a midwest journey :: july 2022

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

September, Third Week :: 2021

The neighbor, we think, has a new gun. A semi-automatic from the sounds of it, as he does target (?) practice (?) in the late afternoons. The stutter of explosions ricochets around our tiny valley doubling and redoubling until the dog tucks tail and runs indoors and we follow suit, ears ringing. We’ve lived rurally for over 15 years now and while I will never own a gun, I understand why other people keep a rifle in the back closet. It’s helpful for scaring off coyotes and cougars, dispatching a suffering hen, or bringing home a freezer full of venison. To each her own.

I don’t feel so gracious about the semi-automatic though, and I confess that my neighborly feelings have taken a hit lately. Every barrage bouncing its echo around our woods seems a reminder of all that is wrong with America; I have to bite my tongue to keep from shouting something rude into the void. Honestly, it’s just one of the many ways I’ve been floundering for weeks. The computer fiasco (that is still unresolved, cross your fingers for me!) combined with upended wedding plans (still waiting on a visa), the emptied house, plus the whole world being broke in all the ways…I don’t even know what to do with myself some days.

My funk these last weeks led me, as funks do, to revisit some old social media haunts. Can I just say that two years out from having my own social media accounts I am finding those places absolutely bizarre and frightening now? I scrolled through pages and pages of people turning themselves into set pieces and still lifes, dousing themselves with cynicism, or swimming in a stream of crisis/argument/drama that never stops. I saw lots of beautiful things and a lot of wonderful people, too, of course, but it leads me to wonder what we are doing to our minds and our ability to process, reason, and think independently. (If you’re so inclined, maybe step back a moment and see how much everything in those places looks and sounds exactly the same depending on which pond you’re swimming in.)

It took me a while to shake off the heaviness of that social media immersion, but I’m finding my energy again and thinking about new routines and rituals. I dragged myself back to the keyboard this week to work on a story. (“Why tell stories? We do it because we’re sick of reality and we need to create what isn’t yet there.” ~ Colum McCann) And I’ve got a spare room now, which I’m making into a quiet space for yoga and early morning meditation to start the day. I find that early morning time essential to recovering my calm and equanimity. It’s a place I can deliberately set down the things that cling to me, like my neighbor’s choices or my self-flagellation over the lost work, or the weight of the world’s calamities, and choose to reorient myself toward the peacableness and gentleness I want to inhabit.

“Because the mind is an important and sacred place, keep it clean and clear.” ~ Ryan Holiday

Next week I have plans for a little Autumn reset, an idea I gleaned from my Ayurvedic counselor. Autumn is my golden time of year, but I often find the transition from summer to fall a little harsh, so I’m going to take a couple of days to eat simply (gentle foods and warming broths) and rest my mind and body around the Equinox.

I hope that will lead naturally into my other Autumn goals:

• retreating from Internet persuasion,

• seeking less commentary and pursuing more deep reading,

• taking in less news and spending more time around a table in conversation*,

• making fewer plans and doing more consistent, patient work on whatever is in front of me.

Plus all the good baking and cooking with autumn foods, leaf walks and rainy days, and the first fires in the woodstove to look forward to.

Do share what plans you are making for Autumn and what ways you are finding peace in the midst of the world’s noise and complexity. I look forward to hearing from you.

xo

tonia

Gathered:

~ Finished the delicious translation of the Reynard the Fox tale this week. Gorgeous Old World storytelling featuring the wily, feral, charismatic Reynard evading the King and his crowd and naturally exposing the hypocrisy and machinations of power. Beautiful interiors, food, and vocabulary (plus female characters who are useful and intelligent!) Such a fun change of pace from my usual reading.

~ The Hawthorns are ripening here so it’s time to make Hawthorn Cordial again. Last year I served this at our Samhain dinner and it was delicious.

~ My daughter is writing the most charming kid’s novel about a girl who moves to France and can talk to animals. It’s absolutely fabulous. (And so is she.) You can find her website here and if you want to cheer her on, subscribe and help her grow a community online. <3

~ Mary Beard’s lecture on the classic myths and how they aid the cultural exclusion of women from power. “The ancient world is preoccupied with gender because patriarchy is never easy with itself.” I’m looking forward to getting her book, too.

*Ivan Illich: “Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge…I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.”

March, first week :: 2021

I learned a new word for myself this week: nemophilist : someone who is in love with forests and the woods, who visits often, a “haunter of the woods.” I was born in a desert valley, but I swear my heart formed under the roots of a moss-pelted Douglas fir. Even as a child I knew that I belonged with trees. I love so many kinds of natural places, but when I enter our tiny patch of woods and stand still, I feel connected and known in a different way, as if I had sprung from this very ground, as if I am a part of the vital network that links all the natural world. And of course, I am. It’s a part of our modern affliction that we think of nature as something outside ourselves, something we go to visit or escape into. But nature is not something out there, it is us.

Sometimes, I begin my day meditating outside on the back deck. In the winter, that means bundling up and carrying a candle out to my chair, but there is something wonderful about sitting in the still-dark, listening to the world before the neighbors begin driving by on the road below, just the sound of the creek and the occasional shush of trees I can’t yet see. It’s like finding myself again before the world pulls and tears, asking me to forget. Today I found myself whispering, show me how to live within this harmony.

I spend a lot of time thinking how to lessen my impact, create zero waste, leave no trace. But lately I’ve been thinking how that language can lead to disordered thinking of ourselves as something apart from, as invaders who don’t belong here and must tiptoe across the landscape in repentance for existing. Instead, I want to start asking how to live with, to learn the harmony and reciprocity I am meant to be a part of. Not just how can I quit consuming too much and creating waste, but how can I be a gift to this land? What can I give back to it? It’s a small shift, but one that leads me more into the flow of abundance and generosity that I believe nature is always singing about.

