One of our current efforts is to eliminate plastics out of our food preparation and storage. Howard did a bunch of reading on the effects of microplastics, particularly the interactions between chronic fatigue, long covid, and microplastics. The science is not clear, but switching our food containers is a small change and if it helps, why not? We definitely needed to switch out our plastic cutting boards. They were aging and had begun visibly shedding plastic fragments every time we used them. In an effort not to replace old plastic with new plastic, Howard acquired some stainless steel cutting boards. I don’t like using them. The sound of the metal knife on a metal cutting board sends bad sensations up my arm. So I did a small splurge and bought a set of acacia wood cutting boards.
I’ve always found the textures and colors of stained wood to be beautiful. I love how wood was grown instead of made. Every time I use this board I am pleased with how it feels in my hands, how it looks to my eye, and how it functions as part of my food preparation. Life is full of tools for necessary tasks. Selecting them to provide a small joy instead of a small annoyance improves my daily experience. It gives me a small lift instead of a small drain. I need every lift I can get.
One of the things I love about road trips is the way it shuts out so much of the noise of daily life. There is a clear and simple objective, to travel safely to the destination. Everything else waits until we arrive. Even when we’re posting to social media or checking in on email, there is a distance between me and my usual online existence. Road trips force a focus on the needs of the moment, they ground me in Now. So I was surprised when driving south on I-15 that I was constantly bouncing through fragments of memory. It is a road that I frequently traveled in other eras of my life, and apparently in those past trips I’d seeded memory along the road to be re-discovered on this one.
I found myself thinking of the many trips I’d taken to and from Cedar City while one of my kids went to college there. The stops I made at local attractions during those years where I learned local history. The times one of my other kids rode with me because long drives pulled him out of depression and we were able to talk. The time I parked on this road in stalled traffic on a snowy Thanksgiving weekend while the plows tried to clear the road ahead. The events are fragmentary and most of them don’t have a fixed location I can name. I just have “This stretch of road looks like that one time when…”
Memory comes with emotion. Somehow the hard emotions are stickier than the happy ones. Even when I don’t have a concrete memory to recall, some stretches of road had layers of feeling for me to discover.
Howard was my companion on this trip and he was untroubled by the landscape of memory which I encountered. I did my best to not fill the air with musings about the fragments of feeling and memory I encountered. Sometimes I shared if there was a specific story to tell. Mostly there wasn’t much point in pulling Howard out of his pleasant road trip to express a vague memory of stress associated with a particular curve in the road.
As we traveled I wondered why the hard memories lingered. I know that many of the trips along the road were joyful. I sometimes wrote stories or blog posts in my head while in transit. I enjoyed learning local history. We traveled this road once to see an Annular Eclipse, a fun day trip. Perhaps I held the happy moments close and carried them home with me instead of leaving them scattered by the roadside like litter.
Driving through, did seem to do some sort of clean up, because on the return trip I did not spend so much time haunted by memories. Of course the return trip was its own adventure. It is harder to be contemplative about the past when confronted with current events that need action.
So now I have a midnight blown tire complete with overnight hotel and finding a tire store the next morning as part of my experience of the road. All things considered we had the most convenient possible roadside emergency. We were right by an exit with a well-lit gas station and a hotel with a vacancy.
Part of me wants to travel the road again for the specific purpose of collecting and exploring all of those memories. I’d like to Walk the Spiral again. But at this moment in time wandering through memory is going to be set aside in favor of moving forward. I have so many things I want to do, and I need to focus my attention on those.
The trip was good. We traveled to Los Angeles for the Writing Excuses recording camp. We returned safely having safely traveled 1300 miles of road and memory. Time for me to put away road trip thoughts and be at home.
I woke up with a head full of worry about the world and the future, so I got out of bed instead of stewing in it. The light outside the window felt like pre-dawn because cloud cover softened the 8am light. No one else was awake, so I moved freely through my thoughts and spaces undisturbed. I have nothing on the calendar for today. Today’s task list is similarly sparse. The urgency of summer conventions is gone, and I hit my book deadline, which means today is unassigned. I have not pre-planned my efforts by hour. Instead I can wander and consider what to do.
I want to work on sanding cabinets.
I have only a couple of months left before the weather is too cold for stain and varnish in my unheated garage. I need to get these finished so that they are ready for installation as soon as I can line up both a work crew and enough money to pay for a work crew. Odds are strong I can make that happen in the spring. But that thought path leads back to the thoughts which I tried to escape, so instead I look ahead to the work of today: sanding.
I step outside to breathe morning air. The first signs of fall are beginning. Soon all the green leaves on the trees will be as golden and as discarded as this one. A precursor of things to come.
