May 3, 2022

Gleanings

• Give me ordinary. Give me cups of tea in the backyard and an afternoon so slow I can hear the hummingbirds. Give me time to look at the moon and midday trips to the bookshop. Give me satisfaction with Enough. (via ARB)
• My mother died in 2003, ravaged by Alzheimer’s, which robbed her of memory but not of her spirit. “There was a terrible war, here,” she told me, pointing at bullet holes that still mark the facades of old Wrocław buildings. “Terrible things happened. Terrible.” By then, she did not know she had a daughter, but the memories of the war lingered in her mind.
• There is a suddenness to beauty, a shock to it. I sometimes think I’m quite dulled to the world these days, but then it happens, I’m pulled through, and that reminds me what I’m here for.
• Purple, acid yellow and milky white. I can’t imagine how many seed species there are on earth, and like the urchins, how much variety exists in each one’s appearance, both subtle and dramatic. It blows my mind.
• For I know I can’t make time slow, but I can lean into inhabiting the ever-present nowness, the slices of the day.
• Earlier in the day when we had first pulled out the map book, we looked at the grid the lines that marked the roads and then out at the prairies that surrounded us and wondered if there was anything out there. And the answer is yes, there much to be seen and much more to be imagined.
• It has been extraordinarily hard navigating the tightrope between expressing myself truthfully, and not hurting my mom’s feelings.
• Imagine, I always said, the death of a child. How terrible. How terribly sad.
• All through the 1st year of the pandemic, when we didn’t see anyone apart from masked cashiers in the grocery store and the masked lifeguards at the pool, I was so grateful for the company of jays.

May 2, 2022

Bridge

I got Covid last week, and the whole experience takes me right back to pregnancy and early motherhood in way that narrative can be imposed from without when we’re most vulnerable.

And also how resistant I am to being vulnerable.

I’ve never liked being told who I am, or what is my destiny. I have no interest in numerology, or my enneagram, or Tarot. There is a part of me that’s ever resisting the idea that I’m not singular, that I’m one of the others, even though I know that I am the others. All I want is for there to be a little room for me to figure things out for myself.

Maybe I just really hate anybody telling me what to do?

I remember being that insufferable though when my kids were small, on both sides of the equation. I remember all the people who smugly smiled and said, “You’ll see!” and how I was so sure that I’d show them and do it differently (and sometimes I actually did). I remember too coming through the other side and how I’d perilously managed to piece my shattered universe back together with ragged pieces of scotch tape, it seemed like, and all these lessons I’d decided I’d learned so painfully so that other people wouldn’t have to. All the advice I imparted, literal Excel spreadsheets in regards to baby books, and sleep schedules, stroller models, and baby carriers. None of it really of any use to anyone else. Such a lesson in subjectivity, but one that it took me a long time to learn.

A month ago, when many people in my circles started getting Covid, I got my hackles up. Partly because I REALLY wasn’t in a place to accept getting Covid, because we were on the cusp of a trip to England that had already been cancelled once due to Covid. Nope, we weren’t going to get it. We couldn’t. And we didn’t, thank goodness, thanks to avoiding places like crowded airports and jet-planes. Though I was paying attention, people I know on social media sharing their stories, providing daily Covid updates. I went shopping and bought a whole of stuff like Lipton Cup-a-Soup and Vicks Vapour Rub, imagining these as a kind of insurance. If I had them, I wouldn’t need them at all.

And mercifully, I didn’t. Not until we were home again, and the stakes weren’t as high. We’re all vaccinated and boosted. and if Covid’s inevitable, now’s as good a time as any. I suspect the airport and the jet plane are what did it, Canadian customs with officials yelling at us to bunch up together in the lines, all those people whose masks were hanging down below their noses. “If I can see your nostrils, then what’s the point of your mask?” I sang, not loud enough, half-delirious after twelve hours of travel.

