Spring in Chicago is always an uncertain affair, but this year warmth seems especially reluctant to show up, much less stick around. When I moved here almost seven long years ago—and how did it get to be that many years? Most of my adult life?—I was sort of fascinated by how apparent the seasons were. There is such a distinct difference between not only fall and winter but early fall, late fall, midwinter, early spring… It’s part temperature, part quality of light, part the way the air feels against your skin. And while a day in February feels incredibly different than a day in late December, once spring rolls around I begin to chart things in terms of what’s blooming around me.
And so I can tell you: crocuses are so last month, daffodils are toast, tulips are on the way out. The acacias are blooming, and I saw my first tiny open bud of lilac last week. (They’re going crazy now, scenting the air and so full that the tips of the branches are solid petal.) The dandelions have been blooming merrily for some time. Crabapple and redbud trees are so densely packed with blooms that you can’t even see the branches and forsythia was blazing yellow but now its flowers are littering the sidewalks. spent. Magnolias are hanging on, but the hyacinth were long ago broken under their own weight. And I never realized before that we grow forget-me-not here, but there are clouds of them blooming in people’s yards, blue and tiny and evocative of both simplicity and loss.
For once, my lack of blogging has been less about an inability to write than about a complete lack of the time or energy required to complete a thought. Seriously, April and May have been full-on, balls-to-the-wall insane. I went from working barely part-time to working full time and sometimes a little more; I performed in two concerts, did publicity for five, and attended at least that many; I moved. Again. It’s been a whirlwind, and I feel like I haven’t drawn a full breath in at least four weeks. What this month has pounded into my head is this: I’m very serious about the things I do for a living. This sounds sort of silly, given that I’ve been a florist for more than three years now and I’ve been playing music since I was about eleven, but in retrospect I’ve been treating these things more as happy accidents than as intentional and evolving parts of my life, serious endeavors that deserve my fullest attention.
It’s not that I took these things non-seriously before, I guess. Especially with music, it would have been impossible for me to do what I do without some pretty major effort happening. But there’s been some sort of shift lately—I think it’s that these things have gone from being part-time jobs, hobbies, to being constants. I chart the seasons, not just spring but all of them, in terms of what flowers I’m seeing in my shop and in the streets and gardens; I thought to myself today that I need to spend some time practicing scales this summer, something I haven’t done since finishing grad school five years ago. (Ouch, say both my fingers and my ears.) This is some serious business, in other words. And as such, it behooves me to know my shit, to know what I’m talking about, to execute things well. Which is super awesome, but is also part of why I feel so tired this month. Doing things well is hard. Worth it, but hard.
But it’s good, and I’m just going to keep on keepin’ on, as they say. Practice my scales, and read books about roses. Water my plants. Watch the season’s progression, and dream about next year’s music. And good god, sleep, once May ends.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Saturday, April 09, 2011
back to the start
I have a friend who is truly, deeply devoted to young adult fiction. It’s a genre I don’t spend much time with anymore, but I do have a section on one of my favorite bookshelves that contains some of the literature that I read as a child, books that I now turn to for comfort when life shakes me up and tosses me down. Very little is more soothing to me than revisiting these old friends, these chapters from a distant past before I knew heartbreak and other adult pains, these books that I have read so many times that I literally know every word, every turn of phrase and cadence of sentence. They don’t ask me to analyze them or apply them to my own life, because they’re about a part of me that was dissolved into my present self nearly two decades ago, but sometimes I end up applying them anyway. Sometimes I learn a lot more than I expect from them.
Right now, my life is in transition. My relationship has ended, sadly and painfully, and in the wake of its passing I’m being forced to confront myself again as a person alone. While I know that this re-centering is part of the natural course of recovery, it is also undeniably painful and difficult. As I huddle around myself, quiet and contemplative and careful and mostly patient, I’m revisiting some of these old and beloved volumes to see what they have to offer to the me of now. Some of these books have been a part of me for so long that reading them feels like a warm blanket drawn around me, a cocoon where I can rest, a place where no surprises are in the offing. It is deeply comforting. I bought The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, a young adult novel by Patricia MacLachlan (also the author of the vastly more famous Sarah Plain and Tall) when I was probably twelve or thirteen, just slightly older than Minna herself, and my copy is now so old that the pages are a brownish yellow. In content it’s a simple book: Minna, an eleven-year-old cellist playing in a local music school’s chamber group, struggles with the first pangs of love while also navigating the difficulties of playing a Mozart string quartet. I myself began playing chamber music when I was about sixteen, probably in part because of Minna, and my first clear quartet memory is of the piece that she learns with her group, Mozart’s K. 157. The slow movement that is Minna’s nemesis is one of my favorites, a slow melancholy moment set in the middle of two effusively joyous movements.
