Nothing Is Lost :: July 2025

My father is gone now, swept swiftly away from us at the end of April by a riptide of cancer. I am still reorienting myself, like some digital map spinning up, then down, looking for center. It is the end of possibilities that hurts the most, the end of what should have been, and wasn’t. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this new kind of grief. I’ve never been prone to high emotion; malaise is more my usual path, followed by self-recrimination and doubt, as if the cancer – or the relationship – was my doing alone. We are two months on. How strange it is that someone so essential to my own being can just…stop.

  Meanwhile, the world.

I’ve barely let myself acknowledge the news, but it trickles in. I don’t let myself go too far down any path of despair or fear because I know it accomplishes nothing. We are in the inevitable collapse of an unsustainable system and we will have to live our part.

“Forgive me these shadows I cling to, good people, trying to hold quiet in my prologue. Hawks cling the barrens wherever I live. The world says, “Dog eat dog.” ~ “Some Shadows”/William Stafford

Once a week now, I go to a Mindful Gardening class at the university’s learning garden. The class is a motley group of ages and orientations but our instructor is one of those beautiful women who looks like she emerged from nature itself, all soft fabrics and earth colors, a gentle voice. She brings her newborn tied in a sling around her chest and invites us to listen to the earth, and we all do, without embarrassment. We are hungry for mothering, I think. All of us with our different stories, all of us needing reassurance, all of us suffering from the same fractured anxieties.

We pull weeds under the blistering sun, turn the compost pile, encourage the native plants to grow. Sometimes we talk to each other, but mostly, we are quiet and busy. Our jittery bodies shape themselves around the plants as if we were one of them – and we are – thick-stalked and branching, reaching toward both sun and soil for connection.

When I signed up for this class weeks ago, I chose it because my brain was grief-dull. I needed something that let my focus and concentration off the hook; I didn’t realize it would be healing. I put my hands in the soil and I think of my dad’s body going back to the earth, of the beautiful circle of our existence turning and returning, of the physical reality of our bodies becoming dust and being taken up again into the bodies of other creatures in a long and continual renewing. Nothing is lost. We are literally made of this renewal – the bodies of all our ancestors live inside us. We are all, day by day, heading back to our beginning. When my dad died everyone talked about his going home to an eternal somewhere in the sky. I prefer to think of him here all around me, present now and always in leaf and bud and bone. And I find this makes the rest of the world bearable too. Whatever dies - nations or species or eras - is composted into the next turning, the next flowering, however strange or far away that may be.

Grief can be like standing on a distant mountain. It takes you out of the day to day world and expands your horizon. Suddenly you see how short the time really is, how close to your own death you already are. But just recently, I’ve felt myself returning to the place where we all live again, close up to the frustrations and fears of this moment. I suspect that it is nature, quiet, and connection that will make living in this now possible, just as they have made accepting this loss possible. But the truth of now is that nature, quiet, and connection are under immediate threat. I know it is going to take radical determination to regain — and retain — those things in our lives. Maybe I will write more about that later, if you would like.

~Thank you so much for your kind notes over the past months. I know some of you have been facing similar things and my heart is with you. I hope you are finding your own places of peace and connection.


  After the initial fog of loss – and many hours of mindless TV watching – I’m making July as screen-free as possible. I use the Brick app to make my phone (almost) a dumb phone and I’m not watching TV or movies.  

Instead, I’m spending as much time as I can outdoors. I’ve started observing and jotting down nature notes again, something I haven’t done since I started school five years ago. I’m remembering patterns I once took time to notice and had forgotten I knew - cycles of plants and wildlife that return to my awareness like old friends. Right now, the young crows are begging loudly for food in the mornings and the thimbleberries are ripe. Soon it will be time for blackberry picking and dahlias. I plan on observing every inch of this summer and beyond.

~ I’ve taken up knitting again (with the help of my lovely DIL) and I’m working on a vest for the fall. It is so exciting to see a garment take shape under my needles.

~ And I’m reading, of course. A few standouts:

  • Sara Baume:  I loved Seven Steeples, but I’ve added A Line Made by Walking to my favorites now too. The story of an artist working her way through grief and depression, it is finely observed and wonderfully quiet. Baume’s character struggles with her identity as an artist, wondering if she has been lying to herself about her talent, but all the time we as readers can see that she moves and thinks and observes as an artist. It’s a meditation on the ways we are unkind to ourselves and hold unrealistic expectations and, in its own way, permission to be small and unambitious. A nice companion to this is Baume’s Handiwork, which is her own meditations on her life as an artist.