Fall is gorgeous, but after that is winter with bare trees, not enough light, and cold. Winter is sometimes hard on me. I look at this lone golden leaf and my mind wants to rush ahead to all the hard things to come. Instead I turn to look at all the things which are still green. It is too early to mourn the lack of green when I am still surrounded by it. If I rush ahead to mourning, I’ll miss the green today.
A beautiful dandelion puff stands tall over my lawn space. I pause to admire it for a moment.
Then I take a closer look at my clover. I’m loving the developing biodiversity of what used to just be turf grass.
One of the things I could do today is scatter more seeds. Fall is a good gardening season. Any effort I can put in before the weather gets cold will reap benefits next spring, and all the years after.
I step closer to my grape vines and discover that I’ve currently got some reaping to do. The grapes are ripe.
For the first September in a long time, I don’t have a big trip across the middle of the month. (I have a small trip at the end of the month, but it doesn’t require much prep.) This means I might be able to harvest and process grape juice this year. That might lead to grape jelly. I still have an abundance of raisins from past years, but I might make some of those too.
And now I see the pattern in my morning. All of my things are showing me how today’s work is connected to what came before and what came next. I can’t change the past. I can’t control the future. Yet the choices I make today are dependent on the past and create the choices I’ll have available in the future. If I get the cabinets stained, I have the option to install them midwinter, or next spring, or whenever I have funds. If I process grapes into juice I can choose when to drink it or serve it to friends. If I scatter seeds, some of them may grow and I have flowers in my future. The work of today is to take actions that create paths toward choices that I want.
The other day I was carrying groceries up my walk when I glanced over at my front lawn space. The glance became a pause because I realized that while I was not looking one of my projects succeeded. My lawn is now more clover than grass.
I need to pause and admire this clover in all the places it is growing. It blooms every week between mowings. Yes I have lots more lawn where I need to sow clover. Yes clover is only a tiny step forward on the path toward re-wilding my green spaces so they’re more water-wise and native wildlife friendly. I can see exactly how much more there is to do. But today I have clover. I remember the entire year after I first threw clover seed when none of it sprouted. I remember when I had to go hunting to find any clover at all. Now it is everywhere and spreading.
So I pause, and admire the clover. Then I buy more seed because the only way it is better three years from now is if I scatter seed this fall.
Absence goes unnoticed. There are exceptions of course, when the absent thing or person is something we consciously seek, but mostly when things (or people) are absent, they drop from attention and memory. It is when they return that I think “Oh! I’ve been missing that.” This is an observation about this blog you are reading, which I’ve apparently not posted to since February. It as also about Worldcon, which I attended this weekend for the first time since 2011.
On Worldcon:
I’m unsure how it is been more than a decade since I last attended a Worldcon. I am surprised by how wonderfully connected I felt in returning. My professional friendships have long been in the mode of lightly keeping in touch via social media, interspersed with catching up at events. My friendships are deep in years even when sparse in hours spent together. I was at Worldcon for three and a half days and there was not enough time to visit with all of the people I wanted to see.
My weekend was conversation and community. It was people choosing to come to where we were in order to spare Howard a few blocks of walking. Over and again I was astonished by the gifts of care, time, and attention from other people. I am home again now and I carry memories and photos to assist in remembering. I also have plans to be less absent, to do a better job of noticing when someone goes absent, and ongoing thoughts about the reasons and consequences of absence.
On this blog:
My hiatus was unintentional. The stories I used to tell here got re-purposed for newsletters, Patreon posts, and updates on crowdfunded projects. I threw most of my spare writing energy into crafting my non-fiction book. I can see exactly where my energy went instead of writing blog posts. I understand why I made those choices. Yet I’m still surprised that I’ve gone half a year between posts. Time slips through my fingers.
Planning less absence:
I am turning over in my mind how I can restructure so that I don’t go absent without noticing. The thoughts are half formed an slippery because I am swimming in fatigue. I was fully present to people and friendships for four days when only a week prior I spent five days being present for people and events at Gen Con. Of the past fifteen hours I’ve been asleep for 13 of them.
I am looking forward to unpacking my suitcases, and my plans, and my pictures, and my thoughts. Hopefully I can arrange them into something for sharing.
I said it first to myself, a chant to push back on the anxiety that always lurks in my mind. Then I said it out loud to others, in person, on the internet, because I hoped the thought could help others as well as me. Saying the words is only the beginning of course. Following through is always harder than intention. And it is difficult to not become a hypocrite when I stand in the middle of all of my things and none of them seem to have joy attached. This is what oppression, depression, and fatigue do to our brains. We can hold joy in our hands and it feels like gray dust. So I am learning to blow off the gray just and find the tiny shining nuggets to put into my pockets. It is a deliberate practice rescuing joy from fear. It requires me to remember that hope doesn’t always arrive as and emotional uplift which lightens all we carry. Sometimes hope is expressed as the next painful step in a long slog. Joy is not always shiny and eye catching, sometimes it is quite ordinary. Seeds are very ordinary, often ugly, but if tended they grow into something much bigger and more glorious. Here are the things I am doing to gather the seeds of joy and to give them space to grow.
