Entropy

Ah, spring on the prairies!  As the snow melts, almost green edges of grass appear.  So does the grime of winter:  the few leaves we never got around to raking up, the dirty snow banks covered in the sand and muck that made the city streets passable, blocks of ice covering the storm drains, leaving huge puddles at intersections. Our shoes and boots bring the grime indoors, undoing the cleaning we did just yesterday.  Spring on the prairies seems like entropy in action, a sense of things falling apart, not something new about to arrive.

That is followed by more disorder: the relentless spring snowstorms.  It's true that having the grime covered up makes the world beautiful and serene again.  The sticky snow adheres to tree branches, rendering them even more poetic in the twists and turns they take as they grow away from their trunks. But it seems like evidence of entropy nevertheless, a sense of having dissolved into the backwash of winter memories.  A sense of being stuck in a perverse Groundhog Day, where time simply will not go forward.  

Actually, what I've just written sounds poetically true, but it's not true to physics.  Entropy is called time's arrow.  We know that time is passing because things are changing or falling apart.  Entropy, according to the second law of thermodynamics, is the tendency of systems to decay, to fall apart.  That system might be your body.  It might be your desk as more and more papers and books find their way there. It might be life online, which seems to be decaying in all kinds of problematic and unanticipated directions. Is that what "enshititfication" is all about?  Decay of things that worked perfectly well?  Yes, but that's only part of it.  Entropy happens first at the atomic level, at the cellular level.

Entropy is certainly an intimate part of my lived experience.  My taste buds are less and less sensitive, so that even the wonderful Viennese coffee I bought at Murchie's in Victoria tastes like Maxwell House, though it smells wonderful when I'm grinding the beans.  The nerves in my legs and feet are talking more and more softly to my brain--and my brain is just whispering to my legs and feet--a dangerous state of things that I can only address with a disciplined program of walking.  Even my reading of late seemed focused on entropy, as if entropy were central to the zeitgeist of the third decade of the twenty-first century. It started with Covid, which challenged the social fabric in ways that are still present in people's health and the political polarization we saw in the Trucker's Blockade.  Then the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Then the Hamas attack on Israel and the Israeli response.  The Orange Ogre has only upped the speed of things with his kidnaping of Maduro, his bombing of Iran, his demands for Greenland.  I think someone needs to write a book called Entropy for Stoics. Because the Stoic habit--which is also a Buddhist one--of realizing that in the face of overwhelming external events, the only control you have is over your own response.  Suffering is.  Entropy is. Start building the mental framework that will allow you to endure in perilous times.

My entropy reading began with Katie Mack's entertaining, accessible, and prize-winning book, The End of Everything Astrophysically Speaking).  I had picked up this book, described by the New York Times as one of the 100 notable books of  2020, because I enjoy reading science and I was looking for metaphors for some poems that I can't get to lift off because I don't have a framework I can stretch my sensibility and my experience over.  Mack has two important skills as a writer of popular science:  She's very entertaining--often very funny--and clear.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the disorder of a system increases over time, just as heat disperses to cooler areas. You experience entropy when your coffee gets cold while you're pursuing a great idea or doom scrolling.  The energy of the hot coffee dissipates into the room.  Yes, energy is transferred, but it never comes back to that cup of coffee.  This is both entropy and time's arrow:  it's a one-way street.

Mack explores a number of ways the universe might end, and the quietest of these is simply entropy.  As the universe expands more and more, galaxies and stars and planets will become more distant from one another.  The lived experience of an organism on earth millions of years into the future will be of deeper and deeper darkness at night--assuming we still have a sun.  The energy created by the galaxies and their stars will wind down, losing heat like your cup of coffee; bonds between atoms will not hold, and the energy in the universe will simply dissipate. 

Since February of 2025, my life has had a kind of entropy about it.  I never knew how I would feel when I got up in the morning, whether I'd actually be rested, whether I would be fogged in, how long my energy might last.  The disorder of entropy had its corollary in the uncertainty of my days.  After I read an article by Gillian Deacon in The Globe and Mail about some of the delights of uncertainty, I read her book A Love Affair with the Unknown.  In between chapters about various kinds of uncertainty we face now--our anxiety about the environment comes to mind--she traces the progress of her own illness characterized by extreme exhaustion, weird things happening in her sinuses, and terrible headaches.  Visits to every kind of befuddled specialist are described, as is the fact that she has to take a leave of absence from her job as radio host of Here and Now on CBC. But not before telling us what she loves about hosting a live radio show:  the uncertainty, the flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants chance to make something lively out of a technical glitch or a recalcitrant guest.

It's not surprising that she offers good advice, then.  Like trading anxiety for adaptability.  I inadvertently tried this when I told myself "Cope with what is," though it months before I could do it very well.  And then the question shifted a little.  "This is what you have right now.  What can you make of it?"  I had liked the matter-of-factness of "cope," but the verb "make" gave me more agency. Sometimes the answer was pleasant, thoughtful hours reading Robert MacFarlane's latest book, Is a River Alive? while sitting in the back garden listening to the nuthatches come in for a a sunflower seed and wedge it in the bark of the crab apple tree just above my head to extract the seed.  You can almost always make something out of the present moment if you look carefully about you with  your curiosity at the ready. Sometimes the making was hand piecing while I listened to jazz or Bach, working on the quilt at the top of the post--a quilt with its own kind of disorder. Deacon notes that we choose what to focus on.  We can insist "This shouldn't be happening to me!"  "This is so unfair!"  "I should be getting better!" But that kind of "existential wailing," as I came to call it, keeps us from finding solutions to what is.  

Focusing on the anxiety we feel about our health, the future of the planet, or the fate of our job when AI comes online, Deacon looks squarely at the advantages of feeling vulnerable and uncertain.  When we're vulnerable, we are open to learning new things and to pronouncing an adventurous "I don't know." Certainty and invulnerability are close-minded, whereas vulnerability can be open.  We can craft resilience when we are vulnerable.  I found her reference to Richard Tedeschi's concept of "post-traumatic growth" particularly helpful.  He and his colleagues have done solid research on the way that traumatic events can be followed by reflection, introspection, adaptation, and growth. It's another way not to be passive, to "make" something out of our circumstances, out of this new knowledge of entropy.

Most recently, I began reading The Mattering Instinct by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.  You will be relieved that I'm only part way into it, and that there is no way I can briefly render the subtleties and complexities of Goldstein's thoughts about mattering.  But I recommend the book highly, particularly if you, like me, are intensely aware of the way that entropy is coming for you.  Goldstein argues that mattering is a foundational human project.  In the first instance, we need to matter to someone else. If you are a parent, you know that job one is to let your kids know they matter; in all their complexity, with scraped knees and beauty marks, they matter.  And doubtless you know the lifelong wounds borne by those who have not mattered in that intimate way which appreciates people exactly as they are.  It can, I suspect, be summed up in that trope "Hurt people hurt people."  But secondly, we need to matter to ourselves.  I don't think I'd be simplifying too much if I placed that "instinct" at the intersection of our large, energy-swilling, self-reflective brains and entropy.  In order to keep the anxieties of entropy, of time and dissolution, at bay, we all need what she calls a "mattering project." 