Three days later, Iris woke up with a fever. The test was positive, but we didn’t need it to know. And it’s been fine, Covid not so much “ripping” through our house, but creeping through on tiptoe. Iris had a mild fever for part of one day, was a bit congested for a day or two after, but mostly was back to normal and bored until she’d returned to school after five days of quarantine. I developed cold symptoms last Wednesday, symptoms identical but much less severe to another cold I’d had to January, an affliction I’d been hesitant to label as Covid because that seemed like tempting fate—it had been too easy. Though I hadn’t tested then, because we’d all been locked down anyway, and there was no place to go, and our apartment doesn’t really have a proper place for someone to isolate. In January, at least, nobody else got it.

This time we’ve all got it, but it’s been mostly just relaxing, everyone’s energy a bit depleted with cold symptoms, but nothing worse than that, thank goodness. Everyone’s eating normally, albeit more popsicles than usual. Nobody’s really suffering at all, and I’m so relieved by that—to be fine enough to sit around reading. To not be confined to my bed for days at a time with muscle aches, and fever dreams, all those things I was dreading. (I had a terrible bout of pneumonia in 2015; to have to go through that again, with everyone around me sick, and fears of mild cases getting worse—I didn’t want any of that at all.) We’re so lucky. This is definitely okay. As best scenario Covid stories go, this is the next best thing to being asymptomatic.

But am I doing it again? Not being the others? The way that in the early days of motherhood, I would sometimes fancy myself as rocking it, not having to contend with what everybody else is going through. Am I being Covid-smug with my stuffy nose? Like one of those people who lose the baby weight in a fortnight?

And oh, the inapplicability of everybody else’s advice. Even though I know they’re just trying to be helpful, but it seems strange sometimes to be inundated with tips by people who think their own experience applies to everyone, people who have no idea what you’re going through. (Of course, I do this too.)

The subjectivity of Covid is one of the few things I think we can properly take away from all of this—in addition to “Wash your hands.” The danger of thinking, “I know exactly what you mean.” That there isn’t a gap between your experience and mine. I’m not saying we can’t bridge it, but it’s important just to acknowledge that it’s there.

April 28, 2022

The Friday Gospels, by Jenn Ashworth

I wanted something new, something different. There’s an award called The Portico Prize, given “for the book that best evokes the spirit of the North of England, open to new works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.” I found the 2022 shortlist, and sought out some titles from it when we were at Storytellers Inc, and picked up The Mayflies, by Andrew O’Hagan, whom I’ve read before and which was published in Canada, but it sounded great. And then I also bought a book by Jenn Ashworth, an Lancashire author whose nominated book Ghosted wasn’t on the shelf, but her 2013 novel The Friday Gospels was, a review on the back of it reading “put me in mind of Mike Leigh.”

And oh, I loved it so completely. Instead it terrific when longing ends up in something that so completely satisfies?

The Friday Gospels takes place over a single day in the life of a Lancashire Mormon family whose second son is returning from two years away on a mission, the point of view moving between each member of the family—younger sister Jeannie: troubled older brother Julian; father Martin who’s fallen for a woman he met in the park while out with the dog; his wife Pauline, who’s become a shut-in and struggles to walk, plus Gary himself, whose actual experience and the way he’s regarded by his family are wildly divergent. But then, as it becomes clear, this is the case with all the family members, each one hiding shocking secrets, and just when you think such a character could not possibly have your sympathy, Ashworth turns her story inside out, the most incredible sleight of hand, and she does it again and again.

So that there is bleakness, but also so much humour, and humanity, gorgeous love and redemption, and the most ridiculous-seeming character is brought to life so vividly, flawed and human, tough and tender. With a plot that twists and turns—I read this on the plane and found myself gasping, whisper-shouting “NO!” at the page more than once—I was thoroughly gripped by this story of a single family, but also tremendously moved. I loved this book, and am very happy I also picked up a copy of Ghosted so I have that one to look forward to.

