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The app says the moon is 98.5% full this morning. And that is more than I need to know. “Almost full” is fine.

It’s overcast, but the wind blew the clouds away for a few moments while I was walking Leonard. Long enough for me to notice the almost full moon tinging the sky a deep purple.

The new morning routine is already taking hold. Leonard went to the sliding door as usual, but then it must have occurred to him that we would be heading around the block first thing. He nudged the entry door open with this nose to find me wriggling my feet into my boots. He ducked his head to let me slide the harness on. Tail wagging. What a nice way to start the day: tail wagging.

I am not sure how I feel about him adjusting more quickly than I am to the morning walk. It felt good today, but the run that followed was sluggish. No owl. Not even a hopping blackbird in the underbrush this morning. I guess it’s silly to think every morning is going to lay gifts at my feet.

Warriors, bridges, happy babies. Meditation. I should maybe add a bit of tail-wagging to the mornings.

This time last year I was in London, heading to Northumberland for the half-marathon. Wondering if the people on the train to Heathrow were wearing masks to protect me or to protect themselves. No one outside of Eastern Asia was even talking about masks then. The next day, I was wondering if I were stupid to be shivering in a tent with 400 other runners waiting for a bib — knowing someone could be infectious. Maybe. How likely? Two, three cases so far in England?

Three weeks later everything here at home shut down. I’d slipped through a narrow window at the beginning.

Middle-aged people who’d been playing beer pong at a ski resort in Austria set off a ring of contagion up north. Or so I read in the news. But it could have easily been me, having brought it home from that tent.

Scientists keep changing their minds about what makes us human. What makes us unique when compared to other animals. I have heard some say it is our ability to comprehend our own mortality.

This doesn’t ring true to me. I think this fear of death, this awareness of our impermanence is what we share with other species. And our response is as illogical as theirs. Social animals will shun one of their own with a sign of disease. They bare their teeth. Chase them off. So do we. We can be subtle, though: we use shame to run them off.

Wikipedia says that Syphilis is spread by (among other things) prostitution. I find this utterly fascinating: a bacteria with the awareness to know when money is being exchanged for a sexual act. It is so difficult to wrestle science from our moralities.

There’s been a problem in the Norwegians schools with what they are calling contagion-shaming. (It’s a catchier phrase in Norwegian) (Pun intended). When I talked to my students about the randomness of viruses and our very human nature to want to blame people for their own misfortune so we can convince ourselves we are in control of our own fates, I shared with them that two of my family members have had the virus.

A hand went up: “You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but what were they doing? How did they get it?”

Don’t we all want the answer to be: beer-pong?

Not that I am a complete misanthrope. Margaret Mead said the first sign of civilization in ancient culture was a leg bone that had been broken and healed. She says that doesn’t happen in the animal kingdom. I don’t know. I think it may be more complicated than that. I am not convinced compassion makes us unique either. I don’t think we are the only species continually balancing compassion and self-preservation.

At any rate, there’s no run in the north of England this year. There’s only this new beginning. Dusting myself off and not asking myself what I did to deserve this little break-down. Mental illness. No asking what I did to bring it on. What I didn’t do to avoid it. It happens. There is no returning to the way things were. Things will be different. We heal imperfectly. But we heal. If we let go of our previous ideas of ourselves. And remember that imperfection is part of our charm.

Just look at the crooked trees that are so interesting.

The pine tree’s branches
wither with a new rung’s growth
mycorrhizal networks weave
and redirect through hairy
systems laced like spiders’ silk

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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve had Covid dreams. Logically, I should be more concerned, considering the increase in local cases of the new mutation. I don’t know. Maybe my subconscious has played out the scenario so many times it has soothed itself. Or simply resigned.

It’s been below freezing for a couple of weeks. The house is a little cold, which means the bedroom is especially chilly – and that’s good for sleep.

I doubt the dreams are gone for good. But I’ll enjoy these deep-sleep nights for now.

I’ve only rarely gone outside this week. But enough to see the full moon begin to sag just a little. I’ve stood on the deck to watch – and hear – the sparks flying from the contact cables when the freight train passes. It frightens Leonard, who otherwise loves the cold weather. I wonder if the smell of the hares in the area sits in relief above the smell of the clean snow.

Leonard darts off and returns with fresh snow stuck on his snout. Darts off again.

Tongue out, tail high. I’m not sure how we know when dogs are smiling. He is definitely smiling.

I like to think it’s just the vibe, though no doubt there are physical aspects we pick up on subconsciously – the pinch of the muscle between the whiskers over his eyes. But everything sets off a tiny chain reaction in the world. The slightest breeze. A reflection of light. Particles. We have our own gravitational fields. We have more senses than we are taught in elementary school. Maybe taken as the whole of it: a vibe.

It’s been a long time since the vibe at work has been good. There’s not been a lot of smiling this winter. No dancing around the tree in the gymnasium. No New Year’s hugs. No Friday afternoon jostling in the hallways.

