My Process Quilt

 

I have come to call this my process quilt.  I had no idea what I was doing aside from putting together some cheerful fabrics and hand-piecing sunflower blocks.  I had no colour scheme in  mind:  I'd make it up as I went along, I told myself, just as I was making my life up as I went along during the last eighteen months.  I certainly had no idea how different fabrics would  fulfill their roles.  I didn't know, for example, that buying a crazy gold to match the floral fabric of the diamonds in the bottom right block would completely take over the block.  Nor did I know that being too "matchy-matchy" would compromise the drama of the middle block on the left.  I chose a pink for the points that picked up a pink in the diamonds.  That was my first block, and I was just following the rules I'd learned for conventional quilt blocks.  But the pink almost disappears and the white spaces in the red and white diamonds kind of take over.  I saw the diamonds in the top left block as, well, pink!  I didn't know how the white quatrefoils would make the diamonds look really busy and not very pink. But that was all okay. I just kept choosing cheerful fabric.  And I kept learning.  If you want two fabrics to contrast dramatically, changing value isn't enough.  Make one a cool colour, one a warm colour.  And maybe, as in my last block, the top one on the right, choose the centre first rather than choosing the three fabrics for the points and then hoping you have a good centre.  That gives the block more focus.

I just hit "delete."  

I had written two long paragraphs--an overly-long organ recital detailing the last eighteen months of my life.  "That gets in the way of the reader," I told myself.  All you really need to know--and I had love and support through the whole thing, and none of it was life-threatening, so you needn't feel sorry for me--is that for the last eighteen months I felt frightened, incompetent, and exhausted.  These are the words you can relate to, can map onto your own experience. 

Because I felt incompetent, I didn't hand quilt much and rarely played the piano.  I was doing enough things in my life badly; I wouldn't add these.  But I could hand piece. No one would see my stitches and note any irregularity.  If you mark your fabric carefully, using templates to trace the diamonds or triangles and place the dots where your sewing should begin and end and connect these dots with a pencil line, it's easy to piece this difficult blocks, as long as you also connect those dots with pins before you begin to sew. I simply chose cheerful fabrics that I hoped would work together because what I needed from the entire process was a little cheer and a challenge I could manage.

Marking the blocks--there are 16 pieces of each shape in each block--can be time-consuming, but I made that pleasant by streaming Soweto Kinch, the BBC's knowledgeable and upbeat jazz DJ. I guess you could say that I made an idiosyncratic little bit of pleasure out of the most boring part of the process.  Then you take the sixteen pointy pieces next to the centre and sew them to sixteen diamonds.  These you press before adding the rounded triangles of the outer edge.  Press again.  Then begin to put these little units of three together--a tricky proposition, because your seam doglegs in the middle. You pin the first half of the seam and sew it, and then completely rearrange seam allowances to find the dots and pin carefully at the turn.  Something grows under your hands and it's unpredictable and cheerful at the same time. It's a safe little adventure for those days when your brain can't penetrate the exhausted fog that hems you in.

I'm not convinced it's a good quilt, which usually has a unity of conception you might find in a work of art, but I do think it's cheerful and fun. I was going for process, for something doable. Something I could manage. I would sew four triangles to four diamonds after dinner in a kind of meditative way. Four 1 1/2 inch seams of tiny stitches.  

I had heard Oliver Burkeman be interviewed about Four Thousand Weeks, which was one of The New York Times's 100 notable books for 2021. If we live to eighty, we live 4,000 weeks.  It's an uncanny number, large and yet small enough that we can get our heads around it and feel mortality at our backs. Not like 280,000 days, which is the same time frame but feels much more generous.  What's a wasted day here or there? According to the interviews, there was one important takeaway:  we are not going to get everything done.  We are not going to accomplish everything on our list.  We have to make some choices. This rang true for me.  

When his Meditations for Mortals came out, I bought it. I guess self-help isn't exactly my cup of tea.  But there were a couple of things he said that stuck with me, probably because they were good metaphors.  The first is that we'd like our lives to play out on a computer-controlled super yacht.  We could put our course in our computer and get on with our daily lives, not worrying about navigating the larger trip.  But truth be told, we're really swooshing down a fairly rapid river in a kayak. We have to be observant navigators all the time. In another of his meditations, he puts it another way:  we can't stand on our toes and look over the fence of today to see into tomorrow. We have to live here and now. That's what each piece allowed me to do.  I could be inside the cheer of the fabrics and the tiny straightness of my stitches in a way that was almost meditative.

Two things might redeem my little made-up-on-the-fly process quilt.  One is craftsmanship.  The points of the triangles and diamonds are sharp. Each bit of carefulness--from marking to pinning to the tiny stitches--counted, just as you can make each minute count.  (It sure beats doom scrolling!)  The stitches fastening the sunflowers to the white and black background are invisible. Similarly, you may not know where you are going, but you can get there in a way that has both self-respect and pleasure in the moment.  That's not a bad recipe for getting through difficult days.

The second thing is the black sashing.  My sister Karen had made a small quilt out of half square triangles in a huge range of colours and then wondered how she could get it to hold together.  Try a black border I suggested, and it worked. Black will work where other neutrals like brown or tan won't because it's just sharp. Decisive. So as I worked on my process quilt, I was pretty sure black lattice would give the individual blocks enough space to be themselves, and that perhaps this would hold the quilt together. Like me, you've got a handful of tricks up your sleeve for getting life's waywardness to cohere.  

One trick, I think, for getting through rough times is to glory in the moment because you're doing something that is very you and you are taking the time to do it well. Something to do with your hands, psychologists tell us, is an added bonus because it's both soothing and cognitively a little challenging. Knitting a sock or a scarf.  Writing an email to an old friend. Working in the garden.  Sketching a flower. Bathing a baby. The other is having faith--hard-won faith, probably--that you know a thing or two about navigating tough times.  

Reading and Gardening through Disaster

 As I sit down to write this morning, Lyra is on my lap.  He's picked up on my mood--his timing is often, like today, uncanny.  He has come to mitigate the profound sadness and despair I feel.  How many times will I begin a blog post with the words "It's not been a good couple of weeks"?  Until the midterm elections in the U.S., I suppose.  But it has seriously not been a good couple of weeks.  The floods in Texas and the heartbreaking loss of children and other innocent people living on a flood plain breaks my heart.  I want to tell everyone who lost a friend or a family member in those floods to dedicate their lives to addressing climate change.  Yes, it's not the only cause of those floods, but it's something people can actually do.  It's something all of us can do through daily choices.  Make each "green" choice an active act of remembrance for people around the world who die of weather or the disease and starvation that are exacerbated by a hotter climate, for people who have lost their homes or livelihood because of forest fires.

Then there are the people who die in Gaza waiting for food or water.  I don't know how we can fail to see this as genocide. 

And then there's the Big Beautiful Bill--the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that history has ever seen.  It's obscene that the wealthy get tax cuts while the poor get Medicare cuts. 

It is also midsummer in Regina, and we've been gifted with rain.  The city is quite lush.  One of the unexpected effects of my cataract surgery is that I can see every leaf on a tree, and I register the variety planted through the city with delight.  My clematis is vivacious and ecstatic.  My bush beans have put out the most etherially-coloured blossoms and the pole beans are half way up their poles.  My pots of herbs are jubilant.  When I make a salad, I simply go out and pick a handful of herbs and drop them in like more lettuce leaves. Last week, I told Nikka that my moods are super-charged, intense, and that I walk a very sharp knife blade; they could go either way.  If I'm disciplined enough to "Be.  Here.  Now." what I feel is joy in the fact that my small part of the planet is not hot and has plenty of rain.  I know there are parts of Saskatchewan where this is not the case. But when I look up into the distance--into the future or into other parts of the planet, I feel despair.

