dawning new year :: January 14, 2024

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            I barely noticed crossing the 2023 finish line and entering the new year. The year of the owl was a tough one; it lasted twice as long as it should and death circled on all sides. I hardly had energy to notice that we are supposed to be starting again. I’ve thought it before, but I feel it more intensely now: January, coming in the heart of winter, deep on the heels of all that enforced merry-making, is a terrible, terrible time to have to find the motivation for new routines and habits. I want January to be a month to rest and reflect, to curl up with old journals and pots of tea. I want long, unembarrassed naps, already-watched movies, and thick books about naturalists or explorers enduring harsh conditions outside while I warm my toes under layers of blankets. There’s nothing stopping me from doing this, of course. I can begin a new year of habits on February 1st,  or March 23rd. It makes no difference.

            For now, I can feel the pull of winter on my animal body, drawing me into quieter spaces. This feels like wisdom I should attend; the earth and I are made of the same stardust, after all, but she is much, much older than me and has passed beyond the need to prove herself or produce for show. I find myself wanting to lean into her side and burrow into her skirts, let her decide when we start moving again.

            I don’t mean that I want to stop living though. When I was younger, I thought rest was just the absence of tasks. I thought it involved reclining my body and letting the laundry sit in the dryer and eating take-out or something. In this way, I managed to avoid all sorts of growth and personal development. I could keep myself spinning during working hours with a list of busy tasks and then be too tired to do anything meaningful with my remaining time (like my own art or creative work). And then, because I misunderstood the meaning of rest, I would refuse to create or journal or spend time alone with a notebook in the evenings or on the weekends because I had categorized that as “work” and I knew it was healthy to “rest.” To be fair, rest meant something different to me in the years I was raising and homeschooling four children than it does to me now. There are seasons. But there are also thousands of ways to procrastinate, aren’t there? 

            This winter season I am turning toward myself, going deep into places I have been avoiding. Some of this is the gift left by the owl, some of it is the lines on my face and the silver in my hair, the growing awareness that time does not stretch on indefinitely. If I would become someone, I must become that someone here, in this now. 

            So I set my alarm twenty minutes earlier, spend the time on writing morning pages, discovering that the pen has access to places in me that I have never uncovered. I do this out of desire, not demand. It doesn’t feel like habit or discipline I am building so much as a self I am quietly discovering, the emerging awareness I sometimes have in dreams or in the blurred spaces between waking and sleeping.

            And then because rest is regenerative, the morning pages extend to more words. I feel like seeing where a story might go. I feel like writing a letter, meandering around the soft corners of this winter hour. I feel like finishing, and so I do. Afterward I am more steady in myself than I was before. There is nothing strenuous about these meetings with myself, no intent to produce. And yet the words pile up, the creative spirit stirs.

            In a recent newsletter, L.M. Sacasas wrote about how slowly the sun arrives each day. Dawn is a gradual affair if you are attentive to it. I saw this recently when we were at the beach and I went out early to watch the ocean at sunrise which, according to my weather app, was supposed to arrive precisely at 7:42 am. I walked down about 20 minutes before that, when the sun was beginning to pink the clouds behind me, and headed home an hour later when the eastern sun was up enough to glint off a slant of western water. Maybe we can let the new year dawn on us like that too. Accept that January 1st is just the first pink signal that a new day is arriving instead of the starting gun for a race where we run fast now or fall behind. Maybe after the slow dawn of the new year, we’ll be better able to see what shape it wants to take, how we might live well in the light of it.

            How about you? Are you starting the year running? Or are you feeling the need for more time? Either way, I am holding out for a happy and deeply nourishing year for all of us.

Thinking of you all here, this quiet and encouraging community, with gratitude. Let’s share more words together this year if we can.

tonia

 This and that.

 *Reading: Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. Just exquisitely good storytelling. (Next I’ll watch the movie adaptation: The Quiet Girl.)

*Reading: the story of David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who collected and catalogued many of the indigenous NW plants for the British.

