resistance :: June 20, 2023

Once upon a time, last spring, a dozen small ducklings sailed in a box on the U.S.S. Postal Service and arrived at my door. The journey was short, but long. They traveled in the dark. Cold air seeped in through the holes in the box, the tiny cup of water ran dry. When I opened the hatch two days later, the ducklings peeped with relief and questions. I tipped them out onto the rug and they ran around in confused circles until I boiled an egg, chopped it into pieces, and floated it in the refilled water cup. The smell reminded them of home and tasted like a place they once knew. Their tiny heads got heavy and they fell asleep on the rug in a pile shaped like a box.

They grew and died, one by one. That same year in the woods a coyote family and a wandering bobcat grew sleek and clever on a diet of hopefully tended duck. When the slugs emerged the following spring to eat the daffodils, I mourned the gap in our small food-chain, but I did not open the emails from the hatchery. When I drove past the feed store, I stubbornly refused to read its announcements until hatchling season had come and gone.

It was not a time for ducklings. Everywhere, suddenly, people went to get a pint of ice cream, or a pair of pants, or a chance at a new life, and died. The people who were left began to run around in confused circles. No one knew what home smelled like anymore. Hardly anyone could sleep, but when they did, they lay alone in the dark, flinching at strange sounds and clicking their thirsty tongues.

My news feed in those days was buzzing with a story about a newly discovered flower somewhere west of the Pacific. It was a color no one had ever seen before (though the indigenous people of its home forest had a name for it so ancient it could no longer be pronounced). It would only bloom when held in the hand of a child still in its innocence. Beauty was in demand, as was innocence, so a black market of seeds sprang up almost instantly, but when the seeds arrived, the gardeners discovered all the children had grown up overnight. The seeds were put in the ground or thrown into the compost and forgotten. During this time, messiahs roamed the country selling sachets or truth serums, or more rarely, bottles of water said to quench every thirst.

One day I was sitting alone in my bedroom thinking of the ducklings. I remembered them sleeping, their bellies full of egg. It was foolish, but I took out my phone and looked at images of them fresh from the box: their downy yellow and black feathers, their dark little feet and beaks. There was a knock at the door; I answered it and found a woman standing there. I could tell immediately she was one of the messiahs. She had a slightly disheveled appearance and there was a twig in her hair. She spoke, but her voice was hoarse and I couldn’t understand her. This embarrassed me, so I looked down at her shoes. They were the kind of shoes you saw sometimes in old movies, little brown oxfords with a sensible heel, slightly scuffed. My thoughts about her softened. The woman rummaged in her bag. I did not want to buy truth serum or sachets, so I shook my head, but she held out her hand anyway. In the center of her palm was a shiny black seed. She put the seed in her mouth and swallowed it. When she opened her hand again, she was holding an egg.

“Come in,” I said immediately. She did. She took off her coat and set the egg on the table. We watched it for a moment to make sure it wouldn’t roll off. The egg was pale blue and incredibly beautiful.

“I would love some cake,” the woman said in her hoarse voice. I was startled. I began to say I had no cake, but the smell of baking had filled the room. On the table beside the egg was suddenly a cake, a pot of coffee.

“Of course,” I said, and we sat down together. The egg lay between us. Sometimes it rocked a little, as if something was inside — a small something, wanting to get out. We watched the egg and ate our cake. The rocking was so slight I sometimes thought I had imagined it.

“No one wants these anymore,” the woman said, hovering her coffee cup just above the egg’s trembling shell. Her voice was smoother now, but a little sad.

“I do,” I said, surprising myself. Between us, the egg was now shell pink. It became very still, almost as if it had never been alive. The woman and I glanced at each other and my cheeks grew hot at how bright my hope had been. She cleared her throat as if she might say something else, but then the egg give a little jolt. A crack appeared near the top. It widened until a small triangle of pink fell off. Beneath it, I could see a tiny, dark unfurling.

“It’s a petal!” the woman whispered.

“It’s a wing!” I shouted at the same moment.

…

At the sight of this small hatching, a word was on my tongue, a word so old I could almost remember how to say it. I whispered it out loud but not even my ears were quick enough to grasp it. The word curled itself into the air and out the window and spread across and across the sky.

