Of Experience and Legacies

 

I made Bill the ultimate chocolate cake for his birthday.  You only find the recipe for the Devil's Food Cake Cockaigne in old editions of The Joy of Cooking.  Newer editions, I suppose, assume that cooks don't have an entire hour to devote to the baking of a cake.  You begin by separating three eggs.  Then you create a kind of pudding by heating chocolate, milk, brown sugar, and a single egg yolk, stirring the  mixture constantly until the chocolate is fully melted.  Once that is cooling, you return to the usual instructions for cakes:  cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add two egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Sift your flour.  Add it to the batter in three parts, adding milk and vanilla between each addition.  Fold in the chocolate pudding.  Whip your three egg whites until stiff but not dry, folding those carefully into the heavy batter:  they are  your only leavening. 

I was oddly happy while I separated and sifted and folded.  My kitchen counter gives me full view of a crab apple tree, which has lots of sparrows and chickadees stopping by to wait for their turn at the feeder, so I could glimpse them in their August busy-ness from time to time while I incorporated one third of the flour and beat it until it was fully incorporated.  I respect the craftsmanship that goes into baking something complicated, and my own competence--decades of folding egg whites carefully into heavy batter--is soothing.  Here is something I'm good at.  And the cake, when we ate our pieces last night, is amazing:  rich and chocolaty and yet light. Bill was blissed as he ate his piece, and that was the point of the whole exercise:  to create an unexpected gift.

But I was also happy because my sense of time has changed this summer.  Instead of seeing time as a suitcase that I must stuff full of words and pages and ideas, I've shifted to seeing time as a journey, a meditation, a pilgrimage even.  I can't fully explain how the shift happened, though it involved sorting my yarn stash, then culling my quilting fabric and reorganizing it so I know where everything is.  I was obsessive about this and then was curious about my obsession.  It felt oddly as if I was planning for a transition, I thought, as I put aside fabrics I knew I would never use to give to the people who made quilts for cancer patients and sick children.

I felt drained by my reading and writing.  I'm reading Rachel Carson's three miraculous books about the sea; Silent Spring is next on my reading list.  I'm trying to imagine a handful of poems about her that will capture what she contributed to our sense of the damage we were doing to our environment in 1962.  In 1962!  Sixty-four years ago she warned us.  And we've done--what--about the injuries we're inflicting? Her role in American culture was two-fold.  Her best-selling books created for their readers such a rich sense of life in the oceans and on the shores.  They are poetic and crowded with information--conjuring quite a different reader:  someone who is focused enough to take in all the details about the tiny, almost prehistoric creatures who now live in the damp sand the sea floods twice a day, for example.  Or the life cycle of the eel. In my poems on naturalists, I'm trying to reveal relationships with nature that are built of curiosity and wonder, not on what nature could do for us--providing wood for houses or rare earth minerals for computer chips.  How was I going to do this for Carson? I was overwhelmed by the challenge.  

I needed a holiday.  So last Monday morning, I began my day by hand-piecing more of my halo blocks while I listened to an old "Ideas" interview with Robert Macfarlane.  He talked about "conquering" or "ascending" mountains and glorying in the accomplishment as well as appreciating the view.  He contrasted that to the approach of Scottish naturalist Nan Shepherd, with whom he spent formative time.  For her, time walking in the Cairngorms was not a conquest, but "a pilgrimage, a meditation." Those words struck me and rattled around in my brain for a while.  Here's the thing I love about hand-piecing or hand quilting.  While your hands are busy, your mind goes wool-gathering. You're concentrating on making tiny straight stitches, so you are not censoring your thoughts.  "A suitcase," I thought.  One of my frustrations with long Covid was that it made it harder to fill up that suitcase with words, essays, ideas, poems.  It made it hard to be "productive," but somehow I did it anyway.  And I don't regret that. 

But now I needed to see time as a pilgrimage, a meditation.  I am choosing, I realize, between life as experience and life as legacy--the number of books or poems published, the number of readers I reach. I have never written because I was seeking fame--what a stupid, unpredictable reason to work so hard!--but because I thought I might figure something out and contribute to the conversation that is our culture.  

