But I can be so grateful for the trilling birds, for the bee upsetting my earbud in a mad dash for my brain.
For the flowering trees pink and white and raspberry-yogurt color against the bluest sky.
The clean breezes.
The quiet smiles of people reading a newspaper on the porch swing. Delivery workers gently maneuvering hand trucks laden with what we need to keep us all afloat.
For shy buds spreading their fingers in greybrown woods to stretch their green skin out against the sun for the first time.
For drops of rain on tulip heads. For babies screeching in sheer joy.
For the sweet salad smell of wild onions rioting through the forest.
For the cool, mournful smell of city gardens after a thunderstorm.
For a birthday party taking place on a stoop and spreading out into the street so that clusters of guests can give each other a six-foot berth. Balloons spelling out a golden HAPPY BIRTHDAY across the awning. It’s almost normal and it’s happening right here.
For birdsong at the open window and the four or so walls that keep us safe and together.
I thought I’d show you how I whip up something tasty using some unusual pantry combinations.
Did I say “unusual”? Freudian slip. I meant “creative,” probably.
One of my favorite things to make is chili. This is primarily because it’s one of those words with almost no actual meaning, kind of like “sandwich” or “dumpling.” I find that anything between a soup and a solid can legally be called a “chili,” if you’re prepared to keep a straight face and stick to your story when you announce what you’re serving.
Today I’m starting with some beans I soaked last night.** We’ll just set them on to boil. That’s another nice thing about a chili: set it and forget it!
While we wait, here: let’s take a look at one I made before, as a sample.
Okay, fine, I know these are cheese balls. I just really wanted some cheese balls for breakfast. They may be to blame for my burgeoning nighttime ulcer and the scabs on the roof of my mouth but I see no reason to stop.
Here’s the irony about this fixation on places: so much of my time is spent in the great nowhere/everywhere that is the inside of a modern apartment with an HVAC system and the Internet.
On top of that, my current dwelling, although very comfortable for my needs, is a gentrification fever dream. How it feels to live there; the walls and pavement that line it; most of the people who now walk their (many) dogs and (far fewer) human children around it—none of these meaningfully existed fifteen years ago. It’s been terraformed of the whole cloth of long-term neglect. The neighborhood got a new name to anoint its rebirth, its entry into the witness protection program.
Living in gentrified space like this can feel like a grander version of living inside with the HVAC and the Internet. It’s a way to escape being somewhere. A way to escape being anywhere at all.
On the other hand, my search for somewhere feels as though it’s all about dirt, trees, bricks, mortar. A place that is not just anywhere. An idiosyncratic place. One on which I can have an impact, and it on me.
Today is Easter. What does this fact mean to you? Perhaps it brings up memories of egg hunts and pastel-foil-wrapped chocolates. Perhaps it is a fact of deep religious significance, a time of hope and joy. Or maybe it reminds you of a time in your past you’d rather forget. Quite possibly, it means nothing to you.
For me, the religious calendar is a rich source of meaning: it layers over whatever is going on year to year, encouraging us to consider what it is to feel joy, grief, hope, regret, as our lives shift and change. Opening up to this kind of ritual pattern can be meaning-making. It opposes the robotic sameness that can permeate everywhere and every time. It forces us to look a little harder and see what is going on beneath what is going on.
On Friday, Good Friday, we cloaked ourselves in ritual grief and loss, forgetting the coming ritual joy of Easter Sunday.
Sometimes, like now, there is a wide gap between the message of the day and what it feels like to be living in it. It may be Easter on the calendar, but the circumstances feel a lot more like a prolonged Lent with no end date in sight.
I’m not sure where to go from here. I’m writing today’s post live with no plan. I feel a little glum and uninspired.
But then I watched the live Easter service from my boyfriend’s hometown church. The pastor was outside at the chapel in the woods, and in this living room the windows were open, and I couldn’t tell which of the birds were singing outside here and which were with her. That’s a bit of hope.
Then, because why not, I watched my own local church. The humans inside were few: just the priest and his wife, the assistant priest, the organist, a liturgist, and the camera operator. A tot of wine in a coffee mug and an Oreo stood in for the Eucarist. (Eucarish?) But the sanctuary was splendid with candles and white cloths and flowers surrounding the cross at the altar. And the organ fluted something mighty. The few humans in the sanctuary shouted and clapped as the phenomenal postlude came to a close. That is something.
The Easter 2020 setup.
Thankfully, Easter is less a cause of political shouting than Christmas. But like Christmas, the reality of Easter is a syncretic mish-mash of sacred and profane, ancient and modern, spiritual and consumerist, Jewish and Christian and pagan.
