Portland, July 27, 2020

I have good news: Portland is not burning or trashed! It’s the same old complicated, messy, beautiful, wonderful city it always was. My son and I walked around this morning, about 5 hours after the last protest ended, just to get some pictures and to spread some love. We bought coffees from a favorite spot, searched high and low for a bathroom (seriously, the lack of public bathrooms might be the most unexpected horror of the pandemic, amiright?), sat in the sun at Pioneer Courthouse Square, drooled outside Powell’s Books (which is only open for online orders), and then went to the protest block (yes, one main block) and got a little tear gas residue and a little teary-eyed.

A brief tour of Portland this morning:

Everything’s pretty empty because of the pandemic.

Pioneer Courthouse Square. (It doesn’t usually have polka dots. That’s just a happy art installation.)

Murals outside the Apple store and down the block. Most of these businesses have been closed since the Stay-Home orders.

This is the block right before the protest zone. You can see some graffiti on the parking structure across the street.

This is the Federal Courthouse building where most of the action takes place. It’s made of concrete and marble. It would be very hard to burn it to the ground, even if people were actually trying to do that.

People cleaning up trash in the street.

The end of the block. The buildings you can see further down are also Federal buildings, but we didn’t see much graffiti or damage there.

This is the park across the street from the Federal Courthouse. Protestors have food and medical stations set up here. There’s a lot of talk about businesses suffering from the protests, but this 3 block area is mostly Federal buildings and parks and most businesses downtown are closed or limited service because of the pandemic, so I’m not sure how many are being directly affected by the protests at night.

And that’s it. It’s a strange thing to watch somewhere you love on the news, to hear lies about it and watch it become a pawn in a political battle. It makes your heart grow bigger for that place, makes you want to shield it and defend it. That’s why I went downtown myself today. I can’t control a government’s actions any more than I can control an individual protestor’s actions, but I can witness reality, and I can carry love and peace with me and release it into these precious streets.

(A reading suggestion for such a time: Ilya Kaminsky’s parable in poetry : Deaf Republic)

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

***

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!)

at the close of a year

It’s Sunday night here - a time that always feels like an ending, but is actually a beginning. It’s late in this twilight space. I should be tidying and settling down to sleep, but it’s the last night I’ll ever be 48 and I want to write a little.

I made signs this week and I’ve tacked one up on my office wall: “Power to the Peaceful”, where I can see it while I work. I have been reminded these past days how quickly I can lose my inner equilibrium, how easily righteous anger can spill over into just plain old ugly, demeaning anger. What a balance this is, to be appropriately angry at injustice and yet not dehumanize those who refuse to (or can’t) see it. To destroy immoral systems and yet somehow care for the redemption of the people who perpetrate them, including yourself.

So the sign is up where I will see it daily, a reminder that peacefulness is difficult work, that the power that comes from it is not the kind that follows in the wake of guns and rigged systems, but the kind that flows inside vines and seeds, rivers and bloodstreams. At the end of this year of living I feel such a call to go deeper with the practice of peace, to move it out of an intellectual space into a lived space. The upheaval around us, the upheaval inside myself, only makes it more clear to me that this is important work.

~ My favorite part about birthdays is the freshness, the whole new year lying ahead, full of potential. I have written out some intentions, thought about how to maintain my attention on those things in the long term. I’m sure I will be writing about them over the next months. Right now they are so fresh and tender, small buds just emerging from under the dark of leaves; I want to keep them close and quiet.

For now, as darkness falls and I can feel sleep calling to me, I’ll share this section of one of Kyce Bello’s poems that I have put in the footer of my blog. I keep it as a prayer, a dream for going forward:

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.

Kyce Bello || Refugia

Love to you, friends.

tonia