August, First week :: 2021

Seems like every afternoon lately, Laika and I have been up on the pasture for a few hours.  I write, or read, she stares at the blackberry hedge waiting patiently for the ground squirrels to make a dash for the compost bins or scuttle back to the safety of their dens.  A band of coyotes has moved onto one of the empty lots around us and we can hear them witch-howling on and off throughout the day.  It’s an eerie soundtrack to write by (perhaps that’s what has inspired my latest short story about a woman whose monthly cycle is…transformative.  It’s been a hell of a lot of fun to write and imagine.) 

I’ve made some peace with this, my least favorite month.  As you might have learned if you followed the PNW heat dome news, most of us don’t have things like air conditioners here.  August is a month to be endured before we get back to our lovely temperate weather.  Or that’s how we used to handle it, anyway.  Summers are hotter now overall, of course, and I despair a little at the thought that this is only the beginning of increased heat, but there is little to be gained by fretting about it.  Best to just lean in and enjoy what is here now.  Long afternoons in the shade writing under my beloved Grandmother Maple, the wild sweet peas climbing the hill, blackberries scenting the air, apples slipping from their branches and landing with a soft thud in the grass, the local osprey calling to her mate over the treetops.

I’ve been guarding my time diligently lately.  I’ve discovered a secret about my creativity – it’s thirsty for silence.  I’m cushioning my days with the quiet, leaving my phone untouched until late in the morning, eschewing tv and movies or youtube videos in the evenings.  Books are what I crave, poetry and mystery and beautiful language.  And nature, long draughts of sky and grass and cool darkening evenings.  That’s where the stories live, whispering to me, calling like the late-summer crickets, a song that lives just under the noise of the busy, busy world.

 . . .

Last week I was going through some boxes in the attic and found one I’d saved from high school.  I was a sentimental girl, I kept papers from all my classes, every note I’d ever received, a packet of my first attempts at poetry.  I only got through about a quarter of the box before I had to walk away.  That deeply earnest girl, desperate to find approval in a dangerously religious school and church made my heart break.  I’d like to set her free from the stifled years ahead, the agonizing grind of trying to fit into a space she was never made for.  I wish I could whisper to her that she would be happy one day, that it was okay to trust herself.  I put the box back in the attic, but I have plans to get it out again around Samhain (Halloween). Last year we began a tradition of burning the year’s ghosts and regrets in a bonfire and I will put much of that box into the fire and release it.

I remember a time when it was hard to imagine letting go even of the things that brought me pain. I thought I might need to hold onto those reminders so I could see who I was and how I got there, but I’ve reached a place now where I’m comfortable with just being who and where I am without needing to retrace the journey over and over. What a relief.

I hope wherever you are this August is not too hot (or too cold, for you Southern Hemisphere folks!) and you are finding your own rest and inspiration and freedom. I’d love to hear about it if you are. Your notes and comments help me feel like I’m not writing into the dark, so thank you for the times when you have those moments and inspiration to chat. I appreciate you!

Peace keep you, friends.

Gathered:

:: This excerpt from L.M. Sacasas’ amazing newsletter, The Convivial Society.

 [Ivan}Illich understood what I think most of us are unwilling to accept. Endless wanting will wreck us and also the world that is our home. By contrast, our economic order and the ostensible health of our society is premised on the generation of insatiable desires, chiefly for consumer goods and services. Your contentment and mine would wreak havoc on the existing order of things. “That’s enough, thanks,” is arguably a radical sentiment. Only by the perpetual creation of novel needs and desires can economic growth be sustained given how things presently operate.1 So just about every aspect of our culture is designed to make us think that happiness, or something like it, always lies on the other side of more.

:: Last week I was talking with a young guy at the coffee shop who told me that he found it ridiculous that he was expected to have opinions on so many things when he hadn’t experienced enough yet to build an opinion. I wanted him to repeat that louder for the rest of us. What a refreshing idea: “I don’t know enough yet to have an opinion!” In the same vein I’ve been thinking about how so many of us keep our emotional equilibrium by avoiding the news. I need to do that, though it creates its own cycles of guilt and angst. I want to stay informed and I really want to know how to respond to the needs of the moment. Lately I’ve been taking a page from Ryan Holiday and leaning back into history instead of forward into the constant doom-reports. I can learn just about everything I need to know about race or gender, the pandemic response, and why political parties can make such agonizingly self-absorbed decisions just by going to the past. And I can skip the hysteria of the local newscasters or twitter feeds telling me what to think. That’s a win.

I just finished Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War, which has the fascinating premise that Civil War ideologies about white male power and property were transferred to the West after Reconstruction and emerged in the mythology of the Cowboy. Ayup, I can see that. Let me know if you have any favorite history authors or sources. I’m not a huge fan of biographies, but I love to read the evolution of ideas and events. If we get a good response, I can post a list of resources here!