But I am not my books.  I am my experience.  The delight in baking a complicated cake for the man who generously helped me get through long Covid, the man who washed more than his share of dishes and gently brought water or tea when he thought I needed to keep hydrated. I am the luxurious feeling of warm, dry, August air on my skin when I am standing under the deep blue of a Saskatchewan sky--the bliss of that.  I am weekly lunches with my daughter and the friendship we've built of that time together, the deep yet simple love. I am the wonder I feel when Lyra and Tuck join me at the computer for a day's writing so I won't feel alone as I struggle.  How can two profoundly different species, one small and dressed in fur, one large and dressed in skin, seek to understand one another?  Why do they even try? Changing the metaphor from suitcase to pilgrimage, from accomplishment to wonder, effects a subtle shift in the way I see time.  I can't quite identify the differences, because I will still be writing, but perhaps not with the impetus or intensity, but with more curiosity. I have the odd idea that the writing will be better if I focus on experience, though perhaps there won't be so much of it. 

Being alive will be a matter of asking the question "Why?" rather than "What?" "What" can be answered:  a poem this week, a revised essay next.  "Why?" cannot, but it is the better question for Shepherd's pilgrimage or meditation. It's an open question, almost one that doesn't really expect to be answered, but you take it seriously nevertheless.  It's a fearless question with uncertain, provisional answers.  "Why?" might seek to answer questions about what it means to a human and how vulnerability and humility can actually be strengths.  "Why?" might try to understand how humans mess up when we try to act as groups or use power to get things done or make change.  But it's also the question of fully engaged old age.  

 

Art as a gratitude practice

Why do human beings continue to create art?  Especially now, when democracy and the rule of law are under such threat in many places in the world?  Especially now, when the very life of our planet is treated cavalierly by some while others make, over and over again, all the valid arguments for saving it?  Why spend our time doing something that requires a future to have any meaning?  Especially when it's so hard.  When many of us walk a narrow winding path up a mountain, with our goal just ahead of us, around the next turn, while our inadequacies as artists are so clear in the edge we could fall over with the least misstep?

There are probably as many answers to that question as there are artists.  To celebrate.  To understand humanity and our place in the world more fully.  To mourn.  To grieve.  To criticize--nay, to excoriate.  Some satirist full of fury needs to tell us how stupid and blind, how selfish and short-sighted we are being. Creating art disciplines us to look carefully at our complicated world and our byzantine humanity.  It forces us to explore a whole host of existential questions:  Why?  My 17-month experience of long Covid has posed this question with an exquisitely sharp scalpel.  If I can't know how I'm going to feel when I'm going to get up in the morning, why would I plan on trying to make something meaningful?  Why not--I'm 76, after all--just settle into a life of reading and quilting and gardening, accompanied by tender cats and a very generous, helpful husband?  Because I can't.  Talking back to long Covid has helped me realize that I get up each morning trying to create a small space for clarity in a chaotic world. I get up each morning trying to untangle the human fankle and find a thread I can pull out of the jumble to understand and celebrate. And I hope, as I create a bit of clarity and order, that I can also make something beautiful.  After all, beauty is the engine of awe, of surprise, of hope.

At the end of May, I went to the wonderful City of Regina Writing Award reading at Artesian, which included Keegan Grandel, Carla Harris, and Medrie Purdham.  While all three thanked the City and the SWG, Medrie's remarks were the fullest, describing the many ways the Guild improves the lives of writers and offers them meaningful support.  She didn't do what writers often do at reading: offer a brief thank-you and set up her first poem.  I thought at the time that her thanks were, in fact, the best set-up of her intricate, imaginative work.  The next day, Bill and I went to hear Daniel Champagne. It was a hot night and we didn't know anything about him except that a former student said we just had to hear him, and she was right.  After his first--I don't know what to call it.  It wasn't just a song. It owed as much to contemporary classical music and jazz as to folk; it was as much percussion as guitar.  Anyway, he took time to thank all the people who helped him get set up.  He named each of them.  Later, he played pieces written to thank his guitar teacher and his grandmother.  At the end, he thanked us for being a fabulous audience on a very hot night and thanked, by name again, all the helpful people at Knox Met.

