Beloved friend, my tender blessings to you upon the turning of the year here just past the autumn equinox, which was Monday. I love the big quarter-year turnings of nature, the solstices and equinoxes. I love their simplicity: they mark the turning of the light. The solstices are the most-light and most-dark points, and the equinoxes are the more-light-in-a-day and more-dark-in-a-day turning points. Leaning into the appreciation of these over time has helped me to learn to love and value the gifts of both the light and the darkness, and to feel into the tide of them over the course of each journey around the sun.
Where I live in the Pacific Northwest folks often refer to wintertime as The Big Dark. It's true; the winter is very dark! At the winter solstice the sun rises 45 minutes later and sets 45 minutes earlier than in my longtime home in San Francisco, making the days an hour and a half shorter. My current home is as far north of SF as the place I spent the most time in Mexico was south of it, so the shift of our position on the planet and how we were facing the sun felt quite dramatic when we arrived! I find it odd that folks refer to The Big Dark but not The Big Light, as if light is the normal state and darkness is an aberration. For me, both the length of the light and the length of the dark were a marvel when I arrived, and I have worked hard to continue to cherish both the long days of summer and the deep nourishing darkness of the winter.
We're thick in the bustle of autumn here now, tending to projects that we meant for this summer, can't do in the winter, and haven't gotten to yet. We're considering our priorities, our budget, our time. There are also lots of visitors and visiting as folks relish this beautiful season. My kitchen is a wild bustle of food preservation: tomatoes and plums humming in the dehydrator, apple butter in the slow-cooker, the table heaped with ripening pears, the freezer filling with blanched vegetables. Every few days another friend offers something from their garden in this season of bounty. Putting food away for winter is a gentle delight. I love to see my weave in our community deepening this third autumn in the sweet tide of garden gifts. It's an exquisite tenderness: knowing more people means more friends to share bounty.
Exquisite is also the word I settled on for the poem atop this newsletter. When sharing that poem at Tuesday's Meditation Gathering, I paused for a long while as I considered what word to use, because "perfect" had come to mind and I'm working on lessening the presence of that word in my life. I dislike that it tends to be singular, breakable, and a judgment. Exquisite where I landed; it's is more complex. The poem is exquisite in how it encapsulates a central truth of existence that I am ever circling:
Just simply alive,
Both of us, I
and the poppy.
For a long time on the boat, I was saying a similar sentiment to myself as a sort of koan, "What does a sparrow do to be good?" or as an intention, "I would like to be good as a sparrow is good." I was questing deeply into enoughness.
Enoughness is a powerful medicine in this time in the world. It is an important time to ground ourselves, to settle ourselves, to hold to what we know as dear. Like poetry. Like blossoms.
The poem is attributed to Issa. Do you know Issa? Kobayashi Issa lived from 1763—1828 and is considered one of the four great haiku poets of Japan, with Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Masaoka Shiki; often they are simply called by their surnames: Bashō, Buson, Shiki, Issa.
My own appreciation of haiku has been deepened by spending the last few months reading at bedtime a mostly-haiku collection called Japanese Death Poems compiled by Yoel Hoffman. I am a little sad to have finished it and will read it again; these gems could be contemplated over many lifetimes. Death poems are an old tradition in Japan, a poem one writes very close to one's death: lessons from the edge of being singular and being total, from the edge of absolute loss and absolute belonging. I saved a few of my favorites for you.
I am so moved by the vast communal conversation about living and dying that I see in the haiku tradition, by the shared weight of communal symbols, like the dewdrop: a condensation of something vaster, fleeting, but ever part of the whole. Ah.
Just simply alive
Both of us, I
and the poppy.
It is enough to be alive, this tells me. My honoring of the quarter-day of the year, these turnings of the light, which I choose to call sacred, holy: the way I do this makes more sense when I set them beside haiku. Simple, meaningful. I have emptied and washed the altar and set everything back upon it anew. I considered all of the prayer flags on their lines and removed any that felt ready to go.
I got out the lights that I set along a little ledge in the temple on the darker side of the year; they have spent the long light tucked away in a drawer. I took the linen sheets off the bed and put the flannel ones one. I moved all the oils I slather my skin with from their summer home under the bathroom counter, where they must sit when the sun climbs high enough to come down directly through the sky light to hit the bathroom counter, and set them out atop the counter, where they can live until spring. I made a nice dinner. We raised our glasses and toasted the day with sparkling water and bitters. I keep meaning to paint a new batch of prayer flags, too, though that keeps sliding over to "tomorrow". I'll get to it soon.
