What I want to say :: January 2026

I’ve been thinking so long about what to say in this space: Resist, Hang in there, I can’t believe it either, Be vigilant, Nourish yourself, Find someone to be kind to, Fly a protest flag… nothing seems right. I’m as devastated, angry, horrified, and searching as the rest of you and I don’t know what to say about it.

If I skim the news at all these days, it is for stories of resistance. I want to know what ordinary people like me are doing and fortify my imagination for responses. I hope I will act if the chance comes to me. I hope I put my body and my privilege in front of whatever cowardice arises. I hope my voice is loud when I need to shout. I hope I have words to say. I hope I am brave.

I’ve got friends who are marchers and others who are builders and I don’t know where I fit between them, but I’ve had Kyce Bello’s poem in the footer of this website for several years now and I returned to it again today to find a little thread of possibility for myself in these terrible times.

Make me a figure with a womb

And relict heart. Make me

the seam that holds the tattered land together

and let me be the speaker that sings

rise, rise

all across the shapely ground.

There is a place in this struggle for the healers and menders too.

This past weekend would have been the poet William Stafford’s birthday. Stafford was a pacifist - a conscientious objector in WW2 - a position that almost no one could understand. But for Stafford, violent action “signal[ed] a failure of imagination.” “Restraint,” he said, “must come from citizens…coercion by violence has hardened much of the world; that feeling lasts. But moderating it is the patient, worthy job.”

Almost everyone I know is numbing themselves against the sharp edges of this terrible now. It is safer to become hard than to bleed. To stay soft and hopeful, open to healing, takes real strength. Stafford’s son Kit said, “my father’s ambition was boundless. A target of his own country’s disdain, even hatred, he had begun his mission of universal reconciliation.”

I am not thinking about a kind of reconciliation that gives hate a pass, or ignores the violent actions and inactions of selfish people. I am thinking about the kind of courage that remains in place, that does the terrifying work of resistance, but also the small work of unplugging from the machine, consuming less, creating safe homes, inviting people in, listening to fears and frustrations, and being forcefully and unapologetically human in a world that wants to turn us all into fodder for the money-and-war machines.

Maybe, what I want to say (to myself and anyone else who needs to hear it) in this time of unbelievable disorientation is: Be hungry for more than what this stunted, sham, plastic world is offering. It runs on fear and scarcity, so cultivate abundance and curiosity. Make connections. Make a coffee date. If you have extra, send some money to the helpers, the fighters, the guardians. Turn off the TV/computer/phone/or whatever damn device is cluttering your mind. Know less about every day’s events and go deep on birds or poetry or physics or history. Feed your imagination. Play a board game. Walk down the street with a smile. Support the library. Read the old books. Eat dinner at your table with candles lit. Donate dog food to the shelter. Memorize a joke and tell it to everyone. Cuss a little. Have a pastry. Take a walk. Learn to juggle. Climb a tree. Write a really bad poem. LIVE. What we’re here for is not just a righteous posture or the destruction of the bad guys or the freedom to Netflix until our eyes bleed. It’s so much more. Be a body, be a spirit, be a voice, a vote, a seed, a light, a life.

Sending love,

tonia

EDITED TO ADD: After I set this to post, there was another shooting in Minnesota. I hope you will read my words here and know that I am not offering platitudes about how we should respond to acts of murder and injustice, but rather a way of carrying on in the day to day while we live our lives with the reality of injustice. My heart is so heavy for all who are suffering and are confronting these terrible acts face to face.

• Quotes from Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, Kim Stafford

Nothing Is Lost :: July 2025

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

  Meanwhile, the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For now,

Tonia

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

Wendell

Wallace

Geography of grief :: April 2025

The ER waiting room has metal detectors and an armed guard and a lot of chairs that are disconcertingly close to other people. I’ve spent an uncomfortable amount of time in this place the past few weeks because my dad has a terrible cancer that refuses to be stopped. I choose the most isolated seat for waiting and hope that my thin mask will keep out whatever is making the man in the corner retch repeatedly or the woman in the front cough until she sags breathless in her chair. The air reeks one day of bleach and another of vomit and always of worry, if not fear. One day there is a young man lying on the single bench with a bloodied arm raised over his head. Another, there is a woman sitting near the desk asking everyone who passes if she can have a drink from their water bottles. I make a sad little game of watching the startled clutching that follows this request.

I bring my homework with me, try to give my attention to composition theory or Titus Andronicus, but it’s pointless. Any words I read float untethered through my brain, knocking mercilessly against medical jargon and test results and expected outcomes. In the ER, time stretches and then suddenly compresses. Somewhere behind a door, my father cannot keep his eyes open. The bones of his face show sharply beneath his skin. When it is my turn to sit by his bed I see new similarities between us – the shape of our jaws, the narrow slope of our noses. Something inside my skin shrinks from this awareness, wants to retreat from this suffering body whose DNA echoes loudly inside my own. To combat this cowardice I hover around him, adjusting his blanket, the octopus of tubes running from his limbs, the pillows beneath his swollen feet. Already, these actions are taking the shape of memory, as if the time has already passed, as if I am already looking back.