These two artists, so completely different from one another, juxtaposed by mere accident of timing, prompted me to think of art as a gratitude practice. There's a lot of science exploring how gratitude is good for us.  I'm not going to do a chapter and verse thing; you can simply Google "Why is gratitude good for us?" and find lots of information.  Gratitude is good for our brains, lighting up our circuitry.  It releases neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, reducing depression and stress.  Gratitude is profoundly social:  it binds us to others and to the life we living.  When we are grateful for the richness of our relationships, we don't take them for granted, but take better care of them. There is some evidence that people who are regularly grateful live longer lives.

When I think about poets who are grateful, Don McKay and Mary Oliver come to mind.  In Don's ongoing practice of writing "songs for the song of ..." the cedar waxwing or the rose-breasted grosbeak, to name a couple from his 2021 book Lurch, you find pearls strung on a thread of gratitude for a natural world that is so rich and varied and innovative and creative in its own right--quite apart of the human beings that happen to live here and try, like Don, to enter that richness with our attention. In "Song for the song of the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak," Don writes 

                                          Imagine
Ella Fitzgerald in the shower singing 
"You are my sunshine," loving the notes,
but letting them swell into surprises
all their own, music with mischief in its back
pocket.

There's gratitude in the attention he pays to the song of the grosbeak, joined to the gratitude he has for Ella Fitzgerald.  Gratitude for song, for invention--whether natural or human.

Or I've simply opened up my copy of Devotions to find "Wild Geese."  I have to give you the whole poem to capture the effect.\

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

     love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese,  high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

As Oliver's poem shows, gratitude is a big picture feeling, akin to awe.  In the moments when you are grateful, you are living in the right time and place.  You are living the right life.  

When I am grateful for Bill's steadfast support over the last 17 months; when I am grateful for the simple, loving relationship I have with my delightful daughter; when I am grateful for Lyra once more reading my mood as he puts his paw gently on my throat and looks straight into my eyes, I am aware that this is my life and I have done some wise things to get myself here.  Things besides grouse about being tired and complaining about the knee that kept me awake yet again. Things besides staring at a paragraph for half an hour without understanding how I can sort it out, how I can get it to sing rather than limp towards the half-formed ideas I have rattling around in my brain.  If I can find the words and the right order, I will know what I think.  And when my patience and doggedness pays off, I am grateful for a world that, momentarily at least, makes sense.

But gratitude is also found in the small and is connected to our curiosity.  The feeling provoked by the two-year-old girl with her hair in startling pigtails who is dancing into her day prompts us to stop and appreciate her joy.  Being grateful for the tiny beans in my garden prompts me to see the seed I planted as "a plant in a box with its lunch," a little miracle, in short.* Gratitude for my roses having made it yet again through the winter prompts me to stop and watch the bees wallow in the pollen and to think about the intricate complexity of their lives and the intelligence of the hive. Maybe it's more available in the small, in the everyday things around us if, like the poets, we pay careful attention.

 

Essays I'd like to write about Lord of the Rings

I'm working on an essay about the trees in my life.  There was a cherry tree in the yard of the old woman next door:  she let me climb up into it, eat cherries, and read.  There were trees that I climbed at the edge of the Catholic seminary at the end of my street.  The seminarians meditatively walking the paths never quite got used to the sound of girls in trees laughing. The elm in our back yard kept us cool so we guarded it with our pocket book and window cleaner:  Dutch Elm Disease was a danger, so we had it sprayed every year at a ridiculous expense and then washed the windows that were also sprayed.  There have been two large pine trees in front of each of the houses I have bought so I could look out on something green in winter.  They're a nuisance in other ways:  grass won't grow under them because they instantly suck up water and then drop acidic needles. But their placid green under the snow soothes my eyes and my spirit on short winter days. A crab apple tree convinced me to buy this house because it was in bloom the May weekend Veronica and I drove from Winnipeg to Regina to buy a house so I could start a new job in July. That tree, which has such a flowing, enclosing shape, has been my place to daydream, meditate, reflect, grieve.  It keeps me safe.

