not done yet :: July 20, 2023

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              I’ve been born again many times: in a crowd, at an altar, in my seat, on my knees, on my feet. Those were jarring rebirths, laboring under the strain of my supposed corruption and persistent doubt, brutal attempts to bring a roving mind to heel. Always, the newly born me would flourish for a time and then falter, would need another altar, another crucifixion. It was years and years before the realization that all this monitoring, repenting, dying, rebirthing was someone else’s idea of living, a system I inherited but didn’t want. Slowly, finally, I killed off my attachment to it. (Don’t bother looking, the grave is in the woods; I burned the bones and buried the ashes deep.)

You must know that no matter what they tell you, nothing can really destroy the original self, the core person. She sleeps, she waits, and when the time is right, she rises.

“Practice resurrection,” Wendell Berry wrote, as earnestly as if he had just pilfered the power from the coffers of the divine. The idea lay in my spirit for years simmering like some stolen jewel, until one summer afternoon when I was alone outside, journaling and watching the bees in the honey locust. The old life was done, had been ending for so many years, but I had not been able to admit it yet. Words began to form themselves under my pen, words I didn’t even know existed in my mind. The moment they became visible on the page, I began to shake. A door behind me clicked shut, the sleeping girl opened her eyes, I was through to the other side.  

            When I try to write about this, I often end up splitting myself in two, the way you do in dreams when you both experience an event and observe yourself experiencing it. I am the girl who was silenced and the girl who held a hand over my mouth. I don’t know how to reconcile this, but the original girl does. “Forget that,” she says. “We’re going to live.” She signs up for school, makes friends, gets a tattoo, plans solo trips, buys a pair of walking shoes, piles of books, a tarot deck for the hell of it, ditches a life’s worth of anger because it’s not worth our time.  The woman who has done my hair for the last 18 years tells me, “You get younger every time I see you.” She is not talking about my appearance. Though I can only seem to write about it in a fractured way, what she recognizes in me is a wholeness, a completion, a freedom. I am the girl who lives.

            As I write this, I am sitting in a café in the little beach town I sometimes dream I have moved to. I’m eating coffee cake and drinking my third pot of tea. I am a little footsore from a walk and frizzled by the mist that comes off the ocean here, and I’m happy. I am halfway through my life and I am happy in a way I didn’t know I could be happy. Now I face the task of nurturing and growing up the original girl. How to do it?

  Find joy, I think. Joy is the path.

            My oldest granddaughter taught me something about this recently. She is 7 now, and most of those years have been spent with a pencil in her hand, drawing. She’s been calling herself an artist since she was around 3. Last time I visited her, she told me she was writing a book. It’s about a rabbit named Thorna and she has written 14 pages of it so far. She has plans for “about 30” but no one can see it until she’s done. Every couple of hours or so she would go to her spot at the dining table, take out a basket of paper, ignore the chaos around her and work on that book a little. Then she’d put it away and go play or read or eat or whatever life had brought her at the moment. She’s been working on this project for several months. No anxiety, no pressure, no deadline, no self-loathing, no avoidance, just claiming her truth, doing her work, day after day. I can’t quit thinking about it. When I look at her, I see what could have been, what still can be.

            My life is not quite so simple and straightforward as a 7-year old’s, but the path is still the same.  Play a little, work a little, follow the quiet strings of joy’s pull day by day, that is the way to grow a self.  Maybe especially, a self that has been forced to sleep for so very long. I have spent a good amount of time grieving those misspent years, but something inside me keeps promising: it’s never too late. As long as I am here and breathing, I am becoming who I am, who I always have been.

            A couple of years ago I put this framed encouragement from Lucille Clifton in my office. I’ll leave it here where it might encourage you too:

 i am not done yet


as possible as yeast

as imminent as bread

a collection of safe habits

a collection of cares

less certain than i seem

more certain than i was

a changed changer

i continue to continue

where i have been

most of my lives

is where i’m going

            

(I know before I publish this that friends who read here have their own experiences, different than mine; that some of you have found peace where I found pain. I honor your story and your choices and want only for you to find joy and wholeness, wherever that is for you.)

 Reading and thinking:

funeral rites :: April 30, 2023

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The people at the funeral don’t believe in ghosts, though they nod gently when I tell my story about the dream the night before, how the dead woman had come to sit so sweetly beside me, how she laughed when I told her about the funeral.

“I think she was happy,” I say, and they smile with relief and Christian politeness. A bridge has appeared for them to bring my ghost over.

“Of course! She’s dancing with Jesus!” one woman says excitedly and raises her arms. She jigs her hips a little. She has lost two sons and a husband. Her eyes, when she leans in to say this again, are both kind and a little manic.

The people all look like memories I have forgotten. Faces emerge somberly out of the crowd, claim to be old babysitters or Sunday school teachers or friends of my mother. I am mistaken for my sister several times. Everyone wears the same clothes they wore thirty years before. Everywhere the sound of polyester, the squeak of stiff shoes.

