This week, I’m unexpectedly back in my suburban hometown and, as always when I’m here, lounging about my parent’s house and away from my normal people and routines in the city, I can’t help but reflect on literally everything.
I’m one week into this season’s “Depth Experiment” (I’m doing 100 days instead of a whole year). It has a distinctly different flavor than last summer’s similar endeavor. I look back on my reflections this time last year, and wow, I was so damn earnest. Things feel more muted now. These past two weeks in particular for me have felt blue as hell.
So I’m thinking about joy, and how to add bright spots to my days, knowing that the overall tone, or shape, is one of melancholy at best and total panic at worst 😬.
Between all this and being back in OC, I’m reconnecting to things that brought me joy as a kid.I’m considering how I might incorporate some of that into my 100 days.
SO: My question for you this here August 7th, 2020, the only one we’ll ever get: What is something that you used to love as a kid? That brought you joy, without being attached to any outcome or result?
For me, that is dance. Here I am at a father-daughter dance with my abuelo, Mario.
We have to hold onto joy! Or else the literal fascists win.
Tell me tell me: What are your bright spots? What made you feel utterly yourself as a kid? Where do you feel safe to let go?
Love you so much it hurts, but hopefully you already know that. Also: Some fun links below 🍿
xxoodani
Links:
👉🏽 For those of you on Instagram, this new account “Recovery for the Revolution” is hella highly recommended reading/following. A quick quote from one of their first posts:
“The most prevalent forms of recovery are predominantly white. In these rooms, folks of color can receive tools of liberation, but are also often suppressed under whiteness to hide their “outside issues”, including systemic oppression. People of color, disabled folks, trans and non-binary folks, queer folks, and womxn are often told to see their stories outside of the ways in which oppression have impacted their lives. Patriarchal, Christian values often encourage folks to use shame as a tool to get and stay sober, and to shame others to do the same, especially if they aren’t “working a program” the way that person determines they should. And yet there exists a continuing ethos that recovery is accessible to everyone, you just have to want it or do it hard enough.”
👉🏽 Oscar Villalon, managing editor of local literary journal Zyzzyva, on a specific type of “desperation and abandonment” during COVID.
When there was little money for food, when breakfast would be coffee and cold tortillas, he alone, barely a teen, would leave the house before dawn, jumping over cercas, raiding meager orchards, carrying back as much fruit as he could for his little sisters and mother. Imagine doing this day in and day out. Imagine knowing nobody was going to help you or even could help you. The only way things might get better would be to leave your family once the girls were old enough to run the house, then find work far away, and send money back to a place you will never call home again. Can you understand what that would do to you?
Lovely post! What I loved as a kid was crafting, any kind of crafting. I made so much stuff, and now when I see all the macrame appearing on walls everywhere it takes me back to the 70s, when my mom would PAY ME to make macrame stuff for her - a belt, plant-hangers, so much stuff. It might be time to for me to dust off my macrame skills and once again, make some bank!
I grew up around mountain lakes that were so clear you could see everything from the surface to the bottom. Some of them would have colored stones and or downed, dead, semi-waterlogged trees that floated near the outlet. We would spend hours playing on the shores of those lakes, building stone forts; bombing pieces of wood we pretended were enemy battleships; skipping stones; or straddling the dead logs and riding them out from the shore like castaways escaping from a deserted island. Nothing could've been better at the time.
I'd post a picture of my favorite lake, but can't figure out how!
Grew up too poor to do much so I loved being outside. We had not much but I had a red blanket that was lava (Leo😈🔥) my sisters was green for grass (she was less spicy than me as a kid haha), we played on our blankets with our TY’s under a huge tree outside our tiny beach cabin on a reservation in Washington. My grandparents owned the house and had my mom pay reduced rent (young mama). We collected rocks and took walks to the bigger beach and giggled at the “swear word wall” where someone graffiti’d profanities and my sister and I thought it was hilarious. We rode bikes and rollerblades and were never inside except to eat and sleep. My mom and stepdad took us camping all the time, as I later learned “because it was free” and “sometimes when we couldn’t pay the electric bill yet”. But my sister and I had no clue, we just ventured around, my sister put together flower arrangements and I collected “cool rocks”.
Lovely post! What I loved as a kid was crafting, any kind of crafting. I made so much stuff, and now when I see all the macrame appearing on walls everywhere it takes me back to the 70s, when my mom would PAY ME to make macrame stuff for her - a belt, plant-hangers, so much stuff. It might be time to for me to dust off my macrame skills and once again, make some bank!
If you *did* want to get back into it...I'd be first on the list for a plant hanger!
I grew up around mountain lakes that were so clear you could see everything from the surface to the bottom. Some of them would have colored stones and or downed, dead, semi-waterlogged trees that floated near the outlet. We would spend hours playing on the shores of those lakes, building stone forts; bombing pieces of wood we pretended were enemy battleships; skipping stones; or straddling the dead logs and riding them out from the shore like castaways escaping from a deserted island. Nothing could've been better at the time.
I'd post a picture of my favorite lake, but can't figure out how!
Ted your reflections are always so vivid. Pun intended.
Grew up too poor to do much so I loved being outside. We had not much but I had a red blanket that was lava (Leo😈🔥) my sisters was green for grass (she was less spicy than me as a kid haha), we played on our blankets with our TY’s under a huge tree outside our tiny beach cabin on a reservation in Washington. My grandparents owned the house and had my mom pay reduced rent (young mama). We collected rocks and took walks to the bigger beach and giggled at the “swear word wall” where someone graffiti’d profanities and my sister and I thought it was hilarious. We rode bikes and rollerblades and were never inside except to eat and sleep. My mom and stepdad took us camping all the time, as I later learned “because it was free” and “sometimes when we couldn’t pay the electric bill yet”. But my sister and I had no clue, we just ventured around, my sister put together flower arrangements and I collected “cool rocks”.
That innocence. So precious.