I wasn’t opening the manuscript. I can spend hours building an essay, making graphics, restructuring a page, following some new connection through the Cosmos. I can feel The Afroscape inside much of that work. But I have not felt called to sit down, open the document and begin another sustained editorial pass.
For a while, I treated that as a question I needed to solve.
Why aren’t I getting back to the book?
But that question assumes the file is where the book is happening.
It isn’t.
Right now, I am gathering what the next version will know.
And once I understood that, the question changed.
I am not avoiding the book.
It isn’t book season yet.
Spring Is the New Year
I have never understood January as the beginning.
January is dark.
January is cold.
January is underground.
The trees are not standing outside screaming about their quarterly goals.
The soil is not panicking because nothing has bloomed.
And still, something is happening.
I have spent enough time paying attention to bodies, plants, fungi, water, planets, hair, cannabis and my own nervous system to know that visible activity is not the only evidence of life.
Spring makes more sense to me as a new year.
And Bespokecurry has already been telling me this.
March has become the annual relaunch of the website. It is when I return to the architecture, look at what survived, notice what changed underground and decide what is ready to emerge.
I didn’t sit down and manufacture that rhythm from a productivity calendar.
It developed.
The organism told me.
Spring is emergence.
Not beginning from nothing.
Return with evidence of winter.
The watas thaw.
Summer Expands
Summer has its own intelligence.
Things stretch.
There is more light.
More wandering.
More experimentation.
More capacity for the work to move outward.
Summer can hold abundance.
It can hold Hom(e)ie Summer Camp.
It can hold photographs and archives and ridiculous ideas that suddenly need bodies.
It can hold me following a current farther than I expected because there is enough daylight—literal and otherwise—to see where it goes.
That does not mean summer is infinitely productive.
Abundance is not extraction.
A garden producing fruit does not mean you stand over it demanding another tomato.
Summer is simply a season when expansion can make ecological sense.
So I let the Cosmos expand.
The watas expand in an around me.
We float.
Autumn Is Compost
This is where I am now.
And I understand it differently than I did even a few weeks ago.
I thought I needed to get back to the book.
My body kept saying something else.
There were still structures that needed to be built.
Not more and more and more content.
Infrastructure.
The website needed to become legible as the world I had actually built.
Old language needed to come down.
Names needed to become accurate.
The planets needed clearer relationships.
The weekly Knewsletter needed its rhythm.
The Afro ABCs needed an architecture.
Observatory needed an architecture.
The visual languages needed enough specificity that Black Minimal Riso could remain Black Minimal Riso without every image becoming the same image.
Mycelial Sankofa needed language.
The Wings needed to stop functioning like a room where completed essays went to disappear.
And suddenly old work began talking to new work.
The Mind Is an Ecosystem already knew tings before I had the current language for Mycelial Sankofa.
Older essays could be reread without pretending the person who wrote them possessed language they did not yet have.
Cannabis notes sitting in the archive could become field notes now—not because I need more content, but because the observations have been accumulating.
An old organism can feed a new organism without being destroyed in the process.
That is compost.
Compost is not trash.
Compost is not failure.
Compost is not what remains because the important season is over.
It is decomposition becoming infrastructure.
Autumn asks:
What already grew?
What is finished?
What needs to circulate?
What needs to break down?
What has become newly legible because something else now exists beside it?
What can return to the soil?
What needs to be left the fuck alone?
That is different from spring.
And I cannot demand spring behavior from a autumnal body.
Mycelium Does Not Perform the Same Labor All Year
This is also where Mycelial Sankofa gives me another way to understand the year.
Mycelium does not need the forest to look the same in every season in order for the network to remain alive.
What happens aboveground changes.
Leaves emerge, expand, fall and decompose. Fruiting bodies appear under particular conditions and disappear again. Organic material returns to the soil. Moisture changes. Temperature changes. Available nutrients change. Relationships among roots, fungi, microbes, water and decomposing matter keep changing with them.
And underneath all of that visible change, fungal life continues negotiating its conditions.
That matters to me because we tend to recognize the mushroom.
The fruiting body.
The visible event.
The ting that pushed through the surface far enough for us to point at it and say:
There. Something happened.
