I’ve started and stopped this week’s newsletter precisely 57 times because what is there to say? Typically my instinct nudges me toward the type of writing that would leave my reader with some kind of takeaway—a nugget of hope, a kernel of inspiration, a bit of humor, a metaphorical head nod or a fist raised in solidarity—but today, instinct demands otherwise. Of course I want to believe in hope, and evolution, and love, and my fellow Americans; it’s also true that everything is awful and even if we get a new president in the fall, we average folks (you know, the 99% of us) are staring into a future that will take generations to repair, if we even repair anything at all. And that’s best case scenario, which, after 2016, I’m not convinced is at all likely.
A proclivity for worst-case-scenario thinking aside, I am an optimist. I believe in humanity (even if most individual humans make me stabby). I believe more people than not are good and kind and generally just want to live and let live. I believe that this pendulum that we’re all at the mercy of, that is swinging so far to the right as to be bandying us over into fascist territory, will ultimately slow and return to a quieter center.
I am also terrified for all that will be lost, that we are losing, along the way.
Every single morning since I’ve been getting up with the sun to sit and write for a couple of hours, a small hummingbird flits and buzzes around the massive plum tree outside my window. Seeing her is one of the small yet exquisite everyday moments I’ve come to depend on here in Pandemia. I am lucky to live in a part of the city more-or-less equidistant to three stunning parks, to have a backyard with a broad reaching California Live Oak, for a bedroom/home office with windows big enough to take in all the life that passes through said plum tree in a given day, and I don’t even care that between the birds making pit stops and the overly ripe plums falling, the surface of my car look like a Jackson Pollock painting. Walking around the neighborhood with my Tater, I collect plums and blackberries and lilac and jasmine and vines of nasturtium I try and fail at propagating, and one time a neighbor gave me pods from their oriental poppies after he caught me swooning over them in his front yard, and there are of course figs to look forward to come September. I leave my phone at home and I take in as much life as I can. I am craving more life. I don’t get to see many humans so it is wonderful to have these other companions of the natural world - the plum tree, whose cycles track my own; the oak tree in the backyard that is home to dozens of birds and where squirrels party (and even raccoons from time to time); the feral cats in the alleys, one of whom lets me pet her and purrs like a motorboat the second I start to scritch under her chin.
We are in staggeringly heavy and dangerous times. I don’t need to spell it out. I know you’re just as bombarded as I am. I sent out my first slow motion sober dispatch back on April 4th, 2020, just slightly over three months ago. That first post oozes earnestness, it bubbles with hope like the sourdough starters in all of our pandemic pantries. On April 4th, San Francisco was a little over two weeks in to shelter-in-place. I was a little over two weeks in to the beginning of my 36th year. Career stuff was coming together after a year spent floundering post MFA; dating was still a thing; my house was still intact (one of my housemates has had to move out after her income disappeared; another is hunkering down at her mom’s house indefinitely). I don’t feel earnest anymore. I feel quiet; tempered. I am feeling the weight of living through this time. I am in constant dance of adjusting expectations. I want to escape. But between shelter-in-place restrictions being reinstated, the closing of international borders, and, you know, sobriety, I don’t escape anymore. I stay. Staying is a gift, even if typing those words makes me want to barf.
I’ve been writing my way though this since April 4th. I’ve written about how sober folks are perhaps more primed for this moment than most because we know how to sit through really difficult life stuff for long periods of time. I’ve written about how dislocating and disassociating is to exist in a horizonless day-to-day. I’ve written about grief and belonging and boredom. I’ve written about messiness, and perfectionism. I’m not quite sure, yet, how to write about the heavy.
We all have our ways of coping, of dealing with the exquisite awfulness of learning to sit with the discomfort of just hanging out with ourselves and our own brains. Though I want to believe there is a future brighter than any of us can imagine somewhere on the horizon, I’m not sure I’ll get to see it my lifetime (if it comes) and anyway, these days, that kind of talk is pretty and all but not particularly helpful. I got back from two nights up at the Yuba River and everything is just shit and at this point I think we have to white knuckle our way as best as we can.
I want to write about grace, and forgiveness, and maybe in a way I already am, but more often than not I sit down to write and the words don’t come until I look out my window at all that life happening and then I remember how much bigger the world is than I could ever imagine. That despite the the darkness of everything everything, life can’t help itself. Neither should we.
(and now, for some joy):
(Tater post-rainstorm is 2020)
Love you all a whole lot. How’s everyone doing? Let me know in the comments 👇🏽
It's so great to hear your voice. The grass is green, chipmunks are everywhere, my chickens love their new feeder, fireflies are in the tree tops and hummingbirds continue to amaze (their hearts beat at 1,200 beats per minute!). Thanks for being you.
I love your writing Dani. I, too am feeling the heaviness of it all. Like a have a sand-filled blanket over me. I know lots of people have it a lot worse than I do right now, and I keep reminding myself how lucky I am to be healthy, but some days feel really dull and gray. I am digging in to learning more about racial inequality, trying to make myself and this world better. Some days I have mountains of energy, other days I am depleted. When it all feels like too much, I look to my three daughters for hope. Their generation seems to still have it. They are more accepting, more aware, more evolved. They have a mess to clean up, and I hope they are up to the task...