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?

(Quote via Austin Kleon)

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

“Do you believe in Magic?” asked Colin, after he had explained about Indian fakirs. “I do hope you do.”

“That I do, lad,” she answered. “I never knowed it by that name, but what does the name matter? I warrant they call it a different name in France and a different one in Germany. The same thing as set the seeds swellin’ and the sun shinin’ made thee a well lad and it’s The Good Thing. It isn’t like us poor fools that think it matters if us is called the wrong name. The Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worry. It goes on makin’ worlds by the millions–worlds like us. Never stop believin’ in The Big Good Thing and knowin’ the world’s full of it–and call it what you like.”

(from The Secret Garden, lightly edited to make the dialect a little easier to read.)

Something’s happened this year and I’m back to getting 2-3 books from the library every week and blowing through them, a pace I kept up through my early twenties. Granted, most of them have been detective novels that are pretty easy to blow through, but it’s been really nice to be reading again.

At the library I saw that there was a third book out from Sara Gran in the Claire De Witt detective series, which is kind of like Raymond Chandler but with a punk lady and a lot more drugs. This quote about the LA hills hit me, because I had just driven through there a few weeks before reading it and thought, “What the hell, why is this city so mountainous?”

Why were the Los Angeles hills so arcane, so occulted to the world outside? People talked about Los Angeles as it it were New York, spread out and deformed, melted like hot cookie dough on a pan. I didn’t know until I got there that the city was a web of mountains and valleys and canyons, starting out wet and cool and drying itself out into desert as it headed east, unlike anyplace else on earth; a maze of dead-end streets that were never parallel and curved in and across themselves like snakes. There was an energy to Los Angeles that was sharp and would cut you if you didn’t recognize it. Every grain of sand in the beaches and the desert buried under the city was a little razor, ready and willing to wound.

But if you saw it for what it was, I was learning, you could maneuver in between the knives and glide through the city, like a needle in a record. You just had to keep your eyes open for synchronicity, and never expect kindness. Just shut up and be grateful when it appeared.