Chamber music, in contrast to the bombast that surrounds an orchestral musician, is a quiet discussion in the corner of a room, a dedicated expression of individual but congruent thought. Part of why I love this book is because the writing is like that, a quiet conversation where simple gestures are imbued with great meaning and value—much like Mozart’s music, in fact. When I read it I’m carried back to my own adolescence when so much of what was happening to me was happening for the first time, shiny and alien, simple but oh so complicated. At the time it was confusing and sometimes terrifying, but now I wish that I could have better savored the freshness of those moments, the newness of what I was feeling. The first time somebody took my hand, the first time I felt my heart tighten at the appearance of another, the first time I fell under the thrall of art or beauty or love: these things are so simple and yet even now, when I’ve experienced them often enough that I sometimes think I should feel more jaded, they astonish.
Minna’s beloved is Lucas, the violist in her quartet. (Of course…) The slow journey they take from first meeting to final page is familiar, but their perspectives from within what is so brand new casts me back into my younger self. When Lucas rests his hand on the back of Minna’s neck three-quarters of the way through the book, nearly the only physical contact they share—no description of a first kiss or even handholding, really—my breath catches. (The contact is barely acknowledged in the text, which somehow makes it seem even more perfect.) Is anything like that, the first touch of a beloved’s hand? Not just the first time with a specific beloved, but the first time with any beloved? Is there anything that will ever feel again like my first brush with Mozart, when I understood so little of what was going on beyond the joy of crescendoing through a series of rising notes in perfect unison with the cellist sitting beside me? Can I see these things again without looking out from beneath the collective weight of all their predecessors?
But now feels like the time for seeing old things as new again. In very tangible ways I’m starting over, and what I want is to see things in connection to their past incarnations but also as singular moments, as containing individuality as well as referential meaning. I need my present self to have an identity beyond my past self, even if they are working together to make me who I am. I want a new day, and I’m waiting patiently until it appears.
Right now, my life is in transition. My relationship has ended, sadly and painfully, and in the wake of its passing I’m being forced to confront myself again as a person alone. While I know that this re-centering is part of the natural course of recovery, it is also undeniably painful and difficult. As I huddle around myself, quiet and contemplative and careful and mostly patient, I’m revisiting some of these old and beloved volumes to see what they have to offer to the me of now. Some of these books have been a part of me for so long that reading them feels like a warm blanket drawn around me, a cocoon where I can rest, a place where no surprises are in the offing. It is deeply comforting. I bought The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, a young adult novel by Patricia MacLachlan (also the author of the vastly more famous Sarah Plain and Tall) when I was probably twelve or thirteen, just slightly older than Minna herself, and my copy is now so old that the pages are a brownish yellow. In content it’s a simple book: Minna, an eleven-year-old cellist playing in a local music school’s chamber group, struggles with the first pangs of love while also navigating the difficulties of playing a Mozart string quartet. I myself began playing chamber music when I was about sixteen, probably in part because of Minna, and my first clear quartet memory is of the piece that she learns with her group, Mozart’s K. 157. The slow movement that is Minna’s nemesis is one of my favorites, a slow melancholy moment set in the middle of two effusively joyous movements.
Chamber music, in contrast to the bombast that surrounds an orchestral musician, is a quiet discussion in the corner of a room, a dedicated expression of individual but congruent thought. Part of why I love this book is because the writing is like that, a quiet conversation where simple gestures are imbued with great meaning and value—much like Mozart’s music, in fact. When I read it I’m carried back to my own adolescence when so much of what was happening to me was happening for the first time, shiny and alien, simple but oh so complicated. At the time it was confusing and sometimes terrifying, but now I wish that I could have better savored the freshness of those moments, the newness of what I was feeling. The first time somebody took my hand, the first time I felt my heart tighten at the appearance of another, the first time I fell under the thrall of art or beauty or love: these things are so simple and yet even now, when I’ve experienced them often enough that I sometimes think I should feel more jaded, they astonish.