:: This time of year I try to sleep out on the deck at least one night. Call it a micro micro adventure. There’s no shame in wanting to be out in nature while also being close to comfort. ;) This year we slept under the full moon and woke with the sun, did some yoga in the cool air, then climbed back in bed to read and drink coffee until it got too hot. That was a pretty good day. I hope to fit in another night out or two.

 :: Lastly, this quote from James Baldwin, whose birthday was yesterday. It’s giving me life right now as I constantly grapple with the fine line between appealing to readers and being true to myself.

 “A writer is by definition a disturber of the peace. He has to be. He has to make you ask yourself, make you realize that you are always asking yourself, questions that you don't know how to face.”

July, third week :: 2021

The house is painted now, a deep, deep green that echoes the trees around it. Every time I go outside to see it I find myself sighing with relief. The color feels restful, joyful, even, if you think of joy as being a kind of rightness, a harmony between purpose, place, and delight.

Ever notice how sometimes a word or an idea begins to follow you around, peeping out of places you don’t expect or even bubbling up surprisingly out of your own interior? That’s how it’s been for me the last few weeks with the word joy. It popped up in school when I was asked why I want to write, it showed up on my birthday when I thought about who I wanted to spend time with, it’s guiding my future choices about school and work, it colors the effort I put into my marriage.

I’ve spent a lot of my life, way too much of it, walled into obligation, expectation, and duty like some kind of medieval anchorite. Dismantling those structures has been fearful, uncomfortable work at times (often because I hate disappointing people and freeing yourself inevitably disappoints someone), but now that I am on the other side of it, I’ve found joy waiting for me everywhere. What I want more than anything is to take that joy in my arms and spin it around and laugh myself silly.

I’ve noticed though, that as soon as I start talking like that, someone else feels threatened by it. Here’s what I have to say: whatever joy or freedom we’ve found is our own. No one gets to pass judgement on it or decide if its the right kind of freedom or the real kind of joy. It’s ours to keep and savor. By the same token, someone else can find release and joy in the places and ideas we’ve left behind. Real freedom relieves us of the need to control or sway others.

What I hope is that each of us will go our way in peace. That we’ll learn to trust our own paths. That we will let anyone who can’t be happy for us go without resentment and wish them peace on their own ways. Freedom is too precious to tangle up in other people’s doubts or fears or needs. <3

Gathered:

~ A new story for newsletter subscribers in the Story Room. If you’d like to have access, click the Subscribe button in the side bar or go to the Subscribe page.

~ One of the hardest parts of the day for me is transitioning between my writing work and my household work. I’ve been using these silent videos to help me get excited about switching gears. I watch 15 minutes at a time while I’m eating lunch or having a cup of tea and then I feel like getting to work again!

~ This beautiful excerpt from 16-year-old Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist.

(More here.)

“My dark, knotted thoughts seem to be staying away at the moment. I feel as free as the gannets and swallows. If they can live their lives, shouldn’t I do the same? Can I breathe and live and also fight? The natural world—which includes us—is facing such enormous challenges that it’s easy to become overwhelmed and depressed. But we must fix them, and if I’m no longer here, alive, I can’t be part of the solution. What is it that’s holding me back? Anxiety?

Depression? Autism? These are the shackles. Surely, I can break free. Or at least I can accept these things as part of me. I have no answers, but the lightness of these thoughts and these days weave my body and mind with everything around me. The only thing that I am really bound to is nature—as we all are.”

— Dara McAnulty

Joy and peace to you, my friends.

tonia

patron of the new year

Hello friends,

I was working on a post for this week, but then Wednesday happened and now I just keep staring at this screen wondering what I’m supposed to say. Currently, I feel angry. And more angry. And impatient with people who are shocked and bewildered because what did you think we’ve been saying for the last five years?! (And that makes me feel humbled and small all over again because of all the Black, Brown,Indigenous, LGBTQ and other marginalized voices who have been telling us this for much, much longer. I’m sorry and thank you for your endurance.)

National traumas leave marks. Emotions take up space and time. That’s where I am.

~~

The only escape I’ve managed from the news cycle the past few days is working on my first novel, The Spaces Between. Because it was under an agent’s contract for so long, I haven’t actually spent much time looking at it critically for a few years. Reading it now is like visiting a younger self. There’s the story on the page, which is entirely fictional, and there’s my memories of where it was written and how it felt. But there is also the memory of my internal struggles hovering like shadows around the words. I can trace my maturing through the lines. Maturing as a writer, of course, but also as a woman. I’m no longer writing for the critical voices in my head. So much of the work I did before was an ongoing argument between those voices and the self that was trying to break free. It makes me grateful that this book was never published, because when I wrote it I didn’t understand what it was to write out of truth. I didn’t realize it of course, but I was writing and living from a narrative I internalized but didn’t believe. Now I am writing as my true self; I have a strong sense when I am going against my own nature and purpose and I recognize the joy that comes when I’ve been the most honest. It’s a good place to be.