April 28, 2022

Tunes

The song on constant play in our house right now is this one, by George Ezra, which we got into while driving our little electric car along the motorways of northwest England last week. It turns out that George Ezra is already very popular, so my efforts at discovering an obscure indie artist are all for nil, but it’s still such a fun song, and I’ve come to love his others too.

April 27, 2022

The Direction of Your Dreams

I was recently writing in a journal of prompts in response to the question of what I’d like to tell my younger self about my life right now. And what I remembered was how much possibility my younger self once found in the phrase attributed to Thoreau , “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you imagine.” Inscribing it into all kinds of scrapbooks, perhaps purchasing a poster of a sunset with it quoted.

What I’d tell my younger self: “Look! I did it.”

*

Two years after my first novel came out, I’d found myself in a creative jam. My publisher had rejected my next novel. I was proud of Mitzi Bytes, but its sales hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was feeling pretty despondent. Like this was my chance, and I’d blown it.

(Never mind that so much of things like book sales are outside an author’s control. Suspicions I’d long held were underlined in a really smart and candid recent post by novelist S.K. Ali, who wrote, “Your book sales are not yours to bear…if you love marketing, great! but a publisher has the greatest pull of all and can put a book on any list — NYT, Indie, USA Today etc — without you moving a finger. So, Sajidah, keep doing all of that stuff you do, giveaways, tiktoks, AMAs, but only because you love your readers. [Those things don’t move book sales. YOU don’t move book sales. Don’t bear that burden.]”)

It was late 2018, in response to that despondency, and feeling like I’d used up all my chances, that I decided to conjure some more. In 2019, I launched the #BacktotheBlog Movement, which led to Blog School, and also a wonderful bookselling project I’m still so proud of, the now-departed Briny Books. And then, in the midst of that summer, I signed a deal for my second novel, everything coming up Kerry after all.

*
I wonder if any advice I have to impart about going in the direction of one’s dreams would be as relevant if I hadn’t ended up defying the odds and getting that book deal in the end? I think it probably would, because my happy ending was not the end, but just another chapter (hurrah!), but experience has shown me that an author is never set, never really arrives, that writing, like everything, is a process of becoming, and the next thing is never sure. That the advice about going in the direction of one’s dreams never stops being applicable.

*
When I say, “Keep going! Don’t give up,” I’m not saying that you should keep beating your head against a brick wall. Sometimes “keep going” means doing something different, a shift, a pivot. I finished a novel in 2007 that nobody wanted to publish, and I’m glad I didn’t go to the ends of the earth in an attempt to find a publisher, because I might have found one if I’d tried hard enough, and that novel wasn’t very good.

What I’m saying is don’t stop creating things. Don’t stop being inspired. The wonderful thing about literature is that readers are so central to the form—there’s nothing passive about it. Keep reading. Keep engaging with ideas. Keep a notebook. Keep a blog. Maybe you have bigger dreams of projects you’d like to get to the end of, but in the meantime, a notebook, a blog. A quilt. A cake. A conversation. All these things are tangible and real. In keeping with the life you’ve imagined.

*

(Keep on creating.)

*

I started thinking about all of this in response to a recent post by Kelly Duran, whose kindness, generosity and candour as an author has been so refreshing to encounter. Her feelings about where she is two years out from her debut novel resonated with me for sure, and made think about the metrics we have to measure success. As well as the dangers on fixating where we’re going instead of noticing and appreciating where we are right now.

With writing, its always about the next thing. And while I understand that, but it’s not the way I want live my days, to measure out my life. I want to rest on my laurels. I want to breathe. I want to rest.

*

I started thinking about all this in response to the book Creative Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto, by Ayun Halliday, whose comics I used to read in Bust Magazine back in the days when I was learning to call myself a feminist. I think I am the small potato I am because of Halliday’s influence, because of her example that it’s possible to live a creative life, to combine that life with motherhood. Blogging’s DIY ethos in line with her zines and off-off-Broadway plays. Her example of how exactly one goes about confidently in the direction of one’s dreams and lives the life she imagines.

