340 days left.

And slowly, the mind wanders to Antarctica.

I can't imagine it.

It lies in a space just beyond the edge of what I see, like an Agnes Martin painting. Not the Antarctica of penguins, not the white mass on weather maps, always seen through the eyes of others.

I mean the inner Antarctica. The metaphysical one. The one you only see in silence.
Agnes Martin wrote describing her paintings: "It has neither object nor space nor line nor anything—no forms. It is Light, Lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form."

Yes. That's the Antarctica I mean.

Her grids like breath. Her horizontals like a prayer folded shut. Her silence louder than our questions.

I do not understand snow nor ice.

Not the way I understand the desert in Arizona, the way heat shimmers off stone, the way the saguaro stands like a sentinel, the way my lungs learn to breathe dry air.

Not the way I understand Oregon green, the moss-wrapped silence of the forest, the soft Pacific rain that never quite stops, the ferns unfurling like secrets.

These landscapes I know in my body. They have entered my feet, my skin, my breath.

But snow?

I lived in Michigan once. Cranbrook. A few winters while studying. Now I remember the cold as a fact, not a feeling. The memory has faded like a photograph left in sunlight. I could not tell you what snow felt like. There is a fragment of a memory I am hanging on to, walking on the coldest night after a snow storm, from the studio, across the campus, through the Greek theater, past the dried out tulip garden. I was terrified that my eyeballs would freeze…is that even possible?

Nothing more remains. Much of that knowing is gone.

And now I ask myself to imagine a place made entirely of what I do not know.

Fields of white that stretch past seeing.
The edge where ocean becomes ice becomes sky.
A world without trees, without soil, without the anchor of familiar life.
So wild.
So pure.
So much about absence.

What does the body do when there is nothing to hold onto? When the landscape offers no shadow, no edge, no seam?
Maybe that is why I must go.
Not to prove.
But to meet the unknown the way you meet a stranger in a dream, without language, without maps, without the armor of understanding.
To grasp what is unseen.
To touch what is not yet mine to know.

340 days.
The countdown has begun.