When the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed in the Mayflower to establish the first European colony in North America, there had been only about a hundred colonists—all of them free settlers—and half of them had died during their first winter. Captain Phillip was taking more than a thousand people—most of them already weak, unhealthy convicts—on an eight-month voyage to the other side of the world.
What they remembered for the rest of their lives was not the cabin itself but rather the warm, yellow lamplight that shone out through loose chinking—light coming to them through the black night as if miraculously, beckoning them to come back in out of the cold, to the hearth of humanity.
The dividend for shutting down emotions as a routine response is invincibility at moments of stress. This is a psychological gamble, in England embraced as a gift. The English don’t fall apart, our most prized national characteristic. Look at history and see how economically productive this quality can be.
It was an outrageous moment in Roman history and not one person complained because everyone suddenly knew the consequences of complaining. Everyone knew that there was no power balance between the Senate and the people of Rome. Democracy was a charade. There was just the Senate and they would kill to keep it that way. And there would be no consequences when they did.
They have passed a law forbidding logic to be taught.
What if you are someone who does not know when something is over?
…it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.
It was a nice posting; the intercept operators could hitchhike into San Francisco. Chamberlain began fiddling with her dial, trying to pick up the Hiroshima station she received. Hiroshima sent out a very good signal. Now all she got was dead air. There was nothing at all.
Was I molested? No, I wasn’t fucking molested. I mean, no more than the average female born circa 1970.
Every day, the universe reminds me that, yes, I am safe now, but I am in America.
The barriers that prevent people from entering the middle class are the defining feature of the middle class
How typical of her not to know something was over when it was over.
Belonging in two places makes you a bridge.
Of my father, my mother, myself, I know in the end practically nothing.
In general my reading life is a richly satisfying one. Between my e-reader and my membership of one of the world’s great city libraries. I have more excellent books at my fingertips than I can ever read. It’s churlish of me to complain about having begun three this week that irked me. Nevertheless!
The first was told by an early hominid who was acutely aware of her sloping brow, hairy feet and other differences from Homo sapiens, much as female characters written by misogynists are always breasting boobily down the stairs. The third was nominally about a saintly college gardener, but actually about the author who hired him and who was such a raging snob that he managed to make everyone appearing in the book, from the gardener to his own six year old daughter, seem repulsive. A feat that would be hard to do if you were trying! Which he wasn’t.
Second’s the worst though, because the book itself is fine and the audiobook performer is great… as long as he isn’t trying to do the accents. Every American, from Whitman to Emerson to Merrill, has a Texan drawl. Rousseau sounds like Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau. I don’t know what Wittgenstein’s supposed to be but it isn’t Austrian.
And it turns out the only thing worse than taking Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines at face value is making Chatwin himself, born in Sheffield, sound like Crocodile Dundee. Excuse me while I walk into the sea.
It was sunset when I got to the barn. The moon rose over the arena, pale gold against a deep blue and purple sky, so bisexual it might have been a Janelle Monáe video.
Lenny’s a different animal at night, gentler and stranger, made of warm shadows, the moonlight bright on his white nose. Time slips sideways. I might be twenty, calling my red horse by another name, or it might be twenty thousand years ago, and me carving his likeness in ochre onto a bone.
(As I was thinking about this post and its title, I pulled up Bosch’s altarpiece of the same name and looked at it on my large high res monitor. Did you know that it is a motherfucking masterpiece? I shared this insight with my pocket coven, most of whom, unsurprisingly, were already fans.)
Between coaching sessions with engineers, I sneak outside to pull white-ramping fumitory and Bermuda buttercups out of my garden. It’s the same meditative headspace as doing a jigsaw puzzle, with added sunshine and birdsong. I actually like and respect the buttercups and especially the fumitory, with its feathery leaves and pink-tipped white flowers. But I like the hummingbirds and native bees and the sprouting meadow wildflowers that support them even more.
