funeral rites :: April 30, 2023

The people at the funeral don’t believe in ghosts, though they nod gently when I tell my story about the dream the night before, how the dead woman had come to sit so sweetly beside me, how she laughed when I told her about the funeral.

“I think she was happy,” I say, and they smile with relief and Christian politeness. A bridge has appeared for them to bring my ghost over.

“Of course! She’s dancing with Jesus!” one woman says excitedly and raises her arms. She jigs her hips a little. She has lost two sons and a husband. Her eyes, when she leans in to say this again, are both kind and a little manic.

The people all look like memories I have forgotten. Faces emerge somberly out of the crowd, claim to be old babysitters or Sunday school teachers or friends of my mother. I am mistaken for my sister several times. Everyone wears the same clothes they wore thirty years before. Everywhere the sound of polyester, the squeak of stiff shoes.

The dead woman liked purple. I appear with her in a slideshow: 12 years old, 14, 18, 45. We wear no makeup, then too much makeup, then we are middle-aged. The slideshow ends; she will always be middle-aged. The preacher tells us we don’t need to be sad, she is happy now. I rub the back of my heel with the toe of my other shoe, wonder if eternal happiness is as exhausting as it sounds. The dead woman liked butterflies. On the screen behind the preacher now there is a purple sky; it fills and unfills with butterflies.

Everyone says it’s a shame we only see each other at funerals and weddings; I think that’s the whole point of having them, but I don’t say this out loud. There are many things I don’t say out loud. I see an old teacher from the church school. He asks about my husband, a man he has met once. He thinks my husband is a pastor. This accidentally makes me laugh. He wants to know then about my husband’s job, his health. He reminisces about the Olive Garden where they were introduced. I am fine, I don’t say. I write. I am finally in university. He has to go, there is a lot to do at funerals, but he tells me to assure my husband that he enjoyed having me in class.

After he leaves, I stand still, waiting to see if I am actually visible. I feel as insubstantial as a ghost, as if you can see through my body to the rows of chairs, the red-flecked carpet. I look around for the dead woman, maybe I can see her now. People circulate. Someone plays softly on a keyboard. I resist remembering this life. I resist the unresisting me that lived before.

In the back room there is a reception. I consider a row of water bottles and a plate of cookies, but I have read my fairy tales: food offered in a transitory space is always a trap. One cookie and I will be haunting the halls of this church forever. I move on to the display of the dead woman’s life. Here are the books she liked as a child, here the photos she had on her wall, here a wooden cat, purple. When I die, what color will I be?

I find my husband just before he takes a cookie and we make our way through the goodbyes and out the door.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he says.

“No,” I say. The sun is shining, and I am suddenly sure of myself once more. I look back at the church, imagine the butterflies escaped from their screen, circling, fluttering over empty chairs, taking refuge in the plastic greenery. I want to run back and open the doors, let them all out. I don’t. There are no butterflies in the sanctuary, just as there are no ghosts. We get in our car and roll through the parking lot. I watch the church recede in the side mirror and catch a flash of purple. The dead woman waves from the steps.

She looks happy. 

---

 Hello friends,

How are you? I don’t know how many of you are still out there, but I’m sending a wave from my corner of the world. It’s been several months, but I’m getting used to these new routines of interaction, study, commute, work. For a while, I couldn’t do much but go to school and recover from going to school (my HSP friends, you understand) but these last weeks I’ve found things coming easier. There’s more space for taking care of myself, more space to enjoy, less exhaustion. I’m finding I want to put my experiences into words again, so I’ve come back to this space today to tell you about a personal loss, and the twist to the heart that sometimes comes when we are asked to revisit our old lives. I’m just telling it in my own way – a little slant, a little storybook.

This piece came to me very clearly one morning. Joy Harjo says we all use the second sight – in dreams, in intuitions, in our art.* I’ve been leaning into this idea that I am already in touch with whatever I need to articulate in this world, trusting myself to write words the way they come to me, instead of rounding their edges so they don’t cut, or delineating too clearly their meaning. Mostly when I write, I don’t know the meaning anyway. Words rise like shoots out of the ground of what I’m living, feeling, experiencing, and consuming. It makes me conscious of how I nurture myself, how I fill the time. I want the ground of my being to be rich and complex and full of possibility so the words can grow straight and true. Maybe we feel these things most clearly when death’s skirts have so recently brushed past.

