Wait

What does it take to be intentional right now? Surely we’re already being asked to do so much: hold down a job while working from home in the midst of so many distractions, figure out what to do when there is no job to hold down because working from home is impossible, try not to panic or become depressed as all the benign routines of daily life become fraught with dangers to ourselves or to others and the endless scroll of a social media homepage becomes one pandemic article after another, figure out how to obtain perishable food items without going to the store (but what about the delivery drivers and low-paid grocery store workers?). Must we also add, on top of that, a demand to be intentional?

In my archival theory readings, there’s this buzz phrase, “reading against the grain,” and I feel like what we need right now is to be very deliberate about living against the grain. The urgency and intensity of the waves of bad news are such that it can be easy to follow them wherever they lead. I’ve tried to push back by emphasizing the good amid the bad, and that’s one way to do it. But I think there’s a deeper, non-reactionary action that needs to be taken, of pausing to breathe deeply, to focus intently and deeply on one thing whether that’s a book or a meditation or a complicated bit of needlework or two birds engaged in a mating display, thereby strengthening and providing respite for your spirit, so that you can take stock of your life as it currently is, take stock of the options open to your, and respond to the moment with clarity and vision (as far out as an hour or a day or a week, if nothing longer is possible).

For some people, this is a moment of furious activity, and certainly we should do what we can to support them. But for those of us who are not so engaged, whose role is to sit and wait, this is a tremendous opportunity. What have you been ignoring in your life, because you’re (deliberately?) too busy to take care of it? What is something you have not taken the time to celebrate, for which you’re grateful and can savor delight? Have you learned anything in this experience that might shape how you live your life as, some day, restrictions are lifted and everyday life resumes a less horrifying character?

I don’t have that much time between working from home and doing schoolwork, but I’ve been trying to take my own advice to heart. My emotions in the midst of this have been informative as I attempt to communicate my aspirations to scholarship committees and see doors close and lean into difficult situations. And, unusually for me at a time when I journal less than ever before, I’ve taken the time to write those things down.

There’s only so much time one can spend in introspection, and that’s good: the world is a good place and others are worth consideration, so we can and should be involved in the external world. But we can also find ways to make this an emotionally formative and informative experience.

May your spirits be strengthened and your hearts refreshed.

Silent, with a Breeze

Two women sit across a table, six feet apart, on a back patio, drinking beers from cans that have been sanitized. One brought the other a loaf of bread.

Strangers on Facebook offer help. Friends on Facebook offer services: tutoring in music theory, in Spanish, in chemistry.

Some people at the grocery store scoff, but nervously: there’s no toilet paper, no meat in the cases, I’m not afraid like the snowflakes - but ah, the waters run clear in the Venetian canals! There are dolphins!

Florists brought the flowers from all their canceled events and gave them away in a square.

Tickets that once cost $45 and up are now free and front row: opera for everyone! (who has internet, that is)

Naturalists trapped close to home post photos of turtle doves and garter snakes, not begrudging these common friends but delighting in them. Nature is never far for those with eyes to see the mosses and the “weeds.”

Reading groups cancel, then switch to online hangouts. We’ve been ready for this for so long, and we didn’t even know it.

A birthday approaches, and as housemates discover all the delivery options, we plan for chocolate cake, for pots of mussels in white wine broth, for sanitizing every container as it comes in. It hasn’t been five days, and I’ve already used 2 pounds of butter.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to take a walk, because this room is quite dark, and I’ve been looking for the light.

Mycorrhizae

With each new book about nature that I read, I find the story of competition for limited resources less and less compelling. The understories and overstories of trees are generous spaces, in which sick trees are nourished or dying trees send forth warnings of infestation that others may prepare against the onslaught. Stromatolites exist as a community of bacteria and other microorganisms, each contributing in its own way and reliant in its own way on the activities of others. We live in networks with one another, and we live and die by the strength of our community. If I lose, it is your loss too. If you lose, I grieve with you. Individualistic Western society embraced the model of survival of the fittest, but communalism recognizes that though this story has been explanatorily useful, it is not the final word.

