March, second week :: 2021

Journalists say they learn by fire how to write quickly and to deadline. I haven’t mastered that skill yet, but I realize if I’m going to keep posting while I’m in school I’m going to have to abandon my hours-long post-writing and light a fire under myself. From now on I’m pretending these posts are written with J. Jonah Jameson lurking over my shoulder shouting “We ain’t got all day, kid!”

Mark and I were able to get away last weekend for a few days at our favorite beach town. It felt crazy to be away from home, checking into a hotel. (Did we really use to do those things semi-regularly?) It was part of a business trip, so I had one day all to myself. I walked in the rain, bought multiple fancy coffees, indulged in a pastry, and ate it back in the hotel room in bed reading the Winter issue of Orion magazine. It was glorious.

Being alone for a few hours in a new setting was the gift I needed before my energy gets pulled into new tasks and new learning. I was able to connect some ideas that had been coming up and realized my intuition has been gently leading me deeper into my Simplicity Practice. I capitalized the letters because that’s how my mind showed it to me this weekend: as a commitment I should be centering around. Moving forward, I am going to be continually asking myself the question, “Is this the simplest way?”

By “simplest”, I don’t necessarily mean easiest, although sometimes I will. Elisa Rathje wrote a lovely post about all the things simplicity can mean last week - a post that helped me realize that what’s confusing about an idea like “simple living” is that different situations may call for different types of simplicity. By this point in my life, I have a good sense of my overall values in most areas and should be able to apply my “Is this the simplest way” question appropriately to different situations. For instance, simplicity with food is not about price and time for me, but rather, naturally simple and holistic systems. Thus, I purchase much of our food from local farmers who use sustainable practices. This requires more driving and more time but supports a broader ecological simplicity I want to see in the world. And it also simplifies our menus because I am cooking with what is at hand rather than sourcing elaborate ingredients for specialized recipes. (During the week it’s often just a grain, a bean, and whatever veggies are available.) Another situation will have a different response. That kind of elasticity in approach should help me in addressing daily needs.

Goodness, the time goes fast. My imaginary editor is yelling in my ear that it’s almost time to move on, so I’ll wrap this up. Btw, I would love to hear your insights on approaching simplicity as an intentional practice (or any other comments!) <3

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A few things to share from this week:

~ Ryan Holiday’s list of 100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life - I have barely scratched the surface with this list, but #20 has prompted me to strap on my foraging basket and bring a sharpened stick on my walks at least once a week from now on.

~ I can’t quit watching this.

~ The very first of the wild greens are popping up packed full of energy and life and I’m delighted. Every morning I’m picking a few dandelion leaves and anything else that looks edible (and probably like a weed), throwing them in the blender with some kale, an orange, and a bit of ginger, and making myself a tiny wild green smoothie to start the day. I can’t wait for chickweed, cleavers, nettle, and plantain to show up. <3

~ This honest Twitter thread from Audrey Assad. “There are only curiosities…there is only presence…there is only gratitude. And those are the things I practice. Curiosity and presence and gratitude are my prayer life. In pain and bliss and everything in between. Whatever or whoever God is, I am still in love.”

~ A list of writing resources from the lovely Holly Wren Spaulding. (Her classes are so good!)

Until next week, my friends. <3

tonia

P.S. The rewrites are taking so much longer than I expected but I want to make sure that I put out a book I’m proud of. I’m sorry it’s taking so long but know I am working hard and I feel really good about the writing and the story so far. Thanks for hanging in there!

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.

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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.)

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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

February 18, 2021

I was reading about the Vikings while the snow piled up around us this week. The dramatic weather made it easy to imagine the kind of landscape that would produce such a stout and clever (albeit, brutal) people. It fascinates me to think how nature, place, and time shape cultures. I think that’s why my interest is often drawn toward dystopian literature. Not for the scares, but for the exploration of what happens when you disrupt assumptions about how the world works, when people’s skills no longer match the time they live in, when nature changes its course. I prefer the stories where we rise to the occasion and prevail humanely over the ones where the world goes feral. I hope we’re writing one of those right now.

We were really fortunate to keep our power during our snowstorms this time though many people didn’t (and still don’t have power). And I’m thinking constantly about those of you in Texas and Oklahoma and other parts of the south. The Vikings might have built a society around surviving harsh winters off-grid, but plenty of the rest of us haven’t. I’m keeping a candle lit for those who are cold, hungry, thirsty, lonely, sick, or homeless right now. And one for the hard-working crews who are working to get power back and rescue those who are in need (including the turtles.) <3

This week:

~ My writing streaks have been going so well (67 days and counting!) that I decided to do a yoga challenge. At least 10 minutes of yoga every day for 365 days. (I was inspired by this video.) I’ve done extended challenges in the past and I know that something happens mentally when you do yoga daily. I’m 13 days in and already feeling the shift.

~ Installed Freedom on my phone (I already use it on my laptop for writing sessions) which has been the happiest event this week. My phone works like a phone for most of the day, not a computer. I love it.

~ From Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, a quote from Andre Gide:

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

(See? We do need your voice!!)

~This mesmerizing Luca Guadagnino video for Sufjan Stevens.

Listen to The Ascension here: https://sufjanstevens.ffm.to/theascensionDirected by: Luca Guadagnino with the collaboration of Alessio Bolzoni & Celia Hempton...

Wherever you are I hope you are warm and healthy.

A blessing as I go, from the precious John O’Donohue:

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

February 11, 2021

Winter tea: Hibiscus, Elderberry, rosehip, Ginger

The temperature’s dropping here as we wait for our annual snow day. We’re supposed to get a couple of inches so our whole area is making plans to pretend we can’t drive anywhere and are stuck at home. I’m super excited. The library even cooperated by providing me with the next book in my mystery series in case I’m forced to sit by the fire and read all day. Yay winter!

The last few days I’ve been thinking about this Chinese proverb: (HT: Lesley )

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”

As soon as I read that, I remembered an older woman I spent time with when I was in my twenties who took a look at my handwriting and my charm-school posture and told me I had some issues with trying to be perfect. Well, yeah. The whole first half of my life could be defined by the word: tension. (I could easily have written that article.)

The good news is that I couldn’t maintain impossible-to-maintain-standards. Eventually I just got tired and started figuring out that while I was a pretty capable person, I was not a very happy or fun one. That was in my 30’s. I have a lot of relaxing to make up for, you guys. I’m going to enjoy Part II so much.

(Btw, I just looked it up and they are still selling that book. Insert horror emoji.)

Things I want to remember from this week:

My inner smart girl has been squealing over all this:

Rep. Stacey Plaskett

~Please, please let me live long enough to need a cape-dress like Stacey Plaskett. What a QUEEN. During yesterday’s trial she was poised, articulate, confident, and in command. So impressive.

~ Speaking of queens, I finally finished The Queen’s Gambit. I have no interest in chess, but I’m obsessed as always with a pre-smartphone era. In their downtime, peopled were reading books and playing chess. Alone, if they had to. I can’t get enough of it. Also the clothes.

~ This has me longing to see a murmuration. Murmurations work because starlings coordinate by “rapid transmission of local behavioral response to neighbors.” Each bird is not keeping track of the whole group, just the seven closest neighbors to herself. Locality, intimacy, neighborly awareness. Huh. More here.

~ I finished this beautiful book a couple weeks ago, but I keep picking it back up to reread passages. It’s the loveliest writing and the most powerful exploration of parental grief and love I’ve read.

“She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it…”

~ Lastly, some folk music and poetry for a snowy day : A MidWinter Miscellany

Wishing you all snowflakes and good books and warm hearts and homes.

tonia