 *Reading: Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about what we are supposed to do with problematic artists.

 *Making: this little blanket

*Making: an art journal with Suzi Banks Baum’s Dark Advent Workshop, learning to be imperfect and work with visual media. So hard for this perfectionist and yet so rewarding.

*Watching:  Ondine, Chinatown, and a selection of movies for a class I’m taking on Conspiracy Theories.

*Watching (soon): the new season of True Detective with Jodie Foster

 *Thinking about: Elizabeth Gilbert shaving her head and saying fuck it to beauty culture.  This whole interview is marvelous.

*Thinking about: Eliza Rathje’s gentle volumes of The Journal of Small Work and how we might envision a different future one small dream at a time.

           

a midwest journey :: july 2022

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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

December, First Week :: 2021

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No matter how I try to prepare for it, the transition from fall to winter always manages to stagnate me. I’m perpetually cold, I feel lazy and apathetic, and I can’t even remember the gung-ho October person I used to be. Usually “just put your walking shoes on” is my standard method of getting myself out the door every day, but lately, I haven’t even managed that.

“Maybe,” a friend says, “that’s what this season is supposed to bring.”

Fine, fine, I think, but dragging myself through the grocery store a few days before Thanksgiving I lock eyes with an older woman passing me in the baking aisle. She raises an eyebrow toward my bulging cart and says, “The holidays are different for women, aren’t they?”

Oh yes they are, my friend, yes, they are. No matter how much simplifying and minimalising I do, there is just always going to be a war between the demands of family and cultural expectations and the creaturely, animal part of myself that wants to burrow down and get soft and warm this time of year.

Since I can’t disappear into a den and sleep the next two months, I’ve been making small concessions to this reality - allowing my writing disciplines to slip, doing more yoga and less walking, pushing pause on the long list of household projects, giving in to an impulse purchase here and there. It feels good to be softer with myself, to be human and needy and not always pushing toward a goal. Maybe that’s the gift of entering winter I can embrace.

. . .

Since I haven’t been around much these last few weeks - and I’m a bit out of the blogging habit - a random list of things occupying my mind and attention, just for fun:

There you go: food, books and TV, and nothing too taxing. I hope you are all well. I know there are some emails I haven’t answered and some people I need to reach out to. If you’re one of them, thanks for being patient with my seasonal ineptitude.

If you’re so inclined, share your own winter pleasures and inspire the rest of us!

Note: I’m sorry Squarespace makes commenting such a pain. I know some of you don’t comment because of all the hoops you have to jump through. I’ll do some research and see if I can add a third party comment host and eliminate all that. Later. In the new year. ;)

Much love,

tonia


(*Another indulgence. I usually boycott all things Amazon.)

October, Third Week :: 2021

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Hello friends,

When I sit down here to write to you, I often imagine I’m penning this out by hand on thick, creamy paper, about to put my thoughts in an envelope and send them through the mail to a dear friend. It helps me to think that way because it can feel disconnected sometimes, typing words on a screen and sending them out to unknown destinations, to sometimes unknown recipients. I don’t know if it’s two years spent behind masks and 6 feet apart or if it’s weariness with the digital reality, but I am tired of disconnection. I want the tangible, the human.

Maybe that’s why I’m so excited about October this year. It’s got an earthy sensuality to it already with the leaves turning in the Northern Hemisphere and the smell of woodsmoke everywhere in the air, but it also includes Samhain/Halloween (holidays I casually group together because of their similarities) which, if you ignore the commercialism, celebrate exactly those human, grounded, connected qualities I am craving.

Growing up fundamentalist christian - and a world-class rule follower - my feelings about Halloween were complicated. I was embarrassed that I could never go trick or treating with friends, embarrassed that ours was the only porch light in the neighborhood that stayed off that night, and ashamed and vaguely repulsed by the way we cowered inside, all of us hunching in the back room and going quiet when someone rang the doorbell anyway. But I’d been trained that death and demons were virtually synonymous - and nothing to be celebrated if I wanted to live eternally - so I also accepted these restrictions as reality and developed a strong dislike for the holiday that lasted for years.

