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.

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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

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.)

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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

"...how to keep from becoming evil..."

I don’t know what else to do with 2020 but just roll with it. Lately my body has been rebelling with aches and pains and general grouchiness against any kind of sitting at a desk so I’ve been putting my energy into moving instead. I can’t remember an autumn when I have written less or been more caught up on yard work. All the bulbs are in, the gardens are put to bed, the herbs are harvested, the roses are pruned, and my yoga game is strong.

Maybe all that physical work is also a way of distracting myself from the state of the country (what in the hell is even going ON, people?!) which is probably a good thing since my Enneagram 1-ness would ordinarily be in high-distress mode about all the ideal-smashing and not-improving that is going on these days.

I mostly gave up alcohol a few months ago, but I’m making it through by being exhausted at night and keeping company with wise mentors. Right now I’m reading Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, which I highly recommend. Both Berry and Snyder have been fighting the good fight (each in their own, often very different, ways) for longer than I’ve been alive. WB had this to say back in 1978, and I’ll leave you with it:

“…living at peace is a difficult, deceptive concept. Same for not resisting evil. You can struggle, embattle yourself, resist evil until you become evil - as anti-communism becomes totalitarian. I have no doubt of that. But I don’t feel the least bit of an inclination to lie down and be a rug either, and now I begin to ask myself if I can live at peace only by being reconciled to battle….I am, I believe, a “nonviolent” fighter. But I am a fighter. And I see with considerable sorrow that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I once thought I would. So how to keep from becoming evil?

Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstractions and not against anything: don’t fight against even the devil and don’t fight “to save the world.” […]

If you don’t see how much badness comes from stupidity, ignorance, confusion, etc - if you don’t see how much badness is done by good, likeable people, if you don’t love, or don’t know you love, people whose actions you deplore - then I guess you go too far into outrage, acquire diseased motives, quit having any fun, and get bad yourself.”

Be gentle to yourselves. And each other.

with love,

tonia

the holy hum

This year, Earth Day and the New Moon are riding close to one another, which seems fitting. We are now, more than ever, aware of the Earth’s call, but the New Moon phase echoes the darkness we feel as well. A New Moon phase is something like walking a familiar forest path at midnight: the darkness teases out sounds, experiences, and emotions we were unaware of when we traveled the path in the light of day. It’s a time to step tenderly but purposefully until we can see our way clearly again. We may feel things we didn’t expect, we may be frightened, or exhilarated, perhaps both at the same time.

It’s been nice to talk with some of you this week about this muddle of emotions, the pull we feel towards change, even the confusion we have about what to do next. No one knows the way. We are all children of the Earth born into the Machine-gods’ realm. How do we learn the language of our birthright again? How do we learn the steps that bring us into the dance?

Wendell Berry offers these thoughts in his essay, People, Land, and Community:

“…as [the mud daubers] trowel mud into their nest walls, [they] hum to it, or at it, communicating a vibration that makes it easier to work, thus mastering their material by a kind of song. Perhaps the hum of the mud dauber only activates that anciently perceived likeness between all creatures and the earth of which they are made. For as common wisdom holds, like speaks to like.”

What if the longing so many of us currently feel for change, the buzz in our chests that disturbs our peace with the status quo, is not a sense of dread, but the holy hum of our true home singing to us, like calling to like, pleading us back into our intended harmony? What if what we feel is the longing of Creation to bring us back?

Only beware…

“In a society addicted to facts and figures, anyone trying to speak for… harmony is inviting trouble. The first trouble is in trying to say what harmony is. It cannot be reduced to facts or figures - though the lack of it can. It is not very visibly a function.”

Part of the problem, Berry says, is that the things that are destructive to our world are systems that are easily explained and backed by information. Even though they make their gains by the oppression of ”nature, people, and culture”, they are surrounded by scientific reasoning and a sense of inevitability. A harmonic system, however, is not so easily explained.

“…it involves an order that in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible.”

Is it any wonder we are confused about what to do now? Our birthright is coherence with a complex system of mutual beneficence, wholeness, and health, yet we have only been taught the rhythms of dissonance. We are born into a system built on competition, where each decision, each tool used, has a logic that makes sense only on its own and takes into consideration only its own profit and success.

“Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information - so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers - because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious…that a culture must be either shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people, and community by information, by quantities, seems invariably to throw them into competition with one another. Work is then understood to exploit the land, the people to exploit their work, the community to exploit its people. And then, instead of land, work, people, and community, we have the industrial categories of resources, labor, management, consumers, and government. We have exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy.”

I fear the Problem of the Industrial Economy is only going to be solved by its inevitable collapse, but that’s not what I’m thinking about today. I’m thinking about how those of us who hear the hum can live in resonance with it (which is naturally in opposition to and in defiance of the Problem.) Last week a friend shared her happiness that with this unusual home-time she has been able to do so many things that she has wanted to do in terms of sustainable living, but she also feels a sense of dread knowing she won’t be able to maintain it when she returns to work. I understand that fully, and I want to offer more today than just an emotional invitation to join an inexplicable rhythm. I believe one reason we fail in these things is that we often take other people’s solutions and try to paste them onto our own lives. What we need is to understand our own place, our own resources, our own abilities. None of us alive now will completely escape the messy realities of our systems. We will have to compromise. We will create waste. We will have to decide which levels of exploitation we can live with. Our answers will not be easily explained or categorized, and they will not be universally applicable. We can only respond to our own situations with attentiveness and love. The important thing to remember is that we can respond.

