It’s going to be hot all week but the weekend was just perfect: blue skies, big clouds, just the right intensity of sun. Bradbury-rereading weather for sure:
Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
(The opening of Dandelion Wine, the summer book)
If you’ve never read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, I think it would make good quarantine reading. They run out of fuel, they nearly run out of food (Almanzo saves them!), they can’t leave the house, there’s nothing to do, and near the end of the book everyone is so broken down they’re ready to give up.
But then! Good old Pa jumps up and shakes his fist at the blizzard howling outside the tar paper shack:
“It can’t beat us!” Pa said.
“Can’t it, Pa?” Laura asked stupidly.
“No,” said Pa. “It’s got to quit sometime and we don’t. It can’t lick us. We won’t give up.”
Then Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.
It’s got to quit sometime and we don’t. That’s right, friends.
Hey have you paid attention to the news lately? Nationally, we get to watch one old white guy with a history of inappropriate touching try to beat another old white guy with a history of inappropriate touching. Globally, we might all die/see the collapse of society as we know it! NOT A GOOD TIME for people with anxiety.
So I’m doing what I can: staying off Twitter, reading books, keeping my personal life raft of loved ones and home and hobbies afloat. And I remembered this post from Austin Kleon, where he shared a quote from Leonard Woolf’s autobiography (it ended up inspiring Kleon’s latest book, Keep Going):
The last months of peace…were the most terrible months of my life, for, helplessly and hopelessly, one watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers…Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.
I was reading Death on the Nile and found this passage:
Jam maker, therapist, world’s greatest detective–what can’t Poirot do?
I can’t mention Mole without having to go back and read parts of The Wind in the Willows again–this time, the parts where it’s getting to be winter and they’re settling in to rest:
No animal, according to the rules of animal etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter. All are sleepy—some actually asleep. All are weather-bound, more or less; and all are resting from arduous days and nights, during which every muscle in them has been severely tested, and every energy kept at full stretch.
I would like to adopt this way of life, please.
My family has always visited the cemetery for Memorial Day. This year was the first year visiting Mom’s grave there and it was hard.
I’m not sure this Mark Doty passage is 100% reflective of my state of mind–my sorrow has a lot of rage in it these days–but it does sum up how you can go about your days within it:
Sorrow feels right , for now. Sorrow seems large and inhabitable, an interior season whose vaulted sky’s a suitable match for the gray and white tumult arched over these headlands. A sorrow is not to be gotten over or moved through in quite the way that sadness is, yet sorrow is also not as frozen and monochromatic as mourning. Sadness exists inside my sorrow, but it’s not as large as sorrow’s realm. This sorrow is capacious; there’s room inside it for the everyday, for going about the workaday stuff of life. And for loveliness, for whatever we’re to be given by the daily walk.
(From Heaven’s Coast)
I’ve had this Mark Doty quote saved for long enough that I don’t remember where or when I first encountered it–definitely not during Mom’s illness, but I’m glad I have it now. This is from the memoir he wrote after losing his partner Wally, which I haven’t read (yet).
“And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd–as if I shouldn’t be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it…I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in.”
Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir
I’ve had this saved in my files for a long time, but only now–six months into therapy, six weeks after the death of my mom–do I think I’m starting to get it. Allowing things is the trick (which I will probably be working on for the rest of my life).
“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
Pema Chodron
