July, third week :: 2021

The house is painted now, a deep, deep green that echoes the trees around it. Every time I go outside to see it I find myself sighing with relief. The color feels restful, joyful, even, if you think of joy as being a kind of rightness, a harmony between purpose, place, and delight.

Ever notice how sometimes a word or an idea begins to follow you around, peeping out of places you don’t expect or even bubbling up surprisingly out of your own interior? That’s how it’s been for me the last few weeks with the word joy. It popped up in school when I was asked why I want to write, it showed up on my birthday when I thought about who I wanted to spend time with, it’s guiding my future choices about school and work, it colors the effort I put into my marriage.

I’ve spent a lot of my life, way too much of it, walled into obligation, expectation, and duty like some kind of medieval anchorite. Dismantling those structures has been fearful, uncomfortable work at times (often because I hate disappointing people and freeing yourself inevitably disappoints someone), but now that I am on the other side of it, I’ve found joy waiting for me everywhere. What I want more than anything is to take that joy in my arms and spin it around and laugh myself silly.

I’ve noticed though, that as soon as I start talking like that, someone else feels threatened by it. Here’s what I have to say: whatever joy or freedom we’ve found is our own. No one gets to pass judgement on it or decide if its the right kind of freedom or the real kind of joy. It’s ours to keep and savor. By the same token, someone else can find release and joy in the places and ideas we’ve left behind. Real freedom relieves us of the need to control or sway others.

What I hope is that each of us will go our way in peace. That we’ll learn to trust our own paths. That we will let anyone who can’t be happy for us go without resentment and wish them peace on their own ways. Freedom is too precious to tangle up in other people’s doubts or fears or needs. <3

Gathered:

~ A new story for newsletter subscribers in the Story Room. If you’d like to have access, click the Subscribe button in the side bar or go to the Subscribe page.

~ One of the hardest parts of the day for me is transitioning between my writing work and my household work. I’ve been using these silent videos to help me get excited about switching gears. I watch 15 minutes at a time while I’m eating lunch or having a cup of tea and then I feel like getting to work again!

~ This beautiful excerpt from 16-year-old Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist.

(More here.)

“My dark, knotted thoughts seem to be staying away at the moment. I feel as free as the gannets and swallows. If they can live their lives, shouldn’t I do the same? Can I breathe and live and also fight? The natural world—which includes us—is facing such enormous challenges that it’s easy to become overwhelmed and depressed. But we must fix them, and if I’m no longer here, alive, I can’t be part of the solution. What is it that’s holding me back? Anxiety?

Depression? Autism? These are the shackles. Surely, I can break free. Or at least I can accept these things as part of me. I have no answers, but the lightness of these thoughts and these days weave my body and mind with everything around me. The only thing that I am really bound to is nature—as we all are.”

— Dara McAnulty

Joy and peace to you, my friends.

tonia

July, Second Week :: 2021

Red dragonfly, misty morning.

That’s my alternative title for this post based off an ancient Japanese calendar I read about recently. In this way of time-keeping, the year was divided into 24 seasons, and each of these was further divided 3 times into a total of 72 seasons, each lasting 4-5 days. These miniature seasons were given lovely, poetic names based on what was happening in nature. (e.g.“Warm winds blow”, “Hawks learn to fly” )

There are so many reasons I love this way of season-keeping, mostly because it requires attendance to the subtle shifts and nuances of change as we move through the year, but also for the invitation to grace the passing days with poetry.

Right now we are in a bit of an upheaval at Fernwood. Outside, the house is being painted and the decks repaired. Inside we are preparing to downsize and shift our living quarters so a soon-to-be married daughter and son-in-law can share our home for awhile. All my curated corners for sitting and thinking are upended, there is always a contractor (agreeable and helpful as they are) just where I want to be, and there’s no end to the amount of decluttering and reorganizing waiting for me. How necessary then to have a place where poetry can enter and soothe.

Red dragonfly on wild sweet pea.

Misty morning, thirsty ground.

House waits with folded hands.