  • Karen Russell: The Antidote. I love Russell’s inventiveness and embrace of the off-beat. This new novel is set in the Dust Bowl and looks at the ways we willfully and collectively forget our sins.

  •  Belinda Bauer: The Impossible Thing (audiobook). Terrific narration. This is based on the real story of the Metland eggs and the history of egg collecting, which is a lot more exciting than it sounds.

  • Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths. This is the first time I’ve read Borges and I understand why people say he’s so singular. (I can see his influence though, in books like Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, maybe even in Ted Chiang’s work, if you like any of those writers.) But this collection feels so timely. It deals a lot with the recursive nature of the world. Things repeat, time overlaps, things exist now because they existed before. Lately I’ve been stuck on the story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius”. It’s about a fictional world called Tlön which is created by a “secret and benevolent society” of academics. They invent an entire language, mythology, numeracy, philosophy and science for Tlön over a great many years.   The society’s core belief is that nothing is real unless it is perceived, or in other words, ideas create reality – and they prove this by slowly hiding their false “history” inside actual cultural records. Over time, Tlön, whose “existence” is now sprinkled into encyclopedias and textbooks and historical records, becomes real to future people who don’t know it was an intentional fiction to begin with. (It's almost like this has happened before. Maybe we should all be reading literature all the time before it’s too late?)

  • Sharon Olds: Arias. I read one of these a day and I’m pretty much always astounded by her fearlessness. From “Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater”

  • “Oh, Mom. Come sit
    with me at this stone table at the bottom
    of the Bay, here is a barnacle of
    egg custard, here is your tiny
    spoon with your initials, sup with me
    at dawn on your first day—we are all
    the dead, I am not apart from you,
    for long, except for breath, except for
    everything.”

As always, I love to hear from you. Share what you’re reading or how you’re surviving our crazy world.

For now,

Tonia

 P.S. I got new kittens and they have been such a bright spot.

Wendell

Wallace

Now :: August 2024

Hello friends,

Outrageously, it is August. Month of sun and smoke. My state continues its annual burning, though we are far away from any flames or damage here closer to the coast. I have been in classes this summer, trading stories with gentle-souled young people. My classmates are beautiful, like rocks you pull glistening from a riverbed, quietly colorful and laced with sparkle. Their stories are full of emotion, all with this reaching, searching quality that makes me want to be good to them and tell them everything will be okay.

Everything will be okay. Maybe we all need to hear that now.

Last night I was standing on my deck as the sun went down and the little bats were coming out to forage. I never have the patience or energy for star-gazing; my night sky pleasure is the little brown bats. I love the way they emerge at twilight and flit like secrets across your view. They live very neatly in the eaves of my house and the canopy of fir trees, but they are not just country creatures. They flutter through city and suburban skies without prejudice. Sometimes when I feel nearly smothered by the pollution of the internet outrage factories I think that every day the bats or the bumblebees or the wood ants are living in an incredible now, without worry, without outrage, or smugness, or despair.

Democracy can be in peril and the cedars dying and the state burning and relationships fractured and cancer licking at the door, and everything will be okay because I am alive, we are alive, now.

This idea settles me somehow. When I was younger, we lived for a day when we would fly away to glory. Here and now was a desolate place, twisted by sin and sharpened at the edges. Pray, wait, endure, long for that some day in the sky. I can look back and see the smudge of days I thought were ugly or beneath my notice, years that I wished away. Now, I just live. Gratefully.  

Now there are blackberries, and a free day, and a little dog who has adopted us. Now there is a kiss in the kitchen and dahlias in a vase. A call from a grown child. Good coffee. Time to write. All this tangled in with the grief and pain and weariness, of course. It is always a tangle. But which one will I stay with?

Soon my class will be done and my new young friends scattered again. I will get a few weeks of summer before I go back. There’s a tree I want to climb, a pasture I want to nap in, so many books I want to read. I would like to write here a little. Be quiet a little.

Do you have any plans for your now?

Birdy

 A little of this and that:

~ Reading the last of the Cromwell trilogy with Simon Haisell. I’ve been putting this one off because I know what’s coming, but the slow pace and the company of a group helps. Simon is a terrific host and offers so much insight into these dense, intelligent novels.

