Beloved friends,
Once, a younger teacher who was training with me came to me for advice. She had established a class of her own and was really excited about the community that was building there. The people she cared for were really enjoying moving their bodies, connecting, learning how to find rest and build energy. She wanted to move things to a deeper level. She'd been trying! It didn't seem to engage her people. How, she wondered, could she get people interested in the spiritual aspect of rolling around on the floor together? What, she asked me, would it take for them to yearn for this? I smiled at her tenderly in the afternoon sunlight and said, "Suffering."
It took me a long time to realize that a lot my work in the world involves holding space for suffering. I offer tools for healing and for wellbeing; I think of my work as being grounded in the love of life and the desire to help people live lives of meaning and joy. And yet what leads people to attend to healing and growth? Most of the time, on some level, the answer is suffering.
Suffering and healing weave closely together. Similarly, we often cherish life most intensely when we are grieving; in those rare moments where we can truly grasp that we will not always be the only thing we are aware of being, how glorious is the sensation of apple skin breaking open beneath your teeth, a sunrise, a shirt? It is an old human observation that pairs of opposites are closely entwined; the Hindu Bhagavad Gita called these "dvandas" a couple thousand years ago.
The poet Ross Gay began a project on his 42nd birthday to write a small essay about delight each day that year. The result is The Book of Delights, which, along the way, finds relationship with sorrow. Ross is a Black man, a teacher, a gardener, a Midwesterner, and an utterly charming being. Based on his age, I can see that the April 7 on which this was written was 2017, the first spring of our last Republican presidency. A time for us-now to learn from.
"Joy is Such a Human Madness":
The Duff Between Us
Or, like this: In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused.
By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (So close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work. The pronoun who turned the mushrooms into people, yes it did. Evolved the people into mushrooms.
Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things–the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this–joy is the most invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.
Precious being, may we learn this alchemy. May it offer us refuge and set us aflame in the days ahead. I look forward to walking onward, hand in hand with you, the duff kicking up gently between our feet. The Resources section is extra long this week for obvious reasons. You are always welcome to share this newsletter, which supports my work as well as folks who might enjoy it. I feel committed to making this free, but it takes a lot of time; if you're able to support me in this by upgrading to a paid subscription or making a one-time donation, that is lovely, too. Your presence and your responses are also a gift; feel welcome to send along anything you thing might suit here.
Resources
Careful Attention
In a time of distress attending to the news can become an anxious habit. Just as the mind can convince us that worrying is somehow protecting us from the thing we are worrying about, attending constantly to the news can feel important; for some people it feels like a moral duty. Unfortunately, unless this level of information is something we are making use of in our work, our action, or living, it tends to wear us down and lead to despair paralysis. In the time to come it will be wise to be informed of what is taking place without being traumatized into a couch cushion, so some suggestions follow. I'm also considering another run of the Reclaiming Your Attention courses I offered in 2022 which brought lasting change for some folks; drop me a line if interested.
- Most major news outlets have a daily email newsletter or summary article which can quickly show you the shape of the news with the option to dive deeper into longer coverage if wished. This is my practice with a set pattern formed in the Reclaiming time: I read news Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We wish to support journalism and subscribe to the New York Times and the Washington Post as well as smaller local outlets. WaPo's "The Seven" and a skim of the NYT headlines works really nicely for me.
- When I asked around about newsletters, lots of folks said they like the 1440 newsletter for an employee-owned, human-created (no AI), factually oriented daily brief. One friend said that both her hyper-liberal daughter and Trump-voting mother use and enjoy it, and that having a source of information that they all trust has been useful in their family.
- NPR remains a stalwart and Heather Cox Richardson's Substack offers a view of current events through a liberal historic lens. For a mainstream lens outside of the US, lots of folks like BBC.
- For folks interested in trying to get a wide perspective values-wise, options that were suggested by folks I trust: Ground News, a news aggregator which shows how different outlets report on the same story, highlighting bias. Tangle is another source that is trying to show how stories are covered in different sources, describing how both left and right wing coverage of events is looking.