The dead woman liked purple. I appear with her in a slideshow: 12 years old, 14, 18, 45. We wear no makeup, then too much makeup, then we are middle-aged. The slideshow ends; she will always be middle-aged. The preacher tells us we don’t need to be sad, she is happy now. I rub the back of my heel with the toe of my other shoe, wonder if eternal happiness is as exhausting as it sounds. The dead woman liked butterflies. On the screen behind the preacher now there is a purple sky; it fills and unfills with butterflies.

Everyone says it’s a shame we only see each other at funerals and weddings; I think that’s the whole point of having them, but I don’t say this out loud. There are many things I don’t say out loud. I see an old teacher from the church school. He asks about my husband, a man he has met once. He thinks my husband is a pastor. This accidentally makes me laugh. He wants to know then about my husband’s job, his health. He reminisces about the Olive Garden where they were introduced. I am fine, I don’t say. I write. I am finally in university. He has to go, there is a lot to do at funerals, but he tells me to assure my husband that he enjoyed having me in class.

After he leaves, I stand still, waiting to see if I am actually visible. I feel as insubstantial as a ghost, as if you can see through my body to the rows of chairs, the red-flecked carpet. I look around for the dead woman, maybe I can see her now. People circulate. Someone plays softly on a keyboard. I resist remembering this life. I resist the unresisting me that lived before.

In the back room there is a reception. I consider a row of water bottles and a plate of cookies, but I have read my fairy tales: food offered in a transitory space is always a trap. One cookie and I will be haunting the halls of this church forever. I move on to the display of the dead woman’s life. Here are the books she liked as a child, here the photos she had on her wall, here a wooden cat, purple. When I die, what color will I be?

I find my husband just before he takes a cookie and we make our way through the goodbyes and out the door.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he says.

“No,” I say. The sun is shining, and I am suddenly sure of myself once more. I look back at the church, imagine the butterflies escaped from their screen, circling, fluttering over empty chairs, taking refuge in the plastic greenery. I want to run back and open the doors, let them all out. I don’t. There are no butterflies in the sanctuary, just as there are no ghosts. We get in our car and roll through the parking lot. I watch the church recede in the side mirror and catch a flash of purple. The dead woman waves from the steps.

She looks happy. 

 Hello friends,

How are you? I don’t know how many of you are still out there, but I’m sending a wave from my corner of the world. It’s been several months, but I’m getting used to these new routines of interaction, study, commute, work. For a while, I couldn’t do much but go to school and recover from going to school (my HSP friends, you understand) but these last weeks I’ve found things coming easier. There’s more space for taking care of myself, more space to enjoy, less exhaustion. I’m finding I want to put my experiences into words again, so I’ve come back to this space today to tell you about a personal loss, and the twist to the heart that sometimes comes when we are asked to revisit our old lives. I’m just telling it in my own way – a little slant, a little storybook.

This piece came to me very clearly one morning. Joy Harjo says we all use the second sight – in dreams, in intuitions, in our art.* I’ve been leaning into this idea that I am already in touch with whatever I need to articulate in this world, trusting myself to write words the way they come to me, instead of rounding their edges so they don’t cut, or delineating too clearly their meaning. Mostly when I write, I don’t know the meaning anyway. Words rise like shoots out of the ground of what I’m living, feeling, experiencing, and consuming. It makes me conscious of how I nurture myself, how I fill the time. I want the ground of my being to be rich and complex and full of possibility so the words can grow straight and true. Maybe we feel these things most clearly when death’s skirts have so recently brushed past.

Wherever you are, I hope you are safe and well. I’ve missed our conversations and our sharing. Thanks as always for reading these words here.

peace keep you,

tonia

…

Some of what I’ve been reading, watching, enjoying these days:

 Listening to:

*Commonplace podcast, episode 109 with Joy Harjo

Watching:

Perry Mason

Reading:

~ Fingersmith // Sarah Waters – a twisty, unpredictable, dark Dickens of a tale.

~A Ghost in the Throat // Doireann Ni Griofa – absolutely gorgeous writing about mothering, poetry, and passion. Unlike anything I’ve read before.

 ~The Outermost House // Henry Beston – Beston’s account of a year living alone in a house he built on Cape Cod in the 1930’s is beautifully written. I can’t quit thinking about his hours alone there and wishing for my own quiet cabin somewhere.

 ~Standing in the Forest of Being Alive // Katie Farris - Farris’ battle with early breast cancer told through poetry. Incredibly intimate, funny, and strong.

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

Poetry in a time of war

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a winter field with dew and cloudy skies, trees distant

I made a rule for myself a long time ago not to feel pressured or guilty about commenting or not commenting here on current crises. There are enough words going around at any given moment that mine are rarely needed, and I don’t think they are needed now with Russia’s attack on Ukraine. I just want to point you to poet Ilya Kaminksy (a USSR-born Ukranian poet who now lives in the U.S.) and his work Deaf Republic. I’ve seen We Lived Happily During the War around in several places but the whole book is worth your time. Especially, if you, like me, lie awake with a head and heart full of feelings and questions about war and its myriad agonies and dilemmas. I find I often don’t want “answers” so much as I want to acknowledge the way it feels to live in safety while others suffer, to just be helpless and confused and saddened. That’s what poetry allows. Maybe you will also find it a place of refuge.

