August, First week :: 2021

Seems like every afternoon lately, Laika and I have been up on the pasture for a few hours.  I write, or read, she stares at the blackberry hedge waiting patiently for the ground squirrels to make a dash for the compost bins or scuttle back to the safety of their dens.  A band of coyotes has moved onto one of the empty lots around us and we can hear them witch-howling on and off throughout the day.  It’s an eerie soundtrack to write by (perhaps that’s what has inspired my latest short story about a woman whose monthly cycle is…transformative.  It’s been a hell of a lot of fun to write and imagine.) 

I’ve made some peace with this, my least favorite month.  As you might have learned if you followed the PNW heat dome news, most of us don’t have things like air conditioners here.  August is a month to be endured before we get back to our lovely temperate weather.  Or that’s how we used to handle it, anyway.  Summers are hotter now overall, of course, and I despair a little at the thought that this is only the beginning of increased heat, but there is little to be gained by fretting about it.  Best to just lean in and enjoy what is here now.  Long afternoons in the shade writing under my beloved Grandmother Maple, the wild sweet peas climbing the hill, blackberries scenting the air, apples slipping from their branches and landing with a soft thud in the grass, the local osprey calling to her mate over the treetops.

I’ve been guarding my time diligently lately.  I’ve discovered a secret about my creativity – it’s thirsty for silence.  I’m cushioning my days with the quiet, leaving my phone untouched until late in the morning, eschewing tv and movies or youtube videos in the evenings.  Books are what I crave, poetry and mystery and beautiful language.  And nature, long draughts of sky and grass and cool darkening evenings.  That’s where the stories live, whispering to me, calling like the late-summer crickets, a song that lives just under the noise of the busy, busy world.

 . . .

Last week I was going through some boxes in the attic and found one I’d saved from high school.  I was a sentimental girl, I kept papers from all my classes, every note I’d ever received, a packet of my first attempts at poetry.  I only got through about a quarter of the box before I had to walk away.  That deeply earnest girl, desperate to find approval in a dangerously religious school and church made my heart break.  I’d like to set her free from the stifled years ahead, the agonizing grind of trying to fit into a space she was never made for.  I wish I could whisper to her that she would be happy one day, that it was okay to trust herself.  I put the box back in the attic, but I have plans to get it out again around Samhain (Halloween). Last year we began a tradition of burning the year’s ghosts and regrets in a bonfire and I will put much of that box into the fire and release it.

I remember a time when it was hard to imagine letting go even of the things that brought me pain. I thought I might need to hold onto those reminders so I could see who I was and how I got there, but I’ve reached a place now where I’m comfortable with just being who and where I am without needing to retrace the journey over and over. What a relief.

I hope wherever you are this August is not too hot (or too cold, for you Southern Hemisphere folks!) and you are finding your own rest and inspiration and freedom. I’d love to hear about it if you are. Your notes and comments help me feel like I’m not writing into the dark, so thank you for the times when you have those moments and inspiration to chat. I appreciate you!

Peace keep you, friends.

Gathered:

:: This excerpt from L.M. Sacasas’ amazing newsletter, The Convivial Society.

 [Ivan}Illich understood what I think most of us are unwilling to accept. Endless wanting will wreck us and also the world that is our home. By contrast, our economic order and the ostensible health of our society is premised on the generation of insatiable desires, chiefly for consumer goods and services. Your contentment and mine would wreak havoc on the existing order of things. “That’s enough, thanks,” is arguably a radical sentiment. Only by the perpetual creation of novel needs and desires can economic growth be sustained given how things presently operate.1 So just about every aspect of our culture is designed to make us think that happiness, or something like it, always lies on the other side of more.