…

Later, I gave the woman the spare bedroom. When I asked her name, she said, “Many lifetimes, all is coming.”* She was very tired. I politely removed the twig from her hair and left her alone to rest. The house was quiet, all the cake was gone. The egg was where we had left it, sitting in the center of the table, now green as a spring caterpillar, now purple as a bruise. It shed layers of shell, revealing first a glimpse of feathers, then a curl of leaf. It had been that way for hours, for days, for years. I went to the kitchen and got my big porcelain bowl, lined it with a towel and brought it back. As carefully as I could, I lifted the egg and held it for a moment. It was warm, pulsing with its hidden life. As I watched, its shell would crack and split then knit itself back together. Breaking and healing, breaking and healing. I brought it close to my face. It smelled like the damp rot of woods or the sharp saltiness of seahorses or the heat of blackberry leaves in August. I set it down as carefully as I could inside the bowl to wait.

*attributed to Sri K. Pattabhi Jois

---

Happy Solstice, my friends!

I’ve had that little story in my mind for weeks now. It felt right to get it on the page for this first day of summer. The world is as crooked and splintered as it’s ever been, but I’ve been listening to hope-givers lately. Sitting in the cool early morning sunshine. Weeding the oh-so-neglected garden in five minute bursts. Planting red flowers at every corner of the house. Reading one poem every day. Practicing yoga while it’s still dark. Learning the birds’ voices. Discovering a green heron, a trio of stags, a small ermine. Eating the strawberries as they ripen.

School is finished for the year! It’s been wonderful, exasperating, instructive, and challenging. I love it. But I’ve been looking forward to having the summer so I can get back to my own writing again. Of course, now that the summer is here, so is my internal resistance. I’m continually amazed at my ability to procrastinate about my art. If someone else gives me a task, no matter how inane, I will do it immediately. But I can endlessly put off writing or creating something of my own. Maybe you know the cycle? I plan to write first thing in the morning, but when the morning arrives I have a headache, or I didn’t sleep well, or I decide I really should clean the bathroom first. Or I actually sit down at my desk and write and then I am overwhelmed with fatigue and all I can think of is sleeping. If not fatigue, then a sudden conviction that I am on the wrong path and I was never supposed to write at all. That conviction can send me on an existential spiral for days (in which, of course, no writing gets done). It has taken me many years to recognize this pattern of resistance, but this year, I am more ready for it. I am finally at a place where I can start to ask why it happens. That’s going to be my focus this summer, actually, looking at whatever fear is keeping me from engaging with my own art.

Some things I am doing to conquer resistance and facilitate creativity this summer:

• Re-reading Christian McEwen’s World Enough & Time very slowly

• Journaling. So much journaling.

• Limiting my screen/watching time by taking the browser off my phone (I already got rid of addictive apps) and reducing TV/movie watching to the bare minimum.

• Walking without music/podcasts/audiobooks

• Going to nature when I feel fatigue or other physical resistance

• Setting specific, daily, SMALL, writing goals

• Affirmations (e.g. My creativity is endless. I have time to write.)

• Creating space for boredom (“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” ~ Virginia Woolf)

A few weeks ago around my birthday, I walked into town with a backpack of my old journals and sat in the park to read them. The combination of walking in silence and revisiting my old selves (I have many, don’t you?) was a pretty potent experience. At 52, I can see so much of my path now, can see how far I’ve come and how steadily I’ve kept to the same goals even though my experience day by day has not felt that way at all. I’ve been an indifferent journaler most of my life, but still, the words have accumulated. They’ve marked out the edges of my experience and my growth as a woman. I feel so grateful for all the imperfect attempts, all the scraps collected, all the longing and trying recorded there. I’ll keep at it. I have a feeling it’s going to unlock some good things for me this season.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with resistance, or your journaling practice, or whatever comes to mind. I always read your emails and comments and do my very best to respond to each one.

Thanks again for being here.

tonia

Some hope-givers I’ve enjoyed recently:

• Zach Bush with Rich Roll on the Future of Human and Planetary Evolution (This one inspired the story above.)

• Janine Benyus at OnBeing on Biomimicry

Reading:

• Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath // Heather Clark - reading this nearly 1000 page book with a friend and already learning so much I didn’t know about Plath.