Wherever you are, I hope you are safe and well. I’ve missed our conversations and our sharing. Thanks as always for reading these words here.

peace keep you,

tonia

…

Some of what I’ve been reading, watching, enjoying these days:

 Listening to:

*Commonplace podcast, episode 109 with Joy Harjo

Watching:

Perry Mason

Reading:

~ Fingersmith // Sarah Waters – a twisty, unpredictable, dark Dickens of a tale.

~A Ghost in the Throat // Doireann Ni Griofa – absolutely gorgeous writing about mothering, poetry, and passion. Unlike anything I’ve read before.

 ~The Outermost House // Henry Beston – Beston’s account of a year living alone in a house he built on Cape Cod in the 1930’s is beautifully written. I can’t quit thinking about his hours alone there and wishing for my own quiet cabin somewhere.

 ~Standing in the Forest of Being Alive // Katie Farris - Farris’ battle with early breast cancer told through poetry. Incredibly intimate, funny, and strong.

a midwest journey :: july 2022

Kansas City Skyline

I seem to always get stuck in the middle seat of any flight, so I had to content myself with brief glimpses of the quilted Midwest landscape out my neighbor’s window as we passed over it last week. I never get tired of the patient geometry of the center of the US, the white snakes of road wide enough to disrupt the green and brown grid, the occasional rise of land, a blue glint of lake, a sparkle of river scratching through the earth. On two of our flights I was stuck between strangers, tucking my elbows carefully against my body so as not to disturb the men on either side of me by actually taking up physical space. Once we were in the air, I spent some of my cramped time considering why I feel compelled to perform this deference to others. The men beside me gave no thought to commandeering both the armrests. Probably, if I had insisted on space for my arms, they would have given it to me, but sometimes social pressure breeds a kind of forgetfulness and I resort to long-ingrained habits of being the good, invisible girl.

I encountered that old self a lot while we were visiting Missouri. The subconscious reads the landscape, rings a bell of recognition to tell us how to feel and act. I kept seeing old shadows on the streets, hearing whispers on the drone of hot air. The only features rising from the flat earth were the buildings, an occasional tree. It took me back to summers as a kid in the thin dust of Idaho: blistering pavement, ice cream from a truck, late night church services. One night in our Missouri loft an old memory returned to me in the form of a dream: I was six again, kneeling by the couch to say the sinner’s prayer, crying because the devil wanted me. I woke to the weight of sticky air on my skin. When we got on the plane again and flew home and I saw the shoulders of the mountains emerging, the trees leaping up like they’d been waiting for us, I could feel myself growing cool and green and straight again too, in recognition of home.

Despite the rising of old ghosts, I did love my trip to the Midwest. The best part of travel is the chance to inhabit the lives and places of others and learn a new context. I’m always interested in the narrative of a place, the way weather and geography fraternize with history and tradition to create the stories we live out of. I gathered the heat, the cloudless skies, the tree-lined highways, the churches, the strip malls, the billboards promising redemption and/or judgement, the farmland, the frozen custard stands, the blues singers on the evening sidewalks, the short shorts and tank tops, the gorgeous diversity of faces, the gun and ammo shops, the historical markers, the earnestly waving flags, and found I understood a little better the whats and whys of that place.

On the flight, I had been reading Barry Lopez’ posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. “…to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations,” he says. “We will need to trust each other.” Lopez was an uncommonly humble man, always open to learning, with no apologies for who he was and what he stood for, but no hubris to assume his way was the only way.

“And whenever I found myself in those situations, I came to understand that it was always good to hold in suspension my own ideas about what the practical, wise, or ethical decision might be in any given set of circumstances.”

He was a good companion for the journey.

---

~I also finished Johann Hari’s excellent book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, on that trip. It’s validated my decision from 3 years ago to delete my Instagram and most of my social media accounts and try to use my phone as a tool, not a distraction device. It’s also inspired me to work on my deep reading and attention span, which are really just muscles that need strengthening. I’m making good use of the Lady Crawley chairs that I bought at a consignment shop several years ago. They’re perfect for deep reading as they are comfortable, but they force me to sit upright and not slump over and fall asleep. In addition, I keep a pencil in hand for making notes and underlining. It makes a difference! (I’m also intrigued by Ryan Holiday’s suggestion to swarm.)