Most of us are never going to hit the big time. But is that really the reason we’re doing it?

It’s not the dreams themselves, it’s the direction.

I’m thinking of yoga, and how much of a pose is about reaching for it instead of actually getting there, and how it’s really the reaching that makes the process worthwhile.

If you didn’t have to reach, what would be the point?

*
I remember thinking about my goals when I was a little bit older, too old to be penning axioms by Thoreau into pretty notebooks, and I wasn’t actually thinking about Thoreau at all. But I was plotting out my life the way one might be plotting the trajectory of a line on a graph, and it occurred to me that if I tried to be a writer, to write, that even if I never achieved such goals as a published book (or two books, or three, or a bestseller, or a prestigious prize) that I’d end up in a very different and likely more interesting place than if I hadn’t tried at all.

That it’s actually impossible to lose this game.

*

What Thoreau actually said, from Walden: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

April 26, 2022

Gleanings

• Surrender to knowing what it should look like or where it’s going to show up, how I’m supposed to do it, or who’s supposed to find it or connect to it or show up. Plant and tend to the seed. And surrender the rest.
• My plans are mere sketches, a few chords on which to improvise; they delight me.
• Seasons always reassure us that life in all its forms continues. It shifts, evolves, and readies itself for what is next.
• This poached, cooled asparagus waits patiently until you’re ready for it and when you are… you just dump it on a plate. [“Nobody writes recipes quite like the Smitten Kitchen!” said nobody, today at least.]
• In this part of the world, at this time of year, there is such a dramatic change in the way light fills our days. As winter ends, and we transition through spring towards summer, we are reminded of cycles – days, seasons, lives.
• I continued with the business of daily living. I felt grateful to be able to. And that’s win enough.  
• I still have chilli peppers in glass jars in the freezer, but they don’t begin to compare to the fieriness of the ones I hung to dry in the window. 
• I carry my past, in ways I wish I did not. I carry the groceries despite having teens. I carry myself in dignity except for when I am swept away .
• What you can’t hear are the fine grits of gravel ticking off the car doors and the wind singing in the barbed wire fences.
• Today, I celebrate the gift of joy, of connection, of relationship. And, I’m so grateful for the reminder to stay open … you truly never know who is going to come your way, cross your path, and through their very being, create invitations and possibilities in your own becoming.
• Like many people, I’ve spent much of my life seeking external validation, permission and approval, especially from my immediate family. I worked hard to make sure that wasn’t part of this process. I wanted to stand in clear ownership of my lived experience and the stories within it, to take responsibility for this being my story, not our story, hence my desire to inform and invite
• What I’m getting at is – creating, exploring with curiosity, learning from the masters at their craft, experimenting and painting over – this is how I want to spend my days.
• What became intolerable to me was devoting my life so fully to my kids becoming themselves, while losing myself so completely in the process. What kind of example was I setting? Who would they become if their mother was nothing more than a reflection of their wants and needs?

April 25, 2022

The Fell, by Sarah Moss

I am besotted with Sarah Moss’s slim and haunting stories, beginning with Ghost Wall, and then Summerwater, and now, her latest, The Fell, which I read on our plane journey home from England. (Interestingly, the one book I’ve read by her that wasn’t slim [Signs for Lost Children]) I didn’t like at all.)

Our plane journey home from England took place one year from the day that my husband and I received our first Covid vaccines, and while things since that day have not unfolded as neatly as we would have hoped, to have this long-awaited journey finally happening seems like the most fitting anniversary, and I just feel so tremendously lucky.