- If you'd like to balance your news intake with sweetness, I enjoy Positive News and The Optimist Daily for high quality journalism about what's going right in the world: lots of science and social innovation.
- These are published daily. Of course one can choose to read a daily source less often, which is my way, but I'm interested in having an option to share that does a weekly roundup for folks who want their information at a slower drip. If you know a good one, I'd love to hear it!
Community and Hope
Jessie Raeder, a longtime member of our community and beloved friend turned me on to Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities last year. I've been saving it to read together if the election went this way. Jessie had the same idea, hurray! This is a quick read at 3 hours. Haymarket Books has this and 9 other books about revolutionary collective liberation available for free download in response to the election results. The free download is essential since the book sold out all over immediately after the election. If Haymarket were proper capitalists, they've have done a quick, gorgeous new print run and jacked up the price, but being revolutionaries, they decided to give it away instead. Go load up with inspirtation!
Jessie's group has completed one evening and it was lovely; reach out if you'd like the info to join for the other two. Tuesdays, 6:30-8pm Pacific on Zoom. I'll be there. I'll be leading a reading, too, in the new year. If you aren't familiar with Rebecca Solnit, she is a writer, historian, and activist, a widely-loved public intellectual. She shared this via her Facebook page after the election; I hope it comforts and galvanizes you as it has me:
"They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love."
If you're excited about getting organized and taking action, Indivisible, a progressive movement organization has a great new resource out that talks about what to do.
On the Other Hand: If You Need To Howl
- "Wednesday Seething" is a playlist that someone I know created the day after the election; she described it as "feminine rage ballads". Spotify.
- If you need a grief song, Elle Cordova's version of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" goes, "My country 'tis of thee, land of inequity" and goes on with eloquent heartbreak from there.
- I'm about to turn 55 (OH MY GOSH. TIME.) which means I was a teenager in the '80s and have a place in my heart which is an endless mosh pit. When I need to howl, punk and the other expressions of youthful rage from that time are dear to me. The Gits are a longtime favorite and SubPop has just reissued remasters of their discography. Spotify. YouTube.
- Recently I saw an incredible little video in which two men were dancing in gorgeous Hindu divinity costumes (blue skin, necklace of life-size skulls) with three-foot flames coming out of third-eye chakras. This turned out to be Bloodywood, an Indian folk metal band from New Delhi. They are devoted to peace and social justice and sing against factionalist politics in their country, a problem so many of us are facing around the world. A wise Indian-born woman in Jessie's reading circle commented that she thought it was time for folks from the United States to reach out to connect with the wider world, and that is sitting in my heart like a seed. We're in this together.
- If you had been on the floor in my temple lately, I would have played you Beautiful Chorus' Darling and Inner Peace back to back, as they sit on the album Hymns of Spirit.
Glimmer: A Tiny Story
Yesterday James and I stopped at the hardware store on our weekly run to town. There was only one cashier on duty because our small town was unusually quiet, the tail end of the bomb cyclone, passing over us. As we walked up with our items, she peered tenderly into a box on the counter, so when she began to ring us up, I leaned over to look into the box, too. My instinct said she was looking at someone, and it was not a large box, so I was thinking: hamster? mouse?
Imagine my surprise upon seeing in the box a slug. One slug. A little slug at that, maybe 3/4 of an inch (2cm) long. I looked up, surprised, and she waved her hands, a little embarrassed, explaining that someone had brought it in accidentally with a return and she couldn't leave with no one else around to tend the register. I asked if she'd like me to take it outside to set it free, which delighted her.
After she rang us up I took the box outside and found an earthy spot in the parking lot. I couldn't see how to pick someone so soft and small up without squashing them, so I banged the box on the ground a couple times and they tumbled out safely onto the soil. May they, too, know peace and wholeness, freedom and belong.
May we all.
I will be taking next week off for the tender tangle that is the Indigenous National Day of Mourning and Thanksgiving.