Why, hello there. It’s the first week of spring and it feels right to start a new season by trying to re-engage the part of my brain that sends these missives to you all.
I thought about writing much sooner—the proof is in my planner, if you’d like to see it—and I had planned to write about “the bunker” (on feeling unprepared for disaster, on the psychology of bunkering, on collective vs individual preparedness). Maybe what I needed instead, for a time, was to be in my own little offline bunker. During one of the weeks spent lightly berating myself for not having done a great many things, including writing about bunkering, I saw that my small-town friend Sarah had already done a better job capturing some aspects of what I’d been feeling.
I got her update in my inbox (actually, in my RSS reader, which has totally changed my relationship to my phone and my ability to get news without social media) and sort of relaxed, like, “oh, I didn’t have to write that after all, because someone else did it for me!”
So, anyway, where have I been? In my own little bunker? Living in a shoe? To sum up, I’ll tell you about ice and mud.
Ice
At the end of the year, I weaned off of the SSRI I’d been on for a couple of years. When I needed it, I really needed it and I’m glad the option was there for me, but I had started to feel frozen and stuck, like I couldn’t access my full emotional range. I was away at school for the holidays for the last time as I chopped up the last doses, wondering when I’d start to feel different. A friend gave me an energy healing in my weird Jesuit dorm room on New Years Day, under the watchful eye of someone else’s God. My healer friend said that I had a disjointed gutter—that the connection between my head and my heart needed repair. I came home to more plumbing metaphors, settled and unsettled back into my life, made some watery messes with my newfound feelings and then, obviously, went ice fishing.
Ice is water’s most dormant state, but there’s still life under there. Since becoming seriously ill seven years ago, there are aspects of my life I’ve chosen to let rest under a layer of ice. Before (and while) I got sick, I was extremely active as an organizer, more of my life spent in meetings than in other forms of social communion. A sense of urgency pervaded my being and I felt overwhelmed by my own personal responsibility to contribute to transforming society. It’s not a coincidence that my body put it all to a stop during the first year of the first Trump term, when so many brand new people became engaged in activism and when many of us were running around in a reactive fugue attempting to extinguish the many small fires of rising fascism.
If you read this newsletter regularly, you know that I haven’t disengaged from the issues and causes I cared about then. Still, compared to how fast and connected and effective I felt back then, it’s hard for me to accept that I am ever doing “enough.” Even as I try to deconstruct its influence on my mental/emotional state, the dominant culture (rooted in white supremacy, capitalist values, Christian self-sacrifice, etc.) still pushes up against those old pressure points.
So, after meaning to attend for years, I went up to my aunt and uncle’s place to join the annual ice fishing derby. The tiny town gathers with visitors from all over for a pancake feast in the Grange Hall and then the fishers get to drilling holes. Fishing is mostly waiting, which is good for my busy, busy brain. There’s nothing to do but wait and see. I loved sitting on the ice (on a chair on the ice in a heated hut) and thinking about everything below. And then there was a fish, flopping, pulled out from under the glass, making a snow angel with its last breaths.
Thaw
I’ve been writing in the voices of the characters in my book, which is a tricky business when the book is nonfiction and the characters are ancestors I never met. This somewhat shamanic approach to these portions of my current project makes “productivity” harder to measure as my thesis deadline approaches. I don’t really write here about my more spiritual inclinations (with minor exceptions), but that’s another layer of my life that has been under ice. The intensity of a regular meditation practice, the mystery of messages received from Tarot and other sources—these did not always play well with a slippery mind and overloaded nervous system.
Over and over, I’ve heard the message that I need to get back in to some kind of regular spiritual practice, so I’m trying to teach myself that it doesn’t have to be super intense or structured or to play at all into the outcome-driven systems within which so many of us feel trapped. It might look like returning to my friend (another good Sara(h)) for a tatting lesson. My great-grandma was an avid tatter and I inherited some of her work alongside the diary that set off my book project. It’s a way to connect to the past in a rather literal sense, to bend time by knotting thread. I also got to sit in a friend’s peaceful place and be away from screens and noises, receiving a patient lesson that paralleled another thing she has taught me, which is to be “so, so soft” to myself. Giving up scrolling has been a gift to my brain. If you’re looking to quit, I recommend you pick up something else to do with your hands and at least one friend to help.