A Long Overdue Meditation

"An so we've wrestled the cup out of Jesus's hand, and we've replaced it with a chalice, because who doesn't know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup? Never mind that Jesus didn't use a chalice, because if it's gold-plated and jewel-encrusted, it is more sacred." - Gregory Boyle

I don't know if I accept this without qualification. I can see a scenario in which love motivates the giving of the chalice into the hand of Jesus, not because it is more sacred, but because the crafting and purchase of it would have entailed sacrifices on the part of the followers. Is it so bad to wish to give something beautiful? I will not give offerings that cost me nothing.

But I think there is a lovely, quiet nugget of truth in the statement, which is that the humble everyday can be sacred. It does not take great gifts or great lengths to find the sacred into our lives. We can cherish what is small too: the blessings that don't cast a large shadow except in our hearts, the moments of generosity in friendship, the beauty of the natural and the mundane (taking a moment to give thanks for so much that we have the privilege to experience). The humble becomes sacred in how it is used, with gratitude, generosity, compassion, and love. And, since Boyle mentioned it, the same is true of the chalice.

Books of 2019

As is traditional, here is the list of books I have read in 2019. I was on quite a roll up until August, when to the surprise of no one, including but also except myself (what the conscious mind grasps can still startle the subconscious mind), it turned out that it was very hard to read much over and above my homework assignments. Still, I was please in reviewing the past few months to find that I had actually managed a fair bit, either through going to the Shakespeare Free Read-Aloud Group (yes, that counts) or through reading shorter works associated with the topics of my courses.

I don't have enough time or energy to go through and highlight or comment on the list as I've done in recent years, so formatting will have to suffice: Entries with an asterisk are those that most profoundly impressed or influenced my thinking or left me feeling intangibly richer for having read them. Entries in bold are ones that I read at the solicited recommendation of a friend. And a word to Dan, Kim, or Eli if you are reading this: your books are carrying over with me into the new year.

*The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World - Andrea Wulf
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
Postliberation Eritrea - ed. Tekle Mariam Woldemikael
*Chesapeake Requiem - Earl Swift
*The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O’Conner
American Fascists - Chris Hedges
A Feast of Snakes - Harry Crewes
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
They Thought They Were Free - Milton Mayer
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories - Mark Twain
The Enchanted April - Elizabeth von Arnim
Finding God in the Waves - Mike McHargue
Labyrinths and Other Stories - Jorge Luis Borges
The Last Hours - Minette Walters
Oblivion - David Foster Wallace
*The Overstory - Richard Powers
The Concept of Law - H.L.A. Hart
The Country Girls - Edna O’Brien
Black Leopard Red Wolf - Marlon James
Known and Strange Things - Teju Cole
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
*Hadji Murad - Leo Tolstoy
Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Machado
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Munnu - Malik Sajad
Sula - Toni Morrison
The Mark of the Grizzly - Scott McMillion
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry - Gabrielle Zevin
The Control of Nature - John McPhee
We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
*War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia - Elizabeth Catte
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne - Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Circe - Madeline Miller
Sea Grapes - Derek Walcott
The Life and Death of King John - Shakespeare
Death and the Maiden - Ariel Dorfman
*Dopesick - Beth Macy
Five Moral Pieces - Umberto Eco
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
Reader, Come Home - Maryanne Wolf
Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Days - Salman Rushdie
Who Fears Death? - Nnedi Okorafor
Titus Andronicus - Shakespeare
States of Inquiry - Oz Frankel
*The Songs of Trees - David George Haskell
The Archivist Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order - Kate Eichhorn
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih
How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell
The Stone Building and Other Places - Asli Erdogan
*The Dark Fantastic - Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

What will I be reading in 2020? Currently, I'm halfway through The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, with The Science of Cheese and Underland on deck. My guiding selection principle for crafting a list of books to read is "books that are under 180 pages or over 500." It was only "under 180" until I realized that I need to read Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman this year, and the only way to get it on the list was re-drawing some inspired boundaries (or I guess I could have claimed that it was actually 5 180-page books in one volume, but I'm uneasy with universally applicable rules). Who knows? Maybe this will be the year that I finally read Gone with the Wind! I am still accepting suggestions for books under 180 pages, though if you've already mentioned one, it's already on my list.