So I obviously had to re-re-re-read Lord of the Rings, because no essay on trees would be complete without Ents.  The row of carrots in my vegetable garden is just a row of carrots.  But Tolkien knew that we saw trees as individuals that had their own sense of time that contrasted to our own, particularly in the cell phone age. This re-reading, I often stopped to think about about how smart and prophetic Tolkien was, how much he knew about us in the twenty-first century.  To read Tolkien in the time of the idiot id in the White House is quite a new experience.  So I kept thinking about the smart questions Tolkien asked or his observations about human frailties and strengths.  I thought I'd like to write a lot of essays, but I'm no Tolkien scholar.  For that you need a former student of mine, Benjamin Barootes, who now teaches Mediaeval literature at Memorial.  

So this isn't an exhaustive nor even particularly smart list of things we could dive into when we read Lord of the Rings.  Please feel free to add your own questions or observations in the comments section.  It's summer:  the perfect time to settle down under a tree in the evening and read LOTR. 

1.  Well, there's the obvious one.  Perhaps because Tolkien lived through the four days of the Great Smog in 1951, he knew how deadly industrialized air was (it was estimated there were between 10,000 and 12,000 deaths).  He reveled in the beauty and variety of nature and recognized that our unabated use of nature's resources hurt us profoundly.  Sauron lives in a wasteland.  Saruman just cuts trees down for the fun of it. Tolkien was a proto-environmentalist. Surely someone has written this one.

2.  Power that admires itself too fully simply says "I want."  "I want destruction."  "I want power."  Never even "I want because...." as if the desire for power were self-evident or even natural. Sauron doesn't utter a single word through Lord of the Rings, as if to emphasize the irrationality of his desires.  On the other hand, even before Sauron is destroyed, but certainly afterwards, stories and poems and songs are eagerly attended to.  The rituals and poems that come after the ring is destroyed, in particular, teach us that language and ritual are the markers of order in defiance of the silence of disorder.   

3.  Tolkien believed in diversity before it was even a thing.  Of course we solve problems better or see our complex sociality more clearly when we have a range of skills and perspectives at hand.  People, wizards, halflings, elves, dwarves all bring their respective skills to, say, the battle at Helms Deep or the destruction of the ring.  

4.  LOTR is a lesson in leadership.  Sometimes leading means trusting people and letting them get on with the job, something middle managers need to learn. (Hands off!  People do their best when they're trusted, not when they're surveilled or shamed. There's scientific evidence to back this up.)  Both Gandalf and Aragorn know that if anyone can get the ring back to Mount Doom, it is Frodo, with Sam's help, of course.  Aragorn organizes a big distraction on the edges of Mordor to give Frodo the best chance, but he doesn't lift the burden from him, nor does Faramir.  

5.  "I'm really the one person who can solve all these problems--if you'd only give me the ring!"  Does that remind you of someone?  Boromir and his father Denethor are both wrong and both bring their deaths upon themselves because of this assumption. Solving problems, in LOTR as in contemporary Canada, takes a community--a varied community.   

6.  LOTR is a lesson in kingship--or leadership, if you will. When Gandalf appears in Rohan, Theoden has become old and hesitant, but when Gandalf kicks out Wormtongue and makes clear the latter's connections to Saruman, Theoden is ready to re-evaluate his response.  After leading the Riddermark to victory at Helms Deep, Theoden gathers his people and rides to the defense of Gondor, where he dies nobly.  Denethor, on the other hand, would rather kill himself and his son than face possible failure or pain.  The time he has spent gazing into the Palantir has not given him knowledge but led to despair.  Where Theoden is willing to revise his worldview, Denethor is frozen in his.  From this follow two more principles:

7. It's not over until it's over.  Uncertainty sucks, but on a daily basis it's all we have. I think it was Voltaire who said "Uncertainty is painful but certainty is stupid." Denethor wants to be certain of his victory and if he can't be, he wants to leave the world on his own terms, taking his gifted son with him.