When I had energy, I cut out all the complex pieces of a block in Jen Kingwell's Halo Quilt; when I didn't have energy, I'd hand piece them while enjoying the interplays of colour and texture.  As you can see from the photograph of her quilt above, it's a kind of entropy quilt.  Most of the blocks seem entirely unorganized, grabbing a turquoise polka dot and putting it next to a red and white text fabric and then adding black and white stripes.  I have a feeling you can't do it badly:  those dark circles, made of the four quarter circles in each block, hold the quilt together.  In the few blocks at the top of the post, you can see that I couldn't quite follow her arbitrary choices.  The central square-in-a square patch and the four curved pieces that will hold the quarter circles match one another.  For me, a quilt is an invitation to a mood, a frame of mind.  So I wanted to create a still centre for your eye.  But then in the quarter circles, I went all out;  it's where the blocks meet that you get the energy.  The "halo" holds it all together.  On rough days, when I didn't have enough energy to matter, I'd sit with a cat on my lap and hand piece.  I had a "mattering project" that fit my difficult days, but one that I could drop when ideas returned to the quiet forest that was my mind, returning tentatively, like deer and rabbits, to just hang out with me, reminding me that in the wild world we all matter.  You matter.

Poetic Gestures

 

Am I really going to start another blog post with the words "It's been a terrible week for the world:  everyone will suffer from a war in Iran if it isn't brought to a swift conclusion, and the idiot id in the White House and the new leader of Iran, whom we haven't seen yet, so who knows who's in charge, have been pretty stubbornly categorical about their intentions"?  No, I'm  not going to begin that way.  I'm going to tell you a story and then talk about a fabulous podcast.

Last Tuesday, I went to the Thirteenth Avenue Coffeehouse to pick up lunch for Nikka and me.  We always lunch together on Tuesday, and I'm reminded each time that I'm lucky to have a wonderful relationship with a lovely daughter.  Can I say that I hate March--not just because I'll turn 76 later in the month?  The constant freezing and thawing creates a lot of ice, and a concatenation of health issues means that I'm prone to falling.  I'm getting too old to fall, so I pick my routes very carefully.  The sidewalk on Thirteenth Avenue where I'd parked was sheer ice, so I took the route between parked and moving cars because it was nicely gritty.  When I came to the Coffeehouse, I could see they'd shoveled, so I had safe footing--until I came to the very bottom of their stairs, where rain earlier in the week had pooled and frozen in a sleek but small skating rink.  But there was one spot next to the handrail that was clear, so I picked my way carefully up the stairs.

I was cheerful and pleasant as they brought my order and I finished paying.  Then I said calmly "You have a large patch of ice just at the bottom of your stairs that you might want to deal with."  I smiled and turned to go when two young men having lunch instantly got up.  "Can I help you?" they both asked.  "No, I'm good," I told them as I made my way to the door, one of them on each side of me.  I quickly recognized that I couldn't hold my food, the handrail, and my cane, so I gave my bag to one of them to carry.  They wanted to grasp my elbows as I went down the stairs, but the handrail is better for me.  They both saw me to the bottom, and the taller of the two handed back my food.  I stopped to look both of them in the eyes to say "You're great.  This was so helpful."  The tall one said "It took thirty seconds," and the shorter of the two said "My coaches used to say if I was sitting down, I was missing something."  "Well, you didn't miss a chance to be kind," I said as I went on my way to my car.  

As I pulled out and drove west on Thirteenth, the car in front of me stopped suddenly, not near an intersection.  "Huh? Well, maybe the driver is deciding which way to go." I halted patiently. But the driver got out of her car and began waving at me.  I rolled down my window and she yelled "There's a bag on the roof of your car."  When you're dealing with a purse and a cane and getting out your keys next to moving traffic, getting recombobulated can be complicated.  I'd left the food on the roof, and she had noticed it and decided to do something about it.

What an antidote to the idiot id!  If you think worldwide, this cluster of kindness wasn't an anomaly.  Now that I need a cane constantly, it's pretty common for me to experience kindness.  While the orange oaf was bombing schools in Iran, thousands of kind things were also being done.  And, according to Fix the News, hundreds of solar panels were being installed, and rewilding efforts were making progress in Europe.  A river in England had been restored to its original meandering shape--not straightened to make farming easier. As drones hit buildings housing important Iranians, the river's species were happily returning.  Egypt eliminated trachoma while Trump was bombing an Iranian desalination plant.

Now stay with me here, because I'm going to take a left turn and do some intricate doodling.  That afternoon, I got on my exercise bike to get my steps in.  I like podcasts while I work out, and Krista Tippett had launched a new season.  As luck would have it, this was an interview with two poets, both of whom had been the U.S. poet laureate, Tracy K. Smith (2017-2019) and Joy Harjo (2019-2022).  I recommend this podcast highly; you'll find it on the On Being website.  I won't do it justice because I was peddling like mad and then stopping the bike occasionally so I could scribble down a few words that resonated.  

They read from their work occasionally, but mostly they talked about the value of poetry in a time of "reckonings," though no one defined that era and no one mentioned the Orange Oaf.  Perhaps because they were in a very ceremonial, public role, they thought about poetry as part of civil society.  Because poetry brings a new state of mind into existence, its practice is highly individual; because it is also meant to speak to others, poetry's very existence means that we are separate and yet interconnected--all at the same time. It helps society see and accept that frame of mind.  Back when I taught, I often told my students that human beings have two very basic, contradictory desires.  They want to be their inimitable selves.  And they want to belong.  Heads in my classroom would nod, at first tentatively, thoughtfully, and then with more vigour. Poetry enacts that basic human contradiction. Joy Harjo said that poetry is also an intrinsic part of the story matrix that joins us.

Harjo was poet laureate during the shutdown for Covid, but Smith took the occasion to travel all over the country, often stopping in small towns that didn't look like poetry was one of their basic interests.  Yet people came.  She would read from her work and then ask the audience what they noticed.  Not "What does the poem mean?"--a question we torture our students with.  But "What did you notice?" She was playing into the hands of their lived experience, because what they would notice would in part be what was familiar.  As people tentatively identified what they'd noticed, someone would take the opportunity to relate an anecdote that the poem had unearthed.  And then others would do the same. Their stories became longer and richer. Thus the "reading" became a celebration of our various humanity.

Curiosity is a mental muscle, Smith says.  I know that for years, I've relied on one of my mantras that tells me to "Just be curious."  Don't leap to judgments about something that is unfamiliar or puzzling.  Just be curious.  It opens up the world rather than shutting me in a safe, certain, windowless box. But I don't think I realized that curiosity is a mental muscle that can atrophy if we don't feed it with surprises.  Poetry inherently keeps that mental muscle alive.  Because poetry is inherently contradictory, or, I would say open-ended, it keeps a certain limber kind of thinking alive that sees contradiction as part of our experience of daily life and as part of our humanity--part of our own experience of the world and part of our relationships with others.