:: Last week I was talking with a young guy at the coffee shop who told me that he found it ridiculous that he was expected to have opinions on so many things when he hadn’t experienced enough yet to build an opinion. I wanted him to repeat that louder for the rest of us. What a refreshing idea: “I don’t know enough yet to have an opinion!” In the same vein I’ve been thinking about how so many of us keep our emotional equilibrium by avoiding the news. I need to do that, though it creates its own cycles of guilt and angst. I want to stay informed and I really want to know how to respond to the needs of the moment. Lately I’ve been taking a page from Ryan Holiday and leaning back into history instead of forward into the constant doom-reports. I can learn just about everything I need to know about race or gender, the pandemic response, and why political parties can make such agonizingly self-absorbed decisions just by going to the past. And I can skip the hysteria of the local newscasters or twitter feeds telling me what to think. That’s a win.

I just finished Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War, which has the fascinating premise that Civil War ideologies about white male power and property were transferred to the West after Reconstruction and emerged in the mythology of the Cowboy. Ayup, I can see that. Let me know if you have any favorite history authors or sources. I’m not a huge fan of biographies, but I love to read the evolution of ideas and events. If we get a good response, I can post a list of resources here!

:: This time of year I try to sleep out on the deck at least one night. Call it a micro micro adventure. There’s no shame in wanting to be out in nature while also being close to comfort. ;) This year we slept under the full moon and woke with the sun, did some yoga in the cool air, then climbed back in bed to read and drink coffee until it got too hot. That was a pretty good day. I hope to fit in another night out or two.

 :: Lastly, this quote from James Baldwin, whose birthday was yesterday. It’s giving me life right now as I constantly grapple with the fine line between appealing to readers and being true to myself.

 “A writer is by definition a disturber of the peace. He has to be. He has to make you ask yourself, make you realize that you are always asking yourself, questions that you don't know how to face.”

July, third week :: 2021

The house is painted now, a deep, deep green that echoes the trees around it. Every time I go outside to see it I find myself sighing with relief. The color feels restful, joyful, even, if you think of joy as being a kind of rightness, a harmony between purpose, place, and delight.

Ever notice how sometimes a word or an idea begins to follow you around, peeping out of places you don’t expect or even bubbling up surprisingly out of your own interior? That’s how it’s been for me the last few weeks with the word joy. It popped up in school when I was asked why I want to write, it showed up on my birthday when I thought about who I wanted to spend time with, it’s guiding my future choices about school and work, it colors the effort I put into my marriage.

I’ve spent a lot of my life, way too much of it, walled into obligation, expectation, and duty like some kind of medieval anchorite. Dismantling those structures has been fearful, uncomfortable work at times (often because I hate disappointing people and freeing yourself inevitably disappoints someone), but now that I am on the other side of it, I’ve found joy waiting for me everywhere. What I want more than anything is to take that joy in my arms and spin it around and laugh myself silly.

I’ve noticed though, that as soon as I start talking like that, someone else feels threatened by it. Here’s what I have to say: whatever joy or freedom we’ve found is our own. No one gets to pass judgement on it or decide if its the right kind of freedom or the real kind of joy. It’s ours to keep and savor. By the same token, someone else can find release and joy in the places and ideas we’ve left behind. Real freedom relieves us of the need to control or sway others.

What I hope is that each of us will go our way in peace. That we’ll learn to trust our own paths. That we will let anyone who can’t be happy for us go without resentment and wish them peace on their own ways. Freedom is too precious to tangle up in other people’s doubts or fears or needs. <3

Gathered:

~ A new story for newsletter subscribers in the Story Room. If you’d like to have access, click the Subscribe button in the side bar or go to the Subscribe page.

~ One of the hardest parts of the day for me is transitioning between my writing work and my household work. I’ve been using these silent videos to help me get excited about switching gears. I watch 15 minutes at a time while I’m eating lunch or having a cup of tea and then I feel like getting to work again!

~ This beautiful excerpt from 16-year-old Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist.

(More here.)

“My dark, knotted thoughts seem to be staying away at the moment. I feel as free as the gannets and swallows. If they can live their lives, shouldn’t I do the same? Can I breathe and live and also fight? The natural world—which includes us—is facing such enormous challenges that it’s easy to become overwhelmed and depressed. But we must fix them, and if I’m no longer here, alive, I can’t be part of the solution. What is it that’s holding me back? Anxiety?