I think it’s easy to forget how many lifetimes have been contained within the last two-and-half years, so many plot twists, so many steps forward and two steps back. The idea of the pandemic is like an ever-looming dark cloud overhead, even though the reality of the experience has been much more textured, layered, unfolding, and even interesting. Interesting especially because the lack of certainty has been unmooring in fascinating ways, even while people stand resolute in their respective camps. (Whatever news sources you read, whatever your beliefs about vaccines–it’s all a story you’ve been writing alongside other people you trust about what this thing is and how it should shape our lives (or not). And in many ways, The Coronavirus has become a host story for a million other parasitic stories–our politics, our most intimate tensions, our economic ideas, our religious values, our parental aspirations. What a heavy frickin’ story, y’all. What a weight.)

Something that has helped me a lot in the last two years has been paying attention to the ways that life goes on in other places where Covid responses were different from ours here in Ontario—a former classmate in Shanghai, friends in New York City, my sister in Alberta, my husband’s family in the UK. The awareness (which I’ve written about before) that there really hasn’t been a way to get it right, that a virus is a formidable foe, and that most of us are just muddling through and doing our best under leadership that’s not necessarily nefarious (Boris Johnson’s lockdown birthday parties, notwithstanding).

It was interesting to be in England last week, which has decided to be finished with Covid altogether, where every fourth person we passed on the street had a hacking cough. I don’t think that doing away with Covid restrictions altogether is the right thing to do, but I also don’t really know what the right thing to do is, and I know we’re a public who has definitely lost our appetite for extreme lockdown measures. (Also, my youngest child testing positive for Covid yesterday, and her symptoms were a few hours of a low-grade fever and a runny nose, all of which have dissipated, and the rest of us continue to test negative, be symptom-free, FINGERS CROSSED. Hooray for vaccines.)

The Fell took me back to a different time though, when the skies were emptied of planes and the jury was still out on washing your bananas with Lysol. It’s November 2020, and Kate—single mother, waitress on furlough—has been quarantining at home with her teenage son after a Covid exposure, and suddenly decides that she can’t take it any more. And so off she goes on a walk on the fells near her home in the Peak District, strictly against the rules, even though the chances of her running into anybody else are nil. The trouble arises when she doesn’t come home.

Do you remember being irate about the idea of people leaving the house more than once a day for exercise? I sure do! Considering perhaps that even that was excessive? The sheer irresponsibility of young people gathering with their friends in the park!?!? An adherence to “rules” instead of any kind of pragmatism. In April 2020, I ordered a bouquet of flowers from a local business because somebody in my Facebook feed was squawking that any kind of “unessential” purchase was putting lives at risk, and I needed to defy her. Sometimes I was furious at the scofflaws, sometimes I was doing the scofflawing myself. All of it was so annoying, and much of it continues to be so.

The Fell is told from the perspectives of Kate, her son Matt, her elderly neighbour Alice (who’s had cancer, and therefore is considered vulnerable, in need of protection, and thus abandoned to her own company), and Rob, who works in Mountain Rescue and is called upon to look for Kate when her son reports her missing.

So much of the arguments against lockdowns and Covid government regulation has been so terribly idiotic that we’ve been deprived of the opportunity for proper reflection on what these responses have been. On what has indeed been their fall-out, the depravity. I think of elderly people left alone in care homes for months at a time. Of the mental health toll. Looking back, the fact that children in Ontario had to isolate for ten days each time they were exposed to Covid via a classmate seems needlessly excessive. The fact that small retail shops were closed for months in 2021, undermining faith in public health measures in such a dangerous way. It’s all be a lot of not great.

And yet the number of people whose response to this madness was supporting wannabe fascists?

It’s enough to make one’s head explode.

The Fell, however, is in lieu of that. A novel about risks and consequences, about community and isolation, about what it really means to protect each other, to save each other. About the risks of life itself, and what it means to take those risks, and unlike so much of the current discourse, it doesn’t offer easy answers. There are no easy answers, but asking the questions is the point.