Is there such a thing as a poetry of gesture?  How can I explain that the people that helped me last Tuesday were creating little haikus of connection that were beautiful and fleeting?  They had observed something others might not see. It began with curiosity:  might that small, silver-haired woman with a cane need some help?  What is that bag doing on the roof of the car? But then they created a transitory connection where nothing had been before.  Dacher Keltner, the world expert on awe, did a vast, multicultural study that revealed what prompts us to feel awe.  Would it surprise you to know that moral beauty is number one and nature number two? "Moral beauty" appears when someone does something kind, compassionate, even self-sacrificing. It can be saving someone's life at the risk of your own--an epic poem. It can be a small act of kindness that briefly diverts you from your twenty-first century rush to get things done--an unassuming haiku, stark in its brevity.         

Staying Open

Psychologists have identified five characteristics of most people's temperaments.  The shorthand goes like this:  extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to new experiences.  I'm not sure I like the way they tend to list "the big five," as a single good choice with an unspoken dark double.  Some of us are introverts; others are extroverts, and the world needs both.  Some of us have stable moods, while some of us struggle with mood disorders or our mental health.  Some of us are easy-going, where others are a bit cranky.  Some of us are conscientious; others need to go their own way or take care of number one.  Some of us are inclined to say yes to new experiences; others say no.  For years, even before I knew about "the big five," I knew there were introverts and extroverts.  I'm definitely an introvert, but my faux extrovert is pretty skilled.  And I knew there were "yes people" and "no people":  some people opened their arms to others, to the world, to surprise, to adventure.  For others, their favourite word, in a whole host of ways, was "No."

Unless it involves doing dangerous things with my body, I'm a "yes person."  (I have neither prowess nor bravery.) Except this moment in the twentieth century is challenging that tendency in so many ways.  For one thing, I'm down on men.  Not you nice guys who are reading this, but those besotted with their own power and wealth:  they've done a lot of damage in the last three or four years.  I'm reading less and less news, watching less and less TV coverage.  This new habit argues with one of the qualities not listed in the big five:  curiosity.  I'm always curious. "What's up with that?" "What's  happening here?"  Or the big one:  "Why?"  That one is too big to embrace the events of Tumbler Ridge.  We'll have to settle with "What can we do?" and for most of us who live far away, the answer is "Be kind." Or "Be helpful when you see someone struggling." "Be open." 

But even before that visceral shock, the idiot id who lives south of us had been riding roughshod over my psyche.  When he kidnapped Maduro, he pulled a painful strand of memories I could call "reactions to American Imperialism" tied to my past that goes all the way back to the Vietnam War, especially the My Lai Massacre, which revealed that even when the "world's policeman" intervenes, it isn't always for noble reasons.  The assumption that anyone could march into another country to change their history or their values makes me almost physically sick. Then the Orange Ogre wanted to own Greenland, without acknowledging the kinds of intransigent conflict that desire created.  He backed off on that.  Then two good people were needlessly killed by ICE in Minneapolis by men with masks.  (Have I said I'm down on men with guns?) Now the occupation that was so necessary to save Minneapolis from itself has been ended.  So I'm left with two reactions.  What stupid and needlessly violent thing will he think of next?  And how soon afterwards will he cancel it--as if it were a needless bad joke?  I can't listen anymore.  

But I can't shift into the "no" camp, for ethical reasons.  Many of us need to witness what is happening.  And if we all turtle into ourselves, who will be left doing the good work, the kind work, reflecting on what our values should be? What will hold our social networks, our communities together if we are all hiding our heads?  So I've decided to shift my energy to what and who is close by, what I can change, where I can see beauty, not ugly violence.  

I'm going after glimmers, identified by Deb Dana.  Glimmers are small moments that make you smile or lift your spirits.  Lyra and Tuck, my two loving cats, provide lots of glimmers, whether they are piled on my legs for a nap, which they do every day after lunch, or whether they are curled up tightly with one another in a configuration that reads "love." Today I took delight in the way a line of trees along Wascana Creek danced and shifted as I drove around a curve and my perspective changed.  I felt delight in all that said about the power of perspective and change. Or the fantails of two pigeons who hang out at our feeder, which make perfect arcs as they ascend to the roof of our garage.  It's a smile, a butterfly, a flower--beauty that doesn't need to be there, but that the world just routinely gives to us, because that's the way the world is.

And I'm brushing up on Dachner Keltner's work on awe.  How feeling awe in a landscape, in a piece of music or a work of art, can remind us that there are big things in the world that we do not fully understand.  How do you understand a mountain?  How do you understand how you feel about the spaciousness of the prairie?  Why does that particular tangle of notes in woodwinds and brass give you goosebumps?  When you acknowledge that you are moved in a way you can't explain, you acknowledge that there is something bigger than we are.  The thing that makes us feel awe most fully is called "moral beauty."  When you see people being kind, compassionate, and courageous, you see the best of our humanity.  At Tumbler Ridge, there were older students protecting younger ones, teachers trying to soothe a frightened class, political leaders holding hands and forgetting politics for a day to acknowledge the suffering of a community. 

Or fall in love.  Remember why you love someone, renew that feeling, really look, observe, remember why you felt it.  For I can't think of anything more open than love.

 

Habit

Imagine creating a cubist portrait of someone you love or know very well. Cubism would give you the chance to capture the myriad aspects of their personality.  You'd inevitably begin with some of the more dominant facets:  the stories they frequently tell so you can see them forming a backdrop to who they are now.  Past and present relationships, including family, of course.  Their passions--at least you hope they have passions!  Passions for books, opera, hiking, watching soccer, vinyl records. Worldview:  how do they see the human condition and human society, and conceive of their place in it? But you might find that you needed a small slice of a bright colour for their habits.

I remember vividly the beginning of my habit of playing four games of Solitaire--analog, with real decks of cards--before going to bed at night.  It was a dark and stormy night.  Lightning flashed and thunder rolled, but Bill and I had our bedroom window and curtains open because it was summer.  I love watching thunderstorms.  But the storm on that summer's night also reminded me of going to Silver Lake in Michigan, for a week's holiday, when I was about seven or eight.  It rained a lot, of course.  So my sister, Karen, who is seven years older than I am, taught me to play Solitaire, and when I got reasonably good, we'd play Double Solitaire, where any player can use the aces that have been uncovered.  Whoever wins their game first, wins. Obviously, Karen won most of the time.  But since then I've returned to Solitaire many times:  it appeals to the side of me that likes creating order.  You shuffle the cards to make them as random as possible, hide half your options while scrolling through the other half, trying to uncover and use the hidden half.  I became rather good at it, though I always knew when I needed a new deck of cards; when I couldn't win and couldn't win the cards were just too sticky. 

Once I got good at it, it became more than just four games of Solitaire; it became a kind of meditation, a probing of life's rules.  There are three different kinds of games.  Those you can win, one hand tied behind your back or half asleep.  These just unfold obligingly and I found they paralleled times in my past life and, I hope, my life to come, where life just worked.  I hadn't cajoled it into working nor did I deserve it; things simply fell into order.  It was the nature of the universe. Interestingly, these games are humbling.  They made me realize my success isn't always of my own making.  Sometimes the universe simply aligns.