…

Yesterday I carted one of the plastic adirondack chairs out to the center of the yard, out of the path of the contractors, just on the edge of the walnut tree shade so I could write. I remember Sylvia V. Linsteadt saying in an old blog post that she tried to spend one day every week out on the land “tracing the songlines of that beloved wild place, so that my work remains infused with its many voices.” I’m determined to put myself in connection with the land and all that it speaks to me every day, even if that happens in fragments and requires listening for the squabble of bluejays over the “sounds of the 80’s and 90’s” coming from a contractor’s radio. In my classes this last spring, I realized I don’t really need more formulas and instruction on basic writing. What I need instead is to loosen something inside and explore outside my domesticated self. Practices like writing outside by hand not only help me listen to the wild places, but also help me access parts of myself that have been shuttered so I can create freely (something that didn’t feel possible until I left religion behind, but that’s a post for another day.)

After I finished writing yesterday, I spent an hour re-watching a talk by Ray Bradbury and making plans to write a short story every week as he suggested. He assured that you can’t write 52 terrible stories, so I hope I’ll be able to share some of those in the Story Room throughout the year. And, of course, I’m still working on the novel as well! In fact, I’m going to wrap this up and get back to work on it.

I hope you will find some peace, poetry, and freedom on your own path this week, no matter what is going on around you.

Gathered:

~ Ryan Holiday’s videos on being an active reader and making time for reading.

(FYI, I’m reading Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America and Graham Joyce’s The Limits of Enchantment right now.)

~ This funny, smart essay by Caitlin Flanagan: You Really Need to Quit Twitter

“Surely Joan Didion has confronted her share of aggravations (cucumber slices not adhering to tea sandwiches; Lynn Nesbit calling during NewsHour; latest Celine sunnies too big for tiny, exquisite face). But would she ever take to Twitter to inscribe these frustrations onto the ticker tape of the infinite? Of course not. She would either shape them into imperishable personal essays or allow them to float past her and return to the place from which they came.”

(I just marked two years without social media accounts. I echo everything Flanagan (and her family) has to say.)

~ Bob Dylan:

“A library is an arsenal of liberty.”

A bientot mes amis.

June, Fourth Week :: 2021

Here we are friends, closing the door already on June. I’m writing from the darkness of my bedroom, trying not to move too much as the temperatures have been so high the last three days and the air is thick with heat. We have one more day to go the forecasters tell us, 115 F today and then we’ll be back down into the 90’s, temperatures I’d normally be complaining about for our temperate climate, but now am happily looking forward to.

Since I wrote last (hello, hello to new readers and old friends!) I’ve finished my first term of school, turned 50 (woot!), celebrated our 30-year anniversary with a week on the mountain (the photos are from that trip) and started putting my house back in order after weeks of neglect. I’m just about ready to enjoy summer now!

Back in the spring, when the new flowers and leaves were beginning to reveal themselves, I told myself I wanted to start keeping a date journal of all the season’s firsts: First maple catkin, first tulip, first returning swallow, etc. but I was so busy with classes I kept procrastinating or forgetting. Now that we are sweltering under this strange heat dome, climate change feeling incredibly urgent and imminent, I keep thinking about how I wished I’d been charting such things for the last decade. I know the roses were early this year, and the first bumblebees, but I don’t know by how much. I think that information is going to matter as we continue down this path.

Not long ago I read Michael McCarthy’s Moth Snowstorm in which he talks about the abundance of wildlife all of us over a certain age used to encounter once upon a time. It’s true, as a young child in the 70’s, living both in the country and the city, I can remember finding hordes of insects, ponds full of frogs and tadpoles to be carted home, bushes full of butterflies and bees, nights dancing with moths. Between 4th and 5th grades, I must have “rescued” a dozen baby birds that had fledged or fallen from nests. Their disappearance happened so gradually I didn’t realize that my own children were rarely encountering these creatures. My children’s children will encounter even fewer. We are living in a slow-motion erasure.

Sam Lee, in a recent Emergence Magazine podcast, talked about that reality and said we have “an ever present need to fill our hearts with the richness of our land’s offerings.” There is grief we must contend with, he continues, but nature itself operates in the present and is always inviting us to see and experience and enjoy.