My fiction reading has taken a hit.  I have no resources left to tolerate the anxiety and uncertainty of a tense plot.  I'm re-reading a lot of things I know I can trust, like Frances Itani's The Company We Keep, about a group of people who are struggling with their individual and idiosyncratic griefs--no grief is like another, I suspect--but who nevertheless help and support one another in the most surprising ways. The novel is a celebration of the power that kindness, attentive listening, and conversation have to make us feel part of the human family, and so less isolated in our despair. 

Or I turned to nonfiction, often about nature, to educate and enliven my sense of wonder.  That was my intention when I picked up Robert Macfarlane's remarkable Is a River Alive?  The answer, of course, is yes, but connecting to, listening to, understanding that aliveness in a way that doesn't anthropomorphise the river is a deep undertaking that requires unselfing ourselves and our language.  

But of course, the three rivers he visits, one of them Canadian, are all under threat. Ever a thoughtful writer who doesn't (like me these days) avoid tales of doom, Macfarlane listens to the story of resistance to exploitation that many people, often at the cost of their lives, have put up to save his first river, Rio Los Cedros, a river in the cedar cloud forest of Ecuador.  Capitalism is hungry for the mountain's precious minerals. Do we really need more gold?  What for?  

Macfarlane writes of his and my fragile equilibrium as he hears about two waterfalls of the same river, side by side, one destroyed by mining, one pristine:  "I'm pierced again by hope and futility:  the two streams of the waterfall.  Hope at the tirelessness of these people, resisting across generations.  Futility at this living forest's vulnerability in the face of the force that comes from the barrel of a gun or the corporate profit motive.  Could such power ever be brought to recognize the river and forest as complexly alive?"  As I read these words, I realized that my fragile mood is simply an effect of living in the twenty-first century and paying attention.  (Maybe paying too much attention for my own good.)  Maybe my frame of mind is simply an effect of being human, certainly during hungry late capitalism in a time when power has been rendered toxic and self-serving in many places in the world. 

Because what's being fought out are two different understandings of power.  The power to exploit, to turn nature or the suffering of others into dollars.  The power to take, to gather into one's already sizeable hoard anything that's not physically or legally locked down.  The power of Smaug.  How lonely and isolated and ultimately inadequate such power is, even while it steals the well-being of others. 

Or the power to give. I've also been reading A Different Kind of Power, Jacinda Ardern's remarkable memoir of her journey from being the kid of a cop whose "beat" was a small, poor town to Premier House, where the New Zealand prime minister lives.  On her way to her swearing in, she takes a call from journalist John Campbell.  He wants "one last idealistic flourish" from her.  "What is it you want to do?" "'I want this government to feel different,' I said.  'I want people to feel that it's open, that it's listening, and that it's going to bring kindness back.'"  Ardern goes on to write "'Kindness.'  That was the word.  It is a child's word, in a way.  Simple.  And yet it encompassed everything that had left an imprint on me....All the people I'd known through the years:  family and friends, people I'd worshiped alongside or worked with, even fought with, but always--always--in the service of something better.  Some people thought kindness  was sentimental, soft.  A bit naive, even.  I knew this.  But I also knew they were wrong.  Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has.  I'd seen kindness do extraordinary things:  I'd seen it give people hope; I'd seen it change minds and transform lives." 

The other natural resource we have as these conceptions of power vie for world domination is awe. We can begin with the awe we feel in the presence of acts of "moral beauty," acts of imagination or compassion or generosity toward people who are struggling--as we all are.  But we can also be in awe at the tiny green beans that I found this afternoon as I harvested some rhubarb.  I learned from Zoe Schlanger's book The Light Eaters, a book on the intelligence and consciousness of plants--though the scientists she follows argue with those words even while the plant behaviour they describe can't be seen any other way--that seeds have been called a plant's lunch bag containing its first meal and its DNA.  Those beans I saw this afternoon, about an inch long and not much thicker than a darning needle, were contained in that little package I put in the soil about six weeks ago. In turn, those tiny beans will contain seeds of their own--a set of magical nesting dolls. Or the awe that we should feel about butterflies.  We don't actually know what happens in the chrysalis a caterpillar makes.  We know the caterpillar more or less dissolves completely, but we can't exactly open it up to see what is happening or we'll halt the process.  So for a while the chrysalis is full of goo.  Then it has wings.  What's the point of awe?  Or of kindness?  Or of sharing with someone who confesses that while she was grieving the death of her husband sometimes all she could do was curl up on the floor that you did the same thing after your mother died. I'll let Robert Macfarlane close today:

"Ideas move in space and time.  They swim like fish.  They drift like pollen.  They migrate like birds.  Sometimes their movement carries them right around the world, and they find new niches in which to flourish."  

Small Pleasures

 

Tuck loves heat.  He scurries to get into the warm spot you leave when you get up for tea, but his favourite place is the heating pad I sometimes leave on low after I've made my bed.  Lyra prefers sunshine and window sills.  Tuck loves head butts.  He will stretch out a paw to draw you to him, forehead to forehead, as if you belong to the same tribe.  Sometimes, when you turn to leave, out comes the paw to grasp you for one more.  His record is twelve head butts at a time.  Lyra loves to arrange himself in my arms like a baby looking up into my eyes.  Or he sits with his head on my breastbone, one paw on my neck, his head turned, and simply melts into my body.  Tuck sleeps on my hips; Lyra sleeps staring at me.  But their absolutely favourite place is together in the space between our pillows, with bouts of washing one another's faces during the night.  "I want to wash your face," Tuck will say, putting his paw on top of Lyra's head to hold it still.  "No.  I'm going to wash yours," Lyra will say as he eludes the paw and runs his tongue along Tuck's muzzle, chewing whiskers as he goes.  Tuck never has any whiskers.

Tuck and Lyra are cats eight and nine in my fifty-three year history with cat families, and most of them have had outsized pleasures.  Niagara, the daughter of my first cat, liked curling up in the bathroom sink and watching water drip on her.  But her all-time favourite thing was the root end of a radish, which she'd fling around in the bathtub.

Of course, they are cats, programmed for pleasure, so much so that they have a sound for expressing it.  But they are pets:  how did their desires become so individual?  In the dark, I know Lyra and Tuck by their desires as well as their differently-textured coats. When I sleep on my side, Tuck is the one who paws at the covers and waits for me to lift them so he can climb underneath and sleep happily with my arm around him as if he were my childhood teddy bear.  When my arm is on my pillow, Lyra rests his front paws there, his face inches from mine, and purrs. No.  My cats aren't pets.  They're companions, and it behooves me to understand the simple things that give them pleasure. 