Minna’s beloved is Lucas, the violist in her quartet. (Of course…) The slow journey they take from first meeting to final page is familiar, but their perspectives from within what is so brand new casts me back into my younger self. When Lucas rests his hand on the back of Minna’s neck three-quarters of the way through the book, nearly the only physical contact they share—no description of a first kiss or even handholding, really—my breath catches. (The contact is barely acknowledged in the text, which somehow makes it seem even more perfect.) Is anything like that, the first touch of a beloved’s hand? Not just the first time with a specific beloved, but the first time with any beloved? Is there anything that will ever feel again like my first brush with Mozart, when I understood so little of what was going on beyond the joy of crescendoing through a series of rising notes in perfect unison with the cellist sitting beside me? Can I see these things again without looking out from beneath the collective weight of all their predecessors?
But now feels like the time for seeing old things as new again. In very tangible ways I’m starting over, and what I want is to see things in connection to their past incarnations but also as singular moments, as containing individuality as well as referential meaning. I need my present self to have an identity beyond my past self, even if they are working together to make me who I am. I want a new day, and I’m waiting patiently until it appears.
Monday, January 24, 2011
the past, via split peas
After a lengthy hiatus, my friend Rose-Anne and I have tentatively resurrected our tandem posting project this week. We’re starting off easy, with recipes that remind us of people.
For me, there are a few dishes that sum up how I feel about cooking, about food, about what qualities—nutrition, comfort, deliciousness—I want the things that go into my body to have. Actually, they aren’t even dishes, they’re categories: bread and cheese (this can range from pizza to grilled cheese to cheese and crackers), beans and rice (a similarly diverse group), and soup. I could live from these three types of food for the rest of my life, I sometimes think, and die happy and well-fed and content.
It’s no surprise, perhaps, that in the wintertime soup is the clear winner, and oh boy, do I make a lot of it. Potato leek, potato and butter bean, pumpkin and black bean, lentil; creamy garlic—with five heads of roasted garlic, people—cream of broccoli, creamy garlic chickpea kale, sweet potato and chorizo: the list goes on and on. In other words, I love me a good bowl of soup, in no small part because on a chilly grey winter day it makes me feel like at least something good is coming from all that darkness outside.
The thing is, my thing for soup far predates my experience with Midwestern winters, and even my experience with knowing how to cook. In middle school and high school I was a highly OCD-style eater; I would eat exactly the same thing every day, and I had a number of regular foods ranging from specific flavors of ice cream to popcorn to Schwann’s apple flautas. (Good god, my parents loved the Schwann’s truck.) These were all foods I could make in the microwave, and I ate most of them on a daily basis. But aside from these snack foods, one of the things I loved the best was Campbell’s soup; I ate so many bowls of things like Chicken Mushroom Chowder and Steak and Potato Soup that sometimes I’m amazed that I survived into adulthood.
Now, of course, those soups are long gone for me; aside from the fact that I make my own, they virtually all have meat in them. (As recently as a few years ago I was devastated to find out that Golden Mushroom, a soup I loved as an adolescent and which I’d innocently believed to be vegetarian, was in fact full of beef fat. Blech.) But sometimes I get, well, nostalgic for those ready-made soups of my childhood. Recently I was dwelling on one soup in particular, Split Pea and Ham, and thinking to myself that when I made split pea soup it just never has the same clout; it always seemed a little bland, a little too gloppy and nutritious and...pea-y for true enjoyment. It didn’t have any depth and it always left me mildly disappointed, to the point where I just stopped making it. This winter, however, I had a moment of cooking inspiration that has moved split pea right back up to the top of my soup rotation.
The soup that I conceived of and later executed is so far above my previous split peas that they aren’t even in the same ballpark, and I owe it all to Rose-Anne. Last year she posted a recipe for Pasta Carbonara, and because she’s a vegetarian and an innovative cook she replaced the bacon that usually goes into the recipe with caramelized red onion coated in smoked paprika. Smoked paprika is not hard to get--you can probably buy it from your local grocery store if they carry McCormick spices--but it seems to be not often used, and I rarely see it called for in recipes. She and I discovered this spice together a few years ago during a series of dinner parties we used to put together, and I still remember the first time she opened the bottle for me, the intense whiff of smoke, rich and dark, that made me immediately want to put it in everything I ate. I think of her curiosity and excitement in that moment every time I use this particular spice. What, I thought to myself, if I transferred this bacon-esque onion idea to something else, like a soup? And so, Smoky Split Pea Soup was born.
This soup, then, is riddled with nostalgia: memories of good friend, cooking parties past, and gawky adolescents eating bowls of microwaved soup. It warms me to the core.