Daily thoughtful study for at least a few minutes at the beginning of my day. This includes scripture reading, prayer, and sampling from at least one other book that invites me to think big thoughts. Right now I’m bouncing between Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Repentence and Repair by Danya Rutenberg, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha, and Phoenix Rising by James Goldberg.
Putting writing at the beginning of my day. Giving myself the chance to work on Structuring Life to Support Creativity, or a blog post, or a private journal entry before the endless admin and demands of the day take over all my hours.
My morning yoga practice is currently on hold while my injured shoulder heals, but I plan to return to it. These three morning things together sometimes take half an hour, other times an hour and a half. The days where I let them take longer tend to be calmer and more joyful.
Regular service to my house and the people inside it. This most frequently means that I’m the one cleaning up the kitchen and dishes after four ADHD adults have once again created chaos while feeding themselves. Yes our house would benefit from better balance in who cleans up the mess, but this small act of creating order out of chaos makes the world around me visibly better, and that is a good thing.
I watch for birds. The past few days I’ve been writing down the first bird I see each day. Writing it down gives “looking for birds” and importance that causes me to slow down and watch the world when I’m out in it.
I’ve picked a few areas for my activism focus. Things I plan to pay attention to and spend energy on. My current focus is pushing back on book banning and anti-trans legislation in my home state of Utah. I am trusting that other people will take on the plethora of other things which also need to be defended against. Because I can’t to it all by myself and if I try, I will burn out.
I avoid the news that wants to grab me with panic-inducing headlines. This includes when online friends are panic posting about whatever awful thing happened today and which is making them scared. I’ve selected a few news sources that are deliberate and researched. I check in on those in the afternoon sometime so that I am not oblivious. When there is news directly affecting my personal interests or my areas of activism, I may dig deeper and read entire articles. Mostly though, I’m scanning enough to have a sense of what is going on, then returning to the work of the day.
When I take actions, I am not broadcasting them on the internet unless that broadcast serves in direct support of the action I’m taking.
I keep my to do lists and get the tasks on them done so that my family has resources, so that my business continues, so that my customers are served, so that I’m honoring my freelance contracts. Doing the work of the day pushes back on despair. It is an assertion of hope that these tasks matter, that I’ll get to make more books in the future, that the world will continue.
In the evenings Howard and I sit together and watch shows. On the surface this may look like a waste of time, hours in front of the TV. But it serves us. It occupies our minds while our bodies rest, which is particularly important for Howard with his long covid. It also rests our minds because it turns our thoughts away from work and from anxiety. We’re “commentary while watching” people, so the experience is interactive as we critique creative choices in writing, editing, or performance. We laugh together. And we settle into a calmer and more regulated state after the affairs of the day.
While watching TV I do sudoku and embroidery kits. Both of these are simple activities which engage my brain and my hands. They have small moments of satisfaction when I complete a puzzle or when the stitches look pretty. Neither is in any way productive toward my career or income. They exist in my life as hobbies. If I stop enjoying them, I will abandon them for something else.
By the end of February I will get to start looking for the first spring flowers.
I should probably start going for walks in my neighborhood again.
Some of these things don’t feel much like joy when I am doing them. Lots of them feel like work. Right now I’m spending lots of energy just to keep anxiety from crushing me. Some nights anxiety stabs me with bursts of adrenaline and for a few minutes I feel like doom is imminent. That is when I turn on Anna Nalick’s Breathe 2am and remember how to hold still. Yet the combination of all of these things make space for joy to grow. They also move me toward the life I want to be living. Sometimes hope is persistence. Sometimes reaching for joy is sitting pouring water on dirt and trusting something will sprout soon.
I watched Schindler’s List last week. I’ve seen the movie before and knew exactly how difficult it is to watch, yet I was drawn to it anyway. I watched in pieces, taking breaks to breathe. In those breaks I wondered why I was doing this rewatch, why was I staring straight at this dark chapter in history. I think the answer is that I was trying to learn how to be a Schindler. How do I be the person who protects others? What compromises and collaborations were necessary for Schindler to accomplish saving those lives? What could I do to maximize the life-saving and minimize the compromising? Obviously the experiences portrayed in the movie will not map directly to anything that is coming, but the core of it, being a person who protects, it felt like I could learn something.