Padraig O’Tuama’s take on We Lived Happily During the War.

For me, I’m sitting with this selection for awhile (from the final poem, In a Time of Peace)

“All of us

still have to do the hard work of dentist appointments,

of remembering to make

a summer salad: basil, tomatoes, it is a joy, tomatoes, add a little salt.

This is a time of peace.

I do not hear gunshots,

but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky

as the avenue spins on its axis.

How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.”

May peace keep the people of Ukraine and all of us.

tonia

January, Fourth week :: 2022

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Most of last week I kept a silent(ish) retreat. I didn’t go anywhere, I was just at home, opting out of the extra noise. I kept the phone off except for a few texts with loved ones, no music or podcasts, no television or movies. I wanted space to think deeply, to listen to my inner self for awhile. But my brain didn’t cooperate. It kept churning up weird bits of media I’d previously digested - pop songs, advertisements, movie scenes - like some kind of mental off-gassing. I began to feel uneasy, imagining my neural pathways coated with the greasy streaks of junk food culture. I considered the disturbing question: what if at the end of my life all that flashes before my eyes is an 80’s soda commercial and a scene from an Avenger’s movie? I might laugh about that idea if I didn’t recognize the way my mind latches onto such things, if I didn’t know those things were designed to manipulate my attention and stay lodged in my consciousness.

At the end of my allotted quiet time, I ran an errand and came home to find piles of feathers in the yard. Not the scatter of a sparrow or a blue jay (or one of my ducks, thank goodness); something bigger, different, something I don’t quite recognize. I kept going out to visit these remains, trying to imagine what, who, when, how. Was I asleep in my bed when it happened? At the grocery store? Eating dinner? The thought disturbs me unreasonably: life - or rather, death - occurring right out in the yard where I might have seen it, but didn’t. It tangles up with the week’s earlier feelings of regret: what else have I not seen? Have I missed what’s important? Am I a part of the real world or only the manufactured one?

For the rest of the day I felt the weight of these questions. How much am I shaped by what I truly value - the sacredness of earth and her creatures, my relationships with others - and how much am I shaped by the noise and expectations of a world that dismays me?

I went out at twilight, doubt clinging to my heels, and was startled by a deer, my old familiar, grazing on the pasture. She stood gently, her neck bent to the earth, entirely undisturbed by my presence. Deer have always arrived for me in moments like these; I read her like I once read scriptures. She was there for herself, but in another way she had come to comfort me, to remind me I cannot be ejected from my belonging. It was a grace, and I felt it as such. I called to her, she flicked an ear, we shared the last of the day’s light and then I went back to the house unburdened for a while, determined to stay a few more days in the quiet. I feel a spark of hope that there is something more inside, something else that might arise if I just give it the time - and silence - it needs.

We all know how to turn off screens, at least in theory; here are some other quiet practices to try:

Carry a book of poetry with you for waiting times. Or just look around, observing what other people are doing.

Don’t check news headlines.

In conversation, listen and encourage other people to talk while you say less.

Turn down the lights and sit in the semi-dark.

Welcome boredom and stay with it.

Doze off any time you can.

Sing to yourself.

Practice pranayama.

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Gathered this week:

~ A friend sent me this lovely little dance clip.

~ Your Bubble Is Not the Culture // Even though this article is about popular culture, there’s a lot to take note of in regards to how we perceive the world around us.

~ My family is practicing yoga with Tim these days. He’s got loads of free videos on youtube. He focuses a lot on correct form and building strength, which is just what I need. Plus he’s corny and sweet. (His subscription service is also amazing and well-worth the money - especially if you don’t go to the gym anymore, like us.)


~ I am happy living simply

“I am happy living simply:

like a clock, or a calendar.

Worldly pilgrim, thin,

wise - as any creature. To know

the spirit is my beloved. To come to things - swift

as a ray of light, or a look.

To live as I write: spare - the way

God asks me - and friends do not.”

(Marina Tsvetaeva, 1919, HT: Holly Wren Spaulding)

…

There are a few new readers here (welcome!) so I thought it would be nice to show myself and say hello.

Some things you might want to know about me - just for fun:

*I’ve been writing online since 2005. I’ve changed A LOT in that time.

*I write serious and live happy. Mostly. :)

*Enneagram 1/INFJ (Also a Gemini, which makes no sense to me.)

*I like kindness, fidelity, integrity, and generosity in people and I’m generally attracted to people in the margins.

*I dislike arrogance, proselytizing, over-confidence, loud voices, and selfishness. Also, those sheet cakes that come from the grocery store and people who don’t put their carts away when they’re done with them.

*I despise fundamentalism, whether it’s on the left or on the right.

*Part city/part country.

*Glasses, braces, mullet, perm, religion: middle school was hell.

*Definitely swear a little.

*Herbal tea, black tea, coffee with lots of oat milk, and red wine.

*I like talking to people who read here, so please say hello!

That’s all for now!

peace keep you, my friends,

tonia