Smoky Split Pea Soup
Olive oil
1 large red onion, thinly chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1 1/2 -2 tsps smoked paprika
4-5 peeled carrots, sliced into coins (approximately ¼ inch thick)
2-3 large or 5-6 small red-skinned potatoes, washed well and chopped into bite-sized pieces (no need to peel unless you want to)
6 cups vegetable broth
6 cups water
2 cups dried split green peas
1 tsp thyme (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
In a large soup pot on low to medium-low heat, use enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pot (2-3 tbs, perhaps more—you may need more than you expect in order to coat the onion) until it shimmers. Add the onion and sauté, stirring occasionally, until the onion begins to brown. Add the garlic, sauté for a minute longer, and then add the smoked paprika. Stir to coat the onion evenly, and let sit for one additional minute. Add the carrots and potatoes and cover, letting them “sweat” for three or four minutes, and then add the vegetable broth, water, and split peas. Turn the heat up to high, give it a good stir, and cover the pot again. Once you hear it start to bubble, you can turn the heat back down to low. Let it simmer for about one hour, stirring occasionally, until the peas have begun to dissolve and the potatoes and carrots are very tender. Add the thyme, salt and pepper, and let bubble for five more minutes. Enjoy.
For me, there are a few dishes that sum up how I feel about cooking, about food, about what qualities—nutrition, comfort, deliciousness—I want the things that go into my body to have. Actually, they aren’t even dishes, they’re categories: bread and cheese (this can range from pizza to grilled cheese to cheese and crackers), beans and rice (a similarly diverse group), and soup. I could live from these three types of food for the rest of my life, I sometimes think, and die happy and well-fed and content.
It’s no surprise, perhaps, that in the wintertime soup is the clear winner, and oh boy, do I make a lot of it. Potato leek, potato and butter bean, pumpkin and black bean, lentil; creamy garlic—with five heads of roasted garlic, people—cream of broccoli, creamy garlic chickpea kale, sweet potato and chorizo: the list goes on and on. In other words, I love me a good bowl of soup, in no small part because on a chilly grey winter day it makes me feel like at least something good is coming from all that darkness outside.
The thing is, my thing for soup far predates my experience with Midwestern winters, and even my experience with knowing how to cook. In middle school and high school I was a highly OCD-style eater; I would eat exactly the same thing every day, and I had a number of regular foods ranging from specific flavors of ice cream to popcorn to Schwann’s apple flautas. (Good god, my parents loved the Schwann’s truck.) These were all foods I could make in the microwave, and I ate most of them on a daily basis. But aside from these snack foods, one of the things I loved the best was Campbell’s soup; I ate so many bowls of things like Chicken Mushroom Chowder and Steak and Potato Soup that sometimes I’m amazed that I survived into adulthood.
Now, of course, those soups are long gone for me; aside from the fact that I make my own, they virtually all have meat in them. (As recently as a few years ago I was devastated to find out that Golden Mushroom, a soup I loved as an adolescent and which I’d innocently believed to be vegetarian, was in fact full of beef fat. Blech.) But sometimes I get, well, nostalgic for those ready-made soups of my childhood. Recently I was dwelling on one soup in particular, Split Pea and Ham, and thinking to myself that when I made split pea soup it just never has the same clout; it always seemed a little bland, a little too gloppy and nutritious and...pea-y for true enjoyment. It didn’t have any depth and it always left me mildly disappointed, to the point where I just stopped making it. This winter, however, I had a moment of cooking inspiration that has moved split pea right back up to the top of my soup rotation.
The soup that I conceived of and later executed is so far above my previous split peas that they aren’t even in the same ballpark, and I owe it all to Rose-Anne. Last year she posted a recipe for Pasta Carbonara, and because she’s a vegetarian and an innovative cook she replaced the bacon that usually goes into the recipe with caramelized red onion coated in smoked paprika. Smoked paprika is not hard to get--you can probably buy it from your local grocery store if they carry McCormick spices--but it seems to be not often used, and I rarely see it called for in recipes. She and I discovered this spice together a few years ago during a series of dinner parties we used to put together, and I still remember the first time she opened the bottle for me, the intense whiff of smoke, rich and dark, that made me immediately want to put it in everything I ate. I think of her curiosity and excitement in that moment every time I use this particular spice. What, I thought to myself, if I transferred this bacon-esque onion idea to something else, like a soup? And so, Smoky Split Pea Soup was born.
This soup, then, is riddled with nostalgia: memories of good friend, cooking parties past, and gawky adolescents eating bowls of microwaved soup. It warms me to the core.
