my repentant skin

“If we perish - I meant to say persist -

do we arise and turn

with the wind?….”

~Kyce Bello

I lose my appetite for distraction overnight. I’m full up with the world we’ve made, violent and exploitative, rapacious and unthinking. I’m full up on all the ways we can rehearse those realities as entertainment. I feel the great grief and burden of being human, full of possibility and yet incapable of restraint.

So many of our conversations now lead to: will the virus change anything? Will we just go right back?

My rational self fears writer Paul Kingsnorth is right:

“Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.

We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to.”

But maybe not for me, I think. Maybe for me (for you?) something else is stirring.

Prayer in the time of corona: Slow me down enough. Give me enough time to change, to really change. Drive the truth down deep of what I could be if I tried, of how I could really live.

Maybe I will not spend these weeks in the dark feeding from the trough of a broken culture. Maybe I will spend them instead under the sun, the moon, the rainy skies, listening to old wisdom, to the heartbeat of the world and its creative Spirit.

I went to bed last night sick of heart, but then I dreamed of bees. I was standing under the sun longing for them to find me, my arms held open, waiting for them to come explore the territory of my repentant skin.

March 23, 2020

Hello my friends,

The sun is shining today as I sit here and write to you, but it’s the last of the sun for at least a week.  I know that’s going to be hard for people who are just learning to stay home and be settled, and that makes me feel a bit anxious. (Fellow empaths, you understand: it’s hard to keep from absorbing everyone else’s feelings!) So far, at least in my small world, moods have stayed pretty positive and friendly despite the limitations put on everyone.  With the exception of those stubborn few people who refuse to stay home and isolate (which just baffles me !!) I do have a sense that we are all trying our best to save each other.

A lot of artists and writers have been rising to the occasion and posting extra content online and offering what they can to distract and cheer us all.  I’m so thankful for those people whose first instincts in a crisis are outward-facing.  They help us so much.  I’m not really one of those people.  In a crisis, I immediately go emotionally hypothermic:  all the blood and heat goes to guard my core.  I shut down all the extra functions, including anything creative, and close my circle to those who feel safest and most familiar.  It’s a survival function, as much as the instinct to reach out and connect is for others.  We probably need both things in a healthy community.  Some of us are just second-wave kind of people and our time to create and share and support will come. 

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping busy with projects around home.  My husband is working from my little basement office now (and rightly so, it has the best internet access in the house) so I have been fixing up another space for myself, painting and scraping and imagining new curtains sewn from my fabric stash.  I’ve also been making reusable sanitizing wipes (except I used Everclear since there’s no rubbing alcohol to be found), and cutting up old t-shirts for tissues so that the toilet paper will stretch a little further.  

I wrote at the beginning of this month that my current motto is Ora et labora.  That’s not changing any time soon and this week I’m going to make a new prayer altar as well.  We have four children, one who works in medicine, one living in France for the immediate future, and two who work in industries deemed “essential,” so I feel a little vulnerable about all of them being out and about in the world just now.  Somehow, it seems like a little altar might help the prayers be more real. 

So far, enduring a pandemic is like some kind of freestyle dance between focused work and focused nurturing.  Clean the pantry?  Yes.  Digital minimalism?  Not right now, thanks.  I would love to say that at the end of the day I am using all this time to read hard books and think deep thoughts, but really, I’m just trying to decide if I can eat more brownies and find something distracting to watch, just like everyone else I know. 

~ Once I get my new office space set up and it feels like things settle down a bit, I will get back to work on a newsletter for you.  I had planned on sharing a story this time.  Which is still unwritten.  (*eep*)  It will probably be an April newsletter since the days keep going by in a blur.  Our bookstore shut down so the giveaway will be on hold again.  Gee whiz.  Every once in awhile it hits me how strange this all is and how everyone in the whole world is feeling and experiencing the same thing I am right now.  Thank goodness for all of you who are able to respond right away and help us know what to do next.  I’m going to defrost eventually and get back to the words.  I will try to post something weekly though, so we don’t lose touch.  Thanks for your patience.  When I set up that prayer altar this week those prayers will be going up for you too. 

