on becoming but not becoming better?

Yesterday, while at the end-of-school assembly, the seventh grade performed an Oasis song. I looked around at the room full of earnest parents dressed for the warm spring weather, showing up, and choked back some kind of laugh and something else.

They sang "Don't Look Back in Anger." This song played persistently through my middle school years, and I remember listening and singing along with the same earnestness reflected in the seventh graders up there. I felt something about being old, about it all being so funny, about how the becoming just keeps becoming—now an

on the roar of the internet

is there quiet? are you sure?

i thought about when i started reading people on the internet as a teenager and the voyeurism of reading the, then new kind of publishing, so raw and intimate. i thought about this because for much of my life there has always been so much of this kind of news. i remember the freshness of it and how it delighted me to see and feel other people becoming right before my very eyes. i remember the hopefulness i felt about the internet, a place to connect to each other, the ways to glimpse our collective at its most real. and how over time it changed into a roaring din that feels like standing too close to the freeway all the time.

and how many years later i find myself wondering what kinds of hearing have i lost because of the noise. i think we learn to listen based on the sounds we recognize over time. this is how inference and meaning are made. we are made relationally as the stories of the time tell themselves through our experiences.

but i wonder what can we not hear, not make sense of, what have we maybe forgotten or tuned out because of the roar?

i don’t know that for me this is means something, i guess i just wonder because i looked at the peach tree that we planted last year. it was nearly destroyed by hungry deer and this year with water, and a new fence it is growing and even blooming but it is a strange misshapen thing, the leaves have leaf curl, the blooms are huddled in towards the trunk. i’d like to be able to hear enough about this tree to know which branch to trim to stimulate growth, what kind of weird shapes are survivable and which ones arent. i suppose i say this because when i start to look i notice the multitude of ways that the constant prioritization of connection to a global human world changes my (and undoubtedly everyones) connection to a smaller less human world. i don’t know what this means. i don’t think it means we should return to some other time or place.

and when i look, here are a few things i see:

-a print of birds flying on a big blue sky. they are starlings. i know them because they remind me of how music feels when it washes over my body.

-a bouquet. one perfect piece of grass, roses, calendula, california poppy, chamomile, chrysanthemum, and lupin. now its droopy and slightly rotten but it was part of mothers day table spread, as bright as spring.

-an empty tea cup, that i keep refilling with the hope i wake up

-all the tabs, the bookeeping tabs, the scheduling tabs, the podcast i hope to listen to one day tab

this week i smelled chaparral. thick and dry in a big jar, heavy with resin.

i soothed a child back to sleep, as she dreamed through her fever shouting “stop, that doesn’t feel good!” to some kind of opponent in sleep. i was quiet in the middle of the night rubbing her back. it was something to be in the dark, just me and the rustling skunk, the irritated child, the stretch of the moon. i just had a body aware of the temperature, a mind not scratching for the next thing, an imprint of two shapes warm and okay enough. we were here, listening, or sleeping.

poem: ten minutes

In the spirit of softness of spring, here is a poem for all of you that I wrote this time last year. May your May be sweet and I’ll be back soon with more!

ten minutes

just

ten minutes

of attention and connection

crying

honeyed tears

lying in the grass

looking at the moon she turned sweet

into honey

into may

into waves

into smoke

no more beeps and gasps of the machine

just the room

just the scent of cold blue water

cold pines trees, laughter

and the latch of the gate

on wind and time travel

for years i can’t stop thinking about time travel, maybe its the minutiae of now and how in a single day the load of catastrophes we are witness to can stack so unimaginably high while we still do what we do to live. we wake up, drink water, move ourselves around, care, work, sleep. or maybe it is the nature of children who are at once eternal, bubbling, singing, screaching, climbing, and howling and also changing at the blink of an eye into something new, taller, more articulate, able to move in a new way .

or maybe it is because when i imagine the future of the world i feel like i just can’t. this might sound more hopeless than i mean it to, but when i think about time as it hurtles forward with both the miracles of living and the polycrises unfolding i cant imagine what it is. i think about time and remember it stretches in all the directions regardless of my tiny pinprick of imagination and there is some reassurance in this.

and then there is this element of being a human. small, permeable, susceptible to the winds of the world. i say this after spending nearly a month in bed with a surprise storm of being extremely sick. this kind of illness is in itself a time travel, what once made sense, felt urgent, had consequnce changes quickly to the real demands of a body that needs care.

all of these things are a kind of time travel, a disruption of the rhythm, a chance, a portal to some other kind of time. some other kind of being.

and in this time travel the wayposts are important.

there are many time signatures to learn to recognize

this kind of traveling is like learning music, it asks for prensence, patience, and practice.

it is-

the change in the green of the live oak outside the window.

the curl of fog sliding from 4:30 to 5:30 to 6:30 as the days grow long.

the tooth wiggling, then falling out, despite the braces. a visit in the middle of the night of a semi-magical canine obsessed fairy who carries around a lot of money

the anticipation for the first strawberries

the ache

the recognition of dreams pouring through like a water in a colander each night whether they can be caught or not

the recognition is the learning. the learning is the travel. the travel is the possibility made real. maybe we cant travel without the markers? maybe when we touch time it like so much else turns to dust and a huge gust of wind blows us and the time to somewhere new?

maybe this is how the future is imagined?

on waking up to april

last week the back door of my house shattered. there wasn’t a big noise or the sickening thud of a bird hitting the glass. but the cracking spread across the whole door until it was new, smashed in a thousand pieces.

i keep looking at it in all the lights hoping that before it is replaces i’ll grow to appreciate something about it. i keep looking at it thinking about being a teenager and how i would have loved to take photographs of all the glinting light. i keep looking because for the first few days we could barely go in or out without a little shutter. it had the feeling that it might keep shattering or suddenly fall out of its frame into a pile on the floor.

and then the weather shifted and the door filled with condensation, the clouds were in the door in the morning, or after the dew point of the afternoon.

the door felt like now. the door felt like coming into april.

this is the part where it would be clever to have a metaphor easy to reach for that wrapped up the moment of shattering and 2025 and the wobbly world but really it wasn’t like that. it was strange and ordinary and reminded me that i don’t need to know why everything happens.

and that also on that day there was a sick child, there was drinking tea together on the couch, there was the flash of blue sky that only spring has, there were battered petals from the plum tree, there the loads of laundry, there was work.

i don’t know about you but i find myself so often right now asking, what does it all mean? but i am not often asking myself what do i know right now? what is the place of return?

i suppose i say this because i think this is a practice, i think it is creative, and i think it is something we can do in the face of despair.

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there will another note sent out with chances to get together for the month! look out for that and i can’t wait to see some of you soon!