Smoky Split Pea Soup
Olive oil
1 large red onion, thinly chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1 1/2 -2 tsps smoked paprika
4-5 peeled carrots, sliced into coins (approximately ¼ inch thick)
2-3 large or 5-6 small red-skinned potatoes, washed well and chopped into bite-sized pieces (no need to peel unless you want to)
6 cups vegetable broth
6 cups water
2 cups dried split green peas
1 tsp thyme (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
In a large soup pot on low to medium-low heat, use enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pot (2-3 tbs, perhaps more—you may need more than you expect in order to coat the onion) until it shimmers. Add the onion and sauté, stirring occasionally, until the onion begins to brown. Add the garlic, sauté for a minute longer, and then add the smoked paprika. Stir to coat the onion evenly, and let sit for one additional minute. Add the carrots and potatoes and cover, letting them “sweat” for three or four minutes, and then add the vegetable broth, water, and split peas. Turn the heat up to high, give it a good stir, and cover the pot again. Once you hear it start to bubble, you can turn the heat back down to low. Let it simmer for about one hour, stirring occasionally, until the peas have begun to dissolve and the potatoes and carrots are very tender. Add the thyme, salt and pepper, and let bubble for five more minutes. Enjoy.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
lovecraft in tucson
I don't live in Arizona, and I haven't since 2004. My parents and my sister have left the state in the last few months, after roughly twenty years of residency, and I have one truly close friend left there. She's down in Tucson, and her facebook feed was how I heard about the shootings there yesterday.
I've been trying to figure out why I feel so upset. It's an upsetting situation, of course: many people, including a person who sounds decent and forward-thinking and is trying to better peoples' lives, are shot in an act of sudden violence. A child is killed, a federal judge, others as well. These are terrible things. But because of where it happened, I feel my heart twist in an entirely different way.
I love where I am from. I've been in Chicago for six and a half years, but I still have an Arizona drivers license. When I was stranded in a doorway in Germany at midnight this past summer, a stranger paused to ask me if I was okay. When he asked me where I came from, there was no hesitation, although I had flown directly from Chicago: "Arizona." (In one of the more surreal moments from that evening, it turned out he was from Lake Havasu City. Small goddamn world.) But it's been increasingly hard for me this year to reconcile the politics of my state with the people I knew there, the people I lived and worked and hiked with, loved and drank coffee with. How can a place where all these lovely people come from, where I come from, vote to essentially legalize racism, to cut multicultural educational programs, to re-elect the governor responsible for these bills who literally believes that God chose her for this purpose? How is that even possible? It creates cognitive dissonance, because the Arizona I hold in my mind is so completely at odds with the Arizona I read about in the news, again and again and again.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, of course. Arizona has always been a conservative state; I just happened to grow up in a smallish hippie liberal bastion and to go to college in a sprawling desert city with an active radical liberal element. I happened to grow up white and middle-class and well-educated. I was sheltered, in large part, from the actual impacts of the whack-jobbery that was certainly going on when I lived there, by who I was and because, frankly, I never made the time to come far enough out of my bubble to clearly see the other Arizona, the one that confuses me so much now. I remember it dimly, but as more and more years pass the Arizona in my mind is winnowed down to what I loved, not what I--even then--didn't.
There are other reasons why the shooting yesterday was so upsetting, of course. Rep. Giffords sounds like exactly the type of person Arizona needs right now, like somebody I would vote for, and those are few and far between there. But then there's also Sarah Palin with her abhorrent gun sight metaphors--Giffords was, of course, one of her "targets"--the feeling that finally, the crazy is going too far. We never seem to realize that until people start dying, and usually not even then.
I'd like to leave with a quote from my friend Erica, about the ways we use metaphor and the dangers of our careless treatment. Much love to those involved in yesterday's shooting, those in Tucson, in Arizona, my friends elsewhere who are mirroring my shock and horror and shame. I wish for better things in the future.
"What troubles me most, however, is that such oversimplifications cavalierly assume that when we use metaphor, we do not really mean what we say...metaphors do, indeed, mean a great deal and may, in fact, serve as intersecting points for the various components of experience and action." -A. Kolodny
I've been trying to figure out why I feel so upset. It's an upsetting situation, of course: many people, including a person who sounds decent and forward-thinking and is trying to better peoples' lives, are shot in an act of sudden violence. A child is killed, a federal judge, others as well. These are terrible things. But because of where it happened, I feel my heart twist in an entirely different way.
