Nothing Is Lost :: July 2025

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My father is gone now, swept swiftly away from us at the end of April by a riptide of cancer. I am still reorienting myself, like some digital map spinning up, then down, looking for center. It is the end of possibilities that hurts the most, the end of what should have been, and wasn’t. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this new kind of grief. I’ve never been prone to high emotion; malaise is more my usual path, followed by self-recrimination and doubt, as if the cancer – or the relationship – was my doing alone. We are two months on. How strange it is that someone so essential to my own being can just…stop.

  Meanwhile, the world.

I’ve barely let myself acknowledge the news, but it trickles in. I don’t let myself go too far down any path of despair or fear because I know it accomplishes nothing. We are in the inevitable collapse of an unsustainable system and we will have to live our part.

“Forgive me these shadows I cling to, good people, trying to hold quiet in my prologue. Hawks cling the barrens wherever I live. The world says, “Dog eat dog.” ~ “Some Shadows”/William Stafford

Once a week now, I go to a Mindful Gardening class at the university’s learning garden. The class is a motley group of ages and orientations but our instructor is one of those beautiful women who looks like she emerged from nature itself, all soft fabrics and earth colors, a gentle voice. She brings her newborn tied in a sling around her chest and invites us to listen to the earth, and we all do, without embarrassment. We are hungry for mothering, I think. All of us with our different stories, all of us needing reassurance, all of us suffering from the same fractured anxieties.

We pull weeds under the blistering sun, turn the compost pile, encourage the native plants to grow. Sometimes we talk to each other, but mostly, we are quiet and busy. Our jittery bodies shape themselves around the plants as if we were one of them – and we are – thick-stalked and branching, reaching toward both sun and soil for connection.

When I signed up for this class weeks ago, I chose it because my brain was grief-dull. I needed something that let my focus and concentration off the hook; I didn’t realize it would be healing. I put my hands in the soil and I think of my dad’s body going back to the earth, of the beautiful circle of our existence turning and returning, of the physical reality of our bodies becoming dust and being taken up again into the bodies of other creatures in a long and continual renewing. Nothing is lost. We are literally made of this renewal – the bodies of all our ancestors live inside us. We are all, day by day, heading back to our beginning. When my dad died everyone talked about his going home to an eternal somewhere in the sky. I prefer to think of him here all around me, present now and always in leaf and bud and bone. And I find this makes the rest of the world bearable too. Whatever dies - nations or species or eras - is composted into the next turning, the next flowering, however strange or far away that may be.

Grief can be like standing on a distant mountain. It takes you out of the day to day world and expands your horizon. Suddenly you see how short the time really is, how close to your own death you already are. But just recently, I’ve felt myself returning to the place where we all live again, close up to the frustrations and fears of this moment. I suspect that it is nature, quiet, and connection that will make living in this now possible, just as they have made accepting this loss possible. But the truth of now is that nature, quiet, and connection are under immediate threat. I know it is going to take radical determination to regain — and retain — those things in our lives. Maybe I will write more about that later, if you would like.

~Thank you so much for your kind notes over the past months. I know some of you have been facing similar things and my heart is with you. I hope you are finding your own places of peace and connection.

  After the initial fog of loss – and many hours of mindless TV watching – I’m making July as screen-free as possible. I use the Brick app to make my phone (almost) a dumb phone and I’m not watching TV or movies.  

Instead, I’m spending as much time as I can outdoors. I’ve started observing and jotting down nature notes again, something I haven’t done since I started school five years ago. I’m remembering patterns I once took time to notice and had forgotten I knew - cycles of plants and wildlife that return to my awareness like old friends. Right now, the young crows are begging loudly for food in the mornings and the thimbleberries are ripe. Soon it will be time for blackberry picking and dahlias. I plan on observing every inch of this summer and beyond.

~ I’ve taken up knitting again (with the help of my lovely DIL) and I’m working on a vest for the fall. It is so exciting to see a garment take shape under my needles.