How do you know who you are?  There is some argument that, Veronica O'Keene tells us in .A Sense of Self:  Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are, we are sometimes comprised of our neural circuitry and our hormones and neurotransmitters, which occasionally take us over.  Or are you the synaptic tangle of  memories traced in  your brain? Are you your consciousness at this moment, infused as it is with the precise details of where you are right now, reading a mystery while the smell of Earl Grey tea wafts towards you?  Are you the ineffable stuff that floats through your mind about the past, this moment, the future, an idea you have been toying with or reading about? The feelings of bliss that irradiate you or of trauma that just won't go away? Post-structuralists argued that we didn't really have our own identities, that we were "interpellated," shaped largely by social expectations. Though I don't entirely believe this, I taught post-structuralist theories because I thought we should consider the ways our contexts--from capitalism to gender roles--often quietly, even underhandedly, shape who we are.  Are we our stories, some complex relationship between our memories and the way we have configured them to create our narratives? Memories are never neutral; the context of our recall always tilts them slightly.  So maybe we're a conversation, then, between truth and desire or perspective? 

We are many selves at different times. Perhaps one portrait of each of us is sketched by our desires.  And I'm not going down the rabbit hole into the complicated warren of sexual desire; that's altogether too large a labyrinth for any single individual to encompass, which is why I simply lean into the cliche that love is love is love. I'm thinking about the simple desires that sparkle through our days.  "I need a cup of tea!" with the caveat at right this moment it has to be the mango green tea, not Earl Grey. "Do I have some chocolate around here somewhere?" "My head is stuffed full.  I need to go for a walk." "Where's spring? I need to go seed shopping!" Your need to hear a particular song. Yourquest for a good movie or binge-watching reruns of Succession. Your drive, right this moment, to rootle through your crafting drawers and find your knitting needles and make yet another scarf, just needing your fingers to move in this soothing, particular way.

Thinking of our desires as part of our self-portrait has an advantage:  we can then look at them more purposefully and query them.  

We want errant politicians and world leaders to do this, not simply to offer excuses for, say, economy-destroying tariffs, but to ask themselves "Why do I want this?" and to be genuinely curious. My first remembered instance of this came in 2003 when George W. Bush essentially said "Give me some gossip or threats I can use to invade Iraq.  I want to finish what Daddy started." I suspect that most wars, like the one in Ukraine, are started with the unexamined words "I want," without the recognition that they said something about the person with those desires, as well as about history and ideology and the economy. Trump wanted to bomb something with those big beautiful bombs the U.S. has, and Iran seemed like a good idea.  But why?  Why not diplomacy?  Because he wanted....

I've got desires that would benefit from asking why.  It's 9:20 in the morning, and I want chocolate.  Why?  Seriously, I cannot indulge every desire for chocolate I have; I already do it rather too much.  But I'm struggling with words, questioning each sentence, wondering if I've gone too far yet again with the ideas I share here.  Like, really, it's July 2 and I'm asking you to think about the little desires that sparkle through your day--or get  you in trouble.  In the case of chocolate, I'd like some comfort, and chocolate is my easiest avenue to comfort.  A lot of food is, really. 

The minimalist in me wants to say that we could interrogate our desires when, say, we're buying our twentieth pair of shoes or fourth white blouse or that new car or the book you have no place for on your shelves or the stack by your bed, which is already teetering.  If you can push it outside of you, you can challenge it and the planet will be happier.  Oh, and the book.  If it tells a story or elucidates an idea  you need to understand to become more human, buy it!  Maybe donate it to a little library when you're done.  But if it's going to sit on your shelves gathering dust as part of the self-portrait of who you want to be or be seen to be, give it a miss.  Or get it from the library and sheepishly return it unread.

In other words, if it's a thing you want, query it.  What is that desire telling you about yourself? Telling you about yourself this minute.  Maybe it's something you need to take care of, but in a different way.  With a conversation or a walk with your dog.

But if it's doing something, consider indulging it.  I have some admittedly odd desires, many of which circle around doing something that's small enough to be do-able.  Seriously, who else is driven to get up from her computer and go down to the piano to work on that waterfall of notes that hangs in the  middle of a Chopin Nocturne?  Nine completely unpredictable notes.  But it's still just nine notes.  If I play them often enough, I will get better at it, and when I'm working on a hard piece of writing I need a demonstrable accomplishment. At seventy-five, I've taken up fifteen-minute gardening.  I can't spend all Sunday morning in the garden, as I used to:  my knees and back won't take it.  But fifteen minutes weeding the vegetable garden is a tonic. There are microbes in the soil that raise serotonin levels in your brain, improving  your mood.  And when I'm done, I can see that my pole beans are going to get all the water and fertilizer I give them.  There's something peaceful and lovely about a weeded garden, something orderly that I need in my chaotic life. 

In the photograph above you see three sets of small pleasures.  Tuck, my black cat, and Lyra, my grey tuxedo tabby, love curling up in the afternoon.  Better yet, they love curling up on Mom's latest quilting project as she lays it out to see whether it's working.  The sunflower blocks are born of that desire to do something small and something bright.  They're entirely hand-pieced.  Last winter when I wasn't well, they saved my sanity because I could do just a few at a time, no matter how tired I was.

If planting a garden or planning a quilt or making a collage or writing a real letter to a friend is an intrinsic part of who you are, part of the sparkles that animate your life, celebrate it.  Flaunt it!  Indulge it. Find time for it.  Don't feel you need to justify it. It's you!

How to love the world

It's been a terrible week.  We may be on the cusp of a wider war in the Middle East.  And even if we're not, conditions in Gaza remain dire. Donald Trump had a birthday party with tanks and bombs.  The National Guard was brought in to L.A., not really to manage the crowds, which the police could have adequately done, but to provide a show of force.  To threaten.  To claim more power. To practice declaring a national emergency, perhaps getting the Supreme Court onside so that he can more generally silence criticism.  Here's a toast to everyone that attended 2,000 demonstrations, declaring "No Kings!" 

Not surprisingly, my insomnia has dropped in for an indefinite stay.  But there are perks to insomnia if you can calm yourself enough to grasp them.  One is that I get lots better at meditating, since meditation both stills me and leads me to the frame of mind that will sleep.  The second is that I'm forced to do a better job of sleep hygiene, which mostly involves staying off screens after 8 p.m. and reading something soothing or philosophical at bedtime.  No mysteries or tense novels. For some reason I can no longer remember, I bought myself a lovely hardcover copy of Seneca's letters, which are chatty until he homes in on his Stoic insights.  Here's some advice we could give to Trump or Putin or Netanyahu:  "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."

And then a few days ago, I took Devotions, my copy of Mary Oliver's selected poems, off the shelf to begin again where I'd left off.  In House of Light (1990), there's a poem on "Spring" where she imagines the experience of a black bear awakening from hibernation that ends

    all day I think of her--

            her white teeth

                    her wordlessness,

                            her perfect love. 

It's one of the mysteries of Oliver's poems that she can write so unsentimentally about the natural world:  here it's the combination of the bear's threatening "white teeth"; a lack of words that should, at least in human terms, make her appreciation elusive; and the surprise and mystery of her perfect love.  But what struck me most about the poem were a few lines in its middle that seem to speak to this historical moment:  "There is only one question; / how to love this world." How, indeed?