I love where I am from. I've been in Chicago for six and a half years, but I still have an Arizona drivers license. When I was stranded in a doorway in Germany at midnight this past summer, a stranger paused to ask me if I was okay. When he asked me where I came from, there was no hesitation, although I had flown directly from Chicago: "Arizona." (In one of the more surreal moments from that evening, it turned out he was from Lake Havasu City. Small goddamn world.) But it's been increasingly hard for me this year to reconcile the politics of my state with the people I knew there, the people I lived and worked and hiked with, loved and drank coffee with. How can a place where all these lovely people come from, where I come from, vote to essentially legalize racism, to cut multicultural educational programs, to re-elect the governor responsible for these bills who literally believes that God chose her for this purpose? How is that even possible? It creates cognitive dissonance, because the Arizona I hold in my mind is so completely at odds with the Arizona I read about in the news, again and again and again.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, of course. Arizona has always been a conservative state; I just happened to grow up in a smallish hippie liberal bastion and to go to college in a sprawling desert city with an active radical liberal element. I happened to grow up white and middle-class and well-educated. I was sheltered, in large part, from the actual impacts of the whack-jobbery that was certainly going on when I lived there, by who I was and because, frankly, I never made the time to come far enough out of my bubble to clearly see the other Arizona, the one that confuses me so much now. I remember it dimly, but as more and more years pass the Arizona in my mind is winnowed down to what I loved, not what I--even then--didn't.
There are other reasons why the shooting yesterday was so upsetting, of course. Rep. Giffords sounds like exactly the type of person Arizona needs right now, like somebody I would vote for, and those are few and far between there. But then there's also Sarah Palin with her abhorrent gun sight metaphors--Giffords was, of course, one of her "targets"--the feeling that finally, the crazy is going too far. We never seem to realize that until people start dying, and usually not even then.
I'd like to leave with a quote from my friend Erica, about the ways we use metaphor and the dangers of our careless treatment. Much love to those involved in yesterday's shooting, those in Tucson, in Arizona, my friends elsewhere who are mirroring my shock and horror and shame. I wish for better things in the future.
"What troubles me most, however, is that such oversimplifications cavalierly assume that when we use metaphor, we do not really mean what we say...metaphors do, indeed, mean a great deal and may, in fact, serve as intersecting points for the various components of experience and action." -A. Kolodny
Saturday, January 01, 2011
morning finds you
New Year’s Eve in Chicago was unseasonably, freakishly warm. When we left the apartment at 9 PM to go to a friend’s house, the outside temperature was fifty-seven degrees, like a day in late April had somehow been transplanted to the end of December. When we left the party at about 1:30, the temperature had dropped and the wind was up and I shivered all the way home, cursing myself for wearing a dress outside in December, and by this morning we were firmly back in the grips of January. Although I can’t say I was exactly happy to learn that it was twenty-four degrees outside (feels like nine! woo) I did feel considerably less disoriented. After all, it’s supposed to be cold.
New Year’s has never been my favorite holiday. I feel like I already spend a great deal of time—too much, too often—lost in introspection, so I don’t really need a holiday to remind me that oh shit, it’s been another year. Also, New Year’s in Chicago is cold (usually) and it’s often felt odd to celebrate rebirth when everything is frozen.
I read a book recently, though, about the absolutely astonishing ways that animals survive winter and extreme cold. Some of it was fairly straightforward, or at least involved concepts I knew of or could guess at—constant foraging, torpor and hibernation—and some was not. Frogs and some insects, for instance, are capable in the right circumstances of freezing solid and then reviving when spring comes. (Just think about that for a minute, seriously.) But what really astonished me was that even the behavior I knew about was positively miraculous. Have you stopped to think about bears’ winter torpor recently? It’s something I learned about as a child in mundane terms, but as an adult it becomes something like magic. Bears, according to what we know about bodies and waste disposal and atrophy, should not survive the winter in good health, but clearly they manage somehow.
That’s what I love the most when I read about biology: real life is freaking magical. The ways that animals wait out the storm of bitter seasons defy my imagination and require biological technology that humans don’t really understand, but they exist and furthermore, they work. Magic. There’s something to be said for the ability to hold the fort, but there’s perhaps even more worth in the ability to wake up, to take back up with the world when conditions allow.
I also feel ambivalent about New Year’s because I don’t necessarily like thinking about the new calendar year as a blank slate, a clean start. Last year was hard in some ways but it’s still part of right now, even though I’m going to be screwing up every time I write the date for the next month or so, and I’m bumbling along just the same way I was yesterday. Sometimes I feel like life is really all bumbling, or maybe bumbling mixed with dancing when we manage to be mindful of the magic of everyday life. But regardless of the date, and even though it’s the middle of winter right now, I feel like I’m actually waking up from my torpor, and last night’s April weather backed me up. It may be winter in Chicago, but it’s also spring. Who says I can’t have both? So hey 2011, nice to see you, but I’ll just be on my way now; there’s soup to make and people to love and cats to pet, and I don’t have time to flip the calendar page just yet.