I let the psychically porous part of myself thaw out and at the same time, decided to let the Inner Organizer back in. I don’t have to tell you that we’re living through a chaotic time. I haven’t been writing about it because so many others are doing so very well, people who have the capacity to keep up with developments in a consistent way. Sick of takes and blame and analysis, I found myself wanting to get my hands dirty again. Networking existing and building new mutual aid infrastructure with a few comrades would let me put old muscles to use in a new place. I’d be in and out—mapping people’s skills to help them connect with one another, creating the infrastructure to overcome isolation. But it put me back in my damn phone, Signal chats replacing infinite scrolls, activating that urgent part of myself that wants to control and contain and optimize. Just a couple tasks and I’ll back off.
Oops, my whole calendar is full and I am in a chronic illness flare.
Re-Freeze
Where I’m from, the first time the winter melts off is never really the end. A huge snow and a freezing spell blew through the week before a planned solo writing retreat for my birthday. Multiple migraines and an overload of deadlines ended my own internal Fool’s Spring. And on that (much-needed) retreat, I realized that one of the emotions I’d managed with pharmaceutical intervention was fear. I went for a hike on my birthday in a canyon trail in the high desert. Snow and ice still covered the landscape, but little green shoots had started to appear and the creek was running high.
The hike didn’t last long because I soon felt the particular prickle of fear that I always trust—the surveilled feeling of being near a predator. Sure enough, I soon spotted cougar scat and tracks on the trail and decided to leave the canyon be. That night, I headed out to the retreat’s electric sauna to wind down, but couldn’t. The picture window looking out to the snowy open field seemed to be facing in, framing my vulnerable alone-ness. Anyone could wander by and see me and then what? Concrete fears of cougars, strange men, sudden death all unlocked the general fear of life in this country (always present, currently ascending) that we all, to some extent, sublimate to survive daily life.
The week after the retreat, I worked a traditional American work week (While in school, I usually work about 20 hours a week and the rest is subsidized by my future self ((student loans lol)), and people like the paid subscribers of this newsletter) and it sucked! Wow, how would I ever have time to do organizing work, take care of myself, my relationships, my home, my writing, job applications, etc. etc.? What would become of me? Of us all? It turns out, you don’t have to scroll to fuck with your nervous system.
This is a cycle I’ve been through one million times in a life of chronic over-commitment, and yet I still need reminders to break myself out of it. If this one had to come from Frog and Toad, so be it.
Reading out loud with my sweetie at the end of one of these frenetic weeks, she got to this page and I swear I melted into the wall due to this personal attack on my list-driven lifestyle. Ouch!
Flood
Thankfully, my life is full of Frog-types who are way, way more chill than I am. People who read to me and remind me to eat a little snack. People who remind me to go look at the river—it flooded our entire downtown after the thaw—because it looks magical and unreal.
At the same time I was trying to re-focus on a spiritual life and talking to my dear collaborator about Bruce Lee’s mandate that we “be like water,” I was letting myself get dragged into old patterns and performing the same martyr “someone’s gotta do it” behavior that had got me in so much trouble in the past. The contrast finally made me pause and consider: What if the things that are left undone are just…not possible to do right now? What if every person’s well-being is not my personal responsibility, but a relational, collective responsibility? What if we can’t actually plan for very much at all and instead need to build networks of trust that can be fluid and malleable when the time for action comes?
Mud
Tell me why it took me—a literal Daoist anarchist from the Northwest—decades to find out that Ursula K. LeGuin had translated the Tao Te Ching. It’s been a gift to reconnect with a new version of that text and receive daily reminders that life is/n’t that deep.
Thinking about ancient patterns and practices and the balance of things reminds me that, duh, drugs or no drugs, spring always does this to me. All the energy and the water, the slip of it, makes me think that it all has to happen Right Now, or else. It doesn’t help to be in a legitimately dire situation in which awful men in power seek to put us all into a panic of urgency as they pull Jenga blocks out of society’s infrastructure. But if you’re too reactive, you get stuck in the mud.
Shift into a lower gear and avoid any erratic gas or brake. Don’t stop, but don’t panic. Put your boots on and muck through, but leave them on the porch when you come home.
After all this, I’ve decided I am going to do a very few concrete organizing things for this network and then settle back into what I do best, which is supporting people one-on-one, writing, and taking on small community-building projects with my friends. We do need to be more prepared for all the things that are coming (see someday’s The Bunker post), but we are simultaneously already prepared within the less visible network of all that we’ve already done together.
As a cherished writer friend once told me, “Life is right in any case.”
It’s a muddy moment. Fecund. Fertile. Green mixed with brown. Slippery. Things are being born! Some are manmade horrors beyond our comprehension, sure, but some are baby lambs.
I’ll be back on a semi-regular schedule and really appreciate all of you readers for sticking with me. I would love to hear how spring works in your world. <3
so beautiful and i must get my hands on this translation of the tao te ching immediately.