~ And I’m reading, of course. A few standouts:

  • Sara Baume:  I loved Seven Steeples, but I’ve added A Line Made by Walking to my favorites now too. The story of an artist working her way through grief and depression, it is finely observed and wonderfully quiet. Baume’s character struggles with her identity as an artist, wondering if she has been lying to herself about her talent, but all the time we as readers can see that she moves and thinks and observes as an artist. It’s a meditation on the ways we are unkind to ourselves and hold unrealistic expectations and, in its own way, permission to be small and unambitious. A nice companion to this is Baume’s Handiwork, which is her own meditations on her life as an artist.

  • Karen Russell: The Antidote. I love Russell’s inventiveness and embrace of the off-beat. This new novel is set in the Dust Bowl and looks at the ways we willfully and collectively forget our sins.

  •  Belinda Bauer: The Impossible Thing (audiobook). Terrific narration. This is based on the real story of the Metland eggs and the history of egg collecting, which is a lot more exciting than it sounds.

  • Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths. This is the first time I’ve read Borges and I understand why people say he’s so singular. (I can see his influence though, in books like Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, maybe even in Ted Chiang’s work, if you like any of those writers.) But this collection feels so timely. It deals a lot with the recursive nature of the world. Things repeat, time overlaps, things exist now because they existed before. Lately I’ve been stuck on the story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius”. It’s about a fictional world called Tlön which is created by a “secret and benevolent society” of academics. They invent an entire language, mythology, numeracy, philosophy and science for Tlön over a great many years.   The society’s core belief is that nothing is real unless it is perceived, or in other words, ideas create reality – and they prove this by slowly hiding their false “history” inside actual cultural records. Over time, Tlön, whose “existence” is now sprinkled into encyclopedias and textbooks and historical records, becomes real to future people who don’t know it was an intentional fiction to begin with. (It's almost like this has happened before. Maybe we should all be reading literature all the time before it’s too late?)

  • Sharon Olds: Arias. I read one of these a day and I’m pretty much always astounded by her fearlessness. From “Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater”

  • “Oh, Mom. Come sit
    with me at this stone table at the bottom
    of the Bay, here is a barnacle of
    egg custard, here is your tiny
    spoon with your initials, sup with me
    at dawn on your first day—we are all
    the dead, I am not apart from you,
    for long, except for breath, except for
    everything.”

As always, I love to hear from you. Share what you’re reading or how you’re surviving our crazy world.

For now,

Tonia

 P.S. I got new kittens and they have been such a bright spot.

Wendell

Wallace

Now :: August 2024

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Hello friends,

Outrageously, it is August. Month of sun and smoke. My state continues its annual burning, though we are far away from any flames or damage here closer to the coast. I have been in classes this summer, trading stories with gentle-souled young people. My classmates are beautiful, like rocks you pull glistening from a riverbed, quietly colorful and laced with sparkle. Their stories are full of emotion, all with this reaching, searching quality that makes me want to be good to them and tell them everything will be okay.

Everything will be okay. Maybe we all need to hear that now.

Last night I was standing on my deck as the sun went down and the little bats were coming out to forage. I never have the patience or energy for star-gazing; my night sky pleasure is the little brown bats. I love the way they emerge at twilight and flit like secrets across your view. They live very neatly in the eaves of my house and the canopy of fir trees, but they are not just country creatures. They flutter through city and suburban skies without prejudice. Sometimes when I feel nearly smothered by the pollution of the internet outrage factories I think that every day the bats or the bumblebees or the wood ants are living in an incredible now, without worry, without outrage, or smugness, or despair.

Democracy can be in peril and the cedars dying and the state burning and relationships fractured and cancer licking at the door, and everything will be okay because I am alive, we are alive, now.

This idea settles me somehow. When I was younger, we lived for a day when we would fly away to glory. Here and now was a desolate place, twisted by sin and sharpened at the edges. Pray, wait, endure, long for that some day in the sky. I can look back and see the smudge of days I thought were ugly or beneath my notice, years that I wished away. Now, I just live. Gratefully.  

Now there are blackberries, and a free day, and a little dog who has adopted us. Now there is a kiss in the kitchen and dahlias in a vase. A call from a grown child. Good coffee. Time to write. All this tangled in with the grief and pain and weariness, of course. It is always a tangle. But which one will I stay with?