There’s so much fear between the laughter. Sometimes we reach out to put a hand on a shoulder. We forget. Then we remember. Our stomachs knot with guilt.

We dream.

I want to open all the doors and windows everywhere – and let the snow blow through it all. Cover it all – just long enough for things to start again.

in a dark cupboard
bread rises with its own heat
the baker beats it
down – and again it rises

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The tomatoes I replanted when they outgrew the greenhouse are now rotting greenly on the vine. I figure there is a metaphor there.

The garden was never cultivated. I never cultivated the garden.

The coriander sprouted – then flowered, and quickly went to seed. The beets were too crowded to thrive, and the sweet potatoes sent shoots where there was no soil in which to land.

I’ve no idea what’s up with the strawberry plants, with their wide, lily pad-like leaves, but no berries.

I’ve brought the angel wing into the house now that the temperatures have dropped below 15C. The perennials are dying. Or going dormant.

The honeysuckle has twined its way far past the trellis I put up in May. It’s choking the thuja, but blooming with such a fragrance that I can’t bring myself to cut it back.

I do have hope. There’s the winter to read, and to learn. And there is something to be said for learning one’s place in the making of things.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

INTERPRETIVE TRANSLATION OF TALMUDIC TEXTS. Gratefulness.org

There is a personal grief in private failures, in every missed deadline – every lost hour.
And a communal mourning for every collective dream deferred.

I’ve been meditating on impermanence. I even learned to spell the word correctly. But accepting that things are always in motion is easier than accepting the futility of our determinations with regard to where that motion will take us.

My circle of influence is tiny.

But I smile at the woman I pass in the grocery store and hope there are ripples of influence. Maybe that is all any of us can do. And maybe this is everything?

This, and the daily attention required to cultivate what we plant?

I spent Saturday brooding a mood of discontent.
Fortunately the shell is thin and cracks easily –

I ran in the evening.
And the forest is always a place for sloughing what’s become useless
and for new growth.

We are wild things, after all.

Cultivation is a balancing act.

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Last week, Ruth-Anne West commented on one of my posts:

The desire to share a good word and make a difference from our place of insignificance…now that’s a worthy challenge. Oh let’s try!

This week I have been wondering where exactly tolerance becomes complicity for me personally.

I have been wondering where solidarity slides into appropriation, as well.

20160910_152348
Street art, and a stain: a woman turning her back on the broken heart. Sola Beach 2016

Reading the New Yorker’s essays this morning, Tony Morrison’s words ripped me apart, and left me feeling hopeless for hours.

There are no simple answers. But I think – at this moment – as Ruth-Anne suggests – there is a lot to be done from a place of insignificance.

A smile. Eye contact.

And when necessary, a carefully worded letter.

Early last week I was listening to a podcast – one of my favourite podcasts – while walking the dog. And I literally stopped in my tracks. One of the hosts repeatedly ridiculed a woman for her spelling and grammar skills.

Ridiculing a woman who has been dead for over two hundred years.

It became one of those jokes that becomes a joke because you just keep returning to it.

Pointlessly, yet with such great effect.

This weekend, I realised that, in light of the social climate in the United States, and as a woman who will always be the “trailer park girl” (despite a solid education and liberal political view), I thought it was necessary to speak up:

To remind these historians of the fact that education is a privilege – and was even more so 200 years ago when less than 50% of women in New England were could read. That spelling is not an indication of intelligence, and that the assumption that it is looks like class discrimination, and feels like contempt.

(Not to mention the fact that if the woman did have limited intelligence, ridiculing her for falling for – and daring to write gushing love-letters to – a charismatic and opportunistic politician, is just… well… mean.)

This particular episode was a “live” episode, with an audience of what I kind of think of as my own tribe. But their collective, giggling ridicule made me realise that this is not my tribe and never will be. A slip of the tongue (“ketch” for “catch”), a misspelling or malapropism will give me away every time. But in this case – it would have been the visible flinch from a jibe that reached my core.

I didn’t write a public letter. And I don’t want them to read my email on air. I just want them to not do such a thing again.

It’s not a big thing. But it is a tendril of the root of the problem. And one I can attempt to grab hold of and stop.

Of course, it’s possible they’re laughing over a typo as they hit delete.

But that will be on them.

I will keep trying in very small, quiet ways – from this place of insignificance.

 

 

 

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Dear Di,

You write about language as music:

“I fell asleep one night, in Istanbul, listening to the retired officers wives playing cards in the next room. Playing cards, gossiping, laughing … and I realised that the sound of them soothed me, like the sound of the sea, or a river would. I love language, like others like music perhaps […]”

Yes, the music of overheard, muffled conversations. Funny that I was just thinking about this the other day – in a different context. There is the freedom of eavesdropping without having to participate. It’s like being a child again and listening to the muffled voices of grown-ups in the next room after bedtime, isn’t it?