New Year’s has never been my favorite holiday. I feel like I already spend a great deal of time—too much, too often—lost in introspection, so I don’t really need a holiday to remind me that oh shit, it’s been another year. Also, New Year’s in Chicago is cold (usually) and it’s often felt odd to celebrate rebirth when everything is frozen.
I read a book recently, though, about the absolutely astonishing ways that animals survive winter and extreme cold. Some of it was fairly straightforward, or at least involved concepts I knew of or could guess at—constant foraging, torpor and hibernation—and some was not. Frogs and some insects, for instance, are capable in the right circumstances of freezing solid and then reviving when spring comes. (Just think about that for a minute, seriously.) But what really astonished me was that even the behavior I knew about was positively miraculous. Have you stopped to think about bears’ winter torpor recently? It’s something I learned about as a child in mundane terms, but as an adult it becomes something like magic. Bears, according to what we know about bodies and waste disposal and atrophy, should not survive the winter in good health, but clearly they manage somehow.
That’s what I love the most when I read about biology: real life is freaking magical. The ways that animals wait out the storm of bitter seasons defy my imagination and require biological technology that humans don’t really understand, but they exist and furthermore, they work. Magic. There’s something to be said for the ability to hold the fort, but there’s perhaps even more worth in the ability to wake up, to take back up with the world when conditions allow.
I also feel ambivalent about New Year’s because I don’t necessarily like thinking about the new calendar year as a blank slate, a clean start. Last year was hard in some ways but it’s still part of right now, even though I’m going to be screwing up every time I write the date for the next month or so, and I’m bumbling along just the same way I was yesterday. Sometimes I feel like life is really all bumbling, or maybe bumbling mixed with dancing when we manage to be mindful of the magic of everyday life. But regardless of the date, and even though it’s the middle of winter right now, I feel like I’m actually waking up from my torpor, and last night’s April weather backed me up. It may be winter in Chicago, but it’s also spring. Who says I can’t have both? So hey 2011, nice to see you, but I’ll just be on my way now; there’s soup to make and people to love and cats to pet, and I don’t have time to flip the calendar page just yet.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
wholly wholly wholly
and kisses are a better fate than wisdom
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
~ e.e cummings
I like wisdom too, but I also like giving up entirely into things. But it might be true that those two states of being are not so related. And now, either way, it is time for bed.
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
~ e.e cummings
I like wisdom too, but I also like giving up entirely into things. But it might be true that those two states of being are not so related. And now, either way, it is time for bed.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
in a moment close to now
Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be twenty-nine years old. I never know why that’s supposed to be scary. Yeah, I’m older, but it’s one of those things that is so completely inevitable that for the most part it’s never weighed too heavily on my mind. Next year, of course, I’ll be turning thirty, so maybe that will be more difficult somehow. But hey, probably not. Mostly it’s no big thing, except that I now sometimes get hangovers after two glasses of wine and I often feel sleepy at nine thirty.
My friend Rose-Anne turned twenty-nine just last week, and in a minute I’m going to follow her lead and make a list of things I hope for this year. But first… Well, a horoscope. I have an ex who is very spiritual, and while that’s not something I’m too invested in (sort of like fear of aging, actually), she did get me a little hooked on Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology horoscopes. I can’t help it; they’re funny, and I appreciate his raucous and joyous good-natured advice, even if I don’t always take them too personally. Lately they’ve actually seemed rather pointed, occasionally in some rather harsh ways, but not this week; after all, it’s my birthday. Here it is:
“Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book called Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. I'd love it if in the next few weeks you would think a lot about how you are on your way to becoming what you were born to be. Current astrological omens suggest you will have special insight into that theme. For inspiration, you might want to borrow some of Nietzsche's chapter titles, including the following: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Am a Destiny.””
The picture caption next to this was “Possibility.” Okay, so maybe I’ve been losing sight of this a little bit. Maybe right now is a good time to get back on track. And in light of that, here is my wish list. Twenty-nine, here I come, teeth clenched and with trembling heart.
I want to write more often. I don’t need to “be a writer”, but I want to remember how good writing feels.
I want to bake my own bread on a semi-regular basis. I want that to be relaxing, not stressful.
I want to smile more often.
