December, Fourth week :: 2021

The chair where the owl perched is covered in snow now, but I don’t ever pass it without a tiny uptick in my pulse, a split second when I wonder if that blocky brown shape will be waiting there, will fool my eye again. At first, I’d thought a limb had fallen from the apple tree in the night and somehow landed upright on the arm of the adirondack chair, but a moment later, it swiveled its impossible head and fixed me with an amber stare. Twice this autumn, it came to this spot; two days in a row I stood frozen, pinned like a moth under its gaze until at last, it blinked, unfolded its wings, and disappeared into the trees.

Biologists say that an owl sighted during the day means that a disturbance has occurred - it has suffered a loss of habitat, a disruption in hunting patterns, or maybe, a lost mate - an affirmation of the folklore of North American Indigenous peoples who say the owl is a bad omen, a messenger of death. I joked about it with friends later, my own early morning harbinger of doom perching on a pink adirondack chair.

I don’t know if the owl I saw is one who regularly lives in our woods. During most of the year I can lie in bed and hear several calling through the open window. Their whoo-whooing among the night trees is as reassuring and comforting as this daytime appearance was unsettling. Despite my joking, the weeks after the owl showed itself to me were a storm of loss. Our new dog was hit on the road and killed instantly, relationships frayed, depression stalked loved ones, plans upended and collapsed, I lost months of writing and I couldn’t find the nerve to sit down and write again. I’m not particularly susceptible to omens and signs, but the owl unnerved me more than I’d like to admit. I feel the ghost of it hovering around that chair every morning I go by. Its remembered shape is a fixed point, a talisman of my own vulnerability, but also a symbol of another year of disruption and loss for all of us. It hovers over all the breakdowns we’ve endured, the painful exposure of our true beliefs, the shock of our disconnections and malaise, the revealed power of the market, the media, and the moronic, our fear of getting sick, our proximity to death. Of course I flinch when I think of seeing it again - how much more loss will we face?

A great deal, most likely. I feel the world I once knew passing by, receding into the past. It is not the owl I flinch from, it is the demand that I look truth in the eye and see it as it really is. I want to continue on in my comfort, believing untenable beliefs, assuming my neighbors and I agree, feeling confident that someone somewhere will make disease and extinction and turmoil go away, but that luxury is past. The owl stares at me without blinking and it won’t look away.

Strangely, now that the shock of these realities has settled in, I arrive at the end of the year feeling a little steadier. The owl has come. Change is here. Death has arrived. But I am strong enough to live within it. I know what lies ahead requires courage, as well as creativity and hope, and that’s what I want to mine in 2022.

As MFK Fisher wrote: “When the wolf is at the door one should invite him in and have him for dinner.”

I’ll be writing more about that and the image/theme I’ve chosen for the new year later. In the meantime, I hope you are enjoying this quiet-ish week between the holidays. I’m looking forward to a new year of sharing and learning with you all.

Happy New Year!

tonia

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:

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.”

February, fourth week :: 2021

I went out for a walk this morning, the first one in a while. The trail is just on the far side of winter now, right on the doorstep of spring. I could almost hear the nettles pulsing their fresh green heads beneath the mud. Another week? Two?

For our Northern Hemisphere ancestors, late February would have been a hungry time, the cold damp deep in the bones, the winter stores gone or withered of their vitality. I imagine some long-ago ancestress scanning the fields and woods for that first flash of green, the first sign that nourishment was coming. I live a very different life, but I find myself harboring the same February ache, searching my own fields for something fresh and life-giving. You too?

I made the rounds the other day online, doing my civic duty to stay informed and aware, and I wondered if the news has ever been such a late-winter place, full of muck and weariness. I came away spattered with our local version, a sneering kind of mud, supercilious and cynical, that clings to the mind long after.

I have to be careful with that kind of thing, because cynicism and superciliousness come too easy to me. Writing has been a way to resist it, to grow, by the force of words, something green and hopeful within myself. I wrote myself a note that day: You are not an outrage factory.

I keep thinking of something Barry Lopez wrote about his friend, Brian Doyle, whose life and work mentors me constantly:

You were … the example that keeps us from despair, cynicism, detachment, and the other poisons bred in the bowels of our complex lives.

You walked in beauty, my dear friend. We all watched.

And now it is our turn.

(So. You are not an outrage factory. You are a lamp, made to be filled with light, a bowl of herbs, pungent with healing, a circle of arms for welcome. Your eyes are made for far-seeing and uncovering hope. This, this, this, is you.)

---

A handful of things from the week:

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry is part of our "Poetry Films" series, which features animated interpretations of beloved poems from our archive. ...

H/T: Rachel

~ This post from Susan about where writers work. Some lovely and inspiring photos. (Wendell Berry {happy sigh.} And despite my love for huge bookcases, Nigella Lawson’s space is giving me a bit of claustrophobia!)