• Sarah Waters’ novels - I’ve mentioned her before, but her books have been such a fun break from all the serious school reading I’ve been doing.

• White Cat, Black Dog: Stories // Kelly Link - weird and good. I love these modern retelling of old fairytales.

Thinking about:

• Oliver Burkeman: Just go to the Shed

• The Fabulist in the Woods

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

under pressure :: June 2022

I’ve been walking. Early in the morning, as near to sunrise as I can manage, when the birds are most vocal. If I time it right, I have the trail to myself. At least, without other humans. There are plenty of other beings out at dawn: rabbit, newt, raccoon, snail, osprey, turtle, deer. I’ve been walking daily ever since a friend pointed me to Libby DeLana. Every Damn Day has been her motto for a decade. I’m at Day 62 now, each walk dutifully recorded with the time and weather in a little notebook. Even after the wedding, when I was so tired the air felt as thick as water and every movement was like swimming against a current, we pulled over to the side of the road and took a deliberate walk through a field of lupines. 0.11 miles that day, but still, a walk. I counted it. Other days, when I’ve been tired, or sick, I’ve looped our small woods (the equivalent of once around the block) and been glad for those few minutes of respite.

I like the simplicity of Every Damn Day. There’s no decision for me to make. I don’t have to decide whether I can fit it in or if I feel like exercising, I just get up and go. I wish I could apply this philosophy to other areas of my life, like writing or journaling or meditation, but I’ve realized I have capacity for one daily commitment and no more. Since this one has so many overlapping benefits, it beats out all other options. In one walk I get movement, time in nature, solitude, and stress relief. I need it. Because the truth is, I’m tired.

I keep thinking that I will bounce back. After this class is over, once the wedding is done, once this project or that is done, I will feel more refreshed. But when I cross whatever milestone I set for myself, I get to the other side and realize I’m still exhausted.

This spring I took a class on Global Climate Change. When I told my daughter I signed up for it, she said, “Mom. Is that wise?” Well, yes it was. I am not the type of person who likes to avoid difficult things. I need information; I need to see the whole picture and know the truth. Otherwise, I feel like I’m lying to myself. So I took the class, and now I know and I can process the sensational from the actual. It helps. But the truth is so very hard and I think it’s contributing to my exhaustion. We’ve had an old-fashioned spring here in the Pacific Northwest, with rain and cold all the way up to the Solstice. I loved it. But even as I loved it, the whole time I was thinking, enjoy it, this may be the last cool spring you’ll know. And that’s only one of the issues that weighs constantly on my mind.

We are under a lot of psychic pressure these days.

i would cry—there is so much grief

today and always

how even now, a haint riddled with bullets

has perched herself on my stoop

to warn of all the little deaths

headed my way.

Juneteenth, 2020 by Miriama J. Lockington

In the fall, I will be full time at the university (in-person for the first time) and so I had a lot of ideas about what to do this summer. Finish the novel, paint the duck house, redecorate the spare bedroom, begin a short story collection around the experiences of living, then leaving, Christianity. But every time I think about doing any of those things I go back to bed.

I’m old enough now to know that the body is wise and can be trusted. Reluctance in the face of progression is just a bell ringing to tell me that something needs examination. So I went walking and gave myself some space to examine. When I came home it was with the realization that this is not the summer for a lot of physical and mental exertion. This is a summer to rest and prepare for what will be difficult intellectual and social work in the years ahead. And I discovered - when I let go of my expectations - that what I really want to do, more than anything, is to keep walking, to be outside as much as possible, and to read, read, read.

So I’ve released myself from the task list and given myself a new job: to walk every day, and to get through as much of my to-read shelves as possible this summer. (It’s an embarrassing amount of books, but I’ll do my best.) That’s it.

This morning I was re-reading Rebecca over breakfast and I came to the passage where the narrator talks about her current life, living from hotel to hotel. Their days are simple, she says, and sometimes boring, but

“…boring is a pleasing antidote to fear. We live very much by routine…We have tried wireless, but the noise is such an irritant, and we prefer to store up our excitement, the result of a cricket match played many days ago means so much to us.”

