An apple and a little dish of honey would usually do the trick. Or a piece of candy in a crinkly golden wrapper. Sometimes just the honey, no apple. Ok, sometimes no dish. When the littler one was little, the worst days, when worry overwhelmed, could be set right with sugar. Dopaminergic disaster easily averted.

When heartbreak, hormones, and lesser cataclysms of adolescence arrived with an onslaught of physiological force, sugar would no longer serve. Or at least not on its own. And so, on some nights, while the rest of the family sleeps, we slip out the front door.

Sometimes we wander around the campus of the college across the street, other times we head towards the roundabout down the street. Most often we don’t make it out of the driveway at all. To be out under the sky is enough. We tip our heads back. Here the solar flux and cosmic radiation from events long past, crisscross space with their radiant energy and silently mix with the fog of our breath in the lamplight. Sidereal light and metal halide in one grand synchrony, shimmering.

Getting lost is a uniquely human problem. It’s too easy to forget this vast and wonder-filled universe, of which we are each but a tiny and transient collection of stardust. Box breaths and butterscotch help. But in using the constellations as compass, we are not alone. The Abeona and Adiona labels are drawn from 19th century illustrations of the midnight sky, used for marine navigation, recorded from the same position, looking outwards and inwards— a tribute to the perpetual, shimmering tension between discovery and return. Your faith in our process, silently mixing with the process itself, is all that allows this work to exist. Let these new wines be our tribute to you. For in the night black of the blending table, your trust is the fixed star by which we navigate.

 

Thank you, again and always~

MH