Everyone was up early this morning, stumbling around in the half light of dawn. I was opening yet another box of milk for my tea because I can never remember if one is already open in the refrigerator until it is too late.
I wait for the pauses in the rain to check on the red tailed hawk and their nest building. How have the sweet peas been growing? Do I need to trellis them? Let them grow up instead of crawl under the grass.
It is winter still and the rain alternated between raining sideways and stopping all together. Each time a pause the birds erupting from every tiny place.
My family staggered around warm and haggard from this last sickness moving through and the recent memory of vomit, clinging to surfaces now scrubbed clean. We have been sick nearly non-stop for too long to count. In our warm house, in our enough food, in our try-our-best-to-love well situation, we are tired.
The weariness of showing up is there. I turn transparent some days, lace like, just barely there moving through it all.
And I can’t believe how people do this maneuvering, this tending of life when you have to live in a plastic tent and hope that food and medicine literally falls from the sky because everywhere else has been smashed and there is not guarantee of return. How do you move when you are making your way from one continent to the next knowing that return is not an option, holding your family, the unknown future, and your own sanctity as you move?
How do we stay visible to each other in that? How do we hold our humility? How do we keep inviting learning humanity? How about when we are tired? Fed up? Undone by it?
I clung to the last slivers of a dream, friends, the blare of ambulance, some kind of thing to work out that slipped away before I opened my eyes.
This kind of inhabiting what disappearance can look like, I wonder about it. I notice it. I navigate the lived experience of what feels like a gyre obscuring each thing methodically. I strain to look with focus at the varying levels of violence in it. It gets hard for to distinguish. Each time I load the news my eyes sting with tears.
I am working on what I want to say about it, what rings out in it. I want the stories we tell each other, the way we open doors, the rub of discomfort at difference to all touch in it. I want to hear how you invite the world in. What do you do to you stop it from disappearing. What humility opens you up and lands you? What lets your voice ring like a clear bell?
How do we keep hearing each other when there is so much noise? What lets us listen?
Let’s meet this month for book club to talk about Colum Mc Cann’s beautiful and haunting book, Apeiregon, dear readers, March 19, 5-6 pm PST.
Listening to:
All the Hania Rani
Paying attention to:
The poppies sprouting How fast the grass grows
The Land in Our Bones, Layla Fehgali’s new book. I think we will talk about this in April in book club. This book is incredible.