these are the things my soul was made for

This morning I woke up a bit disoriented by the still-dark sky and had to blink at the clock for awhile to figure out what was wrong. After I dragged myself from bed, I texted a good morning to my daughter, and she returned with a disoriented, “Why are you up so early??” reply from France, who is still on the old clock. Outside, the frost had returned and all the daffodils were bent over at the knees, but the geese and the ducks, sun-centered as they ever are, were entirely unfazed by the new time-keeping. The sun came up and shortly thereafter, the food and water arrived; they honked and chattered their way out of the pen and into the new week. It’s a kind of simplicity that tugs at something deep within me.

In a somewhat serendipitous moment last week, I finally found a copy of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (which so many of you have told me to read!) and spent the weekend highlighting it and reading passages out loud to my family. (I just love it when I find a book that echoes all the thinks I’ve been thinking and says it even better than I ever could.) I realized there are about 30-ish days left in Lent, so I’m beginning his Digital Detox today. No technologies “including apps, websites, and related digital tools that are delivered through a computer screen or a mobile phone and are meant to either entertain, inform, or connect you,” for 30 days. (Exceptions for essential work-related tech, which for me includes my blog and email on a limited basis. I’m also keeping limited text messaging and my photo journal since that is a daily project I don’t want to disrupt.)

My favorite part of this Detox though, is not just eliminating time-wasters and distractions, it’s the encouragement to craft a new life: “During this monthlong process, you must aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill in the time left vacant by the optional technologies you’re avoiding. This period should be one of strenuous activity and experimentation.” I convinced my husband to join me (such a sport) so I’m looking forward to a fun month. I can see that this would be a good practice yearly - more like twice a year, if I’m honest - since technology has a way of sneaking up on you and hooking you when you don’t even realize it. I’m no longer tempted by social media, but don’t ask me how many times a day I read the New York Times and the comments. (Why??) That addiction to novelty is always needing to be tamed.

~ Truthfully, I feel like I am circling ever closer to the life I am supposed to be leading. I have a mental playlist of images and quotations, the witness of particular people, that I return to continually. And there are certain themes that spark a flare within me every single time I encounter them. It has only been recently that I’ve realized that they are endlessly fascinating to me because they are mine. These are the things my soul was made for and I will only ever be my best self when I fully embrace them.

Terry Tempest Williams wrote a story last year for Orion magazine in which she talked about her reciprocal relationship with nature, the way it is always calling to her and she is always calling to it, and how they are constantly calling each other into being. I think about that in times like this, how often I hear the world speaking to me, urging me toward what I know is my own truth. I do not mean truth of a theological nature, per se, but the truth of who I am in this earthly community and my purpose for being here.

A few years ago, maybe a decade or more, I was walking with my family on my Grandmother’s property. The kids were chasing each other around in a grove of Russian olive trees and the rest of us were climbing the rise along the horse pasture. It was a beautiful day, not too hot, though the sun was overhead and bright. We followed a line of old elm trees and I let the others wander ahead. I had heard an owl calling in the trees and wanted to look for it. I walked around, squinting up into the canopy with my city-blind eyes, but I couldn’t find anything. I gave up and left the trees behind, heading out into the open pasture. The kids were shouting and laughing, the voices of my husband and uncle drifting down the hill. There was a scent of sun-warmed sage in the air. I turned to look over the land my Grandmother’s family had homesteaded over a hundred years before. Just as I turned, there was a snap at my ear, a taffeta rustle that brought a kiss of cool air. It was a Great Horned Owl, skimming the space above my shoulder. It flew to the low branch of a tree directly in front of me and bobbed its head. I locked eyes with it for just a moment, dazed, grateful, astonished. Then it hunched itself and leapt into the air again, gone. All these years later I can still feel the pull of him, drawing me into a world of solitude, stillness, attentiveness, space. He was calling me to my own life, though it would take me so many more years before I recognized it as anything other than a memorable experience.

I believe there is purpose in my being here now, and so I believe the world is as much in need of my presence and witness as I was in need of that Owl’s and all the other living things that have graced my path. I believe it for all of us, whether we speak with the hurricane or the whale or through other languages of faith and presence.

This next month I’m going to be listening deeper, following the path I know I’m supposed to take.

Tell me, what are the messages your life is bringing you? Who are your messengers? I’d love to hear more.

peace keep you, friends,

tonia

EDITED: I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote this earlier and talked about the New Moon. Clearly it’s a Full Moon now. Whoops! I wasn’t quick enough to edit it out before the post went out via email. :)

the first days of March

A little Ellis, because, LOVE.

