October, Third Week :: 2021

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

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: