dawning new year :: January 14, 2024

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            I barely noticed crossing the 2023 finish line and entering the new year. The year of the owl was a tough one; it lasted twice as long as it should and death circled on all sides. I hardly had energy to notice that we are supposed to be starting again. I’ve thought it before, but I feel it more intensely now: January, coming in the heart of winter, deep on the heels of all that enforced merry-making, is a terrible, terrible time to have to find the motivation for new routines and habits. I want January to be a month to rest and reflect, to curl up with old journals and pots of tea. I want long, unembarrassed naps, already-watched movies, and thick books about naturalists or explorers enduring harsh conditions outside while I warm my toes under layers of blankets. There’s nothing stopping me from doing this, of course. I can begin a new year of habits on February 1st,  or March 23rd. It makes no difference.

            For now, I can feel the pull of winter on my animal body, drawing me into quieter spaces. This feels like wisdom I should attend; the earth and I are made of the same stardust, after all, but she is much, much older than me and has passed beyond the need to prove herself or produce for show. I find myself wanting to lean into her side and burrow into her skirts, let her decide when we start moving again.

            I don’t mean that I want to stop living though. When I was younger, I thought rest was just the absence of tasks. I thought it involved reclining my body and letting the laundry sit in the dryer and eating take-out or something. In this way, I managed to avoid all sorts of growth and personal development. I could keep myself spinning during working hours with a list of busy tasks and then be too tired to do anything meaningful with my remaining time (like my own art or creative work). And then, because I misunderstood the meaning of rest, I would refuse to create or journal or spend time alone with a notebook in the evenings or on the weekends because I had categorized that as “work” and I knew it was healthy to “rest.” To be fair, rest meant something different to me in the years I was raising and homeschooling four children than it does to me now. There are seasons. But there are also thousands of ways to procrastinate, aren’t there? 

            This winter season I am turning toward myself, going deep into places I have been avoiding. Some of this is the gift left by the owl, some of it is the lines on my face and the silver in my hair, the growing awareness that time does not stretch on indefinitely. If I would become someone, I must become that someone here, in this now. 

            So I set my alarm twenty minutes earlier, spend the time on writing morning pages, discovering that the pen has access to places in me that I have never uncovered. I do this out of desire, not demand. It doesn’t feel like habit or discipline I am building so much as a self I am quietly discovering, the emerging awareness I sometimes have in dreams or in the blurred spaces between waking and sleeping.

            And then because rest is regenerative, the morning pages extend to more words. I feel like seeing where a story might go. I feel like writing a letter, meandering around the soft corners of this winter hour. I feel like finishing, and so I do. Afterward I am more steady in myself than I was before. There is nothing strenuous about these meetings with myself, no intent to produce. And yet the words pile up, the creative spirit stirs.

            In a recent newsletter, L.M. Sacasas wrote about how slowly the sun arrives each day. Dawn is a gradual affair if you are attentive to it. I saw this recently when we were at the beach and I went out early to watch the ocean at sunrise which, according to my weather app, was supposed to arrive precisely at 7:42 am. I walked down about 20 minutes before that, when the sun was beginning to pink the clouds behind me, and headed home an hour later when the eastern sun was up enough to glint off a slant of western water. Maybe we can let the new year dawn on us like that too. Accept that January 1st is just the first pink signal that a new day is arriving instead of the starting gun for a race where we run fast now or fall behind. Maybe after the slow dawn of the new year, we’ll be better able to see what shape it wants to take, how we might live well in the light of it.

            How about you? Are you starting the year running? Or are you feeling the need for more time? Either way, I am holding out for a happy and deeply nourishing year for all of us.

Thinking of you all here, this quiet and encouraging community, with gratitude. Let’s share more words together this year if we can.

tonia

 This and that.

 *Reading: Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. Just exquisitely good storytelling. (Next I’ll watch the movie adaptation: The Quiet Girl.)

*Reading: the story of David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who collected and catalogued many of the indigenous NW plants for the British.

 *Reading: Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about what we are supposed to do with problematic artists.