That’s my plan for the foreseeable future: to pay attention and enjoy, to open my eyes and ears (and my notebook!) and take it all in. I also hope to get back into a writing rhythm here. I’m not sure if I’m going to be in school full time in the fall or not. I loved, loved, loved school and will continue to go, but I missed a lot of things that are important to me over those twelve weeks. Things like having the time to cook a meal without stress, keep a tidy house, mental energy to read books, time to write and take long walks, time to garden and grow. In the culture of “do more and accomplish” none of those things are necessarily reasons to slow down, but to me they are essential parts of living a quality, meaningful life. I think in the future, school is going to be something I add to my already busy and happy days, not something that takes over all of them. We’ll see.

For now, summer, and paying attention.

More soon. Much love.

tonia

April, Fourth Week :: 2021

Happy Earth Day, friends!

Last year I took a whole Earth Day to myself, hiking and spending time outdoors. I thought I’d make an annual tradition of it, but this year I’ll be indoors most of the day on Zoom classes instead. There will be a couple of free hours in the afternoon though, and I’m marking them out for the woods. Just the thought of time under the trees, the air scented with bluebells, will get me through the morning.

This week has been a roller coaster of insecurities and weariness. I had a glimpse of what it is going to be to study writing for the next few years and how I will need to be strong in my ideas and instincts while still being teachable. The experience shook me up a little, but fortunately, just when the doubts about my path started to creep in, words came to rescue me. I picked up The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd’s acclaimed book about the Cairngorm mountains, and began reading Robert MacFarlane’s introduction. He puts great emphasis on the fact that Shepherd had a “modestly regional life,” but “she came to know her chosen place closely, …that closeness served to intensify rather than limit her vision.” She wrote differently than other writers of her time. A close male friend told her the book will be “difficult, perhaps,” to get published and closed off his note with a patronizing jab. The book languished for forty years and even now, beloved as it is by many, is difficult to describe. I was reading this out under the evening sky, out where God moves among the trees and whispers loud enough for me to hear, so maybe you will understand that a feeling formed inside of me, a determination to stay my course, to lean into what I know is my own voice and not be shamed by the limits of the world and experience I draw upon.

“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience.”

~Patrick Kavanagh (quoted in MacFarlane’s introduction)

Right now on this little patch of earth, I have marked the arrival of the first Honeybees, a Bumblebee Queen, the return of the Violet-backed Swallows, Nettles and Rhubarb and Plantain and a dozen other old friends. What a privilege it is to experience and know this land year after year, to be shaped by it and shape my words around it.

Small, slow, and deep is how I want to continue on.

. . .

As a side note, I want to say that just because I don’t always write about current events here, doesn’t mean I don’t keep track of them or speak up about them, k? I care deeply about and participate in the work of justice in my own community and write about issues when I need to or feel I have something to add to the conversation. Thanks for understanding. xo

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Gathered:

~ More on Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

~ Mads Mikkelson’s thoughts on ambition:

My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.

~ Madeline Forman becomes a recording artist at 94. Have a listen to her at 17.

~ Last year’s (long!) Earth Day post.

Much love, friends.

tonia

April, third week :: 2021

I marked off my 120th day of writing this weekend and decided to take a few days off to reset my goals. I’m stuck on one chapter of the novel rewrites and I need a little bit of time away from it to get some perspective. I was feeling bad about how slow these rewrites are going, but then I came across James Baldwin’s admission that writing is just hard. “Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another. They all kick your ass. None of it comes easy.” Amen to that.

I asked Mark to take the long way home tonight, around the dike on the low-lying road that curves around farms and newly bright fields. We rolled down our windows and drove slowly, letting Bortkiewicz’ Lyrica Nova play out into the sunset, something we’ve done for years whenever we need to unwind. These first weeks of school I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to find real rest, but I’ve at least remembered that it begins with a little time and a bit of nature, even if it’s only seen from the window of a moving car.

The moon hung over us as we drove, a bright sickle against the blue sky. She’s moving through her cycle again, patient and constant while our world keeps fracturing and wounding itself. All around us green blades pushing up through soil, rogue daffodils in ditches, flit of deer shadows among the cottonwoods, moth dance above the windshield. Inhale. Exhale. Tomorrow I’ll get back to studying, back to learning how to write, because as James Baldwin says:

“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

Let me know how you’re changing the world today, friends. xo

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Gathered:

~ Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows reading Rilke.

~ Justine Bateman refusing to feel bad about aging.

Peace keep you.

More soon.

Tonia