It's as if my reading is having a conversation.  A couple of days ago, Libby (RPL's e-book program) delivered Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare onto my shelf.  Dalton, a foreign policy advisor for the U.K. government and a self-described workaholic, retires to a renovated barn in the British countryside of her childhood to wait out the pandemic lockdown.  Dalton finds a tiny leveret--a baby hare--on an evening walk.  At the beginning of her walk, she's unwilling to pick it up, but returning that evening she is worried about its vulnerability to owls and stoats, so embraces it in a handful of grass.  It is so small it fits lengthwise in her palm.  The narrative that follows is the story of her relationship with an animal that, unlike cats and dogs or horses, has absolutely no DNA that has evolved to enable the human/animal connection.  Little is known about feeding them--though her parcel of books sent from the London Library contains many recipes for eating them--until she finds a poem of William Cowper, who likewise had a leveret and explains that they like oats, which replace the bottles of kitten food she's been nursing it with.  Dalton's memoir is replete with the mystery of the connection between her and the unnamed leveret (it's not a pet, so she has no right to name it). But no spoilers here.  

But it's the leveret's effect on  Dalton that I want to tie to Mary Oliver's query about "how to love this world."  Dalton writes that "It was not tame but made certain exceptions where I was concerned.  The fact that the leveret appeared to feel safe with me seemed a tacit approval from the wildest of the wild.  It made me feel accepted in my environment, akin to living in a state of peace with nature."  Hares tend to be active at night and sleep during the day, so Dalton found herself with a peaceful sleeping leveret on the stairs or in a doorway.  This prompted her to change some of her habits, sometimes even going out one of the doors of her house and through the rain to get to another room, or taking her clothes downstairs to the shower to disrupt the leveret's sleep as little as possible.  "The leveret's preoccupations influenced me in other, more subtle ways.  As its gaze travelled further, so did mine, drawing my mind, and increasingly my feet, outdoors." She finds herself observing other hares and changes in the landscape more closely: "I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature, no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me." The London-based, jet-setting foreign policy advisor finds herself thinking about how the landscape enables or endangers the safety of her leveret and other vulnerable wild creatures, leading her to plant trees and to create, on her small farm, complicated and varied hedges that enable safety to birds and other small animals.

My spring and early summer was uncertain.  In many ways, it was like yours.  Working in the garden was often made impossible by heavy smoke or by unpleasantly windy days, so seeds and flowers in boxes went in later than usual--something I fussed about.  I wondered whether the dramatic changes I was making to Home in Stormy Weather were working.  Why was brain fog so often dropping down at about 5 pm? Was the leftover of my post-viral exhaustion or just an ordinary tiredness from being 75?  If so, did I like 75?  "Cope with what is," I often reminded myself, not always successfully.  

But the crab apple tree in our back yard was an enormous help.  It was in bloom when we decided to buy the house in 1990, and it's been my familiar since then.  I love the way its bark swirls around the trunk and branches.  It's been a place where nuthatches could jam in a seed to open it just above my head.  This year, I I stared out the kitchen windows or out the window halfway up the stairs just to follow the rising of tight pink blossoms in their leafy green cups, to watch the full blooms  hang on to the tree in spite of wind and rain, to note that there were apples the size of the head of a pin on the ends of branches that seemed to grow daily.  Then last week, I found that a dead branch had blossomed.  It was about a month late, but the bare brown stems had put out a handful of blossoms that looked both thicker and more crystalline that the usual blossoms.  I have been reading, in Zoe Schlanger's remarkable The Light Eaters, about how plants adapt to unfamiliar conditions by doing things we never thought them capable of.  But here was a mystery in my back yard. How do dead branches find the energy to blossom?  Why have they put out blossoms and not leaves?  They have lasted a good couple of weeks and continue to hang on.

Here, I think, is the answer to Oliver's question about how to love this world.  See it.  Study it.  Use what you see and observe to find paths outside your own preoccupations and obsessions.  That's exactly what the powerful too infrequently do:  find in a hare or a blossom or an imagined bear the compelling reality of something besides their own unassuageable desires.

Uncertainty, perspective, and moss

 

I like David Frum.  He's one of a handful of right-leaning commentators, like Canada's own Andrew Coyne, whom I always read because I need to know how people who don't lean left are thinking.  We can't just abandon ways of thinking on the basis of a thinker's ideology:  they know stuff we don't and have perspectives we ignore.  So last Thursday, Bill and I were finally getting our trip to Victoria, cancelled in February because the day before we were to leave I came down with an unspeakably bad cold, one that's still causing me to crash with post-viral exhaustion. But enough about me.  Back to David Frum. I had grabbed up a handful of magazines to read on the plane, including one with his article "Why the COVID Deniers Won."  We can't just ignore COVID deniers, labelling them uninformed or ill-educated, partly because such labels simply make them more intransigent.  Keeping conversations alive:  that's what civil discourse does, and that's what David Frum does in his careful paragraphs on uncertainty:

"The onset of the pandemic was an unusually confusing and disorienting event.  Some people who got COVID died.  Others lived.  Some suffered only mild symptoms.  Others spent weeks on ventilators, or emerged with long COVID and never fully recovered.  Some lost businesses built over a lifetime.  Others refinanced their homes with 2 percent interest rates and banked the savings.

"We live in an impersonal universe, indifferent to our hopes and wishes, subject to extreme randomness.  We don't like this at all.  We crave satisfying explanations.  We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it's somebody we don't like.  At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people.  This is the eternal appeal of conspiracy theories.  How did this happen?  Somebody must have done it--but who?  And why?" 

Blaming bad events on bad people.  We're in the midst of that right now, with all the uncertainty that entails.  (I won't name names.  In our household, we call him "Oh-oh," short for "Orange Oaf.") Even a brief review of history will uncover authoritarian leaders who made changes to millions of peoples' lives because they thought something--the economy?  Science? War?--worked the way they believed.  I only had to go as far back as Margaret Thatcher to recall an example, though her creation of chaos was largely limited to Great Britain and the Falklands. A war for the Falklands?  Why?

But what does this have to do with a week in Victoria?  Just as I put down David Frum's illuminating article, we were flying low over the ocean from Vancouver to Victoria.  I can't explain what I saw on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, except to say that there were swirls and streaks of smooth, silvery water punctuated by a background that glittered.  How could you possibly explain something as complex as these ocean currents?  How could you explain the islands that lifted from the ocean floor--someone can, I'm sure.  But those islands are also subject to forces too complex to be explicable in the aggregate, like storms and erosion.  Or this fact:  trees put out thousands of seeds every year, but very few actually root.  Why this one and not that?  And how will this tree growing influence the microclimate of the island? 

When you go on holiday, you put aside the daily commitments and habits that can more or less rule your brain and your life and instead commit yourself to wonder.  To being observant.  To asking idle questions.  That is was spring in Victoria--daffodils everywhere, even naturalized on the edge of the highway and in every yard, along with grape hyacinths and a dozen other wildflowers I couldn't identify; tulip trees in blossom; deep red rhododendrons in full bloom; moss everywhere--made shifting gears easy. I'm good at finding the little back roads on Google Maps, so after a day of walking along several beaches in and near Victoria, we took the back roads out to Sooke for dinner.  That was the second dose of wonder for the day, after the ocean and the mountains.  Bill drives the twisty roads and I get the chance to look deep into the trees where the forest floor is carpeted with ferns.  Or to gaze in wonder at something I saw several times we drove out to Sooke and up to Duncan.  The highway would be bordered by sheer rock--the side of the mountain vertical and exposed.  And the rock was home to ferns, mosses, wildflowers, trees, small cataracts.  I wish I had a photograph for you, but these were not good places on the twisting roads to just stop and take a picture.  Imagine the outburst in Victoria gardens when spring arrives in that luscious climate where gardeners have laboured in the fall to plant every bulb that will thrive.  Then translate that to the side of a mountains.