Hari also contributed to the conversation with Lopez’ work about being slow to draw conclusions:

“I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world, and with myself. I think all of these ideas - the messages implicit in these mediums - are wrong. Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right - you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular with they are first articulated.”

(If the book is too much, Rich Roll had a great podcast with Hari on this topic. It’s long, but you can break it up over a few good walks!)

~ Pat Barker’s books on the women of Troy (read gorgeously by Kristin Atherton) have been keeping me company on my walks this month. Highly recommended!

Light and love, friends.

tonia

under pressure :: June 2022

I’ve been walking. Early in the morning, as near to sunrise as I can manage, when the birds are most vocal. If I time it right, I have the trail to myself. At least, without other humans. There are plenty of other beings out at dawn: rabbit, newt, raccoon, snail, osprey, turtle, deer. I’ve been walking daily ever since a friend pointed me to Libby DeLana. Every Damn Day has been her motto for a decade. I’m at Day 62 now, each walk dutifully recorded with the time and weather in a little notebook. Even after the wedding, when I was so tired the air felt as thick as water and every movement was like swimming against a current, we pulled over to the side of the road and took a deliberate walk through a field of lupines. 0.11 miles that day, but still, a walk. I counted it. Other days, when I’ve been tired, or sick, I’ve looped our small woods (the equivalent of once around the block) and been glad for those few minutes of respite.

I like the simplicity of Every Damn Day. There’s no decision for me to make. I don’t have to decide whether I can fit it in or if I feel like exercising, I just get up and go. I wish I could apply this philosophy to other areas of my life, like writing or journaling or meditation, but I’ve realized I have capacity for one daily commitment and no more. Since this one has so many overlapping benefits, it beats out all other options. In one walk I get movement, time in nature, solitude, and stress relief. I need it. Because the truth is, I’m tired.

I keep thinking that I will bounce back. After this class is over, once the wedding is done, once this project or that is done, I will feel more refreshed. But when I cross whatever milestone I set for myself, I get to the other side and realize I’m still exhausted.

This spring I took a class on Global Climate Change. When I told my daughter I signed up for it, she said, “Mom. Is that wise?” Well, yes it was. I am not the type of person who likes to avoid difficult things. I need information; I need to see the whole picture and know the truth. Otherwise, I feel like I’m lying to myself. So I took the class, and now I know and I can process the sensational from the actual. It helps. But the truth is so very hard and I think it’s contributing to my exhaustion. We’ve had an old-fashioned spring here in the Pacific Northwest, with rain and cold all the way up to the Solstice. I loved it. But even as I loved it, the whole time I was thinking, enjoy it, this may be the last cool spring you’ll know. And that’s only one of the issues that weighs constantly on my mind.

We are under a lot of psychic pressure these days.

i would cry—there is so much grief

today and always

how even now, a haint riddled with bullets

has perched herself on my stoop

to warn of all the little deaths

headed my way.

Juneteenth, 2020 by Miriama J. Lockington

In the fall, I will be full time at the university (in-person for the first time) and so I had a lot of ideas about what to do this summer. Finish the novel, paint the duck house, redecorate the spare bedroom, begin a short story collection around the experiences of living, then leaving, Christianity. But every time I think about doing any of those things I go back to bed.

I’m old enough now to know that the body is wise and can be trusted. Reluctance in the face of progression is just a bell ringing to tell me that something needs examination. So I went walking and gave myself some space to examine. When I came home it was with the realization that this is not the summer for a lot of physical and mental exertion. This is a summer to rest and prepare for what will be difficult intellectual and social work in the years ahead. And I discovered - when I let go of my expectations - that what I really want to do, more than anything, is to keep walking, to be outside as much as possible, and to read, read, read.

So I’ve released myself from the task list and given myself a new job: to walk every day, and to get through as much of my to-read shelves as possible this summer. (It’s an embarrassing amount of books, but I’ll do my best.) That’s it.

This morning I was re-reading Rebecca over breakfast and I came to the passage where the narrator talks about her current life, living from hotel to hotel. Their days are simple, she says, and sometimes boring, but

“…boring is a pleasing antidote to fear. We live very much by routine…We have tried wireless, but the noise is such an irritant, and we prefer to store up our excitement, the result of a cricket match played many days ago means so much to us.”