Soon my class will be done and my new young friends scattered again. I will get a few weeks of summer before I go back. There’s a tree I want to climb, a pasture I want to nap in, so many books I want to read. I would like to write here a little. Be quiet a little.

Do you have any plans for your now?

Birdy

 A little of this and that:

~ Reading the last of the Cromwell trilogy with Simon Haisell. I’ve been putting this one off because I know what’s coming, but the slow pace and the company of a group helps. Simon is a terrific host and offers so much insight into these dense, intelligent novels.

~ Listening to this repeatedly.

~ Been mixing things up by avoiding the streaming services and getting old-school DVD’s from the library on a Friday night. Sometimes it’s helpful not to have so many options. In the current stack: 

First Reformed,

Drive My Car,

Trainspotting

~ Just about to start The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control

~ Why I Hate Instagram Now.

I’ve been off Instagram and all other similar platforms for years, but I sometimes scroll my husband’s very boring (sports-algorithmed) IG feed, so I can recognize this frustration. Remember when we thought we were using these platforms to connect with each other?

“Meta, Instagram’s parent company, still says its mission is giving people “the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” As it thwarts my efforts to see all the photos posted by people I know and chose to follow, I call bullshit. Injecting Reels in my feed, then refusing to let me abolish those diversions, hasn’t just put my loved ones in competition with viral nonsense––it has repeatedly subverted my attempts to ensure that my loved ones win.”~Conor Friedersdorf

~It’s the magnificent James Baldwin’s 100th birthday. Here’s a nice article about where to start with his books.

~Are Novel Covers Alienating Male Readers? These covers are alienating me, so I can see it!

OK! That’s about it for this month. Shall we meet here again soon?

Peace keep you, friends.

tonia

 

 

dawning new year :: January 14, 2024

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            I barely noticed crossing the 2023 finish line and entering the new year. The year of the owl was a tough one; it lasted twice as long as it should and death circled on all sides. I hardly had energy to notice that we are supposed to be starting again. I’ve thought it before, but I feel it more intensely now: January, coming in the heart of winter, deep on the heels of all that enforced merry-making, is a terrible, terrible time to have to find the motivation for new routines and habits. I want January to be a month to rest and reflect, to curl up with old journals and pots of tea. I want long, unembarrassed naps, already-watched movies, and thick books about naturalists or explorers enduring harsh conditions outside while I warm my toes under layers of blankets. There’s nothing stopping me from doing this, of course. I can begin a new year of habits on February 1st,  or March 23rd. It makes no difference.

            For now, I can feel the pull of winter on my animal body, drawing me into quieter spaces. This feels like wisdom I should attend; the earth and I are made of the same stardust, after all, but she is much, much older than me and has passed beyond the need to prove herself or produce for show. I find myself wanting to lean into her side and burrow into her skirts, let her decide when we start moving again.

            I don’t mean that I want to stop living though. When I was younger, I thought rest was just the absence of tasks. I thought it involved reclining my body and letting the laundry sit in the dryer and eating take-out or something. In this way, I managed to avoid all sorts of growth and personal development. I could keep myself spinning during working hours with a list of busy tasks and then be too tired to do anything meaningful with my remaining time (like my own art or creative work). And then, because I misunderstood the meaning of rest, I would refuse to create or journal or spend time alone with a notebook in the evenings or on the weekends because I had categorized that as “work” and I knew it was healthy to “rest.” To be fair, rest meant something different to me in the years I was raising and homeschooling four children than it does to me now. There are seasons. But there are also thousands of ways to procrastinate, aren’t there? 

            This winter season I am turning toward myself, going deep into places I have been avoiding. Some of this is the gift left by the owl, some of it is the lines on my face and the silver in my hair, the growing awareness that time does not stretch on indefinitely. If I would become someone, I must become that someone here, in this now. 

            So I set my alarm twenty minutes earlier, spend the time on writing morning pages, discovering that the pen has access to places in me that I have never uncovered. I do this out of desire, not demand. It doesn’t feel like habit or discipline I am building so much as a self I am quietly discovering, the emerging awareness I sometimes have in dreams or in the blurred spaces between waking and sleeping.

