my repentant skin

“If we perish - I meant to say persist -

do we arise and turn

with the wind?….”

~Kyce Bello

I lose my appetite for distraction overnight. I’m full up with the world we’ve made, violent and exploitative, rapacious and unthinking. I’m full up on all the ways we can rehearse those realities as entertainment. I feel the great grief and burden of being human, full of possibility and yet incapable of restraint.

So many of our conversations now lead to: will the virus change anything? Will we just go right back?

My rational self fears writer Paul Kingsnorth is right:

“Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.

We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to.”

But maybe not for me, I think. Maybe for me (for you?) something else is stirring.

Prayer in the time of corona: Slow me down enough. Give me enough time to change, to really change. Drive the truth down deep of what I could be if I tried, of how I could really live.

Maybe I will not spend these weeks in the dark feeding from the trough of a broken culture. Maybe I will spend them instead under the sun, the moon, the rainy skies, listening to old wisdom, to the heartbeat of the world and its creative Spirit.

I went to bed last night sick of heart, but then I dreamed of bees. I was standing under the sun longing for them to find me, my arms held open, waiting for them to come explore the territory of my repentant skin.

the first days of March

A little Ellis, because, LOVE.

The pasture is usually home to only grass and blackberries (and wild sweetpeas in the summer), but this morning I saw two yellow daffodils nodding their heads at me as I headed back to the house after my chores. I squealed a little, then felt sheepish, even though no one was around to hear me but the poultry. It must be the aftertaste of this cynical world - this feeling that wonder and joy are only for children and not for grown humans. I marched on down the hill and found another daffodil clinging to the stone wall along the garden and appreciated it loudly, just to make up for my earlier cowardice. The revolution will not be wonder-free.

I had plans to be working on a new novel right now, but I haven’t even begun thinking about it yet. I’ve been taking in the wisdom of Ross Gay instead, who insists that writing “comes from our bodies.” I’ve been deep cleaning, organizing, painting, getting the garden ready, baking; working more with my hands than just my head. I have to say, after several intense months of writing, this feels wonderful. It’s a good reminder that I am at my healthiest when body and mind are both active. And I know that while I clean and putter around, words are churning quietly somewhere inside and they will let me know when it is time to put them down on paper.

I’m glad to be busy with physical work right now for other reasons too. It keeps me from being too worried about things I can’t control, like elections, and finances, and the fact that we are supposed to go to Europe in six weeks to see our daughter and the whole world is sick right now. Ora et labora is my current motto: pray and work. That’s old wisdom, right there, from monks who lived in the Middle Ages and knew a thing or two about having to wait and trust God that everything is going to work out fine.

Someone asked me the other day what I do for a living and I fumbled around as usual and tried to figure out a way to put it into words, this hodge-podge life of writing, and nurturing, and availability, and home-making. I never know what to say. Sometimes the words fall on sympathetic ears, as they did this time, and I can feel the warmth and appreciation of a kindred spirit, but many times they don’t. I am finding more confidence now to let that disapproval and misunderstanding go. I know what I believe, that if we are going to hold together at the center as communities, there have to be people who make beauty, who tell the stories, who have time to lend a hand, who set a table for fellowship. Fortunately, it seems like many of the people who are most sympathetic and open to that idea are young people. I love our young people; they are so bright and smart and determined and open. I’m always listening in, trying to understand how they see the world, how they think we can change it. I hope I am always flexible enough to hear and understand.

Well, I should wrap this little ramble up. There is more work to be done today, (“I’m blessed with work!” Bonus points if you can name that movie). Hope you are all finding daffodil-surprises and celebrating them shamelessly.

Peace keep you,

tonia

P.S. I’m in the mood for some good farm life/homemaking books. Fiction, preferably, so send me your favorite titles. I love Miss Read and Gladys Taber (not fiction, but she makes the cut), Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden. All those 40’s and 50’s authors who write so beautifully about making homes. Swoon!

a nightime ritual

I know we are not supposed to love the long, dark winter nights, but I do anyway. (Especially now that we finally have our little hobbity wood stove installed and every night means curling up by the fire.) The only thing I don’t like about winter really is trying to get up in the dark, cold mornings. I’ve been working on waking up at 5 am for quite awhile now and I’m doing much better, but I do find that what happens the evening before is really the key to an easy wake up.