It struck me how slow life was once (for those affluent enough not to have to scrape every minute towards survival, anyway). Waiting days to hear the score of a cricket match and savoring the anticipation. Our bodies and minds evolved within that kind of slowness. How natural that we should always be trying to get back to it.

If you are interested, tell me if you are feeling this collective psychic weight, and how you are dealing with it. What are you craving? How are you making it happen? I’d love to hear.

I hope to be in this space more often this summer. Let’s see how it goes. xo

lots of love,

tonia

p.s. I included a few wedding photos at the bottom, including a glimpse of (nearly) the whole family, for those who have been here long enough to watch those kids grow up!

---

Some notable books from the last weeks:

~Independent People// Halldór Laxness. A slow, deep burn of a book with a seam of black humor running quietly through it. It’s set in Iceland at the turn of the 20th century, when the old ways and the new, progressive ideals were bumping into each other. Bjartur, the main character, is a brute in just about every way, but I suspect Americans, at least, will not find his blind commitment to Independence and self-sufficiency unfamiliar. This, and other novels, helped Laxness win the Nobel Prize. It’s worth the read.

~Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World//Jason Hickle I’m going to be giving copies of this one to several friends. An easy, engaging read, but Hickle manages to show the reality of our capitalist systems, why they function as they do, and why they can never, ever save us or the planet. He also shows what an alternate system could look like. Highly recommend.

~The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History//Brian Fagan. I came across this by accident among some used books and picked it up since I was studying the same topic at the time. Did you know there was an Ice Age in the Middle Ages? It caused all kinds of havoc and changed the fate of nations and governments all over the world. If you want to understand how climate change is more than altered weather, you might find this account helpful.

~Eleutheria//Allegra Hyde. This one is worth noting because it’s at the beginning of what I suspect is a whole tide of eco-literature written by authors who have come of age in the shadow of climate change. In this one, a sheltered young woman (raised by survivalist parents) tries to find a way to save the changing world and makes a mess of things.

~Fiber Fueled, Will Bulsiewicz - Great overview of gut health and how to stay healthy through diet. (Hint: eat lots and lots of different plants!)

And, finally, some scenes from the wedding. (Excuse my half-closed eyes in the last photo, but all the kids are smiling!)

all Wedding photos: Shelby @ Marley Kimbo Media

Year of the Owl :: March, 2022

This morning I made oat and honey bread, brewed a pot of green tea, gathered my notebooks and laptop and turned on Puccini because I love the sound of opera floating from the windows while I sit on the deck and write. At last it is warm enough to sit on the deck and write.  Ravens are croaking somewhere on the other side of the creek, the neighbor is shouting at his dog, the kid who rides the dirt bike is gunning his engine just at the curve of the road below the house as he always does. When the engine noise fades, I catch the soft hoot of the owl in the woods.

Owls everywhere.

 Yesterday, a woman I’d just met told me she was out walking in the park and saw two baby Barred Owls perched on a branch. The mother was nearby; when the woman stopped to watch the babies, the mother flew over the woman’s shoulder, gliding through the notch between her shoulder and her ear. A warning. Once, at a raptor rescue center, the woman said, she had put on a thick leather arm glove and an owl had perched on her arm.

“It was so much heavier than I thought it would be,” she told me.

All at once, people I care about are very sick. Maybe they will not live to see the old age I am always planning on. When the woman was telling me her story, I found myself wishing I could hold that owl on my arm and test its weight ahead of time.  You can be so sure of yourself and then it can all change. Suddenly, I could not listen to the owl story anymore. I interrupted, told another story about myself and coyotes. The woman looked at me, disappointed. Maybe I had not at first seemed like someone who was self-absorbed and bad at listening. Maybe I had seemed like someone who would understand about the babies and the owl flying so close she could feel the air bend to meet its wings.

I am someone who understands about the owl, but it was still hard to sleep last night. By 3 am I was tangled in a long skein of dreams about the ways I disappoint people - storytellers, family members, everyone. I have noticed that the onset of grief and bewilderment seem to have one of two effects on people: they either fall back or push forward. I do not want to fall back into the woman who is held captive by the mild disappointment of strangers, who believes that the right thing to do is always whatever makes other people relax. I have to shake off the urge to return to old ways of being and push on, accepting that I have my own weight, my own demands on the world.