The mosses were a particular wonder for me after reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss, which I highly recommend.  Actually, read everything she's written for the botany and the wisdom; she's a particularly philosophical companion during our traumatic time. She talks about the "ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure."  Mosses that grow on rock secrete acids that slowly turn rock to sand, allowing them patiently to thrive anywhere. There are 22,000 kinds of moss world-wide, occupying their individual niches. They are patience personified.  They can wait long periods for water.  They don't care how fast they grow and are willing to create their own ideal circumstances. And they create ideal circumstances for others.  Where there is moss, there is humidity.  They are perfect nurseries for baby trees.  They can pull moisture right out of the air and are the rain barrels of the trees they live on. They aid decay in the forest so it can renew itself. Where there is moss, the mycorrhizae that allow trees to talk to one another and share resources flourishes.

It wasn't just the moss, but everything growing out of the sides of solid rock that gave me the perspective I need right now.  Looking at these unlikely greenhouses, these massive vertical slabs of rock covered in plants, I said to myself "The earth wants life here and is inventive enough to make it happen."

Like you, I can have a pretty dark view of life right now, particularly as I look at the appallingly stupid willfulness and cowardice of politics south of the border.  But that's not the only place where disaster thrives. Yes, in spite of the mosses, we're destroying our planet, possibly making it uninhabitable for ourselves.  Yes, the IDF has gone back into Gaza and is purposefully killing aid workers. Yes, Trump and Putin are gambling with the lives of millions of Ukrainians with their awkward bromance.  What is it that allows people not to think about the consequences of their actions in the lives of others? Has Oh-oh even thought about what it's like to lose  your job and then multiplied that by hundreds of thousands? Oh, I forgot.  He's a narcissist.  What makes narcissists?  He just tells us it may take a few years, and his great America will arrive, made solely by him, he says. How much hunger and despair will also have been created?

But uncertainty is also a principle alive on our planet, a principle that gives rise to beauty and wonder. Do what you can.  Buy Canadian.  Elect the party you think will be most effective in tending to the needs of the unemployed while Trump has an explosion that none of his advisors has the courage to question. You know, I've almost gotten myself to the point where I think the human race could disappear, and I'd be okay with that. I'd miss the art we create and engage with.  I'd miss the friendly conversations that enliven coffee shops and show us at our most compassionate and curious. But I 'd trust the mosses to experiment their away around to a second draft. 

Mean March

My book on minimalism, forthcoming from Guernica Editions, ends with a chapter on patience, which is really a minimalist response to the world:  if you are patient, there's nothing you need to fix or rant about. The chapter describes February as the month most demanding of our patience:

"February on the prairies can also be a wild card. Some days are warm enough to melt the snow on the side streets; three days later it’s four inches thick again. Although spring supposedly arrives next month, we can still get blizzards and temperatures in the minus thirties. In February, we haven’t arrived anywhere.  We are waiting for a train in a chilly wood-lined station where our voices echo.  We are in the middle of nowhere, in the no man’s land of mood between the new year and the spring equinox.

"February’s white skies, which have neither camber nor variety, suffocate me with their enormous wool blankets and smother my spirit.  That’s February, that sense of boredom, that nothing is changing, that everything is muffled—feelings, vitality, all muffled in an unending round of uncertain days.  When the white skies meet white snow, I don’t quite know where I am or where the cloud’s ceiling is.  That disorientation that is almost existential—that’s February.

"February calls for patience. It’s fitting that February’s tedious minimalism—this hoary muffled world of days that seem stubbornly to crawl across an empty horizon—calls for patience, which is really a hard-won minimalist response to the world." 

But what about mean March?  That we say it either comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb or that it comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion indicates the uncertainty of its weather. March is the month where grit is everywhere.  It's the month when I dread falling on the ice that's come overnight, following on the previous day's thaw.  So we rejoice at the warmth one day and then we go down on our bums the next morning.  Mean March!  

And yet.  And yet.  A week ago, I had begun to walk outside since I could find a clear path into Regina's Crescents neighbourhood, and it gave me such joy.  I looked around me and saw grit and grey and unenthusiastic trees and shrubbery looking like an old Brillo pad, and I felt such lightness.  This was probably because of the light:  the sun is higher and has warmth in it, and the days are longer.  Our bird brains react to this with a lift.  But the world was not visually beautiful.  I have recently learned that human beings are wired for vision.  The occipital lobe, our visual processing centre, takes up about a third of our brain and registers everything from colour to shape to movement. It's no wonder that when we think about beauty we imagine seeing it.  

So I had to shift my perspective to understand why I was so happy walking down the gritty streets.  The first thing I noticed was birdsong.  Geese and ducks and sparrows and one lone seagull. There was also a very quiet pair of partridges. 

And then I had to make contact with my skin, with the delightful feel of a light breeze on my face.  It didn't feel like my skin would begin to turn up at the corners of my face as a prelude to coming off altogether, as it does on bitterly cold days.  My skin was happy to be out and about.

But it was eagerness that caught my attention, eagerness as a thing of beauty.  There was a father and son throwing a football in a small triangular park still full of snow.  There was my delight in being able to take a walk--no matter what it looked like--not in a mall full of boredom (this is something I've noticed about the people who work in malls), not to the mall muzak but to the sound of birds, not after a fifteen-minute drive that I'll have to repeat when I'm done, but right out my door.  There was eagerness in the conversation of the teenagers who were decidedly, bravely, eagerly underdressed. 

Then last Thursday hit and we were threatened with blizzard-like conditions.  My friend dee Hobsbawn Smith drove in from Saskatoon to launch "One Book, One Province" events focused on her wonderful book of essays, Bread and Water, and said it was awful:  blowing snow and fog--and then sudden blue sky above Lumsden, but with wind continuing to howl.  She wrote that the trip home the next day was even worse, "a shit show. Five accidents. Semis and pickups in the ditch, the highway blocked by semis in two spots, one in each direction, with EMS on the scene." March came in like an eager lion, windy and cold.  It gave us some serene days in the middle, and then roared lustily out again, leaving us with an April Fool's joke today--more snow and temperatures 8 degrees lower than normal. Conditions after the Ontario ice storm are way beyond any joke. People without power for three days. What's up?

Solastalgia.  In 2003, Glenn Albrecht coined the word out of three Latin roots that highlighted comfort, devastation and abandonment, and grief. The word is meant to describe our feelings upon finding that the natural world has been dramatically changed by the climate crisis to the point where we no longer feel at home.  No respectable climate scientist is going to point to March in Canada and intone "Climate change." But we feel the change in our bones--sometimes literally. I feel it in my energy level, in a creeping sense of despair at yet another cold windy day when my body and my psyche is seriously ready for a break from winter. 

But what can we do?  We can acknowledge what economists call "The Tragedy of the Horizon," which is basically our inability to pay attention to the effect our current actions will have on the future and on future generations.  I learned about "The Tragedy of the Horizon" in Joseph Stiglitz's wonderful (and readable) book, The Road to Freedom:  Economics and the Good Society, where he actually envisions a "progressive capitalism" that isn't winners take all. Importantly, Stiglitz distinguishes between "freedom from" and "freedom to," explaining that one person's "freedom from" often compromises another's "freedom to."  His opening example is, literally, explosive.  Freedom from limits on buying guns tops another person's freedom to live.  In climate terms, corporations' freedom from regulation and limitations compromise future generations' freedom to live on a liveable planet.  What if we could just say that?  That our actions and choices today limit future freedom?  It's a good place to begin making the changes we all need to make.  If only we could convince the people who are way more powerful than we are of the same thing. 