I want to take in my surroundings peacefully, to not be so far inside my own head that I forget to appreciate textures or colors or scents, leaves and the sky.
I want to allow my relationships with other people to be reciprocal, instead of placing all of the weight of interaction either on them or on myself.
I want to sing along when I listen to music at home alone.
I want to pet my cats and hug my lovers and do the dishes joyfully and savor my food and laugh, as often as possible. (Well, maybe not so often with the dishes. But if I’m doing them, I’d rather take it lightly instead of irritably.)
I want to feel overwhelming joy again, at least once.
And, dear readers, that’s all I have. I don’t know what this year has in store. God knows I would never have predicted how twenty-eight would turn out, so I’m trying to just let things happen and figure it out as I go along. Lately I’ve felt like I have a death grip on my life, like I’m trying so damn hard to be happy that I’m turning into stone, but inflexibility isn’t the answer. If there’s one single thing I wish for this year, it’s to let go. I need so badly for this to happen that what comes after is almost of less consequence than the process. In order for my wishes to come true, I need this one thing first.
Here is my horoscope from a few weeks ago. The picture caption next to this one was “Passion.”
“Your old self is the fuel you will use to burn your old self to the ground. This bonfire will liberate your new self, which has been trapped in a gnarly snarl deep inside your old self. It's only at first that you'll feel freaked out by the flames. Very quickly a sense of relief and release will predominate. Then, as the new you makes its way to freedom, escaping its cramped quarters and flexing its vital force, you will be blessed with a foreshadowing of your future. The intoxication that follows will bring you clarity and peace of mind.”
Yes, please. Bring me my passion, my joy, and my fierce desire back. No more stone.
My friend Rose-Anne turned twenty-nine just last week, and in a minute I’m going to follow her lead and make a list of things I hope for this year. But first… Well, a horoscope. I have an ex who is very spiritual, and while that’s not something I’m too invested in (sort of like fear of aging, actually), she did get me a little hooked on Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology horoscopes. I can’t help it; they’re funny, and I appreciate his raucous and joyous good-natured advice, even if I don’t always take them too personally. Lately they’ve actually seemed rather pointed, occasionally in some rather harsh ways, but not this week; after all, it’s my birthday. Here it is:
“Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book called Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. I'd love it if in the next few weeks you would think a lot about how you are on your way to becoming what you were born to be. Current astrological omens suggest you will have special insight into that theme. For inspiration, you might want to borrow some of Nietzsche's chapter titles, including the following: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Am a Destiny.””
The picture caption next to this was “Possibility.” Okay, so maybe I’ve been losing sight of this a little bit. Maybe right now is a good time to get back on track. And in light of that, here is my wish list. Twenty-nine, here I come, teeth clenched and with trembling heart.
I want to write more often. I don’t need to “be a writer”, but I want to remember how good writing feels.
I want to bake my own bread on a semi-regular basis. I want that to be relaxing, not stressful.
I want to smile more often.
I want to take in my surroundings peacefully, to not be so far inside my own head that I forget to appreciate textures or colors or scents, leaves and the sky.
I want to allow my relationships with other people to be reciprocal, instead of placing all of the weight of interaction either on them or on myself.
I want to sing along when I listen to music at home alone.
I want to pet my cats and hug my lovers and do the dishes joyfully and savor my food and laugh, as often as possible. (Well, maybe not so often with the dishes. But if I’m doing them, I’d rather take it lightly instead of irritably.)
I want to feel overwhelming joy again, at least once.
And, dear readers, that’s all I have. I don’t know what this year has in store. God knows I would never have predicted how twenty-eight would turn out, so I’m trying to just let things happen and figure it out as I go along. Lately I’ve felt like I have a death grip on my life, like I’m trying so damn hard to be happy that I’m turning into stone, but inflexibility isn’t the answer. If there’s one single thing I wish for this year, it’s to let go. I need so badly for this to happen that what comes after is almost of less consequence than the process. In order for my wishes to come true, I need this one thing first.
Here is my horoscope from a few weeks ago. The picture caption next to this one was “Passion.”
“Your old self is the fuel you will use to burn your old self to the ground. This bonfire will liberate your new self, which has been trapped in a gnarly snarl deep inside your old self. It's only at first that you'll feel freaked out by the flames. Very quickly a sense of relief and release will predominate. Then, as the new you makes its way to freedom, escaping its cramped quarters and flexing its vital force, you will be blessed with a foreshadowing of your future. The intoxication that follows will bring you clarity and peace of mind.”
Yes, please. Bring me my passion, my joy, and my fierce desire back. No more stone.
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