 *Making: this little blanket

*Making: an art journal with Suzi Banks Baum’s Dark Advent Workshop, learning to be imperfect and work with visual media. So hard for this perfectionist and yet so rewarding.

*Watching:  Ondine, Chinatown, and a selection of movies for a class I’m taking on Conspiracy Theories.

*Watching (soon): the new season of True Detective with Jodie Foster

 *Thinking about: Elizabeth Gilbert shaving her head and saying fuck it to beauty culture.  This whole interview is marvelous.

*Thinking about: Eliza Rathje’s gentle volumes of The Journal of Small Work and how we might envision a different future one small dream at a time.

           

not done yet :: July 20, 2023

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              I’ve been born again many times: in a crowd, at an altar, in my seat, on my knees, on my feet. Those were jarring rebirths, laboring under the strain of my supposed corruption and persistent doubt, brutal attempts to bring a roving mind to heel. Always, the newly born me would flourish for a time and then falter, would need another altar, another crucifixion. It was years and years before the realization that all this monitoring, repenting, dying, rebirthing was someone else’s idea of living, a system I inherited but didn’t want. Slowly, finally, I killed off my attachment to it. (Don’t bother looking, the grave is in the woods; I burned the bones and buried the ashes deep.)

You must know that no matter what they tell you, nothing can really destroy the original self, the core person. She sleeps, she waits, and when the time is right, she rises.

“Practice resurrection,” Wendell Berry wrote, as earnestly as if he had just pilfered the power from the coffers of the divine. The idea lay in my spirit for years simmering like some stolen jewel, until one summer afternoon when I was alone outside, journaling and watching the bees in the honey locust. The old life was done, had been ending for so many years, but I had not been able to admit it yet. Words began to form themselves under my pen, words I didn’t even know existed in my mind. The moment they became visible on the page, I began to shake. A door behind me clicked shut, the sleeping girl opened her eyes, I was through to the other side.  

            When I try to write about this, I often end up splitting myself in two, the way you do in dreams when you both experience an event and observe yourself experiencing it. I am the girl who was silenced and the girl who held a hand over my mouth. I don’t know how to reconcile this, but the original girl does. “Forget that,” she says. “We’re going to live.” She signs up for school, makes friends, gets a tattoo, plans solo trips, buys a pair of walking shoes, piles of books, a tarot deck for the hell of it, ditches a life’s worth of anger because it’s not worth our time.  The woman who has done my hair for the last 18 years tells me, “You get younger every time I see you.” She is not talking about my appearance. Though I can only seem to write about it in a fractured way, what she recognizes in me is a wholeness, a completion, a freedom. I am the girl who lives.

            As I write this, I am sitting in a café in the little beach town I sometimes dream I have moved to. I’m eating coffee cake and drinking my third pot of tea. I am a little footsore from a walk and frizzled by the mist that comes off the ocean here, and I’m happy. I am halfway through my life and I am happy in a way I didn’t know I could be happy. Now I face the task of nurturing and growing up the original girl. How to do it?

  Find joy, I think. Joy is the path.

            My oldest granddaughter taught me something about this recently. She is 7 now, and most of those years have been spent with a pencil in her hand, drawing. She’s been calling herself an artist since she was around 3. Last time I visited her, she told me she was writing a book. It’s about a rabbit named Thorna and she has written 14 pages of it so far. She has plans for “about 30” but no one can see it until she’s done. Every couple of hours or so she would go to her spot at the dining table, take out a basket of paper, ignore the chaos around her and work on that book a little. Then she’d put it away and go play or read or eat or whatever life had brought her at the moment. She’s been working on this project for several months. No anxiety, no pressure, no deadline, no self-loathing, no avoidance, just claiming her truth, doing her work, day after day. I can’t quit thinking about it. When I look at her, I see what could have been, what still can be.