Another reason is that I felt a need to remind myself that people can be terrible to each other. That I should not be complaisant because the worst is possible. My need for this reminder comes from my deep privilege in that my life is full of kind people. Even the ones who I know have caused harm did so out of mis-aimed kindness or human frailty, not out of a need to be cruel. I am so fortunate to know so few cruel people that I have to remind myself that they exist. The watch reminded me that ordinary people can get shepherded into cruelty if they go with the flow of cruel leaders. So I was learning how to recognize when the flow is pressuring all of us into places where we are either careless or harmful.
Watching this movie did not help my anxiety during the first barrage of executive orders as the new administration took office. I watched them make choices that were deliberately retaliatory, vindictive, and cruel. That is the flow coming at us from above. Given the reality of what is being done at the highest levels in my country, I have choices to make. So I watched a hard movie to figure out how someone else made choices in difficult circumstances. I may re-read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom for the same reasons. Or I might read a bunch of soothing and optimistic fiction instead. Mary Robinette Kowal has a new book coming out, and my eyes just reminded me of Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. Sometimes I need to look straight at the hard things. Other times I need to rest so that when hard things actually happen I have the reserves to be strong against the pressure to join in cruelty.
In midwinter when everything is dark, cold, and difficult, I have to remember that spring has already begun to do the work that will make flowers bloom.
I once listened to the Hardcore History Podcast’s series about World War One. The detailed history was fascinating, but the thing that is sitting with me today is remembering how the change in war technology meant that the best tactic for governments to achieve their political aims was to turn people into cannon fodder in battle after battle, often not to gain ground, but to see who ran out of people first. It was a brutal, grinding war of attrition. The people who paid the highest price were the young ones who were thrown into the path of those machine guns. The technology of war has changed a lot in the past hundred years. That change is not just the weapons and equipment, but also in the existence of cameras and internet. This means the battlegrounds are different, but governments are definitely wrangling for power. I can see it happening. I can see these large scale choices being made, and I can see how the incoming US administration has indicated the need for some sacrifice to achieve their goals. I hear that word “sacrifice” and I recognize that they’re planning to turn many US citizens into economic cannon fodder during the impending tariff war. I look at the list of “day one” plans and the vast majority of them are going to make my life harder or increase the burden on my already strained finances.
My life will be cannon fodder in the upcoming political wrangling. I am like the peasants in the climactic battle of the show Galavant who have built a nice little home for themselves in the spot that turns out to be exactly where three armies come together to do battle. They’re doomed to lose everything and they can’t stop it, they can only hunker down and hope to survive. Given that this is how the world at large feels to me, my instinct to entrench makes a lot of sense. I want to create safety for myself and others. If possible I want to do it without losing any ground.
I wish I had better answers than this, or less anxiety over what is coming. Anxiety aside, my job for the next weeks and months is the same as it has been for the past weeks and months: Do the work in front of me. Keep my eyes open for ways I can help and support others. Make more books.
I’m a bird watcher. I do most of my watching in my backyard rather than making time to go to natural places, but even when I’m driving around town on errands, I watch for flapping or chirping or bright moments of color. Birds are an ordinary joy and I love them. A few years back I adopted a tradition of noting the first bird I saw on New Year’s Day. (I learned this from Canadian poet and author Amal El Mohtar whose books are absolutely worth your time.) Once I know what my “bird of the year” is, I can look up what that bird might represent. It is an augury of a sort. From what the internet tells me about the “meaning” of the bird and what the bird means to me personally I decide what I’m carrying forward.
In January 2024 I saw crows. I wrote about them in my Newsletter (which you can read here). Any time I saw crows all year, they made me happy. Crows are supremely confident problem solvers. I very much was that all year long. It was a good match for the year I had.
This year my first bird was waiting for me the moment I glanced out my kitchen window. It was a small brown puff ball sitting calmly on the perch of my feeder. At first I thought it was a house finch, which is a common and domestic sort of bird. I was beginning to settle my thoughts and find peace that my bird should be so common. It was logical that a common bird would be what came to me in a year where I didn’t have time to go seek a bird and instead expected one from my backyard. Then I looked closer. My bird was a female pine siskin.
Photo courtesy of William H. Majoros, creative commons sharealike.
She looks entirely ordinary, blending in with the sparrows and finches, but she’s unusual. It was only last week that I spotted my first ever pine siskin when her male counterpart flashed yellow at me in my back garden. If I hadn’t seen and identified the male previously, I would have doubted my identification. I stood at my window and watched her until she flew away only a moment later. Then I did my internet search.
Pine siskins are the hope and joy which surprises us unexpectedly like the flash of yellow on an ordinary looking brown bird. Siskins are beauty found in the ordinary. Seeing a siskin might be a message to embrace adaptability and resilience.
All of those things seem like good touchstones for me as I start the new year. They fit well with my intentions and priorities for the coming year. I don’t know if I’ll get to see many siskins through the year, they’re probably only stopping through, but I’m glad this one was waiting for me on New Year’s Day.