~ Saturday’s full moon is the Snow Moon, the last full moon of winter. I’m going to make something simple for dinner, in keeping with the late-winter theme. (Maybe a nightshade-free version of colcannon and some sausages? I might splurge on dessert though.) If the weather cooperates, we’ll spend some time under the moonlight. <3

~ Exploring the work of Caroline Shaw after reading about her in The Atlantic. Here’s a nice introduction.

I’ll leave you with something from Brian Doyle:

The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.

Let’s hold hands against the darkness, shall we?

tonia

best of the books, 2020

Happy, happy new year (AT LAST) my friends! Since I’m not getting any newsletters out right now, here’s a little end of year reading update. I finished 107 books this year which was a pretty good year for me. These are the ones that stand out in my memory (with some of my Goodreads notes included):

Nonfiction:

On Immunity: An Inoculation - Eula Biss - My son gave me a copy of this well before the pandemic arrived, but it’s certainly timely now. Biss writes as a mother, with a mother's perspectives and concerns, in pursuit of understanding the history of vaccination, the fears around it, the science we know and don't know, and the ways our lives are changed because of it. She is empathetic, real, curious, and human in her responses to what she uncovers. The book is not so much an argument for vaccination as an exploration of what it means to be a parent, what it means to live in community, our dependence on each other, and the real challenge of fear. The book is imminently readable and approachable. Highly recommended.

Distant Neighbors: Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder - Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder have two very different approaches to life (WB is an agrarian in the Christian tradition, GS is an environmental activist and Zen Buddhist) but both men are poets and writers who managed to forge a respectful and affectionate friendship through the years. I was so touched by their admiration and respect for each other's work, for the way they capitalized on agreement and went to each other for understanding their own biases and assumptions. My own affection for both men grew as I read their correspondence, but I was most taken with Berry, whose quiet humility, thoughtfulness, integrity and goodness shines through. What a lovely book for these fractious days.

Stamped From the Beginning - Ibram X Kendi - I don't feel qualified to judge the merits of this book as a history text - as I read I began to think of it more as sitting down with an intelligent, informed neighbor to hear their side of an ongoing story. It was powerful, shocking (not to discover that racism is pervasive, but to realize how much of it I've passively accepted in my life), humbling, and infuriating.

It is a long book, over 500 pages, and densely written. At times, I thought Kendi wielded his labels a little too broadly, but as I said, I considered the book from the standpoint of hearing a version of my history from a necessary and informed perspective rather than a precise history (though, as I said, I'm simply not qualified to judge it on those merits.) Still, it's an outstanding, eye-opening, and disturbing work that I wish everyone could read.

Poetry:

Deaf Republic - Ilya Kaminsky -

"We lived happily during the war
And when they bombed other people's houses, we
protested
but not enough..."

"At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow this?"

A parable/poem about a town's response to oppression and occupation. When a deaf boy is shot in the street by a soldier, the townspeople choose to become deaf. A moving challenge to our collective silence and our acceptance of atrocity.

Refugia - Kyce Bello - Refugia are habitats of retreat, where organisms and ecosystems go to try and survive. Kyce Bello takes that idea and explores what it means to be alive now, in a world that is changing, where much of what we love is dying. What does it mean to be a mother now? A child? How do you make plans to survive? How do you bear the weight of guilt? What will carry on? What will be left behind?

An absolutely beautiful and timely collection that has held my hand through all these pandemic days and will go on and on with me through the years ahead. (In fact, I keep a portion of one of these poems in the footer of the blog.)

Fiction:

Less - Andrew Sean Greer - I just loved this. It reminded me of a P.G. Wodehouse novel - if Wodehouse made Bertie Wooster a gay, middle-aged, slightly lost novelist and set him loose in the world without Jeeves. Sweet, funny, and quite brilliant. Nice skewering of the publishing world and writer's egos. It was a charming break from the too serious reading I've been doing.

Weather - Jenny Offill - I kept hearing how strange Offill's writing was, so I put off reading her. My bad. I absolutely loved this, and I love her style. It takes tremendous skill to pull a narrative along in short paragraphs. I thought it was brilliant. And the subject matter - a woman's anxiety about climate insecurity - is imminently relatable.

Writers & Lovers - Lily King - This story of a young woman trying to finish her novel and work through grief is one of my favorites this year. King's descriptions of the inner-anguish of novel writing alone would make this a keeper, but she has also created a protagonist that is easy to like and easy to root for.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk - A strange little murder mystery with a grouchy, complicated, astrology and animal loving protagonist. (Somehow connected in my mind with Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands, which I also enjoyed a lot.)

Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse - Fantasy set in pre-Columbian America? YES. Fabulous world creation, characters, intricate and interesting plot, great writing. Crows. Amazing. Can't wait for the next installment.

I’d love to hear any of your favorites, so please feel free to share! (I also love to hear about books you hated and why. Unlike last year (I’m looking at you, Where the Crawdads Sing) I had a pretty good run and don’t have any books I want to burn in the New Year’s bonfire, but if you’ve got one, do tell! )