Right after Thanksgiving I noticed I was feeling stressed already about the holidays, so I wanted to make a little more effort in keeping to a nighttime ritual in December. When I keep to this ritual it makes such a difference in my sleep and my mind is clearer the next day to get right into work:

• Dinner together and conversation

• Clean up kitchen / make fire (usually my husband does this)

• Get things soaking: beans or grains for the next day, my herbal infusion*, seeds sprouting

• Put away screens

• Turn off overhead lights, turn on lamps

• Light candles

• Choose relaxing music

• Wash face and put on pjs

• Knit (with tea and my two squares of dark chocolate - such an old lady)

• Read

• Go to bed by 9:30 (my daughter is waking up in France at this time, so we usually text a little, even though that means looking at a screen. I sleep better after talking to her. <3)

Other things that help are exercising during the day so my body is tired, not eating too much at dinner, and sleeping with an eye mask.

What about you? Any nighttime ritual tips?

(Obviously, I don’t have little ones at home anymore, but when we did, I kept a pretty similar routine but instead of having personal time, I would read aloud to everyone for a good half hour or more while the kids drew or played with legos. Those were some of our favorite times and we read a lot of good books! We kept it up until they were older teenagers - although at that point they would mostly just fall asleep on the floor. :) )

For more inspiration:

Niamh at Fairyland Cottage has some videos about setting the tone for sleep and waking up early that are so lovely I’ve watched them multiple times.

*I do a quart jar with nettle and red raspberry leaf overnight and drink it over the next two days. Sometimes I add oatstraw or red clover or hibiscus too. I find the raspberry leaf helps even out my hormone swings quite a bit! You can read more about infusions here.

just keep moving...

Happy November!

I snapped this photo on my way out the door for my morning walk yesterday. It fascinates me a little that I seem to always take pictures of myself for the internet outdoors, just out of bed and sans make-up. (It’s a long road from the 80’s teenager who wore a staggering amount of pearlized cosmetics and Aquanet and never let her appearance-guard down for a moment, even in the privacy of her own bedroom.)

I think I snap these photos because they represent moments when I feel happiest - on my way out of doors to move my body. That makes it sound like I’m one of those bouncy, energetic people who loves to be outdoors, but it’s not true. I’m actually a low-energy, low-stamina person who likes to be very, very comfortable all the time, pretty much what you’d expect from a writer. :) But somewhere along the line I decided that wasn’t going to serve me well and I needed to move. So I do, nearly every day. I keep it up because now that I’m in my late-forties (ouch) I find that not moving daily = stiffness, sore joints, back injuries, bad moods, mental fog, and weight gain. No thanks!

So many times I talk to people my age and older who think eating right and exercise are not worth the effort, or it’s too late for them to make any changes, but “too late” doesn’t happen until you’re dead! and feeling good is worth every bit of the self-discipline, even when it happens slowly (as it does for me.) Recently, I made an inspiration board for my husband and I and put it on the fridge to keep us motivated, pictures of older adults who are/were going strong with diet and exercise past the time others thought they should slow down. (Like Tao Porchon Lynch, Dr. Ellsworth Wareham, Rich Roll, Joan McDonald , and the fabulous Twyla Tharp among others!)

There’s always a transition period for me with the colder weather, and I’ll have a few days where I don’t want to leave the warm house, but if I just keep putting on my shoes and going out, eventually I start to look forward to those crisp mornings. It’s a better energy booster than caffeine to get me going for the day and I need that for all the hours I spend sitting in front of a screen.

November goals:

Move.

Eat more veggies.

Move some more.

(Oh, and finish the first draft of this novel! So close!)

peace keep you, friends,

tonia

there is a place

This weekend, we took to the woods to learn how to find mushrooms. We had a gorgeous day, and the woods were eager to share their treasures. Our guide took us off-trail, taught us to let nature lead us. We looked for open, mossy spaces, free of tangled undergrowth, the places where mushrooms want to grow.

Every species has its ideal conditions for growth, he told us.

I thrive in these cool, damp, shadowed woods.

I would like to unwind time like a ball of wool, get back to the unformed part of myself and let her know: not every creature thrives under the sun. There is a place where the soft, deep parts of you can live.

Give me the quiet, secret spaces. Let me hear birds and rain at their work, follow truth like a deer trail through the trees.

A long time ago I lived under a steely sun, among false prophets, confident of voice and reasonable-eyed. They said the path to truth was too difficult to find, I would lose my way. They taught me to harden and to doubt.

But now I know truth spreads itself secretly underground, waits on every trail, waits for me to arrive and take it up at the right time.

I am un-hardening, un-doubting. I am looking closely for what’s real, what emerges from the fern-soft ground.

It was the Romans who taught us that time is a line stretching forward, but the Greeks believed time was a circle that comes around and back again. Perhaps that unformed girl is here, only waiting for me to come back round to her.

Perhaps she will step out now into this kinder world, perhaps she will find a place to fruit and grow soft under this understanding sky.