Maybe patience isn't always a good idea.

On Vulnerability

I have fallen as I climbed the stairs from the Paris Metro into a rainy, windswept day.  I have fallen in the middle of York Avenue in Toronto--fortunately early on a Sunday morning.  I have fallen turning 90 degrees to dry my hands on a dishtowel.  I have caught my toes on nothing in the Lawson Fieldhouse and starfished onto the rubber pavement that caught my lazy toe. Curbs are my nightmare, particularly in winter, when I think I know where the edge is, only to have my heel hit a little ski slope, and down I go.  Or going up curbs.  If I'm not concentrating, I don't lift my right foot up far enough and my knees hit the pavement. I fell, on average, every 36 days last year. 

In an attempt to understand why I was falling and why my right leg quite consistently froze up mid-stride, I have spent three hours in an MRI.  I have had ten vials of blood drawn and then gone back for two more.  I have had my body mildly electrocuted for a nerve-induction study that would measure how well or badly my nerves were sending signals to my brain or my brain was sending signals to my limbs.  All through this, I have felt this was my fault:  that last winter, after three bad falls on ice, I gave up walking outside when I didn't have to until I was safe, and I let the strength in my right leg deteriorate to the point where it spasmed in weakness every three or four steps. 

But it wasn't my fault.  I have "significant" nerve damage because I have a couple of bulging disks and some arthritis in my back that has pinched nerves in my spine.  My brain was only whispering to my feet and legs.  My feet and legs were sending soft, slow messages to my brain that I was on uncertain terrain.  I nearly cried when the neurologist told me that.  

Because I was an English professor, I've tried to learn from this experience. (I know that sounds like a non sequitur, but English professors--all readers and lovers of art, really, try to learn from everything that is human.)  Simone Weil was obsessed with, among other things, "affliction," those moments in people's lives when they are or feel they are thrust outside normality or outside the human family.  Affliction can be as simple as feeling utterly incompetent in your body because you can't navigate curbs safely or it can be as complex and debilitating as being homeless or being an addict. A character in the novel I'm revising is working on an honours paper on Weil and sees affliction in the  homeless encampment outside the Regina City Hall.  What she sees is people "Beyond suffering.  Degradation and social exclusion and abandonment." My character is young, and she has a better grasp of the enormity of it: it isn't about falling up curbs.  It prompts her to recall Weil's plangent question:  "What are you going through?" Here's my first lesson:  I found that I asked that question more often, sometimes silently, sometimes by opening a door or asking how someone was doing or just seeing someone and making eye contact and smiling, saying hi.

I learned that my body is a means, not an end.  When you are young, the experiences of your body are ends in themselves.  It's your body, after all, that delivers you the pleasure of sunshine on your skin or great sex or the high you feel after a wonderful run. Celebrate every one of those delights your body delivers.  Lyra has just now climbed into my lap, and the weight and fur of a loving cat comes to me courtesy of my body.  Sometimes I think that part of our general ennui right now is that our screens make us all eyes, and we aren't experiencing or valuing the delights of our skin, the sound of animated conversations in a coffee shop, or the smell of baking bread. 

Then your hearing starts to go or things don't taste quite as intense as they used to, or you keep falling during your runs. (Though I have to say that cataract surgery has returned to me the vision of a world that is almost psychedelic in its intensity:  I'm seeing colours and textures I haven't noticed for years, seeing them everywhere. Grocery shopping is a gas.) You need to make a shift, to see your body as a container of your experience, your humanity, your knowledge and wisdom, your love of life. It has to get you to that long sleep with as much delight and love and grace as you can muster.  It has become a means.  So you need to take care of it, be gentle with it, accommodate it. I have learned, I think, to stop beating my body up so much with questions about its incompetence, though I've had a beast of a cold for nearly three weeks and I still want to ask "Why?"  Why am I still so exhausted?

You've been subject to my many mantras, particularly the one about being curious.  Or "Be. Here.  Now."  But I've discovered a new one.  "Cope with what is.  Embrace it if you can." I'm asking why a little less often, or cutting the question off mid-sentence.  Exhaustion is what I've got this afternoon.  What am I going to do with it?  A longer nap among the cats? A Miss Fisher mystery, stopping to envision all the delicious clothing?  Certainly I will obsess a little less about my step count and maybe find a good complicated book that I can just stop and think about when the cats feel cuddly. 

Worldviews and Reading

When you open the covers of a novel, you open the door or a gate or a window onto a different world view.

That's how I was going to begin this post, except I realized that this is also true when you read the first few lines of a poem or story.  Then I had to widen my scope even further to say that's what happens when you look at a painting or listen to a piece of music or go to a movie.  Maybe that's one of the sources of art's enduring power, the reason we seek it out, or even part of a workable definition of art, which eludes us still:  we seek a new perspective on our world. My aged scholarly roots in New Criticism and my own taste urge me to add that art is not dictatorial; it requires my participation or even collusion in the process of meaning-making. The work of art cannot say "You must agree with my vision. It's inarguable." If all a writer is willing to give the reader is certainty or a one-dimensional world view, the result is what Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning psychologist, called confirmation bias: "See. That view you already held?  You're right." That's propaganda.  

Yes, the artist puts his or her finger on the scale in the sense that they offer you this world view and not that one.  The writer may believe in hard-won hope or in demonstrable despair. The writer of historical fiction, for example, may hope that we gain knowledge from understanding historical events.  The writer of satire may think the best thing for the human psyche is to have its ego deflated regularly.  And as I spool out examples, it's clear to me that one of the uses of generic categories is that they narrow down our sense of the writer's world view, maybe so it rubs up against our own.  Writers of speculative fiction can create grimdark or hope punk.  Writers of realistic fiction can have the bitter bite of Kesey's Catch-22 or the gentle illuminations of human complexity in Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything, which I finished reading last night. So when I say "I don't really like satire," I'm just acknowledging that there's an obvious mis-match between the satirists' world-view and my own.

But what I want to acknowledge and explore here is that my tastes have changed in ways I find uncomfortable.  When I was young, I could read great draughts of Dostoevsky.  I once taught an entire class on Thomas Hardy, though that was because the prof who was supposed to teach it couldn't.  That was 1997:  I had no difficulty spending a term reading and teaching Hardy, though I couldn't do it now. Hardy's vision of a laughingly brutal universe in which anything that could go wrong would go wrong feels foreign to me--God knows why.  Hasn't that been the tenor of the last handful of years?  Except, hang on, it isn't fate that has caused the genocide in Gaza--let's call it what it is, though let's also be careful not to blame every Jew.  Nor is fate responsible for what Russians are doing to Ukrainians in the territory they capture.  It's us.  It's human beings.  It's the rapaciousness of certain leaders and the willingness--fearful willingness, probably--of others who follow orders.  Greed is the besetting sin of the early twentieth century.  Insatiable hunger for power. It's behind our failure to address climate change and behind the handful of wars that fill me with despair every morning. 