            And then because rest is regenerative, the morning pages extend to more words. I feel like seeing where a story might go. I feel like writing a letter, meandering around the soft corners of this winter hour. I feel like finishing, and so I do. Afterward I am more steady in myself than I was before. There is nothing strenuous about these meetings with myself, no intent to produce. And yet the words pile up, the creative spirit stirs.

            In a recent newsletter, L.M. Sacasas wrote about how slowly the sun arrives each day. Dawn is a gradual affair if you are attentive to it. I saw this recently when we were at the beach and I went out early to watch the ocean at sunrise which, according to my weather app, was supposed to arrive precisely at 7:42 am. I walked down about 20 minutes before that, when the sun was beginning to pink the clouds behind me, and headed home an hour later when the eastern sun was up enough to glint off a slant of western water. Maybe we can let the new year dawn on us like that too. Accept that January 1st is just the first pink signal that a new day is arriving instead of the starting gun for a race where we run fast now or fall behind. Maybe after the slow dawn of the new year, we’ll be better able to see what shape it wants to take, how we might live well in the light of it.

            How about you? Are you starting the year running? Or are you feeling the need for more time? Either way, I am holding out for a happy and deeply nourishing year for all of us.

Thinking of you all here, this quiet and encouraging community, with gratitude. Let’s share more words together this year if we can.

tonia

 This and that.

 *Reading: Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. Just exquisitely good storytelling. (Next I’ll watch the movie adaptation: The Quiet Girl.)

*Reading: the story of David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who collected and catalogued many of the indigenous NW plants for the British.

 *Reading: Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about what we are supposed to do with problematic artists.

 *Making: this little blanket

*Making: an art journal with Suzi Banks Baum’s Dark Advent Workshop, learning to be imperfect and work with visual media. So hard for this perfectionist and yet so rewarding.

*Watching:  Ondine, Chinatown, and a selection of movies for a class I’m taking on Conspiracy Theories.

*Watching (soon): the new season of True Detective with Jodie Foster

 *Thinking about: Elizabeth Gilbert shaving her head and saying fuck it to beauty culture.  This whole interview is marvelous.

*Thinking about: Eliza Rathje’s gentle volumes of The Journal of Small Work and how we might envision a different future one small dream at a time.

           

a midwest journey :: july 2022

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Kansas City Skyline

I seem to always get stuck in the middle seat of any flight, so I had to content myself with brief glimpses of the quilted Midwest landscape out my neighbor’s window as we passed over it last week. I never get tired of the patient geometry of the center of the US, the white snakes of road wide enough to disrupt the green and brown grid, the occasional rise of land, a blue glint of lake, a sparkle of river scratching through the earth. On two of our flights I was stuck between strangers, tucking my elbows carefully against my body so as not to disturb the men on either side of me by actually taking up physical space. Once we were in the air, I spent some of my cramped time considering why I feel compelled to perform this deference to others. The men beside me gave no thought to commandeering both the armrests. Probably, if I had insisted on space for my arms, they would have given it to me, but sometimes social pressure breeds a kind of forgetfulness and I resort to long-ingrained habits of being the good, invisible girl.

I encountered that old self a lot while we were visiting Missouri. The subconscious reads the landscape, rings a bell of recognition to tell us how to feel and act. I kept seeing old shadows on the streets, hearing whispers on the drone of hot air. The only features rising from the flat earth were the buildings, an occasional tree. It took me back to summers as a kid in the thin dust of Idaho: blistering pavement, ice cream from a truck, late night church services. One night in our Missouri loft an old memory returned to me in the form of a dream: I was six again, kneeling by the couch to say the sinner’s prayer, crying because the devil wanted me. I woke to the weight of sticky air on my skin. When we got on the plane again and flew home and I saw the shoulders of the mountains emerging, the trees leaping up like they’d been waiting for us, I could feel myself growing cool and green and straight again too, in recognition of home.