Maybe there is a special freedom and relief of knowing that no one gives a damn about you. The privilege of sometimes covertly and uncomprehendingly enjoying the world’s activity.

Again: opening to wonder. Like listening to the birds in the park without trying to identify the calls of the individual species. There’s something rather meditative about that, about not putting things in boxes, not categorising, not judging. Just sitting in a teeming civilisation of birds – or humanity – and listening to the music. And then dancing on your own.

I fear that psychiatrists might call that parallel play and diagnose me with some kind of anti-social disorder. But then, authenticity is about rejecting arbitrary boxes, isn’t it? Like I tell my students every year: “Pity the Platypus”, who doesn’t fit the man-made categories. But we should all be the platypus. Be the Platypus, I tell them.  Someday I will get around to writing the book with that title.

And that leads me to: I could kick you for giving me yet another book to buy. I’m assuming that Rod Judkins has already said all of this in the book you quoted.

I cannot tell you how tired I am of all of these online tests to categorise ourselves as this or that. The Whitman quote is ubiquitous, but there is a reason it is. We have no choice but to reach for it!

I crave attention.

I want to observe.

Interactive theater always makes me uncomfortable. By pulling me into the experience, it pulls me out of it. Did I ever tell you about my little epiphany in Oslo a few years ago? I was at a conference for teaching artists and we all took part in a “happening” in the park. Some of us were paired up, with our opposite on the other side of a huge circle of 40+ people. We  held strings that stretched across, criss-crossing over a great expanse of withering grass. There were two dancers in the centre, and a director who told the dancers where to move, and how to negotiate all of the strings.

I really wanted to give my end of the string to a passer-by, and head up to the top of the hill so I could watch – so I could write about the associations the event was giving me. I think I’m an interpreter at heart. Not an actor, not a director. I see metaphors where no one else does.

dsc_0181-3
A fish, half-out of water. Japan: when I was “forest bathing” without knowing it.

But when I think about it, maybe it isn’t that surprising. A shaman, a oracle. A poet. All of those are just people who deal in metaphors, aren’t they? People who just can’t distill experience into straight talk. (I am settling for poet, by the way, that takes hubris enough).

The reason this was an epiphany is that, all these years, I thought I wanted to be the director.

But I’ve wandered – back to your letter: You aren’t in the pub just to watch football. You are there to soak it all up, aren’t you? With your book as a barrier during half-time. (I bet you hate that you can’t whip out your camera at the pub, and have no one notice.)

I think it’s like Japanese forest bathing, only among humans. It sounds healthy to me. At least for people like us.

But you are more flexible than I am. More skilled, at any rate: your ease with putting people at ease. I have been in awe of that since I met you. I think of how you soothed the angry woman I photographed (incidentally) in downtown Stavanger. You immediately made her feel “seen” instead of observed – with just a sentence or two. You would be a good diplomat. But then, that would probably be a bastardising of your talent.

That is a gift beyond that of the shaman, the oracle, the poet. I don’t know what that is. You may say you had no mentors. But you have become one.

From what you write, maybe it did spring from something that you don’t see as a strength, this “sacrificing for each other”? Because I think it is a strength, or has become one, at any rate. Sometimes I think sacrificing can mean giving up one’s own sense of knowing and stepping into another person’s point of view. Not all of us do that as easily. Few as quickly and intuitively as you do.

Maybe that is why you can deal with the mocking in a way I think I would struggle with. You understand it comes from a place of recognition – that is is a way to break down any attempt at pretence and posturing? As I think about it, I realise that it would probably do me good to learn to see it as you do. To “stand it”, as you describe it. And to focus on the curiosity and joy.

You describe me as “settled”. But that’s not how it feels. Yes. I’m happy in the partnership I’ve so fortunately stumbled upon. E. doesn’t anchor me, though; he knows I’m in motion, and he moves with me, or is comfortable trusting I’ll not choose to untether entirely.

And I feel at home in this landscape. I have this nest – thought it feels as temporary as any, no matter how long it will last. Like you, my children are elsewhere. And I know all of this is healthy, because of who we are.

But God forbid I should ever be settled and satisfied with what I’ve seen and sucked from life thus far. Imagine. Were that true, I wouldn’t be reaching still towards you and your stories.

I remember your blog when we met: “People become stories, and stories become understanding.”

I am still waiting for the book with that title.

I wanted to end there, but there is this thing about learning the language. I have tried. I have hired private tutors at 1000 crowns an hour. I honestly believe it all comes down to the fact that I don’t like myself in Norwegian. I don’t like the lack of music, the lack of humor: I can learn the rules, but I can never really sing.

So, yeah. 23 years here, and my Norwegian still stinks. There’ll be no judgement from this corner.

Much love, Di!

XO Ren

Di’s reply

This is one of a series of public letters to friends – friends who write back to me on their own blogs. Please click through.  Category: Correspondence.

If you’d like to catch up, read the letters in chronological order here.