And Hardy knew that.  He was relentless about the damage social structures did to human lives.  But he had this thing about fate that's not consonant with my world view now.  I'm 74.  Fate is right around the corner in the shape of my mortality.  So I need to believe in my agency, my ability to navigate, with a modicum of grace and curiosity, what life is going to throw at me.

In the face of these fucked-up months and years, I can't open yet another gate or door that leads to disaster and brutality and cruelty.  I honestly can't.  So I find myself turning to nonfiction, to books about what we're learning about our world, about the sensory umwelt of bats and about how bats colonies have dialects and how batmothers talk baby-talk to their babies.  Or about how human beings have used notebooks to explore themselves and record their world.  How the very availability of paper bound into notebooks changed the world.  (I'll include a bibliography of my nonfiction delights below.)  Da Vinci's notebooks allowed him to practice drawing in a way that earlier painters couldn't, and so there's a new liveliness to his paintings--not to mention a sense of perspective. 

Jarod K. Anderson wrote Something in the Woods Loves You, a memoir of his hand-over-hand climb out of deep depression and about how nature comforts and illuminates and guides him through that.  I should write a post about it:  it's a beautiful book, honest and inspiring about human self-knowledge--and agency--but not unrealistic about depression. It's organized by seasons, and toward the end, as fall deepens, he can feel something of the darkness descending on him, but knows that he's not helpless in the face of it.  He says "I like to think of the ups and downs of my mental illness as 'brain weather.'" That phrase "brain weather" stuck with me.  Weather is so elemental.  We don't ignore it.  If it's raining, we grab an umbrella as we go out the door.  If it's thirty below, we suit up.

The contemporary moment creates a kind of reading brain weather for me. I find I'm drawn to gentler books, to Elizabeth Strout or Matt Haig or an old Graham Swift.  I want to know how it is with being human in those little daily ways we perhaps no longer take for granted but realize that they are the startling expression our freedom and kindness and generosity and self-reflection, qualities that, in the face of the horror in our newspapers, we suddenly value. And we need to keep them alive.

And maybe the idea of "reading brain weather" explains why we need so many genres and world views in our art.

My current nonfiction favourites include The Notebook:  A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, The Light Eaters:  How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (the title should really allude to plants, animals, and language) by Karen Bakker, and An Immense World:  How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. And of course, Jared K. Anderson, Something in these Woods Loves You. 

Giving Attention and World Peace

One night last weekend, I was sitting in the living room, which was lit only by the Christmas tree, some lights among the Santas on the mantle, and my task light, listening to Handel's Messiah and hand piecing a sunflower block, when something in my brain exploded, connecting giving attention and world peace in the most unlikely, but perhaps the most meaningful way.  Let me try to trace my thinking.

First, there was my last blog post which encouraged you, during this time of global violence and instability, during a time when "brain rot" is the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year, to think about where you gave your attention.  Don McKay brought this reframing to me when he was editing Visible Cities, and it changes the whole economy.  We "pay" attention like we pay our bills or pay for a coffee--a little casually, a little unthinkingly.  It's only money. But if we "give" attention, we realize that our attention is a gift--both to ourselves and to the particulars of the world we are attending to.

At the same time, I was reading two entirely disparate books that had attention at their centres. One was Matt Haig's The Life Impossible, in which the 72-year-old retired school teacher and widow, Grace Winter, travels to the island of Ibiza to check out a house she has apparently inherited from an old friend.  I should say that when Grace became a widow, she lost the single thing in life to which she gave her attention.  This was because she casually refused to drive her son to the local shops on a rainy day, her attention being elsewhere, and his bicycle collided with a bus. Grieving a child's death is one of the most difficult things parents are called on to do, and I don't think we can criticize anyone for the way in which they navigate a loss that is both emotional and existential.  What can you do with the infinite hole that is the loss of a child? What has the universe become that it can take away a child? Its indifference, if not its malignity, is manifest.  Grace's strategy is to make her world smaller and smaller, dividing it into manageable chunks, by paying attention to as little as possible, unspooling her days watching anodyne, bland TV. 

Like Matt Haig's wildly popular The Midnight Library, The Life Impossible involves supernatural events that are really metaphors for life's challenges and opportunities.  While scuba diving in order to investigate the death of the friend who willed Grace her house, she is touched by a supernatural light that sometimes springs from the ocean and gives people extraordinary powers. Grace now knows what people are thinking, has access to bits and pieces of their past, understands the agitation of lobsters in a tank and manages to break it from a distance, forces a seriously unpleasant man complaining about food at a restaurant to plunge his fork repeatedly into his thigh.  For Grace--probably for anyone waking up from a "seizure" while scuba diving--these powers are deeply disturbing.  The world becomes too much, demanding too much of her attention.  But she manages to focus it on a developer who wants to destroy part of Ibiza with a hotel and spa, saving the landscape and the species he'd like to eradicate from the island, from his insanely destructive plans.  Giving attention where she thinks it will be useful, she manages to tame it but also to unleash its ethical power. And giving attention returns meaning to her life.

Simone Weil, who is apparently having a moment, couldn't be more different from Grace.  While I am revising my novel, Home in Storm Weather, I am re-reading Weil and scholarship on Weil because one of my characters, a history student, is working on an honours paper about the French philosopher.  Waiting in my doctor's office, I came across an essay in The Drift  by Jackson Hanson called "Whose Weil?  Simone Weil, Patron Saint of Everyone," in which he looks at current thought about Weil. He almost makes the argument that you can get Simone Weil's life and thought to make sense only if you ignore a lot. One of the best of the recent books on Weil, Hanson tells us, is A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone's Simone Weil, which she wrote for the Oxford University Press very short introduction series.  Perhaps that is because Rozelle-Stone divides her attention thematically rather than chronologically, which allows her to dive deeply into, say, Weil's ethics or into her belief in beauty.  And the first chapter is, of course, on attention.  There were a number of good reasons for this, not the least of which one of Weil's most famous quotations:  "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."  

Let me give you only a handful of examples.  When Weil was five and Europe was in the midst of World War I, she and her brother Andre "adopted" a handful of soldiers who had no family, sending them most of their rations of sugar and all of their chocolate. Weil herself gathered wood, which her parents would pay her for, spending the proceeds on care packages for the soldiers.  She was one of the first women, along with Simone de Beauvoir, to be admitted to the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, where she came first in the philosophy exams.  Afterward, she taught in small schools around France, often getting into trouble for her involvement in politics, before quitting teaching altogether and taking up factory work. She was a hopeless labourer, slow and awkward and frequently fired.  But she paid attention.  For two summers in the late sixties and early seventies I worked ten hours a day in a factory--$1.69 an hour becomes a luxurious $2.39 an hour at the end of the day--and I can tell you that she paid attention.  She fully understood the exhausting tedium of factory work that left the worker little energy for anything above survival at the end of the day.  That came to inform her vision for a post-war France Charles de Gaulle asked her to conceive when she was working with him and the Free French in London, The Need for Roots.

She died paying attention.  Diagnosed with tuberculosis while working with the Free French, she was told to eat well.  Yet she continued attempting to live on what Parisians were given to eat when Paris was occupied by Nazis.  The coroner said she refused food while the balance of her mind was disturbed; others thought she starved herself in an attempt at Christ-like self-erasure that coloured her life; her closest friend said that she simply couldn't eat at the end of her life. Her first English biographer, Richard Reese sums up the controversy by saying "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love." Her life and her choices are obviously not the best argument for paying attention.  A feminist lens might place her with the nineteenth-century heroines who are simply too good to live, goodness being synonymous with a species of passivity.  So they die in childbirth or languish with consumption.