Peace keep you, my friends.  Second-wave people: no guilt. Just do you.

Love each other well.

tonia 

chernobyl

A piece I wrote to share as part of a now-cancelled event. I began this piece well before I knew anything about a pandemic, but it strikes me now how life is always asking us to choose our narrative, and our God. Since we’re all having to keep our distance right now, I thought I might try to close the gap a little by reading you this piece myself. It’s nothing fancy, but we don’t need anything fancy right now, do we? We just need each other.

Peace to your hearts and minds today.

xo

tonia

When I was 15, part of the Soviet Union poisoned itself with a nuclear meltdown.  I saw it on the news and then I went to church-school, where no one was surprised to find the book of Revelation coming true.  I come from a people who memorize the King James Bible and expect to be afraid.  We trained for fear in the basement of the church-school.  Mostly, for the day when someone would burst into the classroom – likely Soviet – and demand renouncement of our faith on pain of death.  How fitting, then, that the apocalypse should begin in the U.S.S.R. 

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,

and made a barren circle 1500 miles wide where no life would be able to live for 20,000 years or more. 

Selah.

Not long after that

I grew up and learned that no matter how much Bible you can recite, religion is a reflection of the people who are practicing it, and so, bears returned to the fields of Chernobyl, along with wolves and dogs and endangered horses and other animals who never got the news about the apocalypse and received something more like a paradise instead, which is the story of a whole different kind of God.   

The thing about the different God is that disasters happen all over the world now and I never go to bed satisfied.  Instead I have this tender feeling right in the middle of my chest, like everything, everything is so precious and loved and I want to take it all in my arms.  Like the butterflies, and the bees, that have never returned to Chernobyl, who are more fragile, who have wings that are only strong for air, who hover around paradise, always wondering if it is safe yet, to go in.

Brigid's Day

A photo from earlier in the week.

The rain has swollen our community creek, so we couldn’t go down to dip our hands in it as we’d planned on this Brigid’s Day, but we prayed a blessing over it anyway. It’s home for fish and frogs, crayfish, the giant salamander that surprised our son one day, countless insects and creatures and birds, stones and root and branches, silt of our common land, and most importantly, water, which grows more precious to me every year. (Do we ever dare complain about rain and snow in these days when so many in the world have no water at all?)

“Let us bless the humility of water

Always willing to take the shape

Of whatever otherness holds it…

Water: voice of grief,

Cry of love,

In the flowing tear.

Water: vehicle and idiom

Of all the inner voyaging

That keeps us alive.

Blessed be water,

Our first mother.”

~ John O’Donohue

***

This week, I also found a lovely series of house blessings in my Northumbria Community Prayer Book to be said on Brigid’s Day. You stop at each room of the house and give a blessing specific to that space. We’ll do that tonight.

Here are a couple of them:

At the Doorway:

May God give His blessing to the house that is here.

God bless this house from roof to floor,

from wall to wall,

from end to end,

from its foundation and in its covering.

We call upon the Sacred Three

to save, shield and surround

this house, this home,

this day, this night,

and every night.

In the kitchen:

Seeing a stranger approach,

I would put food in the eating place,

drink in the drinking place,

music in the listening place,

and look with joy for the blessing of God,

who often comes to my home

in the blessing of a stranger.

May your homes and your places be blessed as well, friends, with generosity, compassion, abundance, and life this weekend.

Peace keep you,

tonia

"we should consider..."

Spending a little time with William Stafford on his (rainy) birthday.

~ “Everyone is a conscientious objector to something. Are there things you wouldn’t do? Well.”

~ “Here’s how to count the people who are ready to do right: “One.” “One.” “One.”

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

“…And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider -

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”