The pasture is usually home to only grass and blackberries (and wild sweetpeas in the summer), but this morning I saw two yellow daffodils nodding their heads at me as I headed back to the house after my chores. I squealed a little, then felt sheepish, even though no one was around to hear me but the poultry. It must be the aftertaste of this cynical world - this feeling that wonder and joy are only for children and not for grown humans. I marched on down the hill and found another daffodil clinging to the stone wall along the garden and appreciated it loudly, just to make up for my earlier cowardice. The revolution will not be wonder-free.

I had plans to be working on a new novel right now, but I haven’t even begun thinking about it yet. I’ve been taking in the wisdom of Ross Gay instead, who insists that writing “comes from our bodies.” I’ve been deep cleaning, organizing, painting, getting the garden ready, baking; working more with my hands than just my head. I have to say, after several intense months of writing, this feels wonderful. It’s a good reminder that I am at my healthiest when body and mind are both active. And I know that while I clean and putter around, words are churning quietly somewhere inside and they will let me know when it is time to put them down on paper.

I’m glad to be busy with physical work right now for other reasons too. It keeps me from being too worried about things I can’t control, like elections, and finances, and the fact that we are supposed to go to Europe in six weeks to see our daughter and the whole world is sick right now. Ora et labora is my current motto: pray and work. That’s old wisdom, right there, from monks who lived in the Middle Ages and knew a thing or two about having to wait and trust God that everything is going to work out fine.

Someone asked me the other day what I do for a living and I fumbled around as usual and tried to figure out a way to put it into words, this hodge-podge life of writing, and nurturing, and availability, and home-making. I never know what to say. Sometimes the words fall on sympathetic ears, as they did this time, and I can feel the warmth and appreciation of a kindred spirit, but many times they don’t. I am finding more confidence now to let that disapproval and misunderstanding go. I know what I believe, that if we are going to hold together at the center as communities, there have to be people who make beauty, who tell the stories, who have time to lend a hand, who set a table for fellowship. Fortunately, it seems like many of the people who are most sympathetic and open to that idea are young people. I love our young people; they are so bright and smart and determined and open. I’m always listening in, trying to understand how they see the world, how they think we can change it. I hope I am always flexible enough to hear and understand.

Well, I should wrap this little ramble up. There is more work to be done today, (“I’m blessed with work!” Bonus points if you can name that movie). Hope you are all finding daffodil-surprises and celebrating them shamelessly.

Peace keep you,

tonia

P.S. I’m in the mood for some good farm life/homemaking books. Fiction, preferably, so send me your favorite titles. I love Miss Read and Gladys Taber (not fiction, but she makes the cut), Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden. All those 40’s and 50’s authors who write so beautifully about making homes. Swoon!

hello!

Hello friends!

Sorry I’ve been MIA this month. Life threw me a couple of curve balls, but all is well and I’m back to work this week. I am working on the newsletter and will get that out in the next few days! There is a book giveaway too, but it will have to be a quick one to get it in before March, so watch for that. :)

Thanks for your kind thoughts and checking in. I hope February has been kind to you all. I look forward to catching up with everyone.

much love.

tonia

tether

Last year I decided to try keeping a log of my days.  Most nights, before I go to sleep, I pull a notebook out of my nightstand and make a list of bullet points about what I did:  Gym.  Ideas for short story.  Novel brainstorming.  Draft for newsletter.  Drove to Portland to pick up xyz.  Backgammon with Mark.  Read.  Etc.  It’s boring reading, but it’s an attempt to unlock what’s hidden in my mind.  Often, I find that writing down went for a walk, reminds me that while I was walking I was thinking about one of my kids, or listening to an important podcast, or contemplating the best use of our property in a climate-altered future.   So the bullet points sometimes take on a life of their own and morph into little essays or lines of poetry or plot ideas for stories. 

This is actually the hardest part of writing for me, I think, continually mining my own life, not letting thoughts sink to the warm dark compost of the subconscious, but pulling them out into the light and pinning them to a page like tiny black beetles, or powder-dusted moths.  (Of course, even these skewered specimens are part of the continual composting in the mind.) The writer’s job is to be attentive to what we would normally ignore, to give shape and form to the humus of ideas lying quiet and fertile within us.  

