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, First week :: 2021

Hello friends!

Phew! My first week of school is behind me. I love it all and I have all my homework done early like a good Enneagram 1. I’m exhausted and also my brain won’t stop churning over all the things and I’m exhausted. Did I say that already? I already regret my arrogance at not taking the easy math path. My children promise me the first couple weeks of term are the worst and I will get into a groove before I know it. (Please let that be true for almost-50 year old brains too.)

I am in love with everything about Community College, especially the egalitarianism of it. It’s open to everyone, it’s cheap(ish), and the professors are not going to get famous and make their careers here, so they’re just the type of people who like to help the ragtag rest of us learn things. And boy are we ragtag. I have to turn off my Zoom camera so I don’t just grin with happiness at all the diverse and wonderful humanity in my classes. Everyone - I mean, mostly everyone I talked to about starting school - told me I would be so annoyed by the young people in my classes, but listen, I AM NOT ANNOYED BY THE YOUNG PEOPLE. I love them. I love the boy who spends the whole class staring at himself and smoothing his hair back, up, down, flip the bangs, every two minutes. I love the kid who refuses to answer any questions posed to him. None. I love the girl who just graduated from her ESL class and always has to ask the meaning of words (you go, girl.) I love the ones who insist we have our pronouns visible next to our names so no one feels unwelcome. I love the spotty, awkward kids whose voices crack when they are called on and the bright-haired extroverts who cannot quit interrupting. The world is just full of interesting and gorgeous humans and I’m so glad to be a part of it. Do I sound excited and ridiculous? I know. But honestly, the world is beautiful and I’m happy to be here.

We ended March with the most wonderful walk down to the river to see the Full Crow Moon ride the night sky. (I just shot these photos with my iPhone, so please excuse the graininess!) I’m getting better about marking these days with small ceremonies. Full moons are for gratitude, which was a perfect way to end the month and begin a new one with so many changes.

I don’t have much more to offer this week, except an apology for the missed comments and emails I haven’t responded to. I hope I’ll be more coherent next week. Until then, enjoy this strange and wonderful world we live in as much as you can. I hope you get some sunshine and maybe some (appropriately distanced and masked) time with actual people this week.

Gathered:

~ I make kombucha every couple of weeks. This post from Cat’s gorgeous blog inspired my best batch yet, which I made with rosehips, hibiscus, elderberry, schisandra berry and ginger. Soooo yummy!

~ Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane are releasing a pandemic album inspired by Gilgamesh. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I can’t even. Preview Gods and Monsters. (Also, Johnny Flynn is the best thing about the new-ish Emma, which has many amazing qualities.)

~ And this reminder from Gladys Taber: “I believe there is nothing so tiresome as an apologetic woman.”

Peace friends,

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.

---

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

February, fourth week :: 2021

I went out for a walk this morning, the first one in a while. The trail is just on the far side of winter now, right on the doorstep of spring. I could almost hear the nettles pulsing their fresh green heads beneath the mud. Another week? Two?

For our Northern Hemisphere ancestors, late February would have been a hungry time, the cold damp deep in the bones, the winter stores gone or withered of their vitality. I imagine some long-ago ancestress scanning the fields and woods for that first flash of green, the first sign that nourishment was coming. I live a very different life, but I find myself harboring the same February ache, searching my own fields for something fresh and life-giving. You too?

I made the rounds the other day online, doing my civic duty to stay informed and aware, and I wondered if the news has ever been such a late-winter place, full of muck and weariness. I came away spattered with our local version, a sneering kind of mud, supercilious and cynical, that clings to the mind long after.

I have to be careful with that kind of thing, because cynicism and superciliousness come too easy to me. Writing has been a way to resist it, to grow, by the force of words, something green and hopeful within myself. I wrote myself a note that day: You are not an outrage factory.

I keep thinking of something Barry Lopez wrote about his friend, Brian Doyle, whose life and work mentors me constantly:

You were … the example that keeps us from despair, cynicism, detachment, and the other poisons bred in the bowels of our complex lives.

You walked in beauty, my dear friend. We all watched.

And now it is our turn.

(So. You are not an outrage factory. You are a lamp, made to be filled with light, a bowl of herbs, pungent with healing, a circle of arms for welcome. Your eyes are made for far-seeing and uncovering hope. This, this, this, is you.)

---

A handful of things from the week:

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry is part of our "Poetry Films" series, which features animated interpretations of beloved poems from our archive. ...

H/T: Rachel

~ This post from Susan about where writers work. Some lovely and inspiring photos. (Wendell Berry {happy sigh.} And despite my love for huge bookcases, Nigella Lawson’s space is giving me a bit of claustrophobia!)

~ Saturday’s full moon is the Snow Moon, the last full moon of winter. I’m going to make something simple for dinner, in keeping with the late-winter theme. (Maybe a nightshade-free version of colcannon and some sausages? I might splurge on dessert though.) If the weather cooperates, we’ll spend some time under the moonlight. <3

~ Exploring the work of Caroline Shaw after reading about her in The Atlantic. Here’s a nice introduction.

I’ll leave you with something from Brian Doyle:

The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.

Let’s hold hands against the darkness, shall we?

tonia