Depression? Autism? These are the shackles. Surely, I can break free. Or at least I can accept these things as part of me. I have no answers, but the lightness of these thoughts and these days weave my body and mind with everything around me. The only thing that I am really bound to is nature—as we all are.”

— Dara McAnulty

Joy and peace to you, my friends.

tonia

June, Fourth Week :: 2021

Here we are friends, closing the door already on June. I’m writing from the darkness of my bedroom, trying not to move too much as the temperatures have been so high the last three days and the air is thick with heat. We have one more day to go the forecasters tell us, 115 F today and then we’ll be back down into the 90’s, temperatures I’d normally be complaining about for our temperate climate, but now am happily looking forward to.

Since I wrote last (hello, hello to new readers and old friends!) I’ve finished my first term of school, turned 50 (woot!), celebrated our 30-year anniversary with a week on the mountain (the photos are from that trip) and started putting my house back in order after weeks of neglect. I’m just about ready to enjoy summer now!

Back in the spring, when the new flowers and leaves were beginning to reveal themselves, I told myself I wanted to start keeping a date journal of all the season’s firsts: First maple catkin, first tulip, first returning swallow, etc. but I was so busy with classes I kept procrastinating or forgetting. Now that we are sweltering under this strange heat dome, climate change feeling incredibly urgent and imminent, I keep thinking about how I wished I’d been charting such things for the last decade. I know the roses were early this year, and the first bumblebees, but I don’t know by how much. I think that information is going to matter as we continue down this path.

Not long ago I read Michael McCarthy’s Moth Snowstorm in which he talks about the abundance of wildlife all of us over a certain age used to encounter once upon a time. It’s true, as a young child in the 70’s, living both in the country and the city, I can remember finding hordes of insects, ponds full of frogs and tadpoles to be carted home, bushes full of butterflies and bees, nights dancing with moths. Between 4th and 5th grades, I must have “rescued” a dozen baby birds that had fledged or fallen from nests. Their disappearance happened so gradually I didn’t realize that my own children were rarely encountering these creatures. My children’s children will encounter even fewer. We are living in a slow-motion erasure.

Sam Lee, in a recent Emergence Magazine podcast, talked about that reality and said we have “an ever present need to fill our hearts with the richness of our land’s offerings.” There is grief we must contend with, he continues, but nature itself operates in the present and is always inviting us to see and experience and enjoy.

That’s my plan for the foreseeable future: to pay attention and enjoy, to open my eyes and ears (and my notebook!) and take it all in. I also hope to get back into a writing rhythm here. I’m not sure if I’m going to be in school full time in the fall or not. I loved, loved, loved school and will continue to go, but I missed a lot of things that are important to me over those twelve weeks. Things like having the time to cook a meal without stress, keep a tidy house, mental energy to read books, time to write and take long walks, time to garden and grow. In the culture of “do more and accomplish” none of those things are necessarily reasons to slow down, but to me they are essential parts of living a quality, meaningful life. I think in the future, school is going to be something I add to my already busy and happy days, not something that takes over all of them. We’ll see.

For now, summer, and paying attention.

More soon. Much love.

tonia

April, third week :: 2021

I marked off my 120th day of writing this weekend and decided to take a few days off to reset my goals. I’m stuck on one chapter of the novel rewrites and I need a little bit of time away from it to get some perspective. I was feeling bad about how slow these rewrites are going, but then I came across James Baldwin’s admission that writing is just hard. “Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another. They all kick your ass. None of it comes easy.” Amen to that.

I asked Mark to take the long way home tonight, around the dike on the low-lying road that curves around farms and newly bright fields. We rolled down our windows and drove slowly, letting Bortkiewicz’ Lyrica Nova play out into the sunset, something we’ve done for years whenever we need to unwind. These first weeks of school I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to find real rest, but I’ve at least remembered that it begins with a little time and a bit of nature, even if it’s only seen from the window of a moving car.