            My life is not quite so simple and straightforward as a 7-year old’s, but the path is still the same.  Play a little, work a little, follow the quiet strings of joy’s pull day by day, that is the way to grow a self.  Maybe especially, a self that has been forced to sleep for so very long. I have spent a good amount of time grieving those misspent years, but something inside me keeps promising: it’s never too late. As long as I am here and breathing, I am becoming who I am, who I always have been.

            A couple of years ago I put this framed encouragement from Lucille Clifton in my office. I’ll leave it here where it might encourage you too:

 i am not done yet


as possible as yeast

as imminent as bread

a collection of safe habits

a collection of cares

less certain than i seem

more certain than i was

a changed changer

i continue to continue

where i have been

most of my lives

is where i’m going

            

(I know before I publish this that friends who read here have their own experiences, different than mine; that some of you have found peace where I found pain. I honor your story and your choices and want only for you to find joy and wholeness, wherever that is for you.)

 Reading and thinking:

funeral rites :: April 30, 2023

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The people at the funeral don’t believe in ghosts, though they nod gently when I tell my story about the dream the night before, how the dead woman had come to sit so sweetly beside me, how she laughed when I told her about the funeral.

“I think she was happy,” I say, and they smile with relief and Christian politeness. A bridge has appeared for them to bring my ghost over.

“Of course! She’s dancing with Jesus!” one woman says excitedly and raises her arms. She jigs her hips a little. She has lost two sons and a husband. Her eyes, when she leans in to say this again, are both kind and a little manic.

The people all look like memories I have forgotten. Faces emerge somberly out of the crowd, claim to be old babysitters or Sunday school teachers or friends of my mother. I am mistaken for my sister several times. Everyone wears the same clothes they wore thirty years before. Everywhere the sound of polyester, the squeak of stiff shoes.

The dead woman liked purple. I appear with her in a slideshow: 12 years old, 14, 18, 45. We wear no makeup, then too much makeup, then we are middle-aged. The slideshow ends; she will always be middle-aged. The preacher tells us we don’t need to be sad, she is happy now. I rub the back of my heel with the toe of my other shoe, wonder if eternal happiness is as exhausting as it sounds. The dead woman liked butterflies. On the screen behind the preacher now there is a purple sky; it fills and unfills with butterflies.

Everyone says it’s a shame we only see each other at funerals and weddings; I think that’s the whole point of having them, but I don’t say this out loud. There are many things I don’t say out loud. I see an old teacher from the church school. He asks about my husband, a man he has met once. He thinks my husband is a pastor. This accidentally makes me laugh. He wants to know then about my husband’s job, his health. He reminisces about the Olive Garden where they were introduced. I am fine, I don’t say. I write. I am finally in university. He has to go, there is a lot to do at funerals, but he tells me to assure my husband that he enjoyed having me in class.

After he leaves, I stand still, waiting to see if I am actually visible. I feel as insubstantial as a ghost, as if you can see through my body to the rows of chairs, the red-flecked carpet. I look around for the dead woman, maybe I can see her now. People circulate. Someone plays softly on a keyboard. I resist remembering this life. I resist the unresisting me that lived before.

In the back room there is a reception. I consider a row of water bottles and a plate of cookies, but I have read my fairy tales: food offered in a transitory space is always a trap. One cookie and I will be haunting the halls of this church forever. I move on to the display of the dead woman’s life. Here are the books she liked as a child, here the photos she had on her wall, here a wooden cat, purple. When I die, what color will I be?

I find my husband just before he takes a cookie and we make our way through the goodbyes and out the door.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he says.

“No,” I say. The sun is shining, and I am suddenly sure of myself once more. I look back at the church, imagine the butterflies escaped from their screen, circling, fluttering over empty chairs, taking refuge in the plastic greenery. I want to run back and open the doors, let them all out. I don’t. There are no butterflies in the sanctuary, just as there are no ghosts. We get in our car and roll through the parking lot. I watch the church recede in the side mirror and catch a flash of purple. The dead woman waves from the steps.

She looks happy. 