This week the sun arrived and a daffodil bloomed, sapsuckers are at work. Thank you, March for coming. We needed you.

---

Notes from this week:

Fred Bahnson’s essay “Keeping the World in Being” - “I’m attracted to Cassian’s writings and the work of other early monastics because they reveal parallels between the era of the desert fathers and our own; they, too, lived during a time when the known world was coming unhinged. In 313 CE, when the Roman emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, thereby marking the beginning of Christendom, men and women of conscience knew that the wedding of church and state was not a betrothal: it was a betrayal. The early anchorites withdrew from this arranged marriage because they knew that Christendom could no longer sustain their inner lives, that civilization had in fact gone mad. They left the cities and withdrew to the Egyptian desert, where the vastness of their spiritual hunger could be met by an equally vast landscape.”

~ With apologies to the minimalist mood of the moment, I’ve given over to bookish hedonism. I don’t want to be restrained. I’m happiest when I’m surrounded by them, reading them, creating them. Nemophile, bibliophile, not sorry. As Ryan Holiday says at the end of his newsletters:

I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect.

May have sent this image to my husband ten times this week:

Aidan McGarry’s book wall.

~ “Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write.” ~ Robert Macfarlane

~Despite my ongoing efforts, I’m not much of a music person (I know, I’m sorry, my formative years were wasted), but I do love a song that reaches out and connects in my mind to characters in my stories. Sometimes it’s the lyrics, sometimes it’s a sound, sometimes a mood, but they’re almost always pop songs because I usually discover them in the car on long drives while my mind is working out plot points. Currently, Harry Styles and I are deep into The Spaces Between with Falling (the whole Fine Line album is terrific, btw). My other novel favored lots of John Mayer.

~ William Stafford is one of my life-mentors for a good reason. His blend of pragmatism and natural optimism make me hopeful. I’m leaving you with my morning copywork from today - with a slight {alteration} - if you’ll forgive my boldness, Mr. Stafford.

A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by—
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”—
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a {queen}.”

May you face all your doubts and questions today in such a spirit.

peace,

tonia

P.S. Three weeks until my classes start and I’m working as hard as I can on rewrites for The Spaces Between. Send stamina and a few extra hours, please. <3

a late-June note

The New Moon has come and gone, as has the Solstice, and I am no closer to getting a newsletter out to you. I seem to be feeling the cumulative stress of these last strange months all at once. New food sensitivities, brain fog, fatigue, racing heart, apathy. I barely recognize myself. And this week, which I set aside specifically for writing, got sidelined by a family member in the hospital and a few days of really emotional decision making for one of my children (mamas, we feel this as if it were ourselves, don’t we?)

To help myself calm down, I put my loved ones on notice that I do not want to hear ANY news this week or any updates on anything that are not of an immediate life or death emergency. This is harder said than done! I have become profoundly aware of how much information our psyches are subjected to everywhere. It’s almost impossible to avoid stimulation. (I am thinking especially now of my dear ones with anxiety or panic attacks, addiction recovery, and auto-immune disorders that require a calm nervous system. <3)

Monday morning, just before the messages started arriving about my family’s needs, I was at the duck house doing my usual chores, head down, fiddling with water buckets and feed dishes, when I had the strong urge to look up. I did, and there, across from me was a doe, staring intently. I’ve written before that deer are indicators of the presence of God for me, so I stopped what I was doing and stared back. We kept eye contact for several minutes and I welcomed her as a God-message. She just stayed right there, holding my gaze and I stayed and drank it in. Then she casually left, and I went back to the house and the week fell apart. But every day I have revisited that gift of calm energy, that preemptive sense of comfort and with-ness.

During these days when I have tried to mute the world around me, I have been thinking about all the little practices I have been developing over these years. Things like leaving social media, non-violence, receiving the gifts of nature, meditation, learning to listen to my body, changing my spiritual communities, and others; things I worried over and felt self-conscious about, things I struggled to explain to others. Now I can see how vital these things are to my continued health, and how my intuition knew well before my head and intellect what would be healing and right for me. I am amazed by it, truly amazed.

Everything from religion to education to advertisements constantly tells us we can’t learn, we can’t know without their approval and expertise, that we can’t trust what is inside ourselves to be sufficient. Like most people, I have believed that all my life. But discovering that I can trust my inner knowing, that the path that seems right to me when I am listening and at peace is nearly always the right path, that Love is all around and in and through and always guiding, that is an amazing joy.

In the garden this morning, I noticed the cool-weather crops have been lingering around longer than usual and the summer plants are still small and unsteady, different than other late Junes - but not surprising for this cool and rainy one we’ve just had. There is no sense of frustration there, no anxiety vibrating off the tomato leaves. I want to live by such confidence, content with the sun I am given, and the rain when it falls, taking what I can and growing. I admit I am not there yet. A part of me is disappointed that I haven’t got a newsletter out for you. It’s been a year since I started writing about cultivating a quiet life, and it feels like a failure to break the string even for a short time. But I think, this too, is part of my healing and coming to be myself. This is not a commercial space or a business. I am not a machine that can pump out content. I am something more than that, of earth and blood, with all the wild sensitivities and rhythms of stars and planets and bees and rivers coursing through me. And so are you.

Be well, my friends. I’ll be writing again soon.

Peace keep you.

tonia