"I divide my time between homes in Arizona and England, six months a year in each place"
About this Quote
A clean, almost bureaucratic sentence hides a whole aesthetic: the deliberate choice to live in the hinge space between two myth-saturated landscapes. Arizona and England aren’t just coordinates; they’re opposing palettes. Arizona carries heat, scale, dryness, the blunt drama of light. England suggests damp weather, old stone, hedgerows, literature you can trip over. By splitting her year exactly in half, Terri Windling isn’t describing travel so much as designing a rhythm, the way an artist structures a studio practice: alternating materials, alternating moods, alternating myths.
The specificity of “six months a year in each place” does quiet rhetorical work. It signals stability, not wandering. This isn’t bohemian drift; it’s an intentional life architecture that implies resources, planning, and a cultivated sense of belonging in two worlds. There’s also a subtle refusal of the demand to be easily categorized. Artists are often marketed as products of a single “scene.” Windling’s line says: I’m not from one place; I’m from an axis.
Context matters here. In an era when “global citizen” branding can feel hollow, the quote lands because it’s modest. No grand claim about identity, just a practical schedule that nevertheless hints at a creative strategy: letting place make you different people across the year, then bringing the cross-pollination back into the work. The subtext is permission-giving: you can build a life that honors multiple homes without treating any of them as a phase.
The specificity of “six months a year in each place” does quiet rhetorical work. It signals stability, not wandering. This isn’t bohemian drift; it’s an intentional life architecture that implies resources, planning, and a cultivated sense of belonging in two worlds. There’s also a subtle refusal of the demand to be easily categorized. Artists are often marketed as products of a single “scene.” Windling’s line says: I’m not from one place; I’m from an axis.
Context matters here. In an era when “global citizen” branding can feel hollow, the quote lands because it’s modest. No grand claim about identity, just a practical schedule that nevertheless hints at a creative strategy: letting place make you different people across the year, then bringing the cross-pollination back into the work. The subtext is permission-giving: you can build a life that honors multiple homes without treating any of them as a phase.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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