Despite the rising of old ghosts, I did love my trip to the Midwest. The best part of travel is the chance to inhabit the lives and places of others and learn a new context. I’m always interested in the narrative of a place, the way weather and geography fraternize with history and tradition to create the stories we live out of. I gathered the heat, the cloudless skies, the tree-lined highways, the churches, the strip malls, the billboards promising redemption and/or judgement, the farmland, the frozen custard stands, the blues singers on the evening sidewalks, the short shorts and tank tops, the gorgeous diversity of faces, the gun and ammo shops, the historical markers, the earnestly waving flags, and found I understood a little better the whats and whys of that place.

On the flight, I had been reading Barry Lopez’ posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. “…to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations,” he says. “We will need to trust each other.” Lopez was an uncommonly humble man, always open to learning, with no apologies for who he was and what he stood for, but no hubris to assume his way was the only way.

“And whenever I found myself in those situations, I came to understand that it was always good to hold in suspension my own ideas about what the practical, wise, or ethical decision might be in any given set of circumstances.”

He was a good companion for the journey.

~I also finished Johann Hari’s excellent book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, on that trip. It’s validated my decision from 3 years ago to delete my Instagram and most of my social media accounts and try to use my phone as a tool, not a distraction device. It’s also inspired me to work on my deep reading and attention span, which are really just muscles that need strengthening. I’m making good use of the Lady Crawley chairs that I bought at a consignment shop several years ago. They’re perfect for deep reading as they are comfortable, but they force me to sit upright and not slump over and fall asleep. In addition, I keep a pencil in hand for making notes and underlining. It makes a difference! (I’m also intrigued by Ryan Holiday’s suggestion to swarm.)

Hari also contributed to the conversation with Lopez’ work about being slow to draw conclusions:

“I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world, and with myself. I think all of these ideas - the messages implicit in these mediums - are wrong. Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right - you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular with they are first articulated.”

(If the book is too much, Rich Roll had a great podcast with Hari on this topic. It’s long, but you can break it up over a few good walks!)

~ Pat Barker’s books on the women of Troy (read gorgeously by Kristin Atherton) have been keeping me company on my walks this month. Highly recommended!

Light and love, friends.

tonia

December, First Week :: 2021

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No matter how I try to prepare for it, the transition from fall to winter always manages to stagnate me. I’m perpetually cold, I feel lazy and apathetic, and I can’t even remember the gung-ho October person I used to be. Usually “just put your walking shoes on” is my standard method of getting myself out the door every day, but lately, I haven’t even managed that.

“Maybe,” a friend says, “that’s what this season is supposed to bring.”

Fine, fine, I think, but dragging myself through the grocery store a few days before Thanksgiving I lock eyes with an older woman passing me in the baking aisle. She raises an eyebrow toward my bulging cart and says, “The holidays are different for women, aren’t they?”

Oh yes they are, my friend, yes, they are. No matter how much simplifying and minimalising I do, there is just always going to be a war between the demands of family and cultural expectations and the creaturely, animal part of myself that wants to burrow down and get soft and warm this time of year.

Since I can’t disappear into a den and sleep the next two months, I’ve been making small concessions to this reality - allowing my writing disciplines to slip, doing more yoga and less walking, pushing pause on the long list of household projects, giving in to an impulse purchase here and there. It feels good to be softer with myself, to be human and needy and not always pushing toward a goal. Maybe that’s the gift of entering winter I can embrace.

. . .

Since I haven’t been around much these last few weeks - and I’m a bit out of the blogging habit - a random list of things occupying my mind and attention, just for fun:

There you go: food, books and TV, and nothing too taxing. I hope you are all well. I know there are some emails I haven’t answered and some people I need to reach out to. If you’re one of them, thanks for being patient with my seasonal ineptitude.

If you’re so inclined, share your own winter pleasures and inspire the rest of us!

Note: I’m sorry Squarespace makes commenting such a pain. I know some of you don’t comment because of all the hoops you have to jump through. I’ll do some research and see if I can add a third party comment host and eliminate all that. Later. In the new year. ;)

Much love,

tonia


(*Another indulgence. I usually boycott all things Amazon.)