There’s no release like a good cry.
You cannot be awkward unless you do something uncomfortable—and that by itself is commendable. . . .
You can feel awkward and still be viewed as competent. . . .
If you only show vulnerability, you seem lost and out of control. But when you admit that you messed up or are feeling scared, and then follow that up with a plan of action, people trust you to lead them.
—Jason Feifer, “Handle Awkward Conversations Like a Pro”
I’ve found most of humanity bewildering and painful for long enough that I’ve learned to crave them less, as much as I might love them. Periods of loneliness are less consuming than they used to be. It helps to live in such a way that there’s usually some critter or breeze or sound out there somewhere to engage my attention.
But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a little about their migration, their life history. Did they return? We thought not; for most, at least, this was the closing journey of their lives.
But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly—for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.
For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end.
That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it—so I hope, may you.
—Rachel Carson in a letter to Dorothy Freeman, from a collection titled Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964
There’s a glow after a rain, in spite of everything: in spite of any entrapments, abandonments, or physical distress; in spite of suppression and exploitation, shunning and judgment, pressure and manipulation. . . . I’ve been asking permission before inserting my phone into golden moments with other animals. It’s tempting, “for their own good,” to ignore a no to a photo request (or to pretend it’s a yes—because other humans could love them, too!), but really my feeling at those times is of taking, invasiveness. I’d much rather my work be blessed with yes. Raven is very particular about photographs, I’ve found. Most insects don’t care or are happy to be admired, as long as I keep a nonthreatening distance. As animal-communicator Pea Horsley has pointed out, developing trust can lead to more-wondrous encounters.
I feel such a joyous surge of wonder every time I stop to think how in such a dark time and when I least expected it, something so lovely and richly satisfying came into my life. . . .
No one could be with you and Stan even a short time without realizing how devoted and congenial you are. And I wonder whether the very fact that you have experienced, and have yourself poured out, so much love, has not made you all the more receptive to the devotion offered by this newcomer in your life. You wrote so beautifully, weeks ago, of how one’s capacity to give love grows with the exercise of it, so perhaps the more love we have received, the more we are able to absorb and in that sense no one ever has enough. And I do know that the facts that we are, to an incredible degree “kindred spirits,” and that for many reasons we need all that we mean to each other, probably lie at the heart of our love. But the more I think about all we both have said, the more I feel that there is something that perhaps will always remain elusive and intangible—that the whole is something more than the sum of the various “reasons.” Henry Beston [who had recently reviewed her book Under the Sea-Wind] says in the review I’m sending you today: “the sun—is always more than a gigantic mass of ions, it is a splendor and a mystery, a force and a divinity, it is life and the symbol of life.” Our analysis has been beautiful and comforting and satisfying, but probably it will never be quite complete—never encompass the whole “splendor and mystery.”
—Rachel Carson, Always, Rachel
On Mastodon, I learn from Dan the Clam Man that there’s more to the phrase “happy as a clam” than I thought. The full usage is “happy as a clam at high tide,” meaning the clam feels safer underwater, hidden from clam-eaters. All this time I thought Clam was happy because their smile goes almost all the way around their head.
The Sun’s last rays before another rainstorm feel metallic through thin clouds and heavy, waiting air.
People with Alzheimer’s are not good listeners. Their attention spans are way too short. They cannot hold onto new information. However, they can be “oracular,” as I like calling it. Because her mind is wandering and time-travelling all the time, MIL comes out with statements or pieces of information (often incorrect or irrelevant on the everyday level) which can be highly meaningful if received on a cryptic or spiritual level (not unlike some answers to questions received in a High Seat Ceremony).