The moon hung over us as we drove, a bright sickle against the blue sky. She’s moving through her cycle again, patient and constant while our world keeps fracturing and wounding itself. All around us green blades pushing up through soil, rogue daffodils in ditches, flit of deer shadows among the cottonwoods, moth dance above the windshield. Inhale. Exhale. Tomorrow I’ll get back to studying, back to learning how to write, because as James Baldwin says:

“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

Let me know how you’re changing the world today, friends. xo

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Gathered:

~ Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows reading Rilke.

~ Justine Bateman refusing to feel bad about aging.

Peace keep you.

More soon.

Tonia

March, Fourth week :: 2021

The new dog, Laika, is a little sensitive. She’s supposed to go to work with my daughter every day but a vet’s office is full of strange dogs and people and noises that make her anxious, so she has to stay home with the rest of us on workdays. I’m not really a dog person, or rather, I like dogs just fine when they belong to other people and not so much when they are my responsibility, but for most of the day Laika is quiet and sleepy and as unobtrusive as the cats, so we get along fine. A couple of times a day she stares at me with the saddest possible eyes until I take her out to the (unfenced) woods so she can explore without getting lost. On Laika-days I am forced out of my homebody-ness and out under the trees in all kinds of weather, something I’ve never been able to do consistently by my own willpower. Which means the dog that I did not really want has become a facilitator of something important for me.

Today while we were tramping around in a different part of the woods I found four plastic jugs full of water tied together with baling wire and buried in the leaf litter near a downed tree. There were rumors around town last year that a couple of homeless men had been sleeping in the old gravel mine that butts up against our property. This is the size of town that knows exactly who the two homeless men are and how they ended up sleeping in the old gravel mine, so I had an instant mental image of those jugs slung over the back of a particular bike on their way to and from town. No one had disturbed the buried jugs for some time, so while it’s mildly upsetting to think of strangers (neighbors?) sleeping in my backyard, I wasn’t really worried as I dug them out. I was wondering instead where the men are now as I haven’t seen them for months. The plague year has closed me in on all sides, put me on the defense, outstretched my compassion.

This week I was listening to Bayo Akomolafe talk about this feeling of overwhelm and how continually focusing on how to solve the world’s problems may be limiting us. Perhaps, he asserts, it is possible to use uncertainty instead. I have plenty of practice with uncertainty: I don’t know what to do about the water bottles in the woods or my homeless neighbors or gun violence or species die-off or the mess of late-stage capitalism. But when Laika draws me out under the sky and the rain hits our skin and the squirrels dash through the Fir branches and the Cedar shelters this tiny cache of human need I am suddenly aware of my connection to this great, groaning, speaking, moving Being that is Us, our world. “This world is promiscuous,” Akomolafe says, “it dances here and there, and new paths are always emerging.” It is in the listening, the connection, the waiting, he asserts, that we may be able to see the new ways of healing the world is devising for itself. Our culture abhors an unsolved problem, knows only the success of production and action, but for centuries there have been people who faced the world’s needs by retreating to lonely places to pray or chant or learn from the land. Maybe my daily visits to the trees are tapping into that quiet energy, maybe this nervous, sensitive dog that needs the woods is a deep calling to come away and learn. If so, I say yes.

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Gathered from this week:

~ Robins - by Peter Johnston. A lovely little film that will help you exhale.

~ Hedgespoken Picturehouse - Are you tired of streaming, polished, image-heavy stories yet? Tom Hirons and Rima Staines have brought their traveling, off-grid, story caravan online for live storytelling. I haven’t listened/watched this yet, but I have plans for tonight with a glass of wine and my pjs. UPDATE: I listened this evening and it is marvelous! <3

Don’t miss Rima Staines’ amazing artwork either.

~Adam Zagajewski’s Mysticism for Beginners

I hope you find some quiet places for your soul this week. And as it was Mr. Rogers’ birthday on Saturday, let me just say, “I like you just the way you are.”

Peace and love,

tonia