Not everything that gets pinned to the page is worth bringing to life though.  Journaling (even in the form of logging) helps uncover my worn-out themes and tired tropes.  I can see on my pages the fixation on some experiences and the underemphasis of others equally, if not more, important.  I can see the pattern of biases, the pockets of anger that indicate I’m not in a state of forgiveness yet.  I can see the doubts that rise and fall with my hormones, and the need to build more mental stamina. I can see my fears pounding for attention.

I think often about the subjectiveness of our lives.  Unless we are in the regular presence of small children or the sick or very elderly, much of contemporary life is a helium balloon, untethered from the tangible and the earthy.  Food arrives on shelves in packages, money exists in pixelated bank statements, trash gets toted off in trucks to unseen locations, beauty is nothing more than photogenics.  Anchoring, like decluttering, is a survival skill for the modern age.  I’m a word person, so journaling is one of my tethers.  My husband is not; I don’t imagine he would find a daily bullet list enlightening at all.  He’s more likely to discover his thoughts on a run or mowing the lawn, which he does.  The point is, we need to tie the balloon to something or it’s lost. 

But more than that is the need to know we exist in this world for a purpose.  “That we are here is a huge affirmation,” John O’Donohue says.  “Somehow life needed us and wanted us.”  Being attentive to the whispered messages of common life may be the writer’s job, but attentiveness to the messages of our individual lives is everyone’s job.  The disconnectedness that pervades our age leads to anger, fear, anxiety, and a sense of un-reality.  If we are here, it is not to be plagued by the spirit of the age, but because we have something to offer, something to combat it, to bring us together, connect us and nurture life. 

So, consider this post, rambling and mundane as it is, a whisper in the dark, an encouragement to dig and discover, a wave to bring you into harbor and an anchor to help you stay.  Find your way, then find your way.  We need you here.

If you want to share, tell me about your journaling habits, or the other ways you tether and discover yourself in the comments!

for a new season

Here we are, seven days into the new decade/new year and I’m arriving kind of rumpled and sleepy-eyed to the after-party.

I didn’t make any real resolutions, or choose a word for this year. I appreciate the gifts of the Gregorian calendar and how it helps us organize a complex society, but I’m kind of over it, personally, if you know what I mean, these arbitrary blocks of time. I’m thinking more in terms of seasons and what this current one (rain and mud, seed catalogs, rumors of war) is saying to me right now.

There’s a note on the bulletin board over my desk which says, “Humanize everything .” I put it there when I was in the middle of a tricky part in one of my novels and have now forgotten exactly why I did. But it caught my eye again the other day and stuck with me.

Whatever it meant all those months ago, now it has me thinking about the people who are hidden from me on any given day. Elderly people alone in their houses, disabled adults in their foster homes, prisoners in their cells, textile workers at their machines, people unloading boxes in warehouses, cleaning my hotel room when I’m out having lunch, washing acres of sheets and towels in fluorescent-lit basements, digging minerals out of the ground for my cellphone/computer, growing bananas on corporate-owned plantations, dismembering chickens in the horror of slaughterhouses, sleeping in doorways, picking up garbage, cutting down trees, worrying about bombs, watching coastlines erode or homes burn, and so many more I don’t even know to consider.

I want to think about people right now, and how to live together like neighbors. I want to give to some new places, listen to some new stories, humanize everything.

There’s a design principle that runs along the lines of “Ask WHY five times.” I’m thinking I should be asking “WHO, WHO, WHO, WHO, WHO?” every day.

Get under the surface, is what I’m saying.

Then there’s the very serious work of promoting beauty in a time of ugliness. And hope in a time of cynicism. And tenderness in a time of talons.

All that to say, I took a walk in the rain the other day and found, like always, that it wasn’t raining as much on the trail as it seemed to be from inside my house.

To help myself, I started taking pictures again. Just a snapshot every day. ( I’m posting them here , very quietly, if you want to see them. )

It would seem that laughter is slightly more necessary right now. Also naps with cats.

I did make one resolution - I think you will understand this - and it is to only consider criticism and complaint from people who are truly invested in me personally.

Which leads to consideration of the inverse of this as well, shrinking my justifiable complaints and criticisms significantly.

Basically what I’m saying is, by any calendar, this season of rain and mud, seed catalogs, and rumors of war seems to be asking for brave seeing and reckless hope and that’s enough to keep me busy for quite a long time.

I’d love to hear your new words/thoughts/hopes for the new year (or this season, if you prefer.) Feel free to share!

peace keep you,

tonia