There are games you just can't win, no matter how clever you are.  It's when the red ten you really need to move is actually covering both black jacks and one king so there's no way you can move it. There's a certain kind of comfort here, particularly if you are a writer trying to publish work.  Sometimes the editor's taste or the timing of your poem or the styles and subjects that are currently popular mean that no matter how successfully your poem captures life and experience and the world, no matter how effective your language is or how beautifully your form echoes sense, it's not going to be  published. 

Then there are the games that I can win if I'm clever.  These are actually my favourite because they suggest I have agency in the world. If I've got one red and one black ace, I can shift cards here and there, so I can finally get to that last overturned card.  If I don't jump on the chance to fill in a space with a king, but wait for the right king, or don't put my black threes on their aces because there are a couple of red twos hanging around and no red aces to give me somewhere to put them, effectively blocking a whole pile of cards I need, I can win this game.  Sometimes I have to be patient with how slowly it's coming, but I realize that order is slowly appearing, and I'm willing to just doggedly go on.  Life's like that a lot:  not all the wins are easy, but determination matters.

I've also learned that in Solitaire, as in communities and nature, diversity matters.  If I've got nothing but black cards and a mix of odds and evens, I may be screwed. If I have two pairs that don't play nicely together--say two red eights and two red sevens--I'll inevitably lose because four cards of the seven you have will never relate to one another.  Sometimes I play these out to make sure my assumptions still hold--and they do.  Again, it's like life.  If you just don't have enough variety, there are perspectives you will never uncover.

Habits are stepping stones, guiding you through your day.  They are handholds when you're feeling off kilter.  They are maps when you don't quite know where you're going.  We cling to them most when life is uncertain.  And if life isn't uncertain now, I don't know what it is. They're also part of our self-portrait.  That funny way you brush your teeth?  It's just you.  I always wipe the counters with a dishcloth, whether they need it or not, at the end of doing dishes.  That's not just me; that's a little bit of my mother. But they can also be caricatures.  I've developed a habit of bending way over to find something in my purse or struggle with the zipper on my coat.  (Zippers may be the thing I hate most about winter.) But Veronica has pointed out that I could stand up straight and bring my purse up or the zipper closer to my face.  I think she's also reacting to the fact that I turn myself into the parody of an old woman when I do that.  

Sometimes I only see a habit clearly when it's no longer serving  me as well as it did.  I think I'm close to giving up my four nightly games.  One reason I initially liked it was that there was no real point to it.  Nothing in my life, my knowledge, or my universe changed if I won or lost. It was forty minutes of being carefree before bed, and I spend very little of my life--except doomscrolling these days--doing things that are entirely pointless.  I'm making a baby quilt that's giving me a lot of pleasure, but it's neither pointless nor carefree.  (It's more green than grey, as it is in the photo above.) There's a real baby waiting for it, and there are twelve places where points must match exactly.  The quilt blocks you see at the top of the post should yield a Halo Quilt designed by Australian designer, Jen Kingwell.   I'm choosing fabrics for the Halo Quilt that read "gypsy tent." Someday there will be a quilt and someone will, I hope, be delighted with its whimsy, but I'm hand piecing it, so it's going to take a while.  I don't care:  it's fun. I thought of doing that in the hour before we go to sleep, but I'm afraid of leaving pins in the bed.

Light, Darkness, and Great Battles

I want to hibernate. I want to gather myself a pile of good books--upbeat or reflective books, not a tough critique of the human condition at present filled with lots of violence and anger.  No rage bait--Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year. The sky is one huge, undifferentiated cloud, which makes me feel lost.  What's up?  What's far away? My sense of perspective struggles. The world is reduced to black and white--which is of course false. The world right now is anything but black and white. Yet maybe black and white is a simplicity I'd like to occupy for a while. I'll gather up some hand piecing in cheerful colours and patterns.  I'll worry a little less about whether things match and more about whether they vibrate.  I want to sit in front of the Christmas tree with nothing but my task light on and read, reflect, and piece. I want to spend time making something beautiful and useful or immersed in words that someone has crafted into a fresh and illuminating beauty. 

It's been a tough year for me.  It's been an even tougher year for the world, as I am well aware; that fact has kept self-pity in check--along with the fact that focusing on one's misery eats up perfectly good time.  The "leader of the free world" is a vengeful toddler with little focus except for his grievances.  There are wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan where little in the way of human wisdom is being brought to bear.  No sense of what's reasonable; no empathy. Could we call this "the year of the guy"?  Angry young men supporting Trump; the masked faced of ICE;  Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu guided by nothing but their own survival and their pile of loot--like Smaug. Twice in the last couple of days when a car wasn't quick off the mark at a light--it's too slippery to be quick!--other cars honked.  What's that all about? Two seconds makes a difference exactly how? People don't realize that it's their own impatience that makes them miserable, that steals their equanimity, not someone else's incompetence. 

Then Krista Tippett sent out her year-end email that began with this sentence: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." Those words have been variously credited to Plato, Philo of Alexandria, or the Scottish Reverend John Wilson.  Do they give you goosebumps like they did me?  I have long loved Henry James's wisdom:  "Three things in life are important.  The first is to be kind.  The second is to be kind.  The third is...to be kind."  I think it's the image of the "great battle," in Krista's quotation that deeply moved me. The planet is in the midst of a great battle against our assumption she's there for us to use.  We don't need to change our lives or adjust our values; tech will get us out of climate change.  Refugees are battling for their existence, with any idea of well-being a distant mist. My wonderful sister-in-law, Gloria, ended her great battle in the middle of November. We saw only the outer signs, but these intimated that there was a great inner battle as well, out of which she fashioned a rich and kind life full of music and families (some of them adopted) manifested in a church that was full for her funeral. 

You've got a great battle too.  Maybe it's with a co-worker you can't connect with, the little digs and slights that arise, their righteous lack of cooperation.  Maybe it's a child you don't understand, in spite of the fact that understanding people is your forte. Maybe it's a relationship strained to breaking by...what?  You can't put your finger on precisely where it broke. Maybe that great battle is with yourself, with your sense of failure to quit smoking or eat less chocolate, to spend less time doom-scrolling.  Your inability to write your next poem or begin a painting you can't quite see. Or you're trying to start something you know will make your life better, but you can't quite get it to work into your life.  I really need to get back to my strength training and my balance exercises, but some days I can barely find the energy to finish making dinner.  Yet if I don't get going, everything will be harder, beginning with those exercises I stopped doing in mid-November.

Or maybe your battle is more ineffable.  A memory that tortures you but that you can't let go of. Grief, which has its own timeline. A mood you can't explain. Or a mood you can explain but that you can't fix or change.  Our inner great battles are made more difficult this time of year, by the fact that the solstice darkness and Christmas light intermingle. They certainly aren't helped by the intransigence of the men who have grasped power and won't let it go until they have killed enough people or ruined enough lives. It's hard to believe in humanity when the yahoos are in charge. The cold and the grey skies don't help.