~ Listening to this repeatedly.

~ Been mixing things up by avoiding the streaming services and getting old-school DVD’s from the library on a Friday night. Sometimes it’s helpful not to have so many options. In the current stack: 

First Reformed,

Drive My Car,

Trainspotting

~ Just about to start The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control

~ Why I Hate Instagram Now.

I’ve been off Instagram and all other similar platforms for years, but I sometimes scroll my husband’s very boring (sports-algorithmed) IG feed, so I can recognize this frustration. Remember when we thought we were using these platforms to connect with each other?

“Meta, Instagram’s parent company, still says its mission is giving people “the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” As it thwarts my efforts to see all the photos posted by people I know and chose to follow, I call bullshit. Injecting Reels in my feed, then refusing to let me abolish those diversions, hasn’t just put my loved ones in competition with viral nonsense––it has repeatedly subverted my attempts to ensure that my loved ones win.”~Conor Friedersdorf

~It’s the magnificent James Baldwin’s 100th birthday. Here’s a nice article about where to start with his books.

~Are Novel Covers Alienating Male Readers? These covers are alienating me, so I can see it!

OK! That’s about it for this month. Shall we meet here again soon?

Peace keep you, friends.

tonia

 

 

a midwest journey :: july 2022

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

January, Fourth week :: 2022

Most of last week I kept a silent(ish) retreat. I didn’t go anywhere, I was just at home, opting out of the extra noise. I kept the phone off except for a few texts with loved ones, no music or podcasts, no television or movies. I wanted space to think deeply, to listen to my inner self for awhile. But my brain didn’t cooperate. It kept churning up weird bits of media I’d previously digested - pop songs, advertisements, movie scenes - like some kind of mental off-gassing. I began to feel uneasy, imagining my neural pathways coated with the greasy streaks of junk food culture. I considered the disturbing question: what if at the end of my life all that flashes before my eyes is an 80’s soda commercial and a scene from an Avenger’s movie? I might laugh about that idea if I didn’t recognize the way my mind latches onto such things, if I didn’t know those things were designed to manipulate my attention and stay lodged in my consciousness.

At the end of my allotted quiet time, I ran an errand and came home to find piles of feathers in the yard. Not the scatter of a sparrow or a blue jay (or one of my ducks, thank goodness); something bigger, different, something I don’t quite recognize. I kept going out to visit these remains, trying to imagine what, who, when, how. Was I asleep in my bed when it happened? At the grocery store? Eating dinner? The thought disturbs me unreasonably: life - or rather, death - occurring right out in the yard where I might have seen it, but didn’t. It tangles up with the week’s earlier feelings of regret: what else have I not seen? Have I missed what’s important? Am I a part of the real world or only the manufactured one?

For the rest of the day I felt the weight of these questions. How much am I shaped by what I truly value - the sacredness of earth and her creatures, my relationships with others - and how much am I shaped by the noise and expectations of a world that dismays me?

I went out at twilight, doubt clinging to my heels, and was startled by a deer, my old familiar, grazing on the pasture. She stood gently, her neck bent to the earth, entirely undisturbed by my presence. Deer have always arrived for me in moments like these; I read her like I once read scriptures. She was there for herself, but in another way she had come to comfort me, to remind me I cannot be ejected from my belonging. It was a grace, and I felt it as such. I called to her, she flicked an ear, we shared the last of the day’s light and then I went back to the house unburdened for a while, determined to stay a few more days in the quiet. I feel a spark of hope that there is something more inside, something else that might arise if I just give it the time - and silence - it needs.

We all know how to turn off screens, at least in theory; here are some other quiet practices to try:

Carry a book of poetry with you for waiting times. Or just look around, observing what other people are doing.

Don’t check news headlines.

In conversation, listen and encourage other people to talk while you say less.

Turn down the lights and sit in the semi-dark.

Welcome boredom and stay with it.

Doze off any time you can.

Sing to yourself.

Practice pranayama.

\|/

Gathered this week:

~ A friend sent me this lovely little dance clip.

~ Your Bubble Is Not the Culture // Even though this article is about popular culture, there’s a lot to take note of in regards to how we perceive the world around us.

~ My family is practicing yoga with Tim these days. He’s got loads of free videos on youtube. He focuses a lot on correct form and building strength, which is just what I need. Plus he’s corny and sweet. (His subscription service is also amazing and well-worth the money - especially if you don’t go to the gym anymore, like us.)