~ I’m forever on the lookout for symbols or imagery that will help me live into the stage of growth I’m in and last week I stumbled across Eleanor Roosevelt. As soon as I saw her picture I felt that she was going to be my patron (or guardian spirit as Austin Kleon would call her) for this part of the year.

Here she is gracing my journal with her bright common sense and strength.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you’ll be criticized anyway.”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

“Be confident, not certain.”

Eleanor makes me want to stand up straighter and get to work. So despite the rocky start to the year and the current state of my emotions, I have a lot of plans for 2021, including some good changes to my day-to-day life (which I’ll share more about later.) Next week, unless some other catastrophic thing happens, I want to share the first chapter of The Spaces Between with newsletter subscribers, so watch for that! <3

In the meantime, take good care of yourself. Be real. Be passionate and angry when you need to, but grab a bag of White Cheddar Hippeas and some Netflix when you need that too, k? Also naps.

Thanks for listening.

peace, friends.

tonia

---

Soundtrack for this post: Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending from The Lark Ascending Collection

On repeat for comfort and inspiration: Paterson (Jim Jarmusch,2016)

"...how to keep from becoming evil..."

I don’t know what else to do with 2020 but just roll with it. Lately my body has been rebelling with aches and pains and general grouchiness against any kind of sitting at a desk so I’ve been putting my energy into moving instead. I can’t remember an autumn when I have written less or been more caught up on yard work. All the bulbs are in, the gardens are put to bed, the herbs are harvested, the roses are pruned, and my yoga game is strong.

Maybe all that physical work is also a way of distracting myself from the state of the country (what in the hell is even going ON, people?!) which is probably a good thing since my Enneagram 1-ness would ordinarily be in high-distress mode about all the ideal-smashing and not-improving that is going on these days.

I mostly gave up alcohol a few months ago, but I’m making it through by being exhausted at night and keeping company with wise mentors. Right now I’m reading Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, which I highly recommend. Both Berry and Snyder have been fighting the good fight (each in their own, often very different, ways) for longer than I’ve been alive. WB had this to say back in 1978, and I’ll leave you with it:

“…living at peace is a difficult, deceptive concept. Same for not resisting evil. You can struggle, embattle yourself, resist evil until you become evil - as anti-communism becomes totalitarian. I have no doubt of that. But I don’t feel the least bit of an inclination to lie down and be a rug either, and now I begin to ask myself if I can live at peace only by being reconciled to battle….I am, I believe, a “nonviolent” fighter. But I am a fighter. And I see with considerable sorrow that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I once thought I would. So how to keep from becoming evil?

Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstractions and not against anything: don’t fight against even the devil and don’t fight “to save the world.” […]

If you don’t see how much badness comes from stupidity, ignorance, confusion, etc - if you don’t see how much badness is done by good, likeable people, if you don’t love, or don’t know you love, people whose actions you deplore - then I guess you go too far into outrage, acquire diseased motives, quit having any fun, and get bad yourself.”

Be gentle to yourselves. And each other.

with love,

tonia

Portland, July 27, 2020

I have good news: Portland is not burning or trashed! It’s the same old complicated, messy, beautiful, wonderful city it always was. My son and I walked around this morning, about 5 hours after the last protest ended, just to get some pictures and to spread some love. We bought coffees from a favorite spot, searched high and low for a bathroom (seriously, the lack of public bathrooms might be the most unexpected horror of the pandemic, amiright?), sat in the sun at Pioneer Courthouse Square, drooled outside Powell’s Books (which is only open for online orders), and then went to the protest block (yes, one main block) and got a little tear gas residue and a little teary-eyed.

A brief tour of Portland this morning:

Everything’s pretty empty because of the pandemic.

Pioneer Courthouse Square. (It doesn’t usually have polka dots. That’s just a happy art installation.)

Murals outside the Apple store and down the block. Most of these businesses have been closed since the Stay-Home orders.

This is the block right before the protest zone. You can see some graffiti on the parking structure across the street.

This is the Federal Courthouse building where most of the action takes place. It’s made of concrete and marble. It would be very hard to burn it to the ground, even if people were actually trying to do that.

People cleaning up trash in the street.

The end of the block. The buildings you can see further down are also Federal buildings, but we didn’t see much graffiti or damage there.

This is the park across the street from the Federal Courthouse. Protestors have food and medical stations set up here. There’s a lot of talk about businesses suffering from the protests, but this 3 block area is mostly Federal buildings and parks and most businesses downtown are closed or limited service because of the pandemic, so I’m not sure how many are being directly affected by the protests at night.

And that’s it. It’s a strange thing to watch somewhere you love on the news, to hear lies about it and watch it become a pawn in a political battle. It makes your heart grow bigger for that place, makes you want to shield it and defend it. That’s why I went downtown myself today. I can’t control a government’s actions any more than I can control an individual protestor’s actions, but I can witness reality, and I can carry love and peace with me and release it into these precious streets.

(A reading suggestion for such a time: Ilya Kaminsky’s parable in poetry : Deaf Republic)