"HIBERNATING" by Keenan Marchand
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illustration by keenan marchand
Glacier waters trickle down, peppered by the cheerful cannon fire of the world’s most talkative birds. The teething wind playfully tugs and tears at my clothes. The world is waking up, and I feel a pull towards life, offering everything and promising even more. I feel the need to shake off the dust and cobwebs in my body, collected from the indeterminate amount of time I’ve spent in this hibernation. These are the richest seasons of life in all of its grand chaos and I have to catch up.
I need to do something. Make something of these feelings within me.
I pull out a sketchbook along with a ragtag crew of pencils, paints, and markers and stare at the white rectangle in my hands. The birds are making nests, the bees are finding flowers, and I am looking at a white rectangle.
I feel silly.
I sit for several hours, occasionally scratching a few lines and saying quick hellos to curious hikers passing by. After a few more hours, the sun eventually begins its descent, and I finally decide to head back down to the land of the two leggeds. Once I get home, I feed the crows. I sit with them for a while and then go inside. I enter my room and close my door, greeted by the piles of discarded clothing on my floor, an unmade bed, and shelves decorated in what can best be described as mess. I lay down in bed and open my sketchbook.
Despite the beckoning of the mountains and all the animals, their poetry swirling around my fragile little body and begging me to dance in the ways I know how to, I find myself staring at…a white rectangle.
That’s seven days…no fourteen, no wait…that’s several months of…this. The hibernation continues.
I decide to punish myself by watching Instagram reels until my eyes bleed, spiral wrinkles forming on my bed-sheets as the whirlpool of deepening discouragement drags me down under. Maybe tomorrow this hibernation will end. Maybe there will be a storm. It comes in waves. When the storm arrives, life becomes breakneck all of a sudden, colourful and demanding from every angle. Commissions, meetings, deadlines, events, projects, and concerts violently blossom in storms of productivity and busyness. I love feeling useful, like I am making something with my life, and that helps me feel okay even when I am absolutely exhausted. When I have triple booked myself time and time again, I think, “Hey, at least I am doing something. At least I am making something.”
Given the choice between the frenzy of storms and the nothingness of hibernation, my impulse is always to choose the storm. Yet I also know that if I could actually speak with the birds and animals, understand their language, they would tell me that my muddied human brain has it a bit twisted.
“Hibernation is not nothing. Rest is not nothing. It is a season of life, a part of the whole thing. It is essential.”
No matter how many times I hear this advice or something similar, every time I relearn this lesson, it always feels like a revelation.
I think most of us are taught a very rigid understanding of rest that is linear and calculable, that can be confined within the box of a lunch break or the days off on the weekend. And because rest doesn’t fit inside those narrow margins, we feel a guilt when we are resting, either because we feel like we should be productive or because we believe we are not resting “correctly.” Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all method for resting. Our own personal relationships with rest will ebb and flow, shift and change over the course of our lives.
When it comes to art, rest is no less essential. It’s difficult when we think of ourselves as creative machines, churning out piece after piece with immediacy and consistency. But even the greatest creatives will face a white rectangle, once and then twice and later again... Though the surrounding structures in place might not offer us any empathy, I like to believe we are each capable of building healthier relationships with our own types of rest, making peace with our need for rest and making space for it.
Maybe a way to think about it is that the white rectangle is that space for rest, for hibernation itself. At a passing glance, there is nothing there, but underneath the snow…the art of just resting is stirring. Similarly, every work of art begins as “nothing,” and yet at the same time, that nothingness holds within itself the potential of anything and everything. Sooner or later, the laundry will be folded, the bed will be made, and the white rectangle will grow into something. Sometimes it just takes time and rest for them to hatch. That is okay.
Keenan Marchand (They/Them) is a Syilx, Secwépemc and Mixed European multidisciplinary artist closest with their Syilx roots, currently living in so-called burnaby on the stolen land of the səĺilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil Waututh), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) Stó:lō and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples. They are also based professionally and relationally in so-called east vancouver on the stolen lands of the skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), səĺilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples mainly in the eastern K'emk'emelay and Skwachàys areas. They are from Nk’mapəlqs (Head of the Lake) and a status member of The Okanagan Indian Band of Vernon.
Keenan has completed visual artwork for the cover of National Urban Indigenous Coalition Council’s first publication Stories Have Always Been Our Governance, various pieces for Vines Art Festival, an artistic map of the Hastings Folk Garden in partnership with the non-profit Hives For Humanity, and a collaboration with single album artwork for the local hiphop group Off Topic. They are a member of the Kamaʔ Creative Aboriginal Artist Collective and have had their artwork displayed as part of the Syilx exhibition Unsettle the Settler: Dismantling Systemic Oppression. Their work is that of a storyteller and is stylistically diverse yet frequently surreal, introspective and expressive. They often incorporate elements of nature, personal and cultural symbolism and animism in their work, touching on the joy, grief, anger, beauty and chaos of existence.
As a musician they have performed at different venues with acoustic sets and have been branching into electronic compositions since they debuted this artistic shift at the 8th Annual Vines Art Festival.
You can find their chaotic work on their social media at @keenanmarchandofficial and more soon on their in-development website!
