March, Fourth week :: 2021

The new dog, Laika, is a little sensitive. She’s supposed to go to work with my daughter every day but a vet’s office is full of strange dogs and people and noises that make her anxious, so she has to stay home with the rest of us on workdays. I’m not really a dog person, or rather, I like dogs just fine when they belong to other people and not so much when they are my responsibility, but for most of the day Laika is quiet and sleepy and as unobtrusive as the cats, so we get along fine. A couple of times a day she stares at me with the saddest possible eyes until I take her out to the (unfenced) woods so she can explore without getting lost. On Laika-days I am forced out of my homebody-ness and out under the trees in all kinds of weather, something I’ve never been able to do consistently by my own willpower. Which means the dog that I did not really want has become a facilitator of something important for me.

Today while we were tramping around in a different part of the woods I found four plastic jugs full of water tied together with baling wire and buried in the leaf litter near a downed tree. There were rumors around town last year that a couple of homeless men had been sleeping in the old gravel mine that butts up against our property. This is the size of town that knows exactly who the two homeless men are and how they ended up sleeping in the old gravel mine, so I had an instant mental image of those jugs slung over the back of a particular bike on their way to and from town. No one had disturbed the buried jugs for some time, so while it’s mildly upsetting to think of strangers (neighbors?) sleeping in my backyard, I wasn’t really worried as I dug them out. I was wondering instead where the men are now as I haven’t seen them for months. The plague year has closed me in on all sides, put me on the defense, outstretched my compassion.

This week I was listening to Bayo Akomolafe talk about this feeling of overwhelm and how continually focusing on how to solve the world’s problems may be limiting us. Perhaps, he asserts, it is possible to use uncertainty instead. I have plenty of practice with uncertainty: I don’t know what to do about the water bottles in the woods or my homeless neighbors or gun violence or species die-off or the mess of late-stage capitalism. But when Laika draws me out under the sky and the rain hits our skin and the squirrels dash through the Fir branches and the Cedar shelters this tiny cache of human need I am suddenly aware of my connection to this great, groaning, speaking, moving Being that is Us, our world. “This world is promiscuous,” Akomolafe says, “it dances here and there, and new paths are always emerging.” It is in the listening, the connection, the waiting, he asserts, that we may be able to see the new ways of healing the world is devising for itself. Our culture abhors an unsolved problem, knows only the success of production and action, but for centuries there have been people who faced the world’s needs by retreating to lonely places to pray or chant or learn from the land. Maybe my daily visits to the trees are tapping into that quiet energy, maybe this nervous, sensitive dog that needs the woods is a deep calling to come away and learn. If so, I say yes.

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Gathered from this week:

~ Robins - by Peter Johnston. A lovely little film that will help you exhale.

~ Hedgespoken Picturehouse - Are you tired of streaming, polished, image-heavy stories yet? Tom Hirons and Rima Staines have brought their traveling, off-grid, story caravan online for live storytelling. I haven’t listened/watched this yet, but I have plans for tonight with a glass of wine and my pjs. UPDATE: I listened this evening and it is marvelous! <3

Don’t miss Rima Staines’ amazing artwork either.

~Adam Zagajewski’s Mysticism for Beginners

I hope you find some quiet places for your soul this week. And as it was Mr. Rogers’ birthday on Saturday, let me just say, “I like you just the way you are.”

Peace and love,

tonia

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

"...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

a late-June note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace keep you.

tonia

of mowing and mindfulness

Yesterday we took some time out to mow the pasture. My husband rented a big brush mower which he had to push up and down hills and around, but I worked with my scythe on the edges and the places too narrow or delicate for the mower. I love working with the scythe; it’s quiet, rhythmic work, and the swish of the blade cutting through the grass is enormously satisfying. I’m not a person who loves outdoor labor, but that’s a job I would do willingly every day.

I’ve been reading on mindfulness lately and it occurred to me as I worked that’s exactly what I love about it: the design of the scythe, the grass, the sharpness of the blade, they all invite mindful attention and presence. I can’t have the scythe in one hand and my phone in the other. My whole body is engaged with the swinging, my eyes and my thoughts are always aware of the blade. It’s one of the few times I don’t feel pulled in myriad directions.

I carried that little gem of insight with me at the end of the day and thought about why I have been feeling so fragmented lately and what I can do about it. As dark came on, I turned off most of the lights and lit a few candles and sat with my knitting. I usually listen to a reading or something while I knit, but last night I wanted to let my mind roam through what I’d learned during the day. It’s strange how rarely I do that, just sit in the quiet with my own mind. It didn’t take long to identify ways I could help myself. I already know what they are, they just get buried under other, competing messages.

As many of us are learning now, we can be operating right inside of systems that are invisible to us. We can be acting on beliefs we have no real consciousness of. (This applies to all kinds of belief systems, not just racism, though that is at the top of many minds these days.) Those deep-seated, so-intrusive-we-don’t-even-recognize-them systems of belief can only be seen when we make a practice of sitting down with ourselves and looking inside. Even though it’s cliche, it is difficult to be alone with our own minds. Somehow, deep down, we know that we will see and understand things that will be too difficult to fix right away, and that’s frightening.

I’ve developed many strategies over the years to avoid such inner-looking, but one way is to imagine myself too busy. Busyness is a nice excuse to keep the eyes focused on some distant point in the future. I usually accomplish this by having ridiculous standards, too much stuff, and co-opting other people’s passions and goals (this is the intellectual version of impulse buying that print/skirt/necklace/mug I saw on Instagram that one day.) The other strategy I employ is being too overwhelmed. Sometimes, the compulsive checking of news and opinions is actually a way of not engaging. Sometimes I am giving other people’s drama too much of my inner space. If I keep myself in a state of anxiety I can’t actually be expected to deal with anything real, can I?

The hardest thing of all is to enter the quiet of this moment and attend only to that and what it reveals (especially when the war drums are beating outside). But to me this is where everything begins. Life is like a golden spiral. What I learn of love and truth in the center of my being will remain constant for my interactions with the world outside of myself. This is why the greatest rule we have is basically, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s a rule that is impossible to follow without intimate knowing and engagement. But it’s also a rule that provides a livable scale.

Myself.

My neighbor.

Spiraling naturally out and out and out.

This practice of mindfulness is one in which I want to continue to learn. I would love to hear your thoughts and insights if you want to share.

Peace to you, my friends.

“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”

~ Thich Nhat Hahn

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I also wanted to share with you this opportunity to help amplify black writers! Amistad Books is hosting #BlackoutBestsellerList .

“To demonstrate our power and clout in the publishing industry, Saturday June 13 – Saturday June 20, we encourage you to purchase any two books by Black writers. Our goal is to Blackout bestseller lists with Black voices.”

(I ordered the first two books in N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth series. If you order books by black writers this week, please leave a note and let me know who you are going to be reading!)