A lot of us can’t stomach contradictions like these. Perhaps because a lot of religious types insist white-knuckled on the purity of their traditions, any syncretism, any muddiness, is an invitation for the irreligious to roll their eyes and disprove the religious. Take Easter: its very name in our language has nothing to do with its Christian content. It is likely the name of a Germanic pagan goddess of dawn. The Christians evangelizing in the British Isles must have shrugged and retained her name and the trappings of her spring celebrations, which overlapped credibly enough with the passover.
And now, we’re doing some bizarre mix of all of it: celebrating the Christian resurrection of Christ on a date tied to the Jewish passover, with all kinds of spring fertility rituals that clearly have nothing to do with either of those things. (Etymonline reports primly that “the paganish customs of Easter seem to have grown popular c. 1900; before that they were limited to German immigrants.”)
But if we can find a way to blend all of these things together in a more or less stable solution, albeit one that forces us to explain to bewildered children what bunnies have to do with eggs, and what eggs have to do with Jesus, then I guess we can find a way to make meaning out of a really weird Easter.
Let’s walk together today while we chat, shall we? Make sure to keep at least 6 feet away from me. I mean, yeah, due to COVID, but also, because I have an exceptionally large personal bubble that I like to maintain even in normal times.
Why here, why now, you ask? Well, every day around 2pm, I start to literally shake. Is it anxiety? Pent-up rage? Some as-yet-undiscovered illness that I’ve always suspected and darkly hoped to discover that I have, which will require me to live a life of leisure at a faraway seaside sanitarium? We don’t know. But the only solution is to strap on some shoes and head out for a walk.
We sleep in a windowless room. The light comes in through large gaps at the ceiling that open the bedroom up to the main room, with its huge east-facing window.
At night it is dark. He turns the clock face off. When I wake up in the night, my only clue to what time it is comes from the far wall opposite the ceiling gap.
If I wake up and it’s full dark, I know it’s too soon to get up. I try to go back to sleep. (Whether I succeed is a story for another day.)
If I wake up and there’s a band of pale light glowing through the ceiling gap, I know it’s growing light out.
If I wake up and there are bright medallions arrayed across the wall, I know the sun is fully up and splaying its light everywhere, flooding as much of itself as it can through the curtain rod holes.
This morning, Good Friday, I saw a light show I’ve never seen before. The pale band was out when I woke up, so I knew it was dawn. But then a little faint orange glimmer popped up in the corner, flickering exactly like a flame. Then four more. Five little candles dancing on the far wall. I lay in bed watching them as they grew in number until they shimmied across the whole wall. They changed with every moment, growing larger until they were full circles of orange flickering light, carved in lines by the horizontal blinds, and dancing with shadows of the leaves of the courtyard bushes they shone between.
Sooty black imprints undulating on dark-orange light prints.
Soon they began to descend, twenty sunsets, as the sun rose and the light cast lower and lower, until the ceiling gap no longer let them in.
That’s when I got up.
Christ’s life, a brief candle. Today we rehearse his death in a ritual of sadness. It’s a day for loss, scheduled on the calendar. We pretend to forget that he will rise on Sunday. That’s how rituals work. For today, we look no further than the grief we bear right now. We sit in it, something I do not know how to do. We sit in it and don’t try to fix it. We let it in and we let it be and we let it pass.
There’s a theme in my life: the search for a place. Or a sense of place, at least.
I’m always thinking about where I’ll be when I finally land where I will be. You see the problem: this is inherently circular.
Where will I be when I’m there?
There, I guess.
But where is that?
Where I’ll be.
Instructive.
I long for it. I get wistful walking through pleasing neighborhoods. When I like one particularly I visit it frequently, lurking around with longing. Most recently it’s the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of DC, which occasionally still gets away with styling itself a “village.”
It’s leafy. That’s the major thing. I think I could thrive anywhere if the trees are big and green around me. And it has that lived-in feeling, especially right now when the weather is abnormally good. It’s all people gardening, sitting on stoops drinking iced tea and shouting kindly with their neighbors from a safe distance. There are lots of Little Free Libraries, which I’m getting better about not automatically laying hands on. And I imagine the insides of the houses: tasteful art, comfortable couches for reading in, dappled natural light from the backyard, which I imagine is similarly leafy and has great places to sit as warm twilight comes on.
It’s not even so much that I want to be there; it’s that I want to be the kind of person I imagine I would instantly become if I were there. Relaxed, capacious. I’d read during the daytime, rather than just for five or ten minutes with eyes half-closed at bedtime. I’d probably know my neighbors, invite each other over for tea, that kind of thing. I’d take up crafting.
Why this longing? I’ve moved a lot over the last 14 years, not only between apartments but also states, from coast to coast and halfway in between. Depending on how you count, it’s somewhere between 16 times (unique top-level street addresses) and 25 times (every time I moved all my stuff from one room or apartment to another). That’s…bonkers.