~ I am happy living simply

“I am happy living simply:

like a clock, or a calendar.

Worldly pilgrim, thin,

wise - as any creature. To know

the spirit is my beloved. To come to things - swift

as a ray of light, or a look.

To live as I write: spare - the way

God asks me - and friends do not.”

(Marina Tsvetaeva, 1919, HT: Holly Wren Spaulding)

There are a few new readers here (welcome!) so I thought it would be nice to show myself and say hello.

Some things you might want to know about me - just for fun:

*I’ve been writing online since 2005. I’ve changed A LOT in that time.

*I write serious and live happy. Mostly. :)

*Enneagram 1/INFJ (Also a Gemini, which makes no sense to me.)

*I like kindness, fidelity, integrity, and generosity in people and I’m generally attracted to people in the margins.

*I dislike arrogance, proselytizing, over-confidence, loud voices, and selfishness. Also, those sheet cakes that come from the grocery store and people who don’t put their carts away when they’re done with them.

*I despise fundamentalism, whether it’s on the left or on the right.

*Part city/part country.

*Glasses, braces, mullet, perm, religion: middle school was hell.

*Definitely swear a little.

*Herbal tea, black tea, coffee with lots of oat milk, and red wine.

*I like talking to people who read here, so please say hello!

That’s all for now!

peace keep you, my friends,

tonia

December, Fourth week :: 2021

The chair where the owl perched is covered in snow now, but I don’t ever pass it without a tiny uptick in my pulse, a split second when I wonder if that blocky brown shape will be waiting there, will fool my eye again. At first, I’d thought a limb had fallen from the apple tree in the night and somehow landed upright on the arm of the adirondack chair, but a moment later, it swiveled its impossible head and fixed me with an amber stare. Twice this autumn, it came to this spot; two days in a row I stood frozen, pinned like a moth under its gaze until at last, it blinked, unfolded its wings, and disappeared into the trees.

Biologists say that an owl sighted during the day means that a disturbance has occurred - it has suffered a loss of habitat, a disruption in hunting patterns, or maybe, a lost mate - an affirmation of the folklore of North American Indigenous peoples who say the owl is a bad omen, a messenger of death. I joked about it with friends later, my own early morning harbinger of doom perching on a pink adirondack chair.

I don’t know if the owl I saw is one who regularly lives in our woods. During most of the year I can lie in bed and hear several calling through the open window. Their whoo-whooing among the night trees is as reassuring and comforting as this daytime appearance was unsettling. Despite my joking, the weeks after the owl showed itself to me were a storm of loss. Our new dog was hit on the road and killed instantly, relationships frayed, depression stalked loved ones, plans upended and collapsed, I lost months of writing and I couldn’t find the nerve to sit down and write again. I’m not particularly susceptible to omens and signs, but the owl unnerved me more than I’d like to admit. I feel the ghost of it hovering around that chair every morning I go by. Its remembered shape is a fixed point, a talisman of my own vulnerability, but also a symbol of another year of disruption and loss for all of us. It hovers over all the breakdowns we’ve endured, the painful exposure of our true beliefs, the shock of our disconnections and malaise, the revealed power of the market, the media, and the moronic, our fear of getting sick, our proximity to death. Of course I flinch when I think of seeing it again - how much more loss will we face?

A great deal, most likely. I feel the world I once knew passing by, receding into the past. It is not the owl I flinch from, it is the demand that I look truth in the eye and see it as it really is. I want to continue on in my comfort, believing untenable beliefs, assuming my neighbors and I agree, feeling confident that someone somewhere will make disease and extinction and turmoil go away, but that luxury is past. The owl stares at me without blinking and it won’t look away.

Strangely, now that the shock of these realities has settled in, I arrive at the end of the year feeling a little steadier. The owl has come. Change is here. Death has arrived. But I am strong enough to live within it. I know what lies ahead requires courage, as well as creativity and hope, and that’s what I want to mine in 2022.

As MFK Fisher wrote: “When the wolf is at the door one should invite him in and have him for dinner.”

I’ll be writing more about that and the image/theme I’ve chosen for the new year later. In the meantime, I hope you are enjoying this quiet-ish week between the holidays. I’m looking forward to a new year of sharing and learning with you all.

Happy New Year!

tonia