It struck me how slow life was once (for those affluent enough not to have to scrape every minute towards survival, anyway). Waiting days to hear the score of a cricket match and savoring the anticipation. Our bodies and minds evolved within that kind of slowness. How natural that we should always be trying to get back to it.

If you are interested, tell me if you are feeling this collective psychic weight, and how you are dealing with it. What are you craving? How are you making it happen? I’d love to hear.

I hope to be in this space more often this summer. Let’s see how it goes. xo

lots of love,

tonia

p.s. I included a few wedding photos at the bottom, including a glimpse of (nearly) the whole family, for those who have been here long enough to watch those kids grow up!

---

Some notable books from the last weeks:

~Independent People// Halldór Laxness. A slow, deep burn of a book with a seam of black humor running quietly through it. It’s set in Iceland at the turn of the 20th century, when the old ways and the new, progressive ideals were bumping into each other. Bjartur, the main character, is a brute in just about every way, but I suspect Americans, at least, will not find his blind commitment to Independence and self-sufficiency unfamiliar. This, and other novels, helped Laxness win the Nobel Prize. It’s worth the read.

~Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World//Jason Hickle I’m going to be giving copies of this one to several friends. An easy, engaging read, but Hickle manages to show the reality of our capitalist systems, why they function as they do, and why they can never, ever save us or the planet. He also shows what an alternate system could look like. Highly recommend.

~The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History//Brian Fagan. I came across this by accident among some used books and picked it up since I was studying the same topic at the time. Did you know there was an Ice Age in the Middle Ages? It caused all kinds of havoc and changed the fate of nations and governments all over the world. If you want to understand how climate change is more than altered weather, you might find this account helpful.

~Eleutheria//Allegra Hyde. This one is worth noting because it’s at the beginning of what I suspect is a whole tide of eco-literature written by authors who have come of age in the shadow of climate change. In this one, a sheltered young woman (raised by survivalist parents) tries to find a way to save the changing world and makes a mess of things.

~Fiber Fueled, Will Bulsiewicz - Great overview of gut health and how to stay healthy through diet. (Hint: eat lots and lots of different plants!)

And, finally, some scenes from the wedding. (Excuse my half-closed eyes in the last photo, but all the kids are smiling!)

all Wedding photos: Shelby @ Marley Kimbo Media

October, Third Week :: 2021

Hello friends,

When I sit down here to write to you, I often imagine I’m penning this out by hand on thick, creamy paper, about to put my thoughts in an envelope and send them through the mail to a dear friend. It helps me to think that way because it can feel disconnected sometimes, typing words on a screen and sending them out to unknown destinations, to sometimes unknown recipients. I don’t know if it’s two years spent behind masks and 6 feet apart or if it’s weariness with the digital reality, but I am tired of disconnection. I want the tangible, the human.

Maybe that’s why I’m so excited about October this year. It’s got an earthy sensuality to it already with the leaves turning in the Northern Hemisphere and the smell of woodsmoke everywhere in the air, but it also includes Samhain/Halloween (holidays I casually group together because of their similarities) which, if you ignore the commercialism, celebrate exactly those human, grounded, connected qualities I am craving.

Growing up fundamentalist christian - and a world-class rule follower - my feelings about Halloween were complicated. I was embarrassed that I could never go trick or treating with friends, embarrassed that ours was the only porch light in the neighborhood that stayed off that night, and ashamed and vaguely repulsed by the way we cowered inside, all of us hunching in the back room and going quiet when someone rang the doorbell anyway. But I’d been trained that death and demons were virtually synonymous - and nothing to be celebrated if I wanted to live eternally - so I also accepted these restrictions as reality and developed a strong dislike for the holiday that lasted for years.

I’m still not drawn to the gory, creepy side of Halloween, but I understand its place better now and I don’t turn up my nose as I used to. In a youth-worshipping, death and sorrow-avoiding culture like ours, a night to explore the taboo, to embrace the dark parts of life is necessary. We need to try death on, accept the fragility of our bodies and the shortness of our time here. We have plenty of special days to remember life and connection. It’s equally important to remember we are walking steadily toward death and loss as well.