But because you are fighting a great battle, you should be the first beneficiary. Smile inwardly to yourself, with kind feelings in your eyes, remembering how you basked in gratitude or smiled at a stranger as you opened a door. Then turn to the person in front of you or off to the side.  Smile. If you know them, reach out a hand or give a hug.  Could we make "kind" into a verb, the way we've done with "nice," when we say that we've "niced" a difficult person and thus gotten them to cooperate?  We can "kind" people and have them help us with the collective challenge of fighting our great battles.

The photograph is of an appliqued Christmas quilt I made some years ago.

A Celebration of Ordinary Days

I could begin this blog post in a number of places.  I could tell you about watching The Great Escaper Sunday night with incandescent performances from 89-year-old Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson just months before her death.  While each of them captures some of the challenges of being old, they also make it ordinary. They and their director don't try to 'tart up' being old. There are walkers, canes, wheelchairs, angina and missing meds. "This is just what happens if you are lucky," Caine and Jackson seem to say.  And while Michael Caine's character, Bernard Jordan, undertakes an inventive and intrepid trip to the 70th Anniversary celebrations of D-Day, it is his wife, Irene, who utters the healing words about how he came back from the war with a dark secret, but he spent every minute of every day showing his love for her with ordinary words and gestures. 

Those same ordinary words and gestures influence his remarkable understanding of the people he meets on his journey, prompting me to say to Bill last night "Love makes us wise." Irene's loving habits extend to her young caregiver, whom she says is better than her job and so needs to dream. The ordinary observations we have about the people we love, the ordinary, loving gestures we practice day after day, subtly keep us alive to the larger ideas of connection and relationship. They keep judgment at bay and curiosity at play, making us open to our complex humanity.  Thus, the ordinariness of love makes us wise.

Or I could tell you about Bill's and my relaxed ordinary day yesterday that included a search for new oven mitts (our old ones are falling apart),  a trip to the bookstore, afternoon tea, and an evening movie, and to say what a wonderful antidote it was to my relentless and restless push to accomplish something every day. Over tea, I watched wave after wave of geese fly overhead.  It's such an ordinary thing, something they do year after year, badly at first, until they've flown enough times off south to fields with enough dropped grain to get better at organizing themselves in vees. 

The ordinary day let me simply wonder why I loved them so.  I know what their departure means: winter and even darker days are on the horizon.  Yet I find something inspiring about their rehearsals. Like the geese, you can noisily embrace those moments when you are between this and that, here and there. You can rehearse some of the more eventful challenges of life, getting ready in steps that are themselves kind of exciting. New, at least. (I'm thinking of old age and death a lot these days, for various legitimate reasons, but I'm nowhere near getting alarmed or worried.  I'm curious, mostly, and the geese help. (No, that parenthesis that isn't closed is not a typo.)

Or I could give you several lines out of Medrie Purdham's remarkable poem, "Rowan, We Are Ordinary," inspired by bringing her newborn son home:

Rowan, we are ordinary

ordinary in the knot of time, under the powder moon, in the redolent grass;                                                                             

ordinary in the uncanny houses, the dreamed ones with mahogany and the moving swells under the rug; 

As her images and word choices suggest, she has an imaginative, resonant, even uncanny way of describing ordinariness.  In a sense, this perfectly illustrates the paradox of the poem's situation.  What could be more ordinary than mother and child, than bringing a baby home from the hospital?  It happens all the time.  But never the same way twice, never with the same sensibilities or emotional valences.  Thus she captures both how ordinary and how absolutely extraordinary the birth of a child and its homecoming are.  The poem is a gift to us all, parents or not, because it reveals how much poetry lies beneath our everyday lives.

Or I might re-interpret Annie Dillard's creed that "How you live your days is how you live your life."  In the past, I've often seen this philosophy as a prompt to get important stuff done every day.  Or when Oliver Burkeman reminds us that we only have 4,000 weeks, I think that I'd best decide what I really want to accomplish and jettison all the other stuff on my list. But where is the place for wonder, for awe in such a life?  Doesn't wonder often happen when we're wool-gathering, between here and there, this and that?  Houses look more vulnerable with all their protective greenery gone to ground, and the soft lights of the early dark, before we close the curtains, remind me, as I drive to the grocery store, that each house has its story, its narrative.  People live there with desires and fears that drive them to do the unexpected--all of which are probably ordinary yet utterly individual. I want to be gobsmacked by the complexity that I pass by every day, but the complexity is ordinary, and spending time in ordinary ways makes possible these ruminations and reflections.

Re: the photographs.  The first is my upstairs hallway.  I love the juxtaposition of the formal doorways and large ceramic jar and the duck's head umbrella Bill stores there.  The second is simply shadows on a wall--completely ordinary.

Vulnerability 2.0

In late October, Veronica and I went to Toronto--our first trip together since the pandemic. We've been travelling together since we became a family of two, and she's one of the best travelling companions you could ask for. She was the one who found the garden on the lakefront designed by Julie Moir Messervy and inspired by Yo-Yo Ma's performance of the first Bach Suite for Unaccompanied Cello. She gave me one of her AirPods and called up the music on her cell phone, so we walked this magical garden with its inspiration in one of our ears, the sound of Lake Ontario in the other.  She is the queen of Google maps and can find you the closest parking lot or craft a route to the airport that stops at the nearest gas station.  She can find you the closest bento box or the funkiest coffee shop where everything is laced with cardamom. (Cardamom in your coffee is amazing.) But mostly what I appreciate is the conversation.  It took us six hours to explore the Art Gallery of Ontario because we kept stopping to cogitate and talk.  We sat in front of a Mark Rothko for a good fifteen minutes while people drifted in and out of the gallery. We went to the ROM for their special exhibition, "Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools:  Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks," only to have the crowds flow past us while we put together our knowledge of European history aided by her wide knowledge of art, talking about Belgium's place in the religious wars of the time and Van Dyke's brushwork.

We were accompanied, unfortunately, by the post-viral exhaustion that has been my companion since a mid-February cold. I've already written here about vulnerability ( BLUE DUETS: On Vulnerability ) and my post-viral exhaustion (BLUE DUETS: My Process Quilt). Fortunately, the mantras that I've slowly constructed didn't take up much room in carry-on.  The first is "Cope with what is."  I like the short, blunt, matter-of-fact word, "cope."  Don't wail or ask existential questions:  get on with life. The second is "If you can't do it with energy, do it with grace," "it" being a kind of X that could mean making dinner or getting yourself back to the hotel once your energy has fallen off a cliff and the brain fog has rolled in with the ocean of tiredness. The third is "It's just a problem to be solved."  This is an old mantra that I've repurposed to mentally help me grasp the exhaustion that infuses my body and mind and depersonalize it. It asks "How would you deal with this if you didn't take it personally?" Create a strategy.  Put it into action.