 Hello friends,

How are you? I don’t know how many of you are still out there, but I’m sending a wave from my corner of the world. It’s been several months, but I’m getting used to these new routines of interaction, study, commute, work. For a while, I couldn’t do much but go to school and recover from going to school (my HSP friends, you understand) but these last weeks I’ve found things coming easier. There’s more space for taking care of myself, more space to enjoy, less exhaustion. I’m finding I want to put my experiences into words again, so I’ve come back to this space today to tell you about a personal loss, and the twist to the heart that sometimes comes when we are asked to revisit our old lives. I’m just telling it in my own way – a little slant, a little storybook.

This piece came to me very clearly one morning. Joy Harjo says we all use the second sight – in dreams, in intuitions, in our art.* I’ve been leaning into this idea that I am already in touch with whatever I need to articulate in this world, trusting myself to write words the way they come to me, instead of rounding their edges so they don’t cut, or delineating too clearly their meaning. Mostly when I write, I don’t know the meaning anyway. Words rise like shoots out of the ground of what I’m living, feeling, experiencing, and consuming. It makes me conscious of how I nurture myself, how I fill the time. I want the ground of my being to be rich and complex and full of possibility so the words can grow straight and true. Maybe we feel these things most clearly when death’s skirts have so recently brushed past.

Wherever you are, I hope you are safe and well. I’ve missed our conversations and our sharing. Thanks as always for reading these words here.

peace keep you,

tonia

…

Some of what I’ve been reading, watching, enjoying these days:

 Listening to:

*Commonplace podcast, episode 109 with Joy Harjo

Watching:

Perry Mason

Reading:

~ Fingersmith // Sarah Waters – a twisty, unpredictable, dark Dickens of a tale.

~A Ghost in the Throat // Doireann Ni Griofa – absolutely gorgeous writing about mothering, poetry, and passion. Unlike anything I’ve read before.

 ~The Outermost House // Henry Beston – Beston’s account of a year living alone in a house he built on Cape Cod in the 1930’s is beautifully written. I can’t quit thinking about his hours alone there and wishing for my own quiet cabin somewhere.

 ~Standing in the Forest of Being Alive // Katie Farris - Farris’ battle with early breast cancer told through poetry. Incredibly intimate, funny, and strong.

a midwest journey :: july 2022

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Kansas City Skyline

I seem to always get stuck in the middle seat of any flight, so I had to content myself with brief glimpses of the quilted Midwest landscape out my neighbor’s window as we passed over it last week. I never get tired of the patient geometry of the center of the US, the white snakes of road wide enough to disrupt the green and brown grid, the occasional rise of land, a blue glint of lake, a sparkle of river scratching through the earth. On two of our flights I was stuck between strangers, tucking my elbows carefully against my body so as not to disturb the men on either side of me by actually taking up physical space. Once we were in the air, I spent some of my cramped time considering why I feel compelled to perform this deference to others. The men beside me gave no thought to commandeering both the armrests. Probably, if I had insisted on space for my arms, they would have given it to me, but sometimes social pressure breeds a kind of forgetfulness and I resort to long-ingrained habits of being the good, invisible girl.

I encountered that old self a lot while we were visiting Missouri. The subconscious reads the landscape, rings a bell of recognition to tell us how to feel and act. I kept seeing old shadows on the streets, hearing whispers on the drone of hot air. The only features rising from the flat earth were the buildings, an occasional tree. It took me back to summers as a kid in the thin dust of Idaho: blistering pavement, ice cream from a truck, late night church services. One night in our Missouri loft an old memory returned to me in the form of a dream: I was six again, kneeling by the couch to say the sinner’s prayer, crying because the devil wanted me. I woke to the weight of sticky air on my skin. When we got on the plane again and flew home and I saw the shoulders of the mountains emerging, the trees leaping up like they’d been waiting for us, I could feel myself growing cool and green and straight again too, in recognition of home.