Because we live on a rural road without a lot of trick or treaters, our observance is quiet - an altar with photos of ancestors and departed loved ones, a visit to family graves, a bonfire where we symbolically burn up things that have died in our lives or things we know we need to release, a cordial made of Hawthorn berries and brandy which is good for shoring up the heart, carved pumpkins to light the way for lost spirits, a spooky story or movie to get the blood pumping. It’s become one of the most meaningful times of year for us and a healthy way to ground ourselves before entering into the season of excess that comes in November and December.

\|/

Speaking of the coming season, I just finished reading There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather and am feeling very inspired to spend more of the rainy, cold season outside this year. Not that I avoid the rain - I’m an Oregonian, after all - but I do have a tendency to cocoon in the cold months and this year I’d like to be more active and more in tune with the season. According to Linda Akëson McGurk, Scandinavian peoples try to spend a part of each day outside, no matter how cold. It’s much more temperate here so I don’t have much excuse. I’ve got plans for moving the picnic table under the covered porch for some outdoor dinners (and I’d like to build a fire pit I can learn to cook over this year), some hikes and shivery picnics, some trips to the coast where we can be lashed with wind and rain, and maybe even an icy kayak trip, if the river allows. But basically, I’m just trying to stay alive. ALIVE !! Shimmery sparkles and bright eyes. You know, resist the armchair, the stiffening joints and thought patterns, the dying of curiosity, that kind of alive.

Does that sound exciting to you? Or crazy? I’d like to hear. And please do tell me your tricks for getting yourself outdoors each day beyond the obligatory walk.

Hope you have a lovely and meaningful harvest season.

tonia

Gathered:

~ Our smartphones are turning us into dopamine junkies

“Making the smartphone less attractive is one strategy she recommends. A simple way to decrease the potency is to go grayscale and make it less colorful. One of the ways to decrease novelty is to delete some apps and certainly it's very important to turn off alerts."

(I’ve had my phone in grayscale for over a week and I’ve found it very helpful!)

~Misunderstanding Thoreau: Reading Neurodiversity in Literature and Life

“People on Twitter regularly mock the fact that Thoreau’s mother brought him food and attended to his laundry while he was at Walden, latching onto this detail as evidence that his rugged individualism was built on the back of women’s unacknowledged labor. On this last point, the writer Rebecca Solnit—who knows a thing or two about both Thoreau and what it means to be a feminist—pushed back in an article in Orion, describing the Thoreau family’s relationship to domestic labor as one in which they “reinforced” each other, each offering work on behalf of mutual and egalitarian benefit. As she put it, people “pretended to care who did Thoreau’s laundry as a way of not having to care about Thoreau.” And in relegating Thoreau’s mother to the laundry pile, Thoreau’s critics themselves unwittingly erased her efforts as a conductor on Concord’s underground railroad. “My position now,” Solnit wrote, “is that the Thoreau women took in the filthy laundry of the whole nation, stained with slavery, and pressured Thoreau and Emerson to hang it out in public, as they obediently did.”

~This lovely work by Tishani Doshi:

August, First week :: 2021

Seems like every afternoon lately, Laika and I have been up on the pasture for a few hours.  I write, or read, she stares at the blackberry hedge waiting patiently for the ground squirrels to make a dash for the compost bins or scuttle back to the safety of their dens.  A band of coyotes has moved onto one of the empty lots around us and we can hear them witch-howling on and off throughout the day.  It’s an eerie soundtrack to write by (perhaps that’s what has inspired my latest short story about a woman whose monthly cycle is…transformative.  It’s been a hell of a lot of fun to write and imagine.) 

I’ve made some peace with this, my least favorite month.  As you might have learned if you followed the PNW heat dome news, most of us don’t have things like air conditioners here.  August is a month to be endured before we get back to our lovely temperate weather.  Or that’s how we used to handle it, anyway.  Summers are hotter now overall, of course, and I despair a little at the thought that this is only the beginning of increased heat, but there is little to be gained by fretting about it.  Best to just lean in and enjoy what is here now.  Long afternoons in the shade writing under my beloved Grandmother Maple, the wild sweet peas climbing the hill, blackberries scenting the air, apples slipping from their branches and landing with a soft thud in the grass, the local osprey calling to her mate over the treetops.