Each day, the exhaustion and brain fog were more insistent, to the point where, on our penultimate day, while we were at the ROM, being awake was painful.  But I had a plan.  ("It's just a problem to be solved.")  I'd seen taxis zooming down Avenue Road past the ROM as we walked from the underground station to the museum, and thought that when I got exhausted I'd just pour myself into a cab and get back to the hotel while Veronica continued to explore the collection.  I even channelled Bill's practice of asking for help, so when I got to the entry I asked the nice young man who took your ticket if I could easily flag a taxi out front.  "Oh, no.  No, no, no.  Go talk to that person" he said, pointing to a young woman in an alcove, "and she will call you a taxi."  I was on my way back to the Chelsea Hotel within 5 minutes and Veronica had a wonderful time exploring Byzantine glass. She told me all about it at dinner--more conversation.  Did you know that glass isn't a solid but a very slow-moving liquid?  If you take old stained-glass windows out of their frames to clean them or repair the building, you will find they are now thicker at the bottom than at the top! That was my reward for coping with what is and just turning it into a problem to be solved.

Learning styles is a big topic of conversation for people who teach.  Yet research shows that one thing always works best:  repetition.  That's one of the reasons I valued class discussion when I taught.  It encourages people to do a mental search of what they know or thought or remembered about the text and then use that in response to my queries.  Conversation  among the class ensues and different perspectives are introduced, meaning you return to your mental model of the text for other examples while listening to what other people have noticed. 

As I contemplate my own vulnerability--which is really a dress rehearsal under very bright lights that highlight my mortality--I've been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, who lived between 121 and 180 and was a Roman emperor during a very tumultuous time, conducting multiple frontier wars that were punctuated by a plague.  Yet Marcus Aurelius took time to write himself notes about the principles he had learned from philosophy that governed his response to life and the challenges of ruling. I had read somewhere that he thought we were "lucky" to be mortal, and I wanted to understand that attitude. In an odd way, it echoed my sense that my vulnerability is an opportunity, a chance to consider aspects of my mortality, particularly my mental and physical decline, before it's started in earnest. 

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are repetitive. Pierre Hadot tells us that this is a function of the way they were composed.  They weren't meant to be a book, a finished and sequential series of thoughts. They were, in effect, numerous bundles of note cards.  He'd think to himself, perhaps during a difficult time or even a peaceful time, "Time to go back to first principles" and write himself a sequence of memoranda about how to live serenely, wisely, effectively, and fully.  I don't know how many times he exhorts himself to be independent of public opinion, to remember that he's doing his best to rule, make decisions, and conduct wars, and that if he gets sidetracked by opinion it is likely he won't be doing his best. Or how many times he reminds himself that human beings are social by nature; thus is reasonable that the focus of his job is to take care of the vast population of the Roman Empire and to be just in his decisions.  If he doesn't like or respect some of the people he is working with, he must proceed with patience and deliberation because it is his duty to care for his people and not everyone has had the advantages of his philosophical teachers. I'm completely losing his gravitas, so let me quote him on how leaders should proceed in difficult times:  

"What need is there to fear, since it is in your power to inquire what ought to be done?  And if all is clear, go forward content, without turning back; but if all is not clear, stop and take the best of counsel.  But if any other things oppose you, go on according to your powers with due consideration, keeping to that which appears just....He who follows reason in all things is both tranquil and active at the same time, and also cheerful and collected."

He was fortunate enough to live in a time when he could believe that the universe made sense, that it was under the influence of rational gods who continually nudged the world in a reasonable direction.  (I don't know what he would have thought if he could have time-travelled to the third decade of the twenty-first century.) Nature was part of that meaningful order, and death was simply part of nature. Let me string some quotations together that come toward the end of the Meditations:

"Consider that before long you will be nobody and nowhere, nor will any of the things exist which you now see, nor any of those who are now living.  For all things are formed by nature to change and be turned and to perish in order that other things in continuous succession may exist."

In other words, change is part of the universe; the new can only come into being at the expense of the old. Thus, "every man lives in the present time only, and loses only this." You are not dying; you are making way for birth, he continuously avers. "How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man! In a moment it is swallowed in the eternal.  And  how small a part of the whole substance, and how small a part of the universal soul!  Reflecting on all this, consider nothing to be great, except to act as your nature leads you and to endure that which the common nature brings."

I could say that he takes all the blood and pain out of dying, which is experienced by a vulnerable, sentient being connected to the people around them, not a node in the universe.  Though maybe, like truth, the sense that you are part of universal change is a horizon to orient yourself by.  But what struck me again and again was his repetition, his constant reexamination of his principles.  Because it helped me see something about my own vulnerability.  Yes, "Cope with what is" is a great mantra for someone who is exhausted.  But it was only after weeks and weeks of telling myself this that I could get beyond saying what I knew to be wise and actually doing it.  It was months before those words could stop me in my tracks, force me to examine exactly "what is," how exhausted I was, admit my vulnerability--which is not the same as powerlessness--and to ask what could bring joy or peace or a sense of purpose into those still and frigid hours. In other words, I had the language but I had to learn its complex meaning and acknowledge how fatigue impinged on my own life.  Perhaps therein lies the power of the repetition of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Don't let the distance between what you say or know and what you feel to defeat you.  Keep listening.  Keep learning.  

Revelations of Fall

 

Nikka and I used to make annual late November or early December Christmas shopping forays to Saskatoon.  We'd take in the shops on Broadway, have lunch at Calories and spend an hour or two at the old Mendel Art Gallery, ending with ten minutes or so in the conservatory next door, admiring the display of the brilliantly red poinsettias against the white snow in the Japanese garden just outside. Inevitably we'd need to stop in Chamberlain for a quick break.  There I heard the clerk welcome a woman by name and ask how she was.  "Not good," she replied.  "The days are so short, and I'm solar powered." 

"I'm solar powered."  I try to give that insightful woman credit when I use this description of myself on a series of rainy days or as we travel into the dark of the year. It makes me ask myself why I watch autumn so assiduously, without an iota of dread.  I watch the archways that the elms carve down the Cathedral Village streets, looking for the moment when they are pure golden light, days later admiring the light drifting beneath them. There are a couple of trees I can see from my study window that I carefully watch change: a tall aspen a few houses down and some ornamental fruit trees across the street.  After a summer of same old same old, change is welcome.  

This year, settling into fall was unusually odd.  In mid-October, I sat out in my back garden to watch the sparrows at the feeder while I chatted with my oldest friend--we go back 55 years. It was a glorious summer day.  Then the sun went down before dinner, and I shivered slightly at the incongruity. We take so many of our cues from the light.  

Fall brings a light of its own kind into my life.  I first note the changing of the season by how sunshine lights up corners of my rooms that I haven't noticed for a while.  I have a crab apple tree in my backyard, on the north side of the house, that keeps my kitchen cool through the summer.  But when its leaves begin to fall, I do a little dance in my kitchen because, midday, I can see to make a cup of tea without turning on a light.  I can admire the sparrows waiting in the branches for a turn at the feeder, where before I could only hear them--so skillfully did they hide themselves among the leaves. On the bank of Wascana Creek, there's a craggy old tree that is full of stars in the fall--tiny yellow fruit dotting the brilliant blue sky.