April 22, 2022

Wild Swimming

While we lived in England, I longed to swim, so much so that I ended up purchasing a plastic pool from Woolworths, setting it up on the tiny concrete slab that constituted the back garden of our terrace house. We lived in the Midlands, and didn’t have a car, which limited my perspective, as well as my geographical range, so that I really wasn’t aware of nearby swimming opportunities available to me, though there must have been some. We were also very broke. Once in the summer of 2003, we took the train to Skegness, which I knew about from the Adrian Mole novels, and we went swimming there. Two years later, we’d take a dip in the sea on our honeymoon in Brighton. But other than these experiences, my English life took place on dry land…save for the time we were walking through the University of Nottingham’s Jubilee Campus and I spontaneously stripped down to my skivvies and went swimming in a muddy pond.

But contrary to my experiences, England has a long and storied swimming culture (which I learned much more about in Jenny Landreth’s Swell: A Waterbiography). From lidos to the Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath, there are plenty of places to swim, and my own swimming obsession has certainly grown out of the passion for #WildSwimming online, among UK women in particular. And so taking a dip during our holiday there became a preoccupation of mine, even though we were travelling in mid-April. Mid-April in England, I decided, was basically Canadian June. And my husband knows me well enough to entertain the possibility that my wild-swim might indeed happen, because to do otherwise would basically cement it in stone.

But even I wasn’t sure. I’m not a cold-water creature. I liked the idea of taking a swim, but knew I’d find it difficult to wade into icy water. I am not Jessica J. Lee, breaking ice with a hammer. Before I knew about her example, I had trouble jumping into lakes in July.

Fortunately, the stars aligned, or at least the weather did. “THE HOTTEST EASTER ON RECORD” blared the overblown UK headlines while we were there, even though it was only 21 degrees and Easter is rarely in mid-April anyway. But it was warm enough that me going for a swim wasn’t completely ridiculous.

And so last Sunday morning, we drove to Crook O’ Lune for a swim in the River Lune near Lancaster. (We were actually planning to stop in St. Michael’s to swim in the River Wyre, which was en-route to our Easter lunch, but then got caught up in Lancaster’s one way system, and the matter was out of our hands.) That everyone in the family was indulging my swimming whim meant that I had no choice but to go through with it, no matter how cold the water—they’d all scrambled down a steep ridge and climbed over a stone wall to get to the river bank in the first place, and were all slightly annoyed with me. If I stayed on the bank, they might have disowned me.

Crook O’ Lune was breathtakingly gorgeous, and the perils of fitting in a swim before Easter lunch is that there is no time to linger and take in the rolling green hills, sheep grazing just beyond. It wasn’t the wildest of wild swimming spots, there being a car park, toilets, and a snack bar, and plenty of people out walking, but there were signs advising against swimming at risk of death, so a subversive element was certainly in place.

I should have brought flip flops, but what can you do? I peeled off my socks and boots, jeans and blouse, revealing the bathing suit underneath. Climbing down the muddy banks and in I went, no sign of eels. Glorying in being one small person in the enormous landscape, hills and sky. Wading in to my waist, which wasn’t so difficult, but going further was hard, and once my chest was under water, it felt too close to whatever I suppose a heart attack might feel like for me to properly let go, but I tried to. Coming out and wading in again, because it’s always easier the second time. Floating, sculling, swimming in freshwater for the first time since Thanksgiving at Woodbine Beach partway around the world.

But then Easter lunch was calling, and it was cold. Overwhelmed with the fact that this thing I’d dreamed about doing had happened, which was kind of the theme of our entire week in England. My husband taking my photo, not that I was doing it for the ‘gram, but without the ‘gram, I might not have done it, it’s true, which I can say about many of the most excellent experiences I’ve had in my life. I climbed out of the water muddy and with hives (my arm had brushed something poison growing on the bank), which I’d say makes for a pretty authentic wild swimming experience all around.