I used to think that if I didn't get to my honorings right on the holy day, I'd missed the moment. I can see my growth and softening in the way that I've come to allow my celebrations to gently sprawl. Why not let the honoring sprawl? It extends the sense of sacredness, lessens urgency, gives me more time to cherish. It eases the terror of perfection and so eats away at the white supremacist capitalist malarky that value upholds. A little later is just fine! A little later is, in fact, wonderful.
So here I am, a few days after the equinox, wishing you a blessed equinox, beloved ones. May this ancient mundane holy honoring bring you a moment of sweetness.
Resources
New Language
I learned about tattoo artist Ruby Ellis' work when I admired her work on the hands of someone I adore at our local Food Co-op. I gasped aloud when I read the caption she wrote for an image of a tattoo that extensively covered someone's belly. That belly which also had what I would have referred to as a long surgical scar from solar plexus to navel. What Ruby said was so much better, "Was a good day- had fun making this belly tattoo, adding to the existing marks of life." Marks of life! Oh, yes. That. Thanks, Ruby
Public Imperfection
I'm a longtime daily reader of Joanna Goddard's fine blog Cup of Jo. One of the recurring features is a "week of outfits"; a recent one featured a lovely therapist named Sharon Beesley in secondhand clothing, often in her gorgeous garden. Another recurring feature at Cup of Jo is house tours, and in the comments some folks clamored for a house tour after seeing that garden. Sharon responded in the comments with a link to a 2014 post on her own blog, a self-led house tour of her home at the time, a 2 bedroom NYC apartment she was sharing with her family of 5. It features unmade beds, pillows heaped all over the floor, a bedside lamp with a bare bulb and no shade; a lot of the kind of normal mess most people strive to hide, and a great determination toward comfort. The note I made on this in the doc where I store things I might share with you here says "holy yes house tour". This is some glorious imperfectionism! I hope it lifts and settles your heart as it did mine.
Bumbly Joy
My final imperfectionist item for you today, darlings, is a video of four bumbling baby racoons attempting to walk along a fencetop. They tumble, fumble, and climb directly over one another. Sometimes I get it out and watch it just to grin. The version of this clip that I initially met did not have the audio overlay, but that link has died, so I am imperfectly sharing this with you; perhaps you will love the audio and it will make you laugh; perhaps you'll turn it off.
Resistance
F*CK the Patriarchy, Save Our Boys and Men
There's a myth that tearing down the patriarchy is bad for men. That is absolute baloney. Yes, patriarchy centers the comfort of men in many ways, but it also demands that they minimize their emotional range and isolates them socially from everyone else: women, children, other men. Male humans deserve to have rich, full, nuanced emotional lives, and Talk to Your Boys supports this. One of the authors, Christopher Pepper, studied with me a bit when I lived in San Francisco, and he and Joanna Schroeder's book is getting great reviews! A wonderful resource.
Passing California Prop 50 from the Comfort of Home
Vote Forward is doing a new letter-writing campaign to support California's Proposition 50, which would allow the state's Democratic supermajority to temporarily redistrict to create stronger Democratic representation. This would last only through 2030; it's temporary emergency gerrymandering by Democrats to fight permanent gerrymandering by Republicans. If you're in favor, no matter where you live, you can support this creative effort at the link above.
Loving on Trans Folk
If you'd prefer to write letters for another cause, Point of Pride, whose mission is "to help trans youth and adults access necessary, life-saving health and wellness services", needs folks to write hand-written letters of support to tuck into the hundreds of care packages they send each month to young people. This is an incredible, small, simple way to love on individual trans youth; you can reach right into someone's life to drop a little care. Thanks to Anastasia
Filling the Streets with a Joyful Noise
October 18th is the next No Kings rally! Now is a great time to reach out to friends. New to protesting? Ask a friend who you know goes to marches if they will take you! Longtimer? Who might you invite to join you who isn't likely to go on their own? Making connections brings more people and spreads more joy as we work to tear down the horrors. James and I have stepped up to volunteer for the Safety Team for our march this time!
Photos from the June No Kings march in Port Townsend. The "Riot-Parking" sign is tongue in cheek; it's a chill, happy day, as you can see on the right, and that's just the owner of my favorite secondhand store near the march's gathering point asking folks not to fill his parking lot so that he can stay in business.
We're In This Together
I invest half of a day in the creation of this newsletter each week, for which I currently earn less than I'd get paid if I spent that time working at McDonald's. I want to keep this up! And I want to continue to give it for free to folks who need it that way. That will only be possible if folks who can support the work do so. I'd be grateful for your support in supporting you! You can upgrade to a paid subscription for as little as $5/month. If you tried that when the link was broken, it's been fixed! Thank you for your support of my work, which means the world to me and puts food on my table.