Here are some ways to think, and some places to begin. I think they are accessible to most, if not all, of us.

Banner from The Far Woods, a couple of local artists whose Work I love.

• We can simplify our diets to take advantage of our particular resources. It isn’t hard to learn what the farmers in our own regions are growing. Then a plan can be put in place to support them on whatever scale we can manage, from roadside stands to Farmer’s Markets, to u-picks, to bulk orders, to CSA’s, to looking for their produce in the regular grocery store.

• We can examine our use of transportation to find the most energy-efficient and community-supportive means for us. It needn’t be all or nothing. Here at home, we cannot walk or ride straight from the house due to dangerous roads, so we drive to a parking lot a mile away and walk or ride from there when we can. My husband commutes to the city with an electric car and a bus pass. It’s not perfect, it’s what we can do.

• We can turn off lights, turn down the heat, turn off screens, dry the clothes on a rack. At least sometimes. And that’s a start.

• We can make our homes centers of production rather than centers of consumption. We can make birthday cards or poems or a loaf of bread or a pair of pants instead of paying others to do it for us every time.

• We can support the land by community clean-ups, voting against exploitative laws and businesses, and asking businesses we have relationships with to use more sustainable means and methods.

• We can reduce our reliance on convenience products by simplifying our wants. We can learn to snack on foods that don’t come in packages or boxes. We can take coffee and a water bottle from home. We can get out of the mindset that we deserve constant treats and make those things special and rare again.

• We can make our spaces safe for pollinators and other creatures by refusing to use pesticides. We can grow flowers to feed them and food for ourselves, even if it is a single pot on the front step.

• We can stop making so many online purchases. We can shop our local stores first and nurture a willingness to accept what is available to us rather than searching endlessly for the ideal product. By buying from a local store we can save local businesses, fossil fuels and trees, we can reduce plastic pollution, air pollution, and waste, wear and tear on the roadways from truck transportation, and our addiction to immediate gratification.

• We can choose tools that are fit for our tasks and not disruptive of the natural order. A good broom, a mop bucket. Fountain pens over disposable pens (this is on my list to conquer!), cloth bags instead of plastic or paper, a good knife instead of a plethora of one-use gadgets, a pot of mint instead of a box of mint tea bags, a healthy lifestyle instead of a cabinet of pills.

• We can hold simpler events. We can break up with Pinterest and decorate for these with natural and found items, make cooking and washing dishes part of the affair instead of relying on disposables, eschew favors and gifts that add to clutter, exchange gifts of pre-loved items and made things.

• We can make peace with our faces and our hair and simplify our beauty products. A healthy diet and water are the best path to pretty skin and hair. Apple cider vinegar and baking soda can do a surprising number of jobs. We can keep the things we really want to keep (for me it’s cruelty-free mascara, lipstick, and a touch of powder when I go out) and let the rest go. We can stop worrying about trends and find a simple, classic haircut that is easy to maintain.

• We can understand the true cost of the things we consume. Cheap chocolate is paid for on the backs of exploited people. The true cost of fairly-traded chocolate is expensive. The answer is to eat less, not buy cheaper. In the same way, budget meat is paid for by animals who suffer horrible lives and deaths, people who work in hellish conditions to butcher them, the land which is drained of fertility and poisoned, and government subsidies that promote it all. The electricity in my area is powered by dams that alter the rivers and damage endangered salmon populations and disrupt the rhythms of Native cultures. When we understand the actual price of what we are consuming so thoughtlessly, it can help us make better choices.

• We can commit to going outside and learning the hum of our own place. The Earth wants to teach us her ways. We can watch the birds build and take advantage of the seasons, which teaches us what we can be doing at the same times; we can learn the weeds that grow in the sidewalk cracks and use many of them for nourishing teas or addition to our meals; we can re-learn how to handle changing temperatures and the feel of the weather on our skin. The more we listen and watch, the more discoveries we make, the more the rhythms become our own.

• We can take inventory of our lives and time. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, we can choose one area at a time and ask ourselves how we could step out of the consumption cycle in our particular situations. We can make slow changes and take pleasure and pride in them.

I’m sure you have more and wiser things you could add to this list, but I offer this as a place to start.

This invitation to the holy hum is for all of us. It is not exclusive, it is not just for those who have time or money or health or off-grid cabins in the wilderness. It’s for all of us to join, in the ways we can. The more of us who do, the more we share, the louder the hum.

Happy Earth Day, my friends. <3

"lead is not gold..."

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

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

~ Dr. Martin Shaw, “Small gods”

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

~ William Stafford, The Answers Are Inside the Mountains