May is the month of starting projects. The garden is in. Things are growing. The earliest herbs are ready to harvest - chive, sorrel, mint, lemon balm, the first nettles if you know where to look. Bees are working. The light is long enough that you can start something at six in the evening and finish it before dark. There is, suddenly, time.
What's actually different about making
There's a specific kind of attention required to make something. You have to know your ingredients - not just their names, but what they do, where they came from, how they react to heat or vinegar or oil. You have to understand the process - why honey extracts plant compounds differently than alcohol does, why beeswax needs to be melted slowly, why some things need two weeks and others need two months. You have to be willing to fail a few times before you get it right, and you have to pay attention to why it failed when it did.
None of this is hard, exactly. It's just a different relationship to materials than the one you have with a thing on a shelf.
When you buy a candle, you're trusting that whoever made it cared enough to do it right. When you make a candle, you find out for yourself what right means. You learn that beeswax has a melting point and a smoke point and a smell that changes when it's overheated. You learn that the wick matters more than you'd think. You learn that the difference between a candle that burns clean and one that doesn't is mostly about the discipline of the maker.
Most of us, most of the time, are too busy to make most of the things we use. That's fine. But there's a difference between a person who's chosen to outsource the making and a person who's never thought about it.
What the season offers
Living with the seasons used to mean something practical. You ate what was ready. You preserved what would otherwise spoil. You made medicine from what was emerging. You worked with the cycles because you didn't have a choice, and the cycles worked with you because that's what they do.
Most of us don't have to live this way anymore. Refrigeration, global supply chains, and modern agriculture mean that asparagus is available in November and strawberries in February. The seasons are still happening, but the relationship between the season and what's on your plate has been almost completely severed.
Which is fine, mostly. We're not nostalgic about pre-industrial food systems. They were also called "famine."
What we mean by living with the cycles
We talk about this a lot at ALLES, and we want to be precise about what we mean, because it's a phrase that gets used by a lot of brands to mean basically nothing.
We don't mean moon timing or astrological gardening. We don't mean an aesthetic of cottagecore or a romanticized version of pre-modern life. We don't mean that you should feel guilty for buying the thing instead of making it.
We mean that the natural world operates in cycles, and that those cycles include rest, growth, harvest, decay, and rest again. We mean that the soil our plants come from is healthier when it's farmed regeneratively, when growers care about how the land is treated, when fields are rotated, when something is given back to the ground in exchange for what's taken from it. We mean that everything we make comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is better when the cycles are honored than when they're ignored. We mean that your body is part of those cycles too, that it has seasons, that it asks for different things at different times, and that paying attention to the asking is, broadly speaking, a good idea.
If you're inspired to make something this month - anything, even a small thing - go ahead. We'll be doing the same.
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