Life splits in two. There is the time with my father and the time when I return to my own life. I feel profoundly present in both spaces. I say yes to every invitation for coffee or an evening out, I take urgent notes in each class. At home, I watch myself attending to ordinary tasks as if they are momentous occasions. Everything seems worthwhile, everything feels like a privilege. Except for when it doesn’t. Suddenly all I can do is drag myself to the couch for another round of British detective shows and watch the dog hair collect on the surface of the floors that last week seemed almost holy in their cleanliness.  

The geography of grief, my friend Missy texts, is mysterious and ungovernable.

~ In these strange days, I’m thinking a lot about how I use my time. I bought a Brick and made my phone into a texting/photo/phone call device only and I ordered the new LightPhone so I can make this a permanent thing. I’m doing a ton of waiting right now – in the ER, in doctor’s offices, etc – but I have no desire to waste these moments in the netherworld of scrolling.

My son and I also committed to 100 days without following the news. I deleted all the political newsletters, blocked the news sites, ignore the headlines which are all designed for maximum fear/outrage impact. Last week I pulled up a weather site to plan for the week ahead and the headline, perched over a 5-day forecast of gorgeous spring sunshine, was “Temps to plummet on Saturday!!” Even the weather requires my dismay and anxiety now. I’ll pass, thanks. I started going outside just before bed to look at the sky instead. Turns out you can feel rain invisibly gathering in the atmosphere ahead of time, that clouds sneak in softly under cover of darkness, that cold reveals itself as soon as the sun goes down. That’s all the forecast I actually need.

     I’m listening to all the things my body wants. Like tea instead of the harshness of coffee, silence instead of music, walks instead of heavy exercise, naps with my kittens and early bedtimes. I find I can’t bear the thought of eating animals right now, so I’m back to the comfort of plants, who seem always ready to welcome me home.

      I haven’t had a lot of bandwidth for serious books lately (though that hasn’t stopped me from stress buying them!), but I’m reading poetry every day, including Mary Szybist’s work, and my friend Kyce Bello’s new book. I’m also slowly making my way through Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which manages to capture the feeling of grief in such unexpected ways.

      How about you? Are you reading anything good right now? What things are making you feel sane and settled? I’d love to hear.

      Thanks so much for reading, for keeping me in your inbox. I always want to write more. Someday I think I actually will, but I so appreciate your patience until then.

 Peace,

Tonia

Oyster Knife :: November 2024

Last night I dreamed an eagle flew into our house. We screamed and jumped up while it perched serenely on the back of our couch, huge and beautiful, and we ran around hiding cats and looking for gloves, trying to figure out what to do with it. It hopped to the floor and began exploring, clicking across the hardwoods, testing the rug, chasing off the dog. I ran to get my camera to record the event and when I came back, it had grown smaller, about crow-sized. I watched as it picked through the cat’s food with its beak, and by the time someone came back with the gloves, it had shrunk even more. Now it looked like a pigeon bobbing around in the living room. Over the next few minutes it changed again. Its feathers faded, its body hollowed out, a fire ignited in its chest and flamed briefly upward. The eagle put its beak on the ground and tipped over on its side, dead.

I woke sad and a little stunned that my subconscious had given me this story in the night. Yes, I thought, this is exactly what it feels like. Even if the country survives this intense fracturing, what I thought about America, the deepest part of me that trusted in our basic decency and goodness has tipped over, dead.

Since election night, I’ve been looking for torches, something to show me the way forward now. This shimmered out of the dark at me yesterday, from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”

“I do not weep at the world, I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston was writing about the limits a segregated America tried to put on her and how she refused them. Despite the pervasive, soul-crushing racism she faced, she saw herself as belonging to the world, capable in it, entitled to that oyster prize like every other human. I love that so much. Maybe I just need to feel possible, to have a direction for all this dismay, but it’s the thought of getting down to work, of honing my blade, that is helping me live right now.

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silences, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.” ”

— Toni Morrison

Sometimes what I have to offer the world feels so slight, just a thread of words tossed into the wind. But writing is what I do, and I’m going to work now. Here, there, everywhere.

How about you, my friends?

Sending love,

tonia

P.S. You might like Eve L. Ewing’s poem “what I mean when I say I’m sharpening my oyster knife”

Now :: August 2024

Hello friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you have any plans for your now?

Birdy

 A little of this and that:

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

~ Listening to this repeatedly.

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

First Reformed,

Drive My Car,

Trainspotting

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

~ Why I Hate Instagram Now.

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

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

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

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

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

Peace keep you, friends.

tonia