But the mushroom is not the whole organism.
And publication is not the whole practice.
That distinction has become essential to how I understand Bespokecurry.
An essay going live is a fruiting body.
An Afro ABCs letter arriving on Wednesday is a fruiting body.
An Observatory transmission is a fruiting body.
A graphic, a Knewsletter, a finished book, a social post—these are visible expressions produced by a much larger network of relationships.
But Mycelial Sankofa asks me to pay attention to what made the fruiting possible.
The archive.
The body.
Memory.
Movement.
Reading.
Water.
Cannabis.
Fungi.
Old photographs.
Unfinished drafts.
Conversations between essays written years apart.
A sentence that sits dormant until another piece of language finally reaches it.
An idea decomposing long enough to become usable material for something I could not have made when I first encountered it.
This is why the Wings matter.
This is why The Mind Is an Ecosystem can speak to work I am developing now without needing to be rewritten into evidence that I always knew what I know today.
The older organism remains where it grew.
The network reaches it again.
A relationship becomes visible.
Something circulates.
Something decomposes.
Something feeds something else.
Something fruits.
That is Mycelial Sankofa as editorial practice.
It is not simply returning to the past.
It is recognizing that what came before remains material in a living network—and that return can create conditions for another form of life without requiring the original organism to become something it was not.
And mycelium makes another part of this clear:
the network does not owe us fruiting bodies all year.
Neither does Bespokecurry.
Spring — Fruiting Is Possible Again
Spring is not creation from nothing.
The ground arrives carrying winter.
Moisture shifts.
Temperature shifts.
Dormant and underground activity meets new conditions.
What has been storing, decomposing, exchanging and reorganizing can begin producing visible life again.
That is why March makes sense as the Bespokecurry New Year.
It is also my birth month.
The annual relaunch is not me restarting the Cosmos.
It is emergence from an existing network.
Whatever I edited in winter comes with me.
Whatever my body learned comes with me.
Whatever decomposed in fall comes with me.
Whatever I stopped forcing comes with me.
Spring makes some of that underground activity visible.
Summer — The Network Expands
Summer allows greater outward activity.
More growth.
More contact.
More experimentation.
More fruiting.
More opportunities for one part of the Cosmos to encounter another and form relationships I could not have planned beforehand.
But even abundance has conditions.
Mycelium does not expand because someone wrote Q3 GROWTH TARGET on the forest floor.
Expansion happens because the surrounding ecology can support expansion.
That is the distinction I want to preserve in my own practice.
Summer abundance does not grant me permission to extract indefinitely from my body.
The terrain still leads.
Fall — What Grew Becomes Material
Then comes decomposition.
The leaf falling from the tree is not the ecosystem losing productivity.
It is becoming available differently.
This may be the season where Mycelial Sankofa becomes most obvious to me.
Fall is when I can look across what Bespokecurry has produced and ask what still has nutrients inside it.
An essay sitting In the Wings.
A strain note written months ago.
An old photograph.
A framework whose language has changed.
A piece I finished but never circulated.
A thought I could feel years before I could name it.
Not everything needs to become another new essay.
Some tings need to be brought into circulation.
Some need to be reread.
Some need to remain historical organisms while developing new constellations around them.
Some need to decompose completely and feed work whose eventual form I cannot see yet.
Compost is circulation too.
Winter — The Network Remains Alive Underground
And then winter.
Less fruiting does not mean less life.
This is the part capitalism has made difficult to recognize because it trains us to measure the organism by what appears aboveground.
But winter changes where I need to look.
January can be quiet on the website while Bespokecurry remains intensely alive.
The letters already prepared can continue appearing like stored fruiting bodies from another season.
Meanwhile, my labor moves underground.
Into The Afroscape.
Into my body.
Into movement.
Into reading.
Into integration.
Into whatever needs sustained attention without also needing to become public.
Mycelial Sankofa helps me understand that this is not a disruption of the Bespokecurry flow.
This is the Bespokecurry flow.
The visible Cosmos and the underground Cosmos do not have to operate at maximum capacity simultaneously.
Sometimes the network needs to extend.