The first time I remember wanting a garden was reading Kate Llewellyn’s The Waterlily, years ago. While “some outdoor space” was high on our list in hunting for this house, a large, level, undeveloped yard seemed so unlikely it didn’t even occur to me to want it. (Large by SF standards: 25 by 45 feet. A fortieth of an acre.)
The me who didn’t garden seems a stranger to me now.
I’m out here every chance I get. My fingernails are black with loam and clay. I meant to restore a postage stamp sized patch of Ramaytush land. Who’d have thought that the land meant to restore me.
Sumana is wondering what we’ll end up calling it. I’ve seen it called the Capitol breach, the insurrection, the putsch (with a nod to Hitler), and my favorite so far: Trump’s riot. It’ll probably resolve into something non-committal like January 6th. Right now, though, I can still hope for a name that makes it clear who was at fault: the crime boss in the Oval Office and his murderous fascist thugs.
My coven and I watched the march from the White House with gradually increasing concern. We have day jobs so had to fit this in around meetings, but also, out-of-control pandemic, so we were already glued to our screens. Being a conscious citizen of a failing democracy is a whole nother full time gig.
A friend who’s an experienced protestor on the side of justice pointed out just how unprepared these weekend warriors were to meet any real show of force from the authorities. But of course the authorities did nothing. There were off-duty cops and military among the rioters, apparently flashing their badges and ID to reassure the Capitol police. My anger at this, at shots fired in the chambers of my government, at the sight of some unspeakable shitheel with his feet up on my Congresswoman’s desk, is enormous. It’s exhausting, to be in such a state of cold rage.
The one friend from my old fundamentalist church who lives in America and votes Republican posted to Facebook that this has made her want to retire to central America. I have spent five years trying not to snap at her but after repressing a dozen much more inflammatory comments, I wrote: “You voted for this.” She deleted my comment, and later, her original post.
This is the situation in which we find ourselves. Healing and reconciliation can’t even begin until those who brought this horror upon us can acknowledge the great evil they have done.
May this turn out to be the death-spasm of white supremacy, of unearned privilege fighting the emergence of a better and fairer world. May we name it accurately and know it for exactly what it is.
My garden has been a gift all quarantine. My whole life I’ve hardly enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed Bic, Emma and Precious, the City Grazing goats who took down the worst of the weeds. After Marco and his team pulled out the raised beds I didn’t want and built a retaining wall and stairs, I started planting, and I haven’t stopped. There’s still one big raised bed at the back for a kitchen garden. So far I have nasturtiums, white sage, rosemary and wood strawberries, plus a young Eureka lemon to complement the neighbor’s Meyer lemon that leans over our fence. The rosemary, lemon and a potted jasmine are the only non-natives I bought.
Everything else is hyperlocal, from Bay Natives, Mission Blue or Yerba Buena nurseries, Annie’s Annuals or Larner Seeds. Ceanothus, ribes, coffeeberry, coast live oak – the keystone species. Bay laurel – much more delicious than dried bay leaves, we put it in all our soups and stews. An arroyo willow. Native grapes, Dutchman’s pipevine for the swallowtails, silver lupine for the Mission Blue butterflies, narrow-leaved milkweed for the monarchs. Hummingbird sage, blue eyed grass, variegated yarrow, coast buckwheat. A bog with sword fern and chain fern and douglas iris. A pond with seep monkeyflower and rushes, which is doing extremely well and which I hope will attract frogs. Yerba buena trailing down the retaining wall. Two elegant Dr Hurd manzanitas that, goddess willing, will grow into sinuous, sculptural rainbow beauties.
It doesn’t look like much yet. I am in constant battle with the Bermuda oxalis, wild radish and those bastard arum lilies. Everything else is barely knee high. But every chance I get I loll out here in a comfy blue lounge chair, listening to contentious crow parliaments in the neighbor’s lillipilli, watching hummingbird aerobatics, loving the sweet descending melody of gold-crowned sparrows. There are fat red-tailed hawks who coast from the hill to the canyon, often with an escort of angry crows. I leave almond offerings on the deck railings for the members of this murder, whom I dearly love. I planted a bog. I am a real bog witch now.
preoccupations