8. And the hands of a king are the hands of a healer.  The wisdom in this makes my eyes get a little  misty.  It's a model of kingship that is pure service, one that abjures power and embraces responsibility. After the ring is destroyed and Sauron defeated, Aragorn spends a lot of time going from place to place to ensure that his people are well. 

9.  People who destroy nature just to create despair and power the "engines" of their own desires are evil.  Somehow the natural world represents a value they can neither share nor understand.  The only thing they can to do something so antithetical to their values and world view is to destroy it. The trees cut down in the Shire and left to rot are destruction for destruction's sake, a proof of power that creates despair:  purely evil.

10.  Long before all the science about how nature heals us, how it brings us crucial awe that creates perspective, how its beauty gets under our skin, Tolkien understood how healing nature is.  Two dried up leaves of athelas can undo the wounds of the Nazgul.

11.  Humility is a strength. Of course, Gandalf counts on Frodo to get the ring to Mount Doom because he's humble, just an ordinary hobbit.  Other people proudly think they could control the ring's force and would not destroy it, whereas only destroying the ring will end Sauron's will to power. Frodo fully understands this, though at the last moment Gollum, whose life has been so twisted by desire for the ring, plays a vital role.  Frodo's not perfect, but he's the best we've got. 

But we can't forget Sam.  Sam is, if possible, even more humble than Frodo, whom he calls "Master." Sam can't carry the ring to Mount Doom, but he can carry Frodo.  The scenes with Shelob in the tunnels are probably Sam at his best.  He considers all his options, always with the idea that he might be wrong in the back of his mind.  He takes the ring and Galadriel's bottle of light from Frodo, whom he believes is dead, knowing this is wrong but not knowing what else to do.  The quest must be continued. When he learns that Frodo isn't dead, the ring and the light help Sam rescue him, but he concludes again he has indeed done a wrong thing and gives them back to Frodo.  Except that he couldn't have rescued Frodo without them. As we're making momentous decision, convinced we're right, that our perspective is unerring, we need to keep Sam's humble questioning in mind.

Please, make this a conversation and add your own thoughts!

Open letter to people who scam writers

Dear scammer,

I don't even know where to begin.  Shall I say that the internet was designed to bring people together?  To create communities that wouldn't otherwise be possible?  A sense of belonging, along with our particular gifts and a sense of agency, are the three foundations of well-being and thriving. It sure didn't take you guys long to figure out how to use our need to belong to threaten people--a grandmother told her grandson was in trouble and needed $500 now.  Or farther along, how to use a writer's vulnerability about their competency to get them to give you money for marketing schemes or non-existent book clubs.  I don't know what it says about humanity that it didn't take you very long to figure out how to exploit people's vulnerabilities about their best qualities:  their care for others or their creative gifts.  I suspect there's some anti-intellectual cynicism in there somewhere, but we'll get to that later.  

And then AI sent that into hyperdrive.  I'll be upfront and say that I don't quite believe in artificial intelligence.  I think AI does a great job of helping a city time their traffic lights to keep people moving along.  Regina's Albert Street is a model of that.  And it has great promise helping us understand the language of dolphins and whales because it's good at pattern recognition.  It can help us find new drugs.  I know that I'm supposed to get $3000 from Anthropic because it trained their AI using a book I wrote years ago.  It was a feminist book, so maybe it will keep the testosterone level, the world-domination goals of AI corporations down a smidgeon. But that's leaving out the fact that most of its "knowledge" or language is stolen. As for the intelligence part of it, I'm not sure.  First off, the writing in the letters you send me about featuring my book with a humongous book club is appalling.  It's like a first-year undergraduate's terrible first essay:  it tries to use a formal register before it understands how syntax works.  I'll admit, though that Claude Mythos scares the hell out of me.  It potentially has more power to disrupt economies than any nation, and  you can't tell me that, despite Anthropic's plans to keep it under wraps, someone isn't going to let the genii out of the bottle, ripe for bad actors.