—Imelda Almqvist, “Alzheimer’s & Oracles”
A strange electrical feeling courses through me. I sort through three bags of clothes my cousin has gathered for donation to a thrift shop and find a couple of things I like. Trim my toenails. Pull a couple of runes for a friend. Encourage online friends who are doing good things or struggling. Bring the outdoor cushions under the eaves. Feed the critters. Burn incense. Superglue the unstuck rubber of my right earbud. Boil water and see a thing like a tiny bug hopping around on the bottom of the pot. Lose track of the speck somewhere in the process of preparing and pouring tea into a dark mug. Squirt in juice from a lemon wedge like sunlight from a friend’s tree. Hope my stomach acids can dissolve whatever the thing was. Text the friend to thank him for the lemon and end up rambling about the tea, the stove, Der Wilderbunker (my tent), sadness, and family difficulties—and forget to mention the lemon.
Then it begins. The rain extends across the ten-day forecast, so at least eleven days, if that holds true. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, but now that I’m in it I’m curious about how things will develop in this liminal space. It’ll provide good practice in surrendering to big forces.
Dinner—for my 500-calories-or-less light-fasting day—is rice and beans with fancy balsamic vinegar from another friend: a weird mix of flavors, but at least it’s flavor. Mixing in canned soup would have overdone it. I could have added salt but think of it too late.
Dusk comes early, though the Moon is bright behind a fresh raft of small clouds, so I turn in early, too. On early nights, my dreams are many and I wake multiple times into a meditative state, following thoughts or absorbing sounds or sensations.
Usually the only time of the day I feel lonely is between bedtime and sleep, at which times I’m most grateful for the people in my phone, including friends from offline who feel like texting—although loneliness sometimes arises in middle-of-the-night wakings, too, when all is quiet except my thoughts. I’ve come to love sleeping alone, though, free of fretting over what a lover might do or want or say; anyway, I always did the breaking up, with the aloneness hitting me—when I accepted that what I had thought was there wasn’t—long before the physical absence, which came as a relief. The only people who have always been there for me aren’t human. I am devoted to them.
Sometime in the night, a nearby tree goes down—waterlogged, I think. (Later I learn it’s the oak friend I called Y, who had already died so is now moving onto a new phase of life. Y now points downhill—so if I want to know Y, I go out.)
According to the ethnographic research, trees were seen by the Sámi as mediators between people and deities.
—Antiquity, “Engraved Trees Map the Way to Preserving Sámi Culture”
Morning comes with a slight feeling of mixed sadness, panic, and despair. This happens often, as the transition from the magic of dreamlands to the solidity of this reality—literally heavier—weighs me down, until I remember something I’m here for and find a willingness to join in. Fortunately, on a quiet day when I can remain snuggled in blankets, the heaviness comes with a muted peace. As long as I don’t fight the feeling with shoulds—should get up, should exercise, should go about my morning routine, should catch up on newletters or watch videos or text someone—I can merge it with the rain, imagine it soaking to the roots of the trees, who will lift it, in time, into the sky, to catch the wind. The rain doesn’t make the sadness go away but widens it, imbuing it with place and purpose, enveloping and tuning it with what many of us—humans and others—are feeling.
Best not to force anything; best to go my own way, to do what moves me.
It’s about trust—learning to trust myself and be trustworthy to myself. The weight deepens my way like a big river’s churn.
When’s the last time I woke to joy? I don’t know. Might have been last week, a month ago, a year ago. It’s okay, though; plenty of joys cushion those moments on either side. It’s a process, individual or collective—labor pains, like Ragnarök, with gods dying for a new world to be born.
And then you might experience something positive happening in your life. You might be put in touch with a deep love or a deep forgiveness, and all of a sudden, those doom narratives just don’t seem that persuasive anymore. . . .
It’s not like some people are just fools and deluded. It’s coming from a whole experience of life and should never be mocked or dismissed or belittled, the things that you feel, that make you cry, that make you laugh, that make you celebrate, that make you grieve.
On our online forums, on social media, we’ve got to remember that any reaction that we encounter is the reaction of a human being. And if the reaction is emotional, if it has charge to it, this is a human being having an intense experience. And I would say we must never forget that, but what I really mean is that when we forget that, we’re not operating in reality. We’re making a cartoon of a human being. We’re not understanding something. When we shut out true information, when we shut out part of the truth like that and operate in a partial reality, in a collapsed reality, we get lost. We get confused. Things become inexplicable to us. And then we grasp for simplifying narratives to tell us what is. And we become susceptible to those narratives that are often wielded by manipulative forces, forces that steal our sovereignty.
