April, Fourth Week :: 2021

Happy Earth Day, friends!

Last year I took a whole Earth Day to myself, hiking and spending time outdoors. I thought I’d make an annual tradition of it, but this year I’ll be indoors most of the day on Zoom classes instead. There will be a couple of free hours in the afternoon though, and I’m marking them out for the woods. Just the thought of time under the trees, the air scented with bluebells, will get me through the morning.

This week has been a roller coaster of insecurities and weariness. I had a glimpse of what it is going to be to study writing for the next few years and how I will need to be strong in my ideas and instincts while still being teachable. The experience shook me up a little, but fortunately, just when the doubts about my path started to creep in, words came to rescue me. I picked up The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd’s acclaimed book about the Cairngorm mountains, and began reading Robert MacFarlane’s introduction. He puts great emphasis on the fact that Shepherd had a “modestly regional life,” but “she came to know her chosen place closely, …that closeness served to intensify rather than limit her vision.” She wrote differently than other writers of her time. A close male friend told her the book will be “difficult, perhaps,” to get published and closed off his note with a patronizing jab. The book languished for forty years and even now, beloved as it is by many, is difficult to describe. I was reading this out under the evening sky, out where God moves among the trees and whispers loud enough for me to hear, so maybe you will understand that a feeling formed inside of me, a determination to stay my course, to lean into what I know is my own voice and not be shamed by the limits of the world and experience I draw upon.

“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience.”

~Patrick Kavanagh (quoted in MacFarlane’s introduction)

Right now on this little patch of earth, I have marked the arrival of the first Honeybees, a Bumblebee Queen, the return of the Violet-backed Swallows, Nettles and Rhubarb and Plantain and a dozen other old friends. What a privilege it is to experience and know this land year after year, to be shaped by it and shape my words around it.

Small, slow, and deep is how I want to continue on.

. . .

As a side note, I want to say that just because I don’t always write about current events here, doesn’t mean I don’t keep track of them or speak up about them, k? I care deeply about and participate in the work of justice in my own community and write about issues when I need to or feel I have something to add to the conversation. Thanks for understanding. xo

---

Gathered:

~ More on Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

~ Mads Mikkelson’s thoughts on ambition:

My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.

~ Madeline Forman becomes a recording artist at 94. Have a listen to her at 17.

~ Last year’s (long!) Earth Day post.

Much love, 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)

"lead is not gold..."

“For many of us, wound means truth. In a sugared world, holding your gaze to something broken, bereft or damaged seems like the deepest, most articulate position we can take. We see this move all the way through the modern arts. It’s what gets the big grants. Myths say no. The deepest position is the taking of that underworld information and allowing it to gestate into a lived wisdom that, by its expression, contains something generative. The wound is part of a passage, not the end in itself. It can rattle, scream and shout, but there has to be a tacit blessing, or gift, at its core.

Many stories we are holding close right now have the the scream but not the gift. It is an enormous seduction on behalf of the West to suggest that jabbing your pen around in the debris of your pain is enough. It’s not. That’s uninitiated behaviour masquerading as wisdom. Lead is not gold, no matter how many times you shake it at the sun.”

~ Dr. Martin Shaw, “Small gods”

“The myth I hold is not that of the curse on the family, the guilt hovering forever as a result of a bad deed; but instead the vision of life haunted by some unerasable good deed: a life that can’t lose for long, or at least forever.  Not Oedipus doomed, but Aeneas bearing the unshruggable potential for later life  - this is the pattern I note.”

~ William Stafford, The Answers Are Inside the Mountains

we'll be wanting voices...

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers {painters, poets, photographers, artists, bakers, sculptors, musicians….} who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.”

~ Ursula K. LeGuin {addition, mine}

chernobyl

A piece I wrote to share as part of a now-cancelled event. I began this piece well before I knew anything about a pandemic, but it strikes me now how life is always asking us to choose our narrative, and our God. Since we’re all having to keep our distance right now, I thought I might try to close the gap a little by reading you this piece myself. It’s nothing fancy, but we don’t need anything fancy right now, do we? We just need each other.

Peace to your hearts and minds today.

xo

tonia

When I was 15, part of the Soviet Union poisoned itself with a nuclear meltdown.  I saw it on the news and then I went to church-school, where no one was surprised to find the book of Revelation coming true.  I come from a people who memorize the King James Bible and expect to be afraid.  We trained for fear in the basement of the church-school.  Mostly, for the day when someone would burst into the classroom – likely Soviet – and demand renouncement of our faith on pain of death.  How fitting, then, that the apocalypse should begin in the U.S.S.R. 

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,

and made a barren circle 1500 miles wide where no life would be able to live for 20,000 years or more. 

Selah.

Not long after that

I grew up and learned that no matter how much Bible you can recite, religion is a reflection of the people who are practicing it, and so, bears returned to the fields of Chernobyl, along with wolves and dogs and endangered horses and other animals who never got the news about the apocalypse and received something more like a paradise instead, which is the story of a whole different kind of God.   

The thing about the different God is that disasters happen all over the world now and I never go to bed satisfied.  Instead I have this tender feeling right in the middle of my chest, like everything, everything is so precious and loved and I want to take it all in my arms.  Like the butterflies, and the bees, that have never returned to Chernobyl, who are more fragile, who have wings that are only strong for air, who hover around paradise, always wondering if it is safe yet, to go in.