Despite the rising of old ghosts, I did love my trip to the Midwest. The best part of travel is the chance to inhabit the lives and places of others and learn a new context. I’m always interested in the narrative of a place, the way weather and geography fraternize with history and tradition to create the stories we live out of. I gathered the heat, the cloudless skies, the tree-lined highways, the churches, the strip malls, the billboards promising redemption and/or judgement, the farmland, the frozen custard stands, the blues singers on the evening sidewalks, the short shorts and tank tops, the gorgeous diversity of faces, the gun and ammo shops, the historical markers, the earnestly waving flags, and found I understood a little better the whats and whys of that place.

On the flight, I had been reading Barry Lopez’ posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. “…to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations,” he says. “We will need to trust each other.” Lopez was an uncommonly humble man, always open to learning, with no apologies for who he was and what he stood for, but no hubris to assume his way was the only way.

“And whenever I found myself in those situations, I came to understand that it was always good to hold in suspension my own ideas about what the practical, wise, or ethical decision might be in any given set of circumstances.”

He was a good companion for the journey.

~I also finished Johann Hari’s excellent book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, on that trip. It’s validated my decision from 3 years ago to delete my Instagram and most of my social media accounts and try to use my phone as a tool, not a distraction device. It’s also inspired me to work on my deep reading and attention span, which are really just muscles that need strengthening. I’m making good use of the Lady Crawley chairs that I bought at a consignment shop several years ago. They’re perfect for deep reading as they are comfortable, but they force me to sit upright and not slump over and fall asleep. In addition, I keep a pencil in hand for making notes and underlining. It makes a difference! (I’m also intrigued by Ryan Holiday’s suggestion to swarm.)

Hari also contributed to the conversation with Lopez’ work about being slow to draw conclusions:

“I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world, and with myself. I think all of these ideas - the messages implicit in these mediums - are wrong. Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right - you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular with they are first articulated.”

(If the book is too much, Rich Roll had a great podcast with Hari on this topic. It’s long, but you can break it up over a few good walks!)

~ Pat Barker’s books on the women of Troy (read gorgeously by Kristin Atherton) have been keeping me company on my walks this month. Highly recommended!

Light and love, friends.

tonia

under pressure :: June 2022

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I’ve been walking. Early in the morning, as near to sunrise as I can manage, when the birds are most vocal. If I time it right, I have the trail to myself. At least, without other humans. There are plenty of other beings out at dawn: rabbit, newt, raccoon, snail, osprey, turtle, deer. I’ve been walking daily ever since a friend pointed me to Libby DeLana. Every Damn Day has been her motto for a decade. I’m at Day 62 now, each walk dutifully recorded with the time and weather in a little notebook. Even after the wedding, when I was so tired the air felt as thick as water and every movement was like swimming against a current, we pulled over to the side of the road and took a deliberate walk through a field of lupines. 0.11 miles that day, but still, a walk. I counted it. Other days, when I’ve been tired, or sick, I’ve looped our small woods (the equivalent of once around the block) and been glad for those few minutes of respite.

I like the simplicity of Every Damn Day. There’s no decision for me to make. I don’t have to decide whether I can fit it in or if I feel like exercising, I just get up and go. I wish I could apply this philosophy to other areas of my life, like writing or journaling or meditation, but I’ve realized I have capacity for one daily commitment and no more. Since this one has so many overlapping benefits, it beats out all other options. In one walk I get movement, time in nature, solitude, and stress relief. I need it. Because the truth is, I’m tired.

I keep thinking that I will bounce back. After this class is over, once the wedding is done, once this project or that is done, I will feel more refreshed. But when I cross whatever milestone I set for myself, I get to the other side and realize I’m still exhausted.

This spring I took a class on Global Climate Change. When I told my daughter I signed up for it, she said, “Mom. Is that wise?” Well, yes it was. I am not the type of person who likes to avoid difficult things. I need information; I need to see the whole picture and know the truth. Otherwise, I feel like I’m lying to myself. So I took the class, and now I know and I can process the sensational from the actual. It helps. But the truth is so very hard and I think it’s contributing to my exhaustion. We’ve had an old-fashioned spring here in the Pacific Northwest, with rain and cold all the way up to the Solstice. I loved it. But even as I loved it, the whole time I was thinking, enjoy it, this may be the last cool spring you’ll know. And that’s only one of the issues that weighs constantly on my mind.