This week I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s strangely wonderful memoir, Year of the Monkey. I confess I had never listened to Patti Smith’s music until recently, I only knew her from the internet and a couple random quotes, but I’m totally hooked by her roving, creative spirit and her comfort in her own skin. I don’t think she’d give a damn that some stranger somewhere once misunderstood her, but I know for sure she’d attend to the message of owls when they arrived.

“You don’t see things like that. You feel them…”

Sometime in the near future, sickness will take someone I love. I will hear the owl again and again. It will watch me from its invisible perch, it will show itself to me, to strangers who will tell me the story whether I am ready to hear it or not. It will all be so much heavier than I think it will be, but I am confident that I will push on anyway, all the way to the edges of my life, growing, changing, disconcerting, disappointing, becoming, until it is my own time to push on into whatever comes next.

 Don’t worry, there are lots of good things going on here as well!  We are having a long-delayed wedding in a couple months and I will be meeting my French son-in-law in a few weeks. (Thank you for the visa at last, State Department!) I am taking a very light class load this spring and summer so we can celebrate and get to know each other, then I’ll be back at my books full time in the fall.

I’m also happy to tell you I have a story in the upcoming issue of Dark Mountain, which launches April 21st. It’s written around the theme of “confluence” and involves the deep connection between women and the earth, shape-shifters, and the boundaries between human and animal worlds. It’s a story I really love. If you are interested in reading it, you can subscribe to Dark Mountain’s biannual publications here, or buy individual books here.

I hope you are all enjoying the change of seasons, whether you are heading into spring or fall. If you feel up to it, let me know what you are reading and listening to right now. My list is below. 

Reading lately:

Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy

– I came to this memoir through Ditlevsen’s poem Self-Portrait 1.  She was telling the truth!

Richard Powers’ Bewilderment

              -I didn’t love this as much as The Overstory, but this wrangling with the grief around climate catastrophe and loss has really stuck with me.  I’ll be hearing Powers speak in April and I’m really looking forward to it.

Sylvia Warner Townsend’s The Corner That Held Them

              -By recommendation of Melissa Wiley. A deep, slow dive into the life of a medieval nunnery without the soft gaze and the sheen of piety. Nothing very much happens and I loved it.

Molly Gloss’ Wild Life

  – A 19th century-style novel set in the early days of the old growth logging in the PNW. Sasquatch, wild forests, and a fierce female protagonist.

Listening to lately:

Kiese Laymon read his book Heavy: An American Memoir

              -Unbelievably good. Half the experience is listening to Laymon read in his own voice.

Sabine Devieilhe & Marianne Crebassa singing Duo des fleurs from Léo Delibes’ Lakmé Opera.

Duolingo French Podcasts

That’s it for now!

Much love to you, friends. Thanks for being here!

tonia

Poetry in a time of war

I made a rule for myself a long time ago not to feel pressured or guilty about commenting or not commenting here on current crises. There are enough words going around at any given moment that mine are rarely needed, and I don’t think they are needed now with Russia’s attack on Ukraine. I just want to point you to poet Ilya Kaminksy (a USSR-born Ukranian poet who now lives in the U.S.) and his work Deaf Republic. I’ve seen We Lived Happily During the War around in several places but the whole book is worth your time. Especially, if you, like me, lie awake with a head and heart full of feelings and questions about war and its myriad agonies and dilemmas. I find I often don’t want “answers” so much as I want to acknowledge the way it feels to live in safety while others suffer, to just be helpless and confused and saddened. That’s what poetry allows. Maybe you will also find it a place of refuge.

Padraig O’Tuama’s take on We Lived Happily During the War.

For me, I’m sitting with this selection for awhile (from the final poem, In a Time of Peace)

“All of us

still have to do the hard work of dentist appointments,

of remembering to make

a summer salad: basil, tomatoes, it is a joy, tomatoes, add a little salt.

This is a time of peace.

I do not hear gunshots,

but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky

as the avenue spins on its axis.

How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.”

May peace keep the people of Ukraine and all of us.

tonia