Our streets begin to look a little more urban, a little more open, with the leaves fallen off the cotoneasters, flowering almond, or lilacs that normally shroud the doorways and windows of our houses.  Walking at dusk, we glimpse one another's private lives: someone stirring a pot in the kitchen or a teenager dancing to hidden music. Domesticity takes on a new beauty as we think of inwardly marshalling our energy, reading the season's new books or making pizza sauce of the summer's tomatoes.

Trees losing their leaves look to me like old men and women shedding their clothes for a familiar and trustworthy lover. Normally we admire them for their green flourishing, but as they lose their leaves, I study their bark.  The craggy depth of an elm.  The twists and turns of my crab apple. The roughness of the usually serene willows. They are modelling openness for us, allowing us to see how they have grown, how they have been wounded by storms.  We can imagine how their roots help them endure the cold, just as we find our underground ways of enduring the dark of the year.

 

Sympathy and Middlemarch

"The meanness is the point."  That's been said about Trump and about MAGA more generally. It can certainly be said of ICE. "My viewpoint is the only one that counts" might well describe quite a number of world leaders' assumptions.  Or "I will have what I want, and humanity or history be damned" might describe others'.  Those ideas about how our relationship with other human beings is constituted drove me into the pages of George Eliot's Middlemarch.  One does not undertake this commitment lightly. In my charming hardcover Penguin edition, the novel clocks in at 850 pages, which challenges the abilities of Penguin's binders:  I quickly had errant pages falling out of my book. 

There's a special group of books that we read for the narrator.  Most of these involve a first-person narrator with a charming voice or perspective.  Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, flawed as his perspective is, nevertheless embodies the nostalgia that infuses the novel. I wanted George Eliot ringing in my ear--I know, that's a lazy conflation.  But who else is responsible for this remarkable passage about Dorothea Brooke's unhappiness with her marriage, an unhappiness felt by many newly-married people who find themselves in painful situations they didn't anticipate: 

"Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.  That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of its frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

How to unwind the perspective here, the gentle ironies?  On the one hand, we're being forgiven for being insensible sometimes.  Yet do we want only to feel "the coarse emotion of mankind"? Somehow, painful as it is, Eliot gives us the sense that we should strive to have a "keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life." 

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  What is this magical tome, this exemplary novel called Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf called the first novel written for grownups?  The first thing to note is that it's called Middlemarch.  Wafting through its pages is discussion of the 1832 Reform Act, which sought to end the kind of gerrymandering that let some small communities return their favourite MP while huge areas were underrepresented. On the other hand, we are witness to many acts of kindness.  In many ways, it's about our collective lives, how we influence and judge and support one another. It's also about growing up:  many of its primary and secondary characters are in their early twenties when they meet challenges beyond their ken and we learn whether or not they have the integrity and spirit to use their frustrations to grow. 

That broad, serious concern is levened by the three romances at the novel's centre. First, the fervent and serenely beautiful Dorothea Brooke marries an old scholar, Edward Casaubon who is working on his magnum opus, "The Key to All Mythologies."  That he even assumes he can undertake such a task tells you something about the size and single-mindedness of his ego.  He and Dorothea go to Rome for their honeymoon, largely because he wants to do some research there, but what really happens is that he begins to see that his project is fatally flawed.  So Dorothea's eagerness to help him is interpreted as criticism of his abilities. Thus he is often cold to her during her most sympathetic moments, which led to the tears that provoked the narrator's commentary above.  Also in Rome, Dorothea meets Casaubon's nephew, Will Ladislaw.  If I tell you that he was played by a young Rufus Sewell in the BBC version, you will detect in the casting the likelihood that Dorothea finds Will more attuned to her feelings--and a lot sexier.  I shan't spoil the ins and outs of this second relationship for you.

The third romance is between Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy. Lydgate is a French-trained doctor who is alive to all the latest science and whose practice implicitly challenges the ways of the other Middlemarch doctors.  In spite of the fact that his practice is in its early stages, he marries Rosamund, largely because she is beautiful and accomplished.  (He has met Dorothea early in the novel and finds her earnestness exhausting. He will later change his mind.) It is Rosamund who will entertain him when he gets home from a difficult day. Eliot frequently notes how Lydgate combines the coldness of science with very human warmth and sympathy in his practice , and it is this sympathy which binds him to Rosamund when he finds her crying because she loves him and he stopped coming to the house until her brother Fred became ill. 

Rosamund and her family have pursued all the exterior markers of success.  Her beauty, her taste in clothes, her skill at the piano, her perfect manners, learned at Miss Lemon's finishing school, will guarantee her goal:  to marry up.  Her father is in trade, so she seeks someone with connections to the landed gentry, preferably titled, and a profession.  I find her a sad character, one whose happiness is doomed by the fact that her sense of self is constructed out of whalebone and money.  She has no inner life that is not shaped by how others see and admire her. That life collapses when Lydgate's practice is in difficulties and he must live more cheaply--a smaller house, fewer dresses and parties.

There's a third tier of characters we come to know well and then there is Middlemarch more generally, with all of its smallness and gossipiness and its delighted criticism when "their betters" are brought low.  There are machinations about inheritances and the ruining of reputations--which ripple throughout the community. There's gossip and people going out of their way to be kind. There is also poetic justice about unkindness, meanness, or cruelty.  It is like a boomerang and will come back to you, possibly ruining your life.  One of the subtler examples of this occurs in Rome.  Just as Dorothea is pulling herself together after the disappointed tears we witnessed above, Casaubon's nephew, Will Ladislaw, is announced and since Casaubon is away, Dorothy meets him alone.  

"She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent--to remind her of her husband's goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be his helpmate in all kind deeds." While she and Will do not flirt, Casaubon senses that their lives are carried out on a different plane, one he can't reach by dint of his focus on thought over feeling.  Dorothea and Will have a common language of sympathy, a common generosity and curiosity about the well-being of others that immediately binds them.  In his will, Casaubon anticipates the romantic blooming of their relationship after he dies, so he disinherits Dorothea if she marries Will. The community regards this as an ugly gesture, one that implies Dorothea's faithlessness. Obviously it says more about Casaubon's envy than about Dorothea's relief in speaking openly to someone who understands her desire to give and receive sympathy. Why should Casaubon wish to control her happiness after he dies, except for the ill-tempered envy that follows him to the grave?  It blows up in his face. Yet this is what Eliot's narrator says of him:

"For my part I am very sorry for him.  It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy:  to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted."

What critics call the ideology of the plot--the pattern of who gets rewarded and who gets punished for their actions and attitudes, and what that pattern says about the values of the narrative, whether it's a novel or a film--certainly punished Casaubon.  This passage is the culmination of three pages that begins with a consideration of Dorothea and cuts off by asking "But why Dorothea?  Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble." In these pages, Eliot is certainly undercutting our expectations.  But to what end? We hope we live in a world where fate is scrupulously ethical--though at the present moment, we doubt that fact, adding to our anxiety, making it existential as well as political.

But what if sympathy were, so to speak, a universal human right?  What if, when you saw or learned of someone behaving oddly or badly, you shifted from ready judgment to the harder task of being curious? Frank Bruni has written a wonderful book on what he calls the "grievance industrial project"--peoples' general tendency to feel aggrieved when they don't get their way or feel disrespected--describing a general trend right now. The evidence he has is irrefutable.  MAGA and Trump, you might have noticed, eat grievance for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  But perhaps sympathy is the force that might hold the rest of us humanly together during this difficult time.