Sometimes it needs to fruit.
Sometimes it needs to metabolize what has fallen.
Sometimes it needs to survive cold conditions without producing anything that somebody standing aboveground would recognize as progress.
And because spring eventually returns, winter does not need to pretend to be spring.
That may be the most important part.
I do not need to manufacture emergence during hibernation because I am afraid people will think the organism died.
The network knows it is still alive.
Winter Goes Underground
I already know January is going to be quiet.
I want it to be.
The Bespokecurry website is going on holiday.
Not because the Cosmos is closing.
Because I am changing where I am working inside it.
There will probably still be letters moving through the website. By then, I will have spent months learning their structure. If I can prepare the remaining letters without turning December into a factory, they can be scheduled.
Stored energy.
The motor can keep running while I am away from the driver’s seat.
But I do not want to spend January producing essays for the website.
I don’t want to be packaging pages.
I don’t want to be making graphics because Tuesday came again.
I don’t want to spend winter pretending that my body cannot tell the difference between January and June.
Winter is when I naturally move toward my body.
Movement.
Strength.
Repetition.
Interior work.
And this winter, I will move back inside The Afroscape.
Not because January 1 has arrived and I have resolved to finally finish my book.
Fuck that.
Because by then, the infrastructure I have been building will be able to hold itself for a little while.
The public Cosmos can become quieter.
And I can go underground with the manuscript.
That is not leaving the work.
That is where the work will be.
Hibernation Is Not Disappearance
I think capitalism has made us suspicious of dormancy.
If there is no new post, where are you?
If there is no new product, what are you making?
If nobody can see the labor, did you work?
If the numbers stop climbing, are you still growing?
But fungi have already taught me better than that.
So has hair.
So has water.
So has my body.
Life does not have to constantly announce itself to remain alive.
There are periods when intervention is useful.
There are periods when the relationship changes because I stop intervening.
There are periods when the most important work is integration.
There are periods when tending means doing less.
There are periods when consuming more does not deepen the relationship.
There are periods when the root system needs what the flower was getting.
Hibernation is not the absence of practice.
It is a practice with a different location.
The Body Is in the Calendar
This may be the part I have been trying to understand all along.
I am not managing a content ecosystem from outside of it.
My body is inside the system.
If Bespokecurry is ecological practice, then my capacity cannot be treated as an inconvenience to the publishing schedule.
My movement practice is not what I do when the work is finished.
Rest is not what remains after production.
The manuscript is not competing with the website.
The website is not competing with my body.
These are different organisms sharing water.
Sometimes one needs more.
Sometimes another goes quiet.
Sometimes something fruits.
Sometimes something decomposes.
Sometimes the appropriate intervention is attention.
Sometimes the appropriate intervention is distance.
Sometimes the appropriate intervention is nothing.
The calendar has to be able to hold all of that.
◉)) I Hear Tings — Aural World
“Seasons of Love” — Rent
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.
The song asks how we measure a year.
That question hits differently when I think about the Cosmos.
Because I do not want to measure a year only by how much I produced inside it.
How many essays.
How many letters.
How many graphics.
How many people arrived.
How many subscribers stayed.
How many times I managed to make myself visible.
I want another measurement.
What emerged?
What expanded?
What composted?
What went underground?
What returned?
What did my body know before my calendar did?
What became possible because I stopped?
What was still alive when nobody could see it?
A Cosmos With a Year
So this is becoming part of the architecture.
Spring is the new year.
Spring emerges.
Summer expands.
Summer abounds.
Fall composts.
Fall returns material to relationship.
Winter hibernates.
Winter goes underground.
And then spring does not start us over.
It brings us back carrying what happened in the dark.
That is how Bespokecurry moves.
Not twelve months of identical output.
Not an endless feed demanding proof that I am still here.
Not productivity wearing ecology as an aesthetic.
An actual ecology.
One capable of abundance.
One capable of decomposition.
One capable of dormancy.
One capable of return.
The Cosmos has seasons.
So do I.