I’ve been guarding my time diligently lately.  I’ve discovered a secret about my creativity – it’s thirsty for silence.  I’m cushioning my days with the quiet, leaving my phone untouched until late in the morning, eschewing tv and movies or youtube videos in the evenings.  Books are what I crave, poetry and mystery and beautiful language.  And nature, long draughts of sky and grass and cool darkening evenings.  That’s where the stories live, whispering to me, calling like the late-summer crickets, a song that lives just under the noise of the busy, busy world.

 . . .

Last week I was going through some boxes in the attic and found one I’d saved from high school.  I was a sentimental girl, I kept papers from all my classes, every note I’d ever received, a packet of my first attempts at poetry.  I only got through about a quarter of the box before I had to walk away.  That deeply earnest girl, desperate to find approval in a dangerously religious school and church made my heart break.  I’d like to set her free from the stifled years ahead, the agonizing grind of trying to fit into a space she was never made for.  I wish I could whisper to her that she would be happy one day, that it was okay to trust herself.  I put the box back in the attic, but I have plans to get it out again around Samhain (Halloween). Last year we began a tradition of burning the year’s ghosts and regrets in a bonfire and I will put much of that box into the fire and release it.

I remember a time when it was hard to imagine letting go even of the things that brought me pain. I thought I might need to hold onto those reminders so I could see who I was and how I got there, but I’ve reached a place now where I’m comfortable with just being who and where I am without needing to retrace the journey over and over. What a relief.

I hope wherever you are this August is not too hot (or too cold, for you Southern Hemisphere folks!) and you are finding your own rest and inspiration and freedom. I’d love to hear about it if you are. Your notes and comments help me feel like I’m not writing into the dark, so thank you for the times when you have those moments and inspiration to chat. I appreciate you!

Peace keep you, friends.

Gathered:

:: This excerpt from L.M. Sacasas’ amazing newsletter, The Convivial Society.

 [Ivan}Illich understood what I think most of us are unwilling to accept. Endless wanting will wreck us and also the world that is our home. By contrast, our economic order and the ostensible health of our society is premised on the generation of insatiable desires, chiefly for consumer goods and services. Your contentment and mine would wreak havoc on the existing order of things. “That’s enough, thanks,” is arguably a radical sentiment. Only by the perpetual creation of novel needs and desires can economic growth be sustained given how things presently operate.1 So just about every aspect of our culture is designed to make us think that happiness, or something like it, always lies on the other side of more.

:: Last week I was talking with a young guy at the coffee shop who told me that he found it ridiculous that he was expected to have opinions on so many things when he hadn’t experienced enough yet to build an opinion. I wanted him to repeat that louder for the rest of us. What a refreshing idea: “I don’t know enough yet to have an opinion!” In the same vein I’ve been thinking about how so many of us keep our emotional equilibrium by avoiding the news. I need to do that, though it creates its own cycles of guilt and angst. I want to stay informed and I really want to know how to respond to the needs of the moment. Lately I’ve been taking a page from Ryan Holiday and leaning back into history instead of forward into the constant doom-reports. I can learn just about everything I need to know about race or gender, the pandemic response, and why political parties can make such agonizingly self-absorbed decisions just by going to the past. And I can skip the hysteria of the local newscasters or twitter feeds telling me what to think. That’s a win.

I just finished Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War, which has the fascinating premise that Civil War ideologies about white male power and property were transferred to the West after Reconstruction and emerged in the mythology of the Cowboy. Ayup, I can see that. Let me know if you have any favorite history authors or sources. I’m not a huge fan of biographies, but I love to read the evolution of ideas and events. If we get a good response, I can post a list of resources here!

:: This time of year I try to sleep out on the deck at least one night. Call it a micro micro adventure. There’s no shame in wanting to be out in nature while also being close to comfort. ;) This year we slept under the full moon and woke with the sun, did some yoga in the cool air, then climbed back in bed to read and drink coffee until it got too hot. That was a pretty good day. I hope to fit in another night out or two.

 :: Lastly, this quote from James Baldwin, whose birthday was yesterday. It’s giving me life right now as I constantly grapple with the fine line between appealing to readers and being true to myself.

 “A writer is by definition a disturber of the peace. He has to be. He has to make you ask yourself, make you realize that you are always asking yourself, questions that you don't know how to face.”