April 14, 2022

Mountains Beyond Mountains

“The world is infinitely complicated. You don’t have to catch up to the complexity; it will inevitably catch up with you. It will bury you with considerations, contextualizations, and unintended consequences. But if, in the midst of the rubble, you can resist explaining away your earliest moral instincts, then you will have preserved something good and true. You might make some people’s lives more livable, more beautiful even. You might make some people uncomfortable. You might feel sad in a sad world. You might feel mad in a maddening world. It’s not an easy way to be—especially if you travel between cultures and classes like Farmer did—but there’s succor in the resistance. It’s the best way I know to stay human.” Courtney E. Martin

I’ve been reading a lot lately, and not writing down nearly enough about any of that (which is FINE, really, because the reading is the point) but I wanted to note something about the wonderful experience I had reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, a 2003 biography of Paul Former, a global health pioneer whose untimely death shook his community in February.

I’d first learned about him through Courtney Martin’s newsletter, and then a couple of days later, CBC Ideas replayed their conversation with him while I was driving in the car, and I knew this was somebody I wanted to learn more about.

I am preoccupied these days with learning how to be properly human in the world, but also doing so without assuming political posturing, which had been my strategy in the difficult couple of years before the pandemic, a strategy that seemed less and less effective once things got really complicated and I began to understand that politics is inherently divisive and inadequate to meet the challenges of our current moment, which requires all hands on deck. And of course, this is impossible. So what to do in the face of that? And Paul Farmer’s life is an answer to that question. (Not THE answer. Kidder writes wonderfully about how Farmer is not a model to follow. Just an example that pushing against the impossible is possible.)

I signed up for a reading group Courtney Martin was running and had two days to read this 300 page book before then, which I knew would be challenge, but it turned out not to be, because I couldn’t put it down. Farmer’s origin story, the story of his childhood, is extraordinary—Martin writes a lot about consciously raising our children and Farmer’s story made me think about the unlikely formula for raising a human being into him, which involves a peripatetic childhood living, variously, on a boat and a school bus. And that he died young (he was in his early sixties) made me think about how fortunate it was that he seemed to emerge fully formed, his worldview solid by his early twenties, and he knew what he wanted to do with his life, working as an anthropologist and a physician. (The idea too about Farmer not being THE answer to the question. It makes me think about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez too being posited as THE answer—these are both extraordinarily brilliant individuals. Most people can’t live up these standards. But surely there is something we can learn from them all the same?)

Farmer couldn’t fix it all, he couldn’t heal everyone, but he went out of his way to help a whole bunch of people in his life, determining that every single life was worth trying to save. Which didn’t always make sense to others—what was the point of saving a handful of others when so many others are suffering? And yet. His story a metaphor of the rest of us attesting to the value of keeping going, of keeping trying, even when it seems it doesn’t matter. But it does. The trying and the outcome, all of it.

April 12, 2022

Gleanings

• In short, we’re not helping anyone by ceasing to create beauty.
• What is it to truly know someone, to expose all, even the dark parts inside?
• I like that it isn’t about achievement, it’s about discovery.
• At some point this spring I need to put the pink fleece housecoat away.
• Now what I’m discovering is that it is hard to keep finding new words in the absence of change. Narrative requires movement, not repetition or stasis. How many times (how many ways) can I say “I am sad”?
• I think there should be a rule, that for every piece of good news we want to post on social media, we must also post AT LEAST 3 pieces of the mundane or depressing AF. That way, we can fully celebrate with you in the good news, because we now understand the subtext: “I was struggling for a while there, but now something really great has happened!!”
• When I make quilts, I am thinking of them as embodiments of usefulness first. I have fabric and batting and I know that a quilt will be used. But I am also driven to make something out of a fierce need to use my hands, my body, my strength.
• When women get old, what do they do? Are they neglected, left to their own devices financially and emotionally? If so, perhaps they end up at a place like the Claremont Hotel, a place for those growing old but not yet ready for a nursing home. A place with one rule: they aren’t allowed to die there.