I’m still not drawn to the gory, creepy side of Halloween, but I understand its place better now and I don’t turn up my nose as I used to. In a youth-worshipping, death and sorrow-avoiding culture like ours, a night to explore the taboo, to embrace the dark parts of life is necessary. We need to try death on, accept the fragility of our bodies and the shortness of our time here. We have plenty of special days to remember life and connection. It’s equally important to remember we are walking steadily toward death and loss as well.

Because we live on a rural road without a lot of trick or treaters, our observance is quiet - an altar with photos of ancestors and departed loved ones, a visit to family graves, a bonfire where we symbolically burn up things that have died in our lives or things we know we need to release, a cordial made of Hawthorn berries and brandy which is good for shoring up the heart, carved pumpkins to light the way for lost spirits, a spooky story or movie to get the blood pumping. It’s become one of the most meaningful times of year for us and a healthy way to ground ourselves before entering into the season of excess that comes in November and December.

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Speaking of the coming season, I just finished reading There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather and am feeling very inspired to spend more of the rainy, cold season outside this year. Not that I avoid the rain - I’m an Oregonian, after all - but I do have a tendency to cocoon in the cold months and this year I’d like to be more active and more in tune with the season. According to Linda Akëson McGurk, Scandinavian peoples try to spend a part of each day outside, no matter how cold. It’s much more temperate here so I don’t have much excuse. I’ve got plans for moving the picnic table under the covered porch for some outdoor dinners (and I’d like to build a fire pit I can learn to cook over this year), some hikes and shivery picnics, some trips to the coast where we can be lashed with wind and rain, and maybe even an icy kayak trip, if the river allows. But basically, I’m just trying to stay alive. ALIVE !! Shimmery sparkles and bright eyes. You know, resist the armchair, the stiffening joints and thought patterns, the dying of curiosity, that kind of alive.

Does that sound exciting to you? Or crazy? I’d like to hear. And please do tell me your tricks for getting yourself outdoors each day beyond the obligatory walk.

Hope you have a lovely and meaningful harvest season.

tonia

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Gathered:

~ Our smartphones are turning us into dopamine junkies

“Making the smartphone less attractive is one strategy she recommends. A simple way to decrease the potency is to go grayscale and make it less colorful. One of the ways to decrease novelty is to delete some apps and certainly it's very important to turn off alerts."

(I’ve had my phone in grayscale for over a week and I’ve found it very helpful!)

~Misunderstanding Thoreau: Reading Neurodiversity in Literature and Life

“People on Twitter regularly mock the fact that Thoreau’s mother brought him food and attended to his laundry while he was at Walden, latching onto this detail as evidence that his rugged individualism was built on the back of women’s unacknowledged labor. On this last point, the writer Rebecca Solnit—who knows a thing or two about both Thoreau and what it means to be a feminist—pushed back in an article in Orion, describing the Thoreau family’s relationship to domestic labor as one in which they “reinforced” each other, each offering work on behalf of mutual and egalitarian benefit. As she put it, people “pretended to care who did Thoreau’s laundry as a way of not having to care about Thoreau.” And in relegating Thoreau’s mother to the laundry pile, Thoreau’s critics themselves unwittingly erased her efforts as a conductor on Concord’s underground railroad. “My position now,” Solnit wrote, “is that the Thoreau women took in the filthy laundry of the whole nation, stained with slavery, and pressured Thoreau and Emerson to hang it out in public, as they obediently did.”

~This lovely work by Tishani Doshi:

September, Third Week :: 2021

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The neighbor, we think, has a new gun. A semi-automatic from the sounds of it, as he does target (?) practice (?) in the late afternoons. The stutter of explosions ricochets around our tiny valley doubling and redoubling until the dog tucks tail and runs indoors and we follow suit, ears ringing. We’ve lived rurally for over 15 years now and while I will never own a gun, I understand why other people keep a rifle in the back closet. It’s helpful for scaring off coyotes and cougars, dispatching a suffering hen, or bringing home a freezer full of venison. To each her own.