We are under a lot of psychic pressure these days.

i would cry—there is so much grief

today and always

how even now, a haint riddled with bullets

has perched herself on my stoop

to warn of all the little deaths

headed my way.

Juneteenth, 2020 by Miriama J. Lockington

In the fall, I will be full time at the university (in-person for the first time) and so I had a lot of ideas about what to do this summer. Finish the novel, paint the duck house, redecorate the spare bedroom, begin a short story collection around the experiences of living, then leaving, Christianity. But every time I think about doing any of those things I go back to bed.

I’m old enough now to know that the body is wise and can be trusted. Reluctance in the face of progression is just a bell ringing to tell me that something needs examination. So I went walking and gave myself some space to examine. When I came home it was with the realization that this is not the summer for a lot of physical and mental exertion. This is a summer to rest and prepare for what will be difficult intellectual and social work in the years ahead. And I discovered - when I let go of my expectations - that what I really want to do, more than anything, is to keep walking, to be outside as much as possible, and to read, read, read.

So I’ve released myself from the task list and given myself a new job: to walk every day, and to get through as much of my to-read shelves as possible this summer. (It’s an embarrassing amount of books, but I’ll do my best.) That’s it.

This morning I was re-reading Rebecca over breakfast and I came to the passage where the narrator talks about her current life, living from hotel to hotel. Their days are simple, she says, and sometimes boring, but

“…boring is a pleasing antidote to fear. We live very much by routine…We have tried wireless, but the noise is such an irritant, and we prefer to store up our excitement, the result of a cricket match played many days ago means so much to us.”

It struck me how slow life was once (for those affluent enough not to have to scrape every minute towards survival, anyway). Waiting days to hear the score of a cricket match and savoring the anticipation. Our bodies and minds evolved within that kind of slowness. How natural that we should always be trying to get back to it.

If you are interested, tell me if you are feeling this collective psychic weight, and how you are dealing with it. What are you craving? How are you making it happen? I’d love to hear.

I hope to be in this space more often this summer. Let’s see how it goes. xo

lots of love,

tonia

p.s. I included a few wedding photos at the bottom, including a glimpse of (nearly) the whole family, for those who have been here long enough to watch those kids grow up!

Some notable books from the last weeks:

~Independent People// Halldór Laxness. A slow, deep burn of a book with a seam of black humor running quietly through it. It’s set in Iceland at the turn of the 20th century, when the old ways and the new, progressive ideals were bumping into each other. Bjartur, the main character, is a brute in just about every way, but I suspect Americans, at least, will not find his blind commitment to Independence and self-sufficiency unfamiliar. This, and other novels, helped Laxness win the Nobel Prize. It’s worth the read.

~Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World//Jason Hickle I’m going to be giving copies of this one to several friends. An easy, engaging read, but Hickle manages to show the reality of our capitalist systems, why they function as they do, and why they can never, ever save us or the planet. He also shows what an alternate system could look like. Highly recommend.

~The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History//Brian Fagan. I came across this by accident among some used books and picked it up since I was studying the same topic at the time. Did you know there was an Ice Age in the Middle Ages? It caused all kinds of havoc and changed the fate of nations and governments all over the world. If you want to understand how climate change is more than altered weather, you might find this account helpful.

~Eleutheria//Allegra Hyde. This one is worth noting because it’s at the beginning of what I suspect is a whole tide of eco-literature written by authors who have come of age in the shadow of climate change. In this one, a sheltered young woman (raised by survivalist parents) tries to find a way to save the changing world and makes a mess of things.

~Fiber Fueled, Will Bulsiewicz - Great overview of gut health and how to stay healthy through diet. (Hint: eat lots and lots of different plants!)

And, finally, some scenes from the wedding. (Excuse my half-closed eyes in the last photo, but all the kids are smiling!)

all Wedding photos: Shelby @ Marley Kimbo Media