. . . If the future is not going to be just some kind of recapitulation of the past, we have to go through a phase of not knowing, when the familiar fades, drops away, and something new arises.
If it’s really new, we’re not going to recognize it in familiar terms. It won’t fit into familiar concepts. It will not conform to familiar stories. Then it’s new. And aren’t we craving something new? Aren’t we craving liberation from the concepts, the stories, the institutions, the systems, the governments that have contained us, the habits, the customs that have kept us so, as a species, so miserable, so constrained? Aren’t we craving liberation from that?
I think maybe that craving is what powers some of those doom narratives that I spoke about. There’s actually something aspirational in them. People are kind of hoping that it gets really bad. They’re hoping that everything blows up. They’re hoping that it all falls apart. They’re hoping for collapse because that delivers them from a situation that has become almost intolerable. And it redeems the promise—or offers a possibility, at least—of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. So I’ll just invite you here to this moment of uncertainty, this place at the crossroads, that maybe you’re firmly in and maybe you’re not.
. . . In this moment, you know that you will choose a path, that the moment for choice will come, that the choice will be revealed to you, but not now. That understanding will come, meanings will come, but not now. And so alongside whatever the emotional generators of the stories were, the grief, the anger, the hope, the joy, whatever it was, alongside of all of those things, there’s something else that you are aware of right now. It is a calmness, a light curiosity, and a serenity. Alive with possibility. . . .
Serenity, curiosity, possibility. Not as a substitute for all of the other things that you’re feeling that come from a valid place, but as a companion to them. So that, when this unforeseeable new information comes in, that will seriously challenge almost everybody, you’ll be ready for it.
—Charles Eisenstein, “The Election May Not Mean What We Think”
My back aches. My exercise routine might alleviate it eventually, but I’m not feeling it yet. It’s enough to be with this feeling.
Messages from friends inform me that winds, largely unfelt in my protected pocket of the forest, have taken out grid power. The river and creek are high but not yet flooding. A whine from something, probably a generator or a crew with heavy equipment clearing a tree or landslide from the road, pierces the rain’s drumming.
And the torrent keeps coming, now with a quick breath of a breeze.
I did indeed feel it was a time for joy rather than sorrow. There had been such an excess of despair and desperation around the election, and one couldn’t help but ask when it was that politics became everything.
The world had grown thoroughly disenchanted, and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent—that holy place where joy resides. I felt proud to have been touring with The Bad Seeds and offering, in the form of a rock ’n’ roll show, an antidote to this despair, one that transported people to a place beyond the dreadful drama of the political moment.
—Nick Cave, “The Red Hand Files #304”
After breakfast—oatmeal with apples from my uncle’s tree, organic walnuts from a community market (with only the occasional shell fragment), and honey from my parents’ neighbors—I turn off the solar inverter to conserve the charge and cozy up with tea and words and then mending: sewing up holes in a sarong, sewing a patch on my fleece jacket to commemorate a biplane flight with my dad for my parents’ big anniversary, and starting on a Brian Serway patch of a black cat with a witch’s hat on a broomstick, for my shoulder bag.
Then they both got in together, and it wobbled no longer.
—A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Something subtle but seismic shifts within me, like a click into something I’ve been trying to reach for years, or like a small opening of a river mouth widening to a torrent of relief.
Last April, after two years of chemotherapy, when my oncologist told me the cancer was now considered incurable, I felt the expected fear and grief. But something I didn’t tell you was this—I also felt relief. Why relief? Because when I heard the system say, “We can’t save you,” it was the first time since my diagnosis that I felt as if my life was in my hands. Watching the election, I felt something similar: grief, fear. Then this thought—Our lives are in our hands. They always were, but it’s clearer than ever now. . . .