But I don't believe in an intelligence that doesn't have senses--that can't smell baking bread or feel a loved-one's kiss or taste chocolate or hear a Bach fugue on a magnificent pipe organ.  Human beings have bodies, and Michael Pollan has convinced me that our intelligence isn't only housed in our brains but that it is experiential. How do you feel awe without a body?  Without a body, how do you describe the kind of existential anxiety that is housed in your solar plexus about today's wars and technology?  How do you react to your pet's uncanny knowledge about how you are feeling?  How do you know that slight weakening in your knees when your lover puts their hand in the middle of your back to guide you through literally or figuratively difficult terrain if you don't have a body?

I had my first invitation just before Easter.  The letter was personally written, I suspect, but a bit cagey.  It came from the Shepherd's Bush Book Club.  Yes, I looked it up online, and it was real if a bit sketchy, and someone had already posted an answer to a question I hadn't yet asked:  was there really a Shepherd's Bush Book Club?  The answer told me where they met.  They had been reading Ian McEwan and were going on to Nana, so I didn't quite know how Visible Cities--a book of photographs that inspired poems--quite fit, but the chap who ran it said that it would appeal to their audience's concern for how we experience the city. When I asked him how he found the copy of a book written in Regina and published in Calgary, he fudged a bit--creating my first unease.  He said that how he'd found it made him smile and convinced him that this was the book his club needed to read.  He didn't, though, tell me a story, and that stuck with me.  We offered to record a reading of half a dozen poems, with Veronica talking about the photographs and me reading the poems, and he was over the moon about that.  Then came the request for money.  A modest amount of money--$74.  He gave me--I'm so naive that I don't know what--websites or Paypal kinds of things where I could send the money.  But I didn't know any of these and it was Easter weekend.  I was baking lavender lemon bars and mixing up twice-baked potatoes (with roasted garlic and old white cheddar--yum!) and didn't have time to go checking these things out.  He nudged me about the money.  Busy, I told him I didn't know how to use these sites and signed off.  He came back suggesting that I could do a bank to bank draft with a Lead Bank in Kansas City with the account of a person with a very exotic and  unpronouncable name.  I immediately blocked my correspondent and deleted all his emails.

Five more exclusive invitations have followed, most of them ill-written.  AI has made this possible.  In a wonderful workshop Gillian Bell gave to members of the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild, she explained how AI allows the perps to "scrape" the internet for information about our books and then write the invitation that follows.  It will sound like they've read our book, though it will also sound as if they are not very good readers or writers.  Writers I know have said they seem to target books with good reviews but only modest sales.

But does AI make this possible in another way?  There are questions huddling in the dark:  can AI write a novel?  Can it write a film script? There is also gossip in the margins of magazines about the arts or culture--about how so-and-so used AI to write a novel, though the publisher then refused to publish it.  About the great film script that was going to be used by...someone. Just today there was scandal about a piece published in Granta that had used AI. I don't believe AI is going to replace art.  How do you write a love scene without having a body that could have experienced it?  How do you describe the existential dread of dying without a body?  A mash-up of other people's words aren't going to cut it.  But my disbelief isn't shared by people who aren't creative, except for the scams they think up.  I fear that there is a cynicism growing about the written word, a mistaken belief that a machine's words are just as good as a human's.  That's where the danger lies.

Because once Claude Mythos has enabled someone to eat a union's pension funds or your child's education savings, once there is economic chaos, art is going to matter.  Once climate change really ramps up, art is going to matter.  Art teaches us empathy and introduces us to the complexity of ethical dilemmas.  Art comforts and illuminates.  Art introduces us to new experiences and points of view.  Art is a conversation about world views and hopes in a time when people are often just shouting at one another.  It asks "What if?"  It helps us solve problems and be kind to one another. Ironically, the people who have designed cynical scams, scams intended to harm writers, are going to need the downstream effects of art when the AI disruption hits.  

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.