The Cosmos Has Seasons
Cosmos Watershed
This essay extends Mycelial Sankofa from a methodology of return into a methodology of time. By looking at mycelium, fruiting, decomposition, dormancy, embodiment, and seasonal change, it asks what happens when Bespokecurry stops expecting every part of the Cosmos to remain visibly productive throughout the year. Spring becomes emergence, summer expansion, fall compost, and winter hibernation—not as metaphor layered over the work, but as an ecological structure for how the website, body, archive, letters, and The Afroscape circulate energy differently across the year.
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | Seasonal Ecology as Creative Infrastructure |
Relationship | Mycelial Sankofa, embodiment, seasonal astrology, creative labor, manuscript practice |
Companion | The Mind Is an Ecosystem |
Origin | Recognizing that the body had not returned fully to The Afroscape because the Cosmos was still completing its public infrastructure. |
Expansion | Extends Mycelial Sankofa into the seasonal metabolism of Bespokecurry: emergence, expansion, compost, hibernation, and return. |
Application | Invites creative practice to change metabolic rate with season rather than demanding identical public output throughout the year. |
Lineage | Mycelium, decomposition, seasonal ecology, embodiment, astrology, manuscript practice, Black ecological thought, creative dormancy. |
Counter Currents | Constant visibility, year-round productivity, urgency, content extraction, artificial growth cycles, treating dormancy as failure. |
Cosmos Coordinates
Field | Entry |
Planetary Body | The Wata(ring) W(hole) |
Planet of Origin | Mycelial Sankofa |
Primary Water | Tidal Water |
Secondary Water | Deep Water |
Movement | Moving between emergence, expansion, decomposition, dormancy, and return without demanding one permanent state. |
Portal | Seasonal flow as an ecological structure for creative practice. |
Primary Technology | Mycelial observation, embodiment, seasonal attunement, archival circulation, rest. |
Cosmological Function | Establishes seasonal metabolism as part of the operating architecture of the Bespokecurry Cosmos. |
Core Inquiry | What changes when creative work is allowed to have seasons? |
Threshold | Recognizing that reduced visibility does not mean reduced life. |
Black Ecological Orientation | Refuses extractive productivity models by treating rest, decomposition, embodiment, circulation, and return as necessary ecological labor. |
Calabash Relationship | What is gathered during one season can be carried, composted, stored, or returned during another. |
Wata(ring) W(hole) Relationship | The Cosmos changes state while remaining one connected watershed; energy moves differently through each season. |
Return Practice | Before forcing production, ask: What season is this work actually in? |
Cosmos Constellations
Constellation | Relationship |
Mycelial Sankofa | Provides the central ecological methodology: visible fruiting is only one state within a much larger living network. |
The Mind Is an Ecosystem | Establishes an earlier genealogy for understanding thought, body, integration, and creative practice as ecological systems. |
The Afroscape | Winter hibernation creates sustained manuscript space while public website production slows. |
Astro Me | Seasonal and astrological timing become atmospheric infrastructure rather than decorative framing. |
Embodiment | The body’s capacity becomes part of the calendar instead of an obstacle to it. |
The Wings | Fall compost includes rereading, circulating, and reconnecting existing work rather than endlessly producing new work. |
I Hear Tings | “Seasons of Love” asks how a year is measured; the essay answers through emergence, abundance, compost, hibernation, and return. |
The Six Waters
Water | Current in This Essay |
Still Water | Winter quiet, dormancy and the refusal to mistake reduced visibility for absence. |
Flowing Water | The circulation of energy, work and attention between body, website, manuscript and the larger Cosmos. |
Deep Water | The underground life of the practice: manuscript work, integration, memory and mycelial relationship beyond visible production. |
Turbulent Water | The pressure of year-round productivity and the expectation that creative practice remain publicly legible at all times. |
Tidal Water | The central current: emergence, expansion, compost, hibernation and return as a repeating seasonal rhythm. |
Sacred Water | Allowing body, ecology and season to determine the appropriate form of labor rather than forcing the same output throughout the year. |
I Hear Tings — Aural World
“Seasons of Love” — Rent
The song asks how a year gets measured. This essay answers by refusing to measure a creative year only through visible production. A year can also be measured by what emerged, what expanded, what composted, what went underground, and what returned carrying evidence of the dark.
Comments