When I’m glued to my phone doom-scrolling the news, it’s almost impossible for me to creatively imagine, but anytime I’ve got my feet in the grass I open in a new way. Even in a city, you can notice the way your body changes with the seasons. You can mirror the earth’s steady and persistent pace. Save the seeds of an apple. Grow veggies in plant pots in the windowsill of your apartment. Feed a stranger. Drive a neighbor through the sunshine to a doctor’s appointment in another state. Never forget how alone we are not. The moss, the mountains, the redwood tree, the marigold, the mourning dove calling for her love’s return—are our allies. Every natural thing in this world is invested in the peace of this world. All that is good and gracious whispers, “We are with you.”
I keep thinking about something I learned in my early 20’s—the rural poor are more likely to survive a catastrophic world event than the wealthiest billionaires. It’s really out of touch to use the word educated to refer solely to college-educated people. Everyone is educated in their own unique way and those of us who had the privilege of attending college are very often the least educated in regards to understanding that we are not just connected to nature, we are nature. To not know that is to be disconnected from our power source.
. . . I know the upcoming years will be challenging. But if the upcoming years are also cherished, they will be less challenging.
I understand why so many people are sharing what they think we should be feeling right now. Though there is love at the heart of that demand, there is no such thing as a moral emotion. No one owes the world their misery. What we owe is our active participation in finding creative and compassionate paths forward. Every activist I have ever known who believed they owed the world their unhappiness has burned out. If we consciously fuel our joy, if we put our attention on the world’s beauty, we will have far more strength and stamina to show up to the world’s pain.
. . . There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.
These conversations can surface big emotions. A lot of what we’re navigating right now can, so I’ve been thinking of ways we can come together to build inner resilience. There is so much we can learn from each other in regards to working with difficult emotions to minimize the time we are undone by them. I’ll say it more bluntly—we can’t be chronically destroyed by microaggressions and also be people who can organize around the violent deportation of millions of our community members or any other inhumane cruelty expected. This moment in history isn’t only about rooting in our values, it’s about rooting in our tenacity, courage, and strength.
Here’s to our tenacity, courage, and strength, friend. I know so much feels heavy right now. It is heavy. But never forget that our hearts are community gardens. I think we’ll all start seeing how much we have on our side once we each begin to see how much we have to give. . . .
All I know of hate
is that it will never
beat the love out of me.
Never forget that it is possible
to cry and sing at the top
of your lungs at the same time.
—Andrea Gibson, “Post-Election Letter to a Friend”
When I go out to a cafe, an old couple at a nearby table bickers. After initial sorrow, I find it almost romantic that they’re secure enough in the relationship to express displeasure without fearing loss of love.
There are no borders, and people go and settle where they want.
—A man in a dream version of Africa, when asked if desert scrubland beyond our gathering place is safe
Of course bickering can erode love if ongoing, but a bit here and there can be healthy if talked out eventually.
Back at home, I light Raven incense and a candle at my ancestor altar and share food with the ancestors of the land.
There’s no place like home, or at least home-for-now, or whatever this is. There are different kinds of home, of course. Right now this one is suffused with pensive silence accentuated by a drip or two here and there on the roof, the seasonal creek crashing down the hill, and an occasional car whooshing far below—a welcome contrast to a neverending throbbing hum at the other place (possibly the sound of the mountain community’s water being pumped up from under the creek, or the electrical pulsation of a neighbor’s hot tub).
Fox barks in the distance. A little flitty bird appears, maybe to thank me for something I put out for the ancestors of the land. Raven flies over, perhaps pissy because I didn’t leave walnuts for them last time I was here (because they asked when I was on the phone with my parents and gave up by the time I was done). If that’s what it is, they’ll forgive me eventually—or maybe they’re telling their mate I’m here, and they’ll both be here soon. Or maybe they’ve already eaten and are looking for a place to roost for the night. Now they call, way far out there somewhere.