Oyster Knife :: November 2024

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Last night I dreamed an eagle flew into our house. We screamed and jumped up while it perched serenely on the back of our couch, huge and beautiful, and we ran around hiding cats and looking for gloves, trying to figure out what to do with it. It hopped to the floor and began exploring, clicking across the hardwoods, testing the rug, chasing off the dog. I ran to get my camera to record the event and when I came back, it had grown smaller, about crow-sized. I watched as it picked through the cat’s food with its beak, and by the time someone came back with the gloves, it had shrunk even more. Now it looked like a pigeon bobbing around in the living room. Over the next few minutes it changed again. Its feathers faded, its body hollowed out, a fire ignited in its chest and flamed briefly upward. The eagle put its beak on the ground and tipped over on its side, dead.

I woke sad and a little stunned that my subconscious had given me this story in the night. Yes, I thought, this is exactly what it feels like. Even if the country survives this intense fracturing, what I thought about America, the deepest part of me that trusted in our basic decency and goodness has tipped over, dead.

Since election night, I’ve been looking for torches, something to show me the way forward now. This shimmered out of the dark at me yesterday, from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”

“I do not weep at the world, I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston was writing about the limits a segregated America tried to put on her and how she refused them. Despite the pervasive, soul-crushing racism she faced, she saw herself as belonging to the world, capable in it, entitled to that oyster prize like every other human. I love that so much. Maybe I just need to feel possible, to have a direction for all this dismay, but it’s the thought of getting down to work, of honing my blade, that is helping me live right now.

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silences, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.” ”
— Toni Morrison

Sometimes what I have to offer the world feels so slight, just a thread of words tossed into the wind. But writing is what I do, and I’m going to work now. Here, there, everywhere.

How about you, my friends?

Sending love,

tonia

P.S. You might like Eve L. Ewing’s poem “what I mean when I say I’m sharpening my oyster knife”

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.

Year of the Owl :: March, 2022

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This morning I made oat and honey bread, brewed a pot of green tea, gathered my notebooks and laptop and turned on Puccini because I love the sound of opera floating from the windows while I sit on the deck and write. At last it is warm enough to sit on the deck and write.  Ravens are croaking somewhere on the other side of the creek, the neighbor is shouting at his dog, the kid who rides the dirt bike is gunning his engine just at the curve of the road below the house as he always does. When the engine noise fades, I catch the soft hoot of the owl in the woods.

Owls everywhere.

 Yesterday, a woman I’d just met told me she was out walking in the park and saw two baby Barred Owls perched on a branch. The mother was nearby; when the woman stopped to watch the babies, the mother flew over the woman’s shoulder, gliding through the notch between her shoulder and her ear. A warning. Once, at a raptor rescue center, the woman said, she had put on a thick leather arm glove and an owl had perched on her arm.

“It was so much heavier than I thought it would be,” she told me.

All at once, people I care about are very sick. Maybe they will not live to see the old age I am always planning on. When the woman was telling me her story, I found myself wishing I could hold that owl on my arm and test its weight ahead of time.  You can be so sure of yourself and then it can all change. Suddenly, I could not listen to the owl story anymore. I interrupted, told another story about myself and coyotes. The woman looked at me, disappointed. Maybe I had not at first seemed like someone who was self-absorbed and bad at listening. Maybe I had seemed like someone who would understand about the babies and the owl flying so close she could feel the air bend to meet its wings.

I am someone who understands about the owl, but it was still hard to sleep last night. By 3 am I was tangled in a long skein of dreams about the ways I disappoint people - storytellers, family members, everyone. I have noticed that the onset of grief and bewilderment seem to have one of two effects on people: they either fall back or push forward. I do not want to fall back into the woman who is held captive by the mild disappointment of strangers, who believes that the right thing to do is always whatever makes other people relax. I have to shake off the urge to return to old ways of being and push on, accepting that I have my own weight, my own demands on the world.

This week I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s strangely wonderful memoir, Year of the Monkey. I confess I had never listened to Patti Smith’s music until recently, I only knew her from the internet and a couple random quotes, but I’m totally hooked by her roving, creative spirit and her comfort in her own skin. I don’t think she’d give a damn that some stranger somewhere once misunderstood her, but I know for sure she’d attend to the message of owls when they arrived.

“You don’t see things like that. You feel them…”

Sometime in the near future, sickness will take someone I love. I will hear the owl again and again. It will watch me from its invisible perch, it will show itself to me, to strangers who will tell me the story whether I am ready to hear it or not. It will all be so much heavier than I think it will be, but I am confident that I will push on anyway, all the way to the edges of my life, growing, changing, disconcerting, disappointing, becoming, until it is my own time to push on into whatever comes next.

 Don’t worry, there are lots of good things going on here as well!  We are having a long-delayed wedding in a couple months and I will be meeting my French son-in-law in a few weeks. (Thank you for the visa at last, State Department!) I am taking a very light class load this spring and summer so we can celebrate and get to know each other, then I’ll be back at my books full time in the fall.

I’m also happy to tell you I have a story in the upcoming issue of Dark Mountain, which launches April 21st. It’s written around the theme of “confluence” and involves the deep connection between women and the earth, shape-shifters, and the boundaries between human and animal worlds. It’s a story I really love. If you are interested in reading it, you can subscribe to Dark Mountain’s biannual publications here, or buy individual books here.

I hope you are all enjoying the change of seasons, whether you are heading into spring or fall. If you feel up to it, let me know what you are reading and listening to right now. My list is below. 

Reading lately:

Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy

– I came to this memoir through Ditlevsen’s poem Self-Portrait 1.  She was telling the truth!

Richard Powers’ Bewilderment

              -I didn’t love this as much as The Overstory, but this wrangling with the grief around climate catastrophe and loss has really stuck with me.  I’ll be hearing Powers speak in April and I’m really looking forward to it.

Sylvia Warner Townsend’s The Corner That Held Them

              -By recommendation of Melissa Wiley. A deep, slow dive into the life of a medieval nunnery without the soft gaze and the sheen of piety. Nothing very much happens and I loved it.

Molly Gloss’ Wild Life

  – A 19th century-style novel set in the early days of the old growth logging in the PNW. Sasquatch, wild forests, and a fierce female protagonist.

 

Listening to lately:

Kiese Laymon read his book Heavy: An American Memoir

              -Unbelievably good. Half the experience is listening to Laymon read in his own voice.

Sabine Devieilhe & Marianne Crebassa singing Duo des fleurs from Léo Delibes’ Lakmé Opera.

Duolingo French Podcasts

That’s it for now!

Much love to you, friends. Thanks for being here!

tonia