I don’t feel so gracious about the semi-automatic though, and I confess that my neighborly feelings have taken a hit lately. Every barrage bouncing its echo around our woods seems a reminder of all that is wrong with America; I have to bite my tongue to keep from shouting something rude into the void. Honestly, it’s just one of the many ways I’ve been floundering for weeks. The computer fiasco (that is still unresolved, cross your fingers for me!) combined with upended wedding plans (still waiting on a visa), the emptied house, plus the whole world being broke in all the ways…I don’t even know what to do with myself some days.

My funk these last weeks led me, as funks do, to revisit some old social media haunts. Can I just say that two years out from having my own social media accounts I am finding those places absolutely bizarre and frightening now? I scrolled through pages and pages of people turning themselves into set pieces and still lifes, dousing themselves with cynicism, or swimming in a stream of crisis/argument/drama that never stops. I saw lots of beautiful things and a lot of wonderful people, too, of course, but it leads me to wonder what we are doing to our minds and our ability to process, reason, and think independently. (If you’re so inclined, maybe step back a moment and see how much everything in those places looks and sounds exactly the same depending on which pond you’re swimming in.)

It took me a while to shake off the heaviness of that social media immersion, but I’m finding my energy again and thinking about new routines and rituals. I dragged myself back to the keyboard this week to work on a story. (“Why tell stories? We do it because we’re sick of reality and we need to create what isn’t yet there.” ~ Colum McCann) And I’ve got a spare room now, which I’m making into a quiet space for yoga and early morning meditation to start the day. I find that early morning time essential to recovering my calm and equanimity. It’s a place I can deliberately set down the things that cling to me, like my neighbor’s choices or my self-flagellation over the lost work, or the weight of the world’s calamities, and choose to reorient myself toward the peacableness and gentleness I want to inhabit.

“Because the mind is an important and sacred place, keep it clean and clear.” ~ Ryan Holiday

Next week I have plans for a little Autumn reset, an idea I gleaned from my Ayurvedic counselor. Autumn is my golden time of year, but I often find the transition from summer to fall a little harsh, so I’m going to take a couple of days to eat simply (gentle foods and warming broths) and rest my mind and body around the Equinox.

I hope that will lead naturally into my other Autumn goals:

  • retreating from Internet persuasion,

  • seeking less commentary and pursuing more deep reading,

  • taking in less news and spending more time around a table in conversation*,

  • making fewer plans and doing more consistent, patient work on whatever is in front of me.

Plus all the good baking and cooking with autumn foods, leaf walks and rainy days, and the first fires in the woodstove to look forward to.

Do share what plans you are making for Autumn and what ways you are finding peace in the midst of the world’s noise and complexity. I look forward to hearing from you.

xo

tonia

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Gathered:

~ Finished the delicious translation of the Reynard the Fox tale this week. Gorgeous Old World storytelling featuring the wily, feral, charismatic Reynard evading the King and his crowd and naturally exposing the hypocrisy and machinations of power. Beautiful interiors, food, and vocabulary (plus female characters who are useful and intelligent!) Such a fun change of pace from my usual reading.

~ The Hawthorns are ripening here so it’s time to make Hawthorn Cordial again. Last year I served this at our Samhain dinner and it was delicious.

~ My daughter is writing the most charming kid’s novel about a girl who moves to France and can talk to animals. It’s absolutely fabulous. (And so is she.) You can find her website here and if you want to cheer her on, subscribe and help her grow a community online. <3

~ Mary Beard’s lecture on the classic myths and how they aid the cultural exclusion of women from power. “The ancient world is preoccupied with gender because patriarchy is never easy with itself.” I’m looking forward to getting her book, too.

*Ivan Illich: “Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge…I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.”