 

Lights and shadows of Autumn

In spite of the pre-grief I wrote about in early September, I am falling into the pleasures of fall.  September is always exciting because it's a signal to learn new things. So I've been reading Walt Whitman's remarkable Specimen Days, a kind of journal-ish autobiography, to see if he doesn't have a place in the second half of the book of poetry I'm working on:  Nature's Culture; Culture's Nature. Whitman thought he could hear spring, which I've already written a poem about.  He also felt that nature helped him recover from a stroke he had in the later years of his life and regularly "wrestled" with a sapling tree near a brook he frequented, often bathing in the brook and then having a dance with the sapling. I'm often terrified of the task I've set myself:  writing poems about a handful of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century naturalists. What can I say that they haven't said?  But then I just get caught up in learning about them, caught up in how our ways of seeing need the prompts and inspiration of people who didn't live in our wired world.  So yes, I'm terrified.  But I'm also learning. 

I'm also reading some essays by John Burroughs, the man who helped care for Whitman at the beginning of his stroke, collected in The Art of Seeing Things.  Burroughs is almost didactic about the pleasures--I know, that sounds like an oxymoron, but I don't think it is--of taking the time to really see the world. He talks about the necessity of loving the world and loving the act of seeing:

"Love sharpens the eye, the ear, the touch; it quickens the feet, it steadies the hand, it arms against the wet and the cold.  What we love to do, that we do well.  To know is not all; it is only half.  To love is the other half....Love is the measure of life:  only so far as we love do we really live.  The variety of our interests, the width of our sympathies, the susceptibilities of our hearts--if these do not measure our lives, what does?"

What we love defines the quality of our lives.  That's good advice for a 75-year-old writer who is undertaking something she's not certain she can pull off. Perhaps it's good advice for all of us.

Burroughs's advice certainly applies to autumn, which gives us a different palette.  We have to look more carefully and more often to see its beauty, the way some leaves become more bronzy, the way trees withdrawn their energies into  themselves, leaving ghostly gold behind them.  The leaves of the wild roses on the bank of Wascana Creek become more ruddy--an entirely new shade of green. The Crayola green we've seen on the trees all summer becomes more subtle, revealing ochres and bronzes and ruddy tones that, paradoxically, are fresh and new to our eyes. And if we have to look more carefully, we slow down. 

And I take pleasure in feeling a little bit like a bear, ready to withdraw.  I find myself opening drawers or closets and thinking about what I really use or wear and how I can make them work a little better--as if I were a bear preparing her den. This morning, leaving the house to grocery shop, I loved the changed smell of the garden, how the smell of leaves mixed with a hint of the smell of lightning on the air and the smell of rain.  Coming home, knowing that rain was forecast for the entire day, I thought "Lovely.  I've got a baby quilt to work on, a Halo quilt I can hand piece while listening to music, and I can make good headway on Middlemarch," which I'm re-reading to appreciate the profound humanity and sympathy of George Eliot's narrator. She even manages to be sympathetic to Casaubon, though that didn't lessen my relief, for Dorothea's sake, when he died.  

The other part of autumn I love is the way the light changes.  It comes into my rooms in different ways, prompting me to see a house I've lived in for 35 years in different ways, to even ask questions of light. Why does the light coming in through the leaves of my crab apple tree resolve into roundish shapes? Two nights ago, Bill and I went for a walk through our neighbourhood rather than on the creek bank.  I think I wanted the comfort of elm-enclosed streets, the dim light of evening pierced by scenes in living rooms.  I wanted to see the gardens people had put in, but to see them in the half-light. I also noticed how many people in Cathedral Village have added art to the sides of their garages.  I ran into a former colleague and had a lovely chat.  I thought about community. 

Because the last week has been awful. Frankly, the last few months have been especially awful geopolitically speaking.  Israel's attack on Hamas in Qatar and its further incursion into Gaza, where people are starving.  The military exercises in China organized by Xi and attended by Putin and Kim Jong Un. Russia sending drones to Poland.  The ongoing war in Sudan--more starving people-- which Anne Applebaum calls a pointless war. Charlie Kirk's assassination. Trump intoning about how leftists and Democrats practice political violence and he's going after all their organizations.  (Never mind that the assassin was a disaffected Republican.) Trump and ICE.  Trump and the National Guard.  There are two things going on here that I can't quite get my head around.  One is how untruth is not only given credence, but is multiplied by the algorithm.  Second, there's something going on in the chess match that is nations' relationships with one another that I can't grasp, some terrifying shift.  Or something about the permission given to men--yes, men--who have been allowed to become despots. I can't take it in.

So, like a bear, I've wanted to hibernate.  But something kept prompting me to think about the places where we live.  There's the nation state, which seems in good shape here in Canada, but fubar other places in the world.  As a species, at this historical moment, we're not electing good leaders.  What is driving this tendency?

There are our communities.  Probably each of you has a different Venn diagram showing where you have a sense of belonging.  Maybe it's your city or neighbourhood enhanced by belonging to an organization or union, further enriched by your belonging to a group of people who loves the things you love--the Stitchers' and Weavers' Guild or the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild here where I live. Here we keep conversations open--something that's being threatened around the world by censorship or polarized political climates where voices are silenced. Here we celebrate what we have in common--regardless of how different we are. Really, if all you do in this terrible time is keep conversations happening, that will be a worthwhile act of resistance.

The third place we live in is art or nature. Nature always tells us the truth, and it's a truth we need to attend to.  We can find a way to be co-conspirators with nature.  Art keeps dialogue and rebellion alive, challenging, affirming, prompting us to ask questions.  This is where we go to keep our souls alive, whether it's to measure the changing greens or admire Eliot's truthful, broad-minded narrator in a time of grievance and lies.

But if you've been reading my theory-of-everything list of the places where our lives unfold with even a hint of critical thinking, you'll say I left something out.  The media.  Our cell phones.  But they've hijacked our sense of what is real and reasonable.  They don't report the fact that in the last decade 100 million children have been lifted out of extreme poverty.  Or that the yellow mountain toad is coming back to Australia and the Jaguar to Mexico.  Or that carbon emissions seem to have peaked. Even the responsible media, like The New York Times, has weaponized the limbic system in my brain that latches on to news that makes me frightened or makes me angry.  Several times a day, they are in my email inbox with "Breaking News!"  I've stopped opening them.  Rather than doom-scrolling, I'm going to be a bear, and see which berries are just now getting ripe.  I'm going to keep reading Middlemarch, and keep working on that baby quilt. There is hope.  You just have to stop your ears against some things, as Odysseus did, and focus on the journey you are choosing to take. And remember what John Burroughs said and how it resists our war- and hate-filled world:  "Love is the measure of life:  only so far as we love do we really live.  The variety of our interests, the width of our sympathies, the susceptibilities of our hearts--if these do not measure our lives, what does?"