And in all these moves, I’ve clung to a sense of the temporary. This is just for now. This is just in these weird circumstances. There’s never been a decision of ah, this is forever.
That’s what I see in my lurk-walks through leafy places. The dream of finally being the sort of person who goes ah, this is forever.
Or, because we know that God laughs when we make plans/sweeping statements, at least “ah, this is not actively temporary. I will not sabotage my happiness by keeping one foot in and one foot out.”
I’m an introvert. Introverted enough that sometimes even my own company is too much stimulation and I must lie quite still in the dark.
I know a lot of extroverts. Extroverts are not okay right now.
I’m trying to empathize. The problem is, in some ways this is a slightly sad version of my best life. I’m currently forbidden to commute, encouraged to take solitary walks where no one is allowed to stop me to talk to me, and I am being socially encouraged for the health of my fellow Americans to eat takeout while I catch up on my stories, when possible. Apart from being separated from friends and family, this is some weird version of the dream.
To try to empathize, though, I close my eyes and imagine the introvert version of this crisis. It would be some new problem that makes home unsafe, that makes being alone or in small groups a public-health hazard. We’d be required to be in groups of ten or more at all times, not allowed to go home and put on the jim-jams and rest our tender vocal cords for a few hours.
This week the stock market struggled to recover amid fears that uneven state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will prolong the period of uncertainty around
G’DAY! WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE A LARGE AMOUNT OF EARWAX? DON’T ANSWER THAT. HERE IT IS.
suggested that in comparable historical recessions, the full picture of economic damage to come would not be fully visible until
HEY. EARWAX AGAIN. JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE YOU SAW IT. ISN’T IT HUGE? DO YOU WANT TO FIND OUT HOW TO
raises the question of whether certain industries, including petting zoos and numblethorps, will ever
OKAY, NOT A FAN OF EARWAX. HOW ABOUT THIS: LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT SOME SLICED BANANAS IN A PAN OF WATER. ARE YOU CURIOUS HOW THIS ONE SNACK CAN HELP YOU NEVER DIE OF OBESITY?
no one is quite sure how many goats are required to fix one supercomputer
C’MON, YOU HAVE TO BE WONDERING IF THE SNACK IS BANANA STEW.
donkeys donkeys donkeys donkeys donkeys wait keep reading the article it’s now talking about
PERHAPS YOU WANT TO LOOK AT AN ANIMATION OF A BUNCH OF CIRCLES FORMING INTO A SQUARE AND THEN INTO LINES AND THEN A CIRCLE?
owngs wlkgpq hcklsieg lqoiet mcsweo sk whwiwto ojwgk wait focus you can definitely read still. You remember how to read
I THOUGHT SO. JUST KEEP LOOKING AT THE CIRCLES. WOW, LOOK AT THEM GO. NOW THEY’RE IN A TRIANGLE. DO YOU WANT TO FIND OUT
Circle. Circle. Square. Lines. Circle.
PERFECT. YOU LOVE THIS MOVING CIRCLE STUFF. WORKS ON INFANTS, WORKS ON PHDS. BEHOLD I AM THE GREAT LEVELER. THE DESTROYER OF READING. LOOK UPON MY WORKS YE MIGHTY AND
A little while ago (roughly 40 or 50 years by the feel of it, but under a month in clock time) I decided to post here once a day for as long as quarantine/lockdown/shelter-in-place/stay-at-home/whatever lasts. This has been fun for me, and good practice, but also a little frantic. Sometimes I wake up with ideas, and many days I don’t. I’m keeping a head start with a decent backlog of little stubs I can expand into posts.
Well, I have that backlog for now. My brain (ever the asshole) keeps piping up to ask: “What if you suddenly run out? What if you find yourself one day with nothing to say?”
(Note that my brain is less concerned with me having nothing interesting to say, because that particular fear ship has sailed).
This feels like a pretty mundane version of the plight of Scheherazade, who forestalled her execution by prolonging her storytelling. Did she also wake up every morning seeing “add to the story and don’t get executed” on her to-do list, and break into a cold sweat? Did she ever know that she had, say, 235 more nights of material ready to go, but wonder what would happen on night 236?
The differences, of course, between me and Scheherazade are that I’m the one who required my daily post, rather than a murderous king. Also, unlike the execution hanging over her head, there are absolutely no negative repercussions if I skip a day. But apart from that, the comparison is ironclad.
All that’s happening here is that my old friend, the scarcity voice, has pulled up a chair. Yes, we have enough for now, but what about when we don’t?
To which the only response is a hair flip and a glib “what about it?” and then one must lace up one’s tennis shoes and go for a walk.