But the recent interest in her philosophy, and Hanson's question "Whose Weil?" suggests she fascinates at this historical moment for some reason.  Is it because we live in a time when egotism and grievance have gotten out of control and we seek a counterweight? She has given me a question that I ask when I'm struggling with walking.  Yesterday at the Lawson, I took my tenth fall of the year, brought over by nothing but my right leg's reluctance to lift itself above the sticky track.  My own toes brought me down.  And I can get rather self-pitying until I see someone whose struggles are so much greater than mine.  Then I ask, with Simone Weil, "What are you going through?" Her question turns self-pity and fear into empathy. 

But I promised a connection to Handel's Messiah, and I'm going to keep my promise.  As I hand-pieced my cheerful sunflower block I thought about these two women and their ideas about attention.  And then the biblical texts chosen for Messiah inserted themselves between these thoughts, with their emphasis, first on human and political arrogance and then on peace.  And came the thunderclap.  In our everyday lives, we can create peace by paying attention, often to people who are labouring in invisibility or different from ourselves.

Surviving a Trump Presidency

I don't know whether I'm proud or dismayed when I say that I've had several cats who are smarter than Donald Trump.  When I broke my ankle, about twenty years ago now, Twig didn't leave me for the two weeks I spent mostly in bed, except to eat.  When I had Covid-19, Tuck stretched out tightly by my side and Lyra huddled down on my chest, reaching his paw up to place it on my throat or on the side of my neck.  Those are just the most dramatic examples of the behaviour of creatures who know, daily, that their job is to love and provide care if necessary and who understand how love and care are reciprocal.  Lyra and Tuck join me every day for my afternoon nap, when they curl up tightly in my lap or against my hip, as if we were the same tribe, as if differences, even between species, didn't exist.  

I don't think love, care, reciprocity--some of the highest human virtues--are in Trump's emotional lexicon, which is instead crowded with anger, hate, greed, grievance, and vengeance.  His misogyny and racism are evidence that emphasizing difference, calcifying in-group and out-group tensions, has political currency.  He is America's id, and he has given far too many Americans permission to speak the same language--or at least to filter out his obscenities and cruelties and vote for  him because they believe he'll lower the price of gas and groceries.  His language has distorted how we talk to and see one another, emphasizing differences between us rather than the human similarities.  It's one of the first things we need to challenge.

So how do we survive the next four years, whether, as Canadians, we are watching in horror, or whether, as Americans, we are caught up in the madness and touched by it daily? I'm inclined to begin with Henry James, who has said that three things in life are important.  "The first is to be kind.  The second is to be kind.  The third is to be kind." Unexpected acts of kindness make me feel a paradox: how a kind act is so evanescent, yet it's one of the ways we can change the world. It might bloom and lead to another kind act later in the day, or maybe just a smile or a iighter mood.  But that's not the whole point.  Kindness is world-defining.  "This is the world I choose to live in, to help create" a kind act says.  It de-centers the greedy, grieved, vengeful id.

                                
Beauty, too, is world-defining. What is human consciousness that it seeks out something as "pointless" as beauty?  It suggests that the order and freedom that are usually part of what we perceive as beautiful feed human consciousness in an important way. We apperceive order in the natural world, for example, and our valuing of the sound of aspen trees or the bloom of a orchid affirms that we have a place in this world, that there is a consonance between the qualities of the world and the qualities of our minds. But our appreciation of beauty isn't transactional, except that we might share it with someone else.  A lot of the beauty we are moved by is, like kindness, evanescent, and as such can't be measured but merely experienced and shared. How do you measure a sunset or a child's first laugh? Trump has no aesthetic sense. (He hasn't even figured out that suit jackets are supposed to be buttoned when the wearer is standing.) Mar-a-lago is an ugly temple to excess, to things you can measure.   But the immeasurable matters.  We are more than our bank accounts.  Time is not money:  it's an opportunity to glory in the world's beauty and to create an entirely different economy when we share that experience with someone else.

I've been reading way too much about the future Trump presidency (and I'm not going to get into the wholly inappropriate choices for his cabinet here, though their ability to unmake America is terrifying), and numerous journalists have said that in order to mitigate the damage his presidency will do, we need to focus.  Pick one thing that you are going to work towards and give it as much time and effort as you can.  Maybe it's the environment or human rights.  Maybe you want to find ways to push against economic inequality--raises and tax cuts for CEO's and a static minimum wage for the poor--that will doubtless be one of the hallmarks of his administration.  Maybe you think the money Trump is going to spend rounding up immigrants might better be spent creating 3 million homes; they will cost the same amount. Do what you can, beginning by keeping informed.  

Slow down. Put away your phone. Think about where you are giving your attention--with emphasis on "giving attention" rather than "paying attention."  (Thank you, Don McKay for this important distinction.)  Your attention is a gift.  Trump won, in part, because enough of the electorate, exit polls show, didn't pay or give attention to the obscenities or racist comments in his later rallies or to that weird one where he played music and danced, or the sentences that weren't sentences and that led commentators to wonder about his declining cognitive capacity.  Trump will want to keep you busy and anxious--he's brilliant at doing just that.  But what if you remembered that your attention is a gift and spent less time doomscrolling and more time with the people you love and the communities you value? What if you made your primarily relationship this year not one you have with your phone but with the people around you?

Support the arts.  Keep nuance and complexity and humanity alive by going to a concert or taking in a play or spending Sunday afternoon at the art gallery.  What if you re-learned deep reading--something you honestly can't do with your cell phone by your side.  Deep reading is so good for our brains!  One of the most pleasurable ways of learning to concentrate and to think outside ourselves--harder than we usually think and about things we know little about--is to get lost in a book.  Even Pope Francis has weighed in on deep reading.  Both he and philosopher Martha Nussbaum argue that "Without the empathy that literature can instill, 'there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion mercy.'" I've read articles and articles about what Kamala Harris did "wrong," and I'm not sure I fully believed any of them, but what if the election results have everything to do with the fact that too many of us don't read deeply any more and have lost the ability to pay careful attention and to think about someone besides ourselves?

The other wonderful thing about the arts--I'm only scratching the surface here; whole books are written about this--is that they are rebellious.  They push back.  They give voice to the voiceless.  They are critical and think deeply. They give us some of the deepest pleasures we experience. They keep another strand of history--cultural history, not the buffoonery that politics has become--alive. So rebel against the age of Trump by going to the art gallery or to a concert.

The other rebellious thing you can do is to play.  Again, it's without "value."  A cynic, Oscar Wilde said, is a man "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."  We are living in a very cynical time.  But play Wordl or scrabble with your family.  Go down the snowy slopes with your kids.  Design your own quilt or knit mittens with deaths' heads or lady bugs on them.  You're not only pushing back at the deep cynicism of our time, but raising your own spirits.

My notebook tells me I'm not done with this topic, but I'll finish for today.  I began with kindness and I'll end with kindness.  Be kind to yourself.  You're going to need your energy for the longer haul, for the Canadian election, probably next fall, or for the midterms in the U.S. "Self-care," insofar as it suggests scented candles or bubble bath, is not all that effective.  Know and respect the limits of your energy or your tolerance.  But the resilience we often seek in "self-care" is found in community.  And your community--even just your small community of friends--need you.