One of my favorite moments in time. This would have been December 2005. Reposting it today in honor of these two birthday fellas. Love!
This practice worked well for me last week, so I’m giving it another go this week. I’ll update the post throughout the week as new passages capture my fancy. New entries will appear at the top of the post.
After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present [note: Burkeman’s argument is that understanding this reality is a good thing that vastly improves our quality of life], it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment—that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can.
A new idea, or more accurately, an old idea I’m reviving. A collection of passages that caught my attention, warmed me, sparked thought, in my week’s reading. What I’d like to do, and we’ll see if it takes, is come back to update this post as the week rolls out. Or, in a week like this one, I can collect things I’ve marked, saved, or shared elsewhere.
In today’s internet, updating a blog post is an odd thing to do. But after nearly twenty years of stashing words in this space, I know the blog’s most important purpose is to serve as a storehouse of memories. It’s a living (if sometimes ignored for a stretch) record of a thought-life.
…the days are more fun than the years which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest one day at a time.
—Horace, Odes, translated by Derek Mahon, quoted in Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals
Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts inserted into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.’
Moominpappa at Sea, chapter 2. The Moomins are in the middle of the sea, searching for the lighthouse island Moominpappa knows is out there somewhere.
“We shall see it soon,” said Moominmamma. Her head was full of little thoughts that she couldn’t really get organized. “I do hope it’s working,” she thought. “He’s so happy. I do hope there really is a lighthouse somewhere out there, and not just a flyspeck after all. We can’t possibly go home now, particularly after such a grand start…You can find big pink shells, but the white ones look very nice against the black soil. I wonder whether the roses will grow out there…”
It’s late August in Moominland, but this passage has such a December ring to my ears. So many small thoughts zinging around. Mind full of shells and soil and roses and lighthouse hopes. Safe harbor behind us, mysterious seas ahead. Island or flyspeck? Reading maps is a risky business.
“Isn’t it just!” I can imagine Little My exclaiming, with relish.
Got the best compliment of my gardening life yesterday. Our neighbor across the street said, “When your poppies faded I thought the show was over. But no. Every day it’s wave after wave of—” (gestures admiringly) “—THIS. Makes me want to puke.”
Yesterday’s fun: as we kick off a new season of High Tide, I carted a stash of blank notebooks downstairs so Huck and Rilla could each choose one to begin the year with.
[Today I learned: I’m a notebook hoarder.]
[Scott: Um, today you learned?]
Amusingly, this photo, the only one I snapped, doesn’t include either of their picks. For the record, Rilla: a lavender Leuchtturm 1917 (my own favorite, except I like a dot grid and this one is blank); Huck: a blue Kokuyo Campus Smart Ring 60, which is a Japanese spiral notebook that I have no memory of acquiring? It’s pretty swoony, though.
Today’s fun: CHOOSING PENS.
[Today I learned: my studio could easily double as a stationery shop.]
Brave Writer online camp is designed for homeschool parents who need a little extra boost of support!
The day-long camp is packed with useful information about
homeschooling
writing
all things Brave Writer
The Brave Writer team offers a day of free webinars on topics like stress-free writing and learning through literature. And during the lunch break, I’ll be hosting a Poetry Teatime for your kids!
Playing my old game of typing nouns into this blog’s media library search bar and choosing one of the photos that comes up. “Crow” yielded comical results: a good many pics related to my book Fox and Crow Are Not Friends, as you might suspect, and several from Johnny Crow’s Garden; but also four pictures from Comic-Con? With no discernible relationship to crows? This baffled me until I clicked on one of the photos and realized it was labeled “crowds.” Which felt like it should have been obvious, but I had to get up really early today and am fuzzy. Took me five lines to solve Wordle, which hardly ever happens. Unless it’s the nasty kind with a dozen possible first letters, like -IGHT or -ATCH, which, today, it wasn’t. Is that spoilish? Does this caption need a spoiler alert?—Oh! all this and I forgot to say what the photo actually IS! It’s a crow mobbing a kite—the raptor, not the windborne disappointment machine—taken in 2012 on a sub-par phone camera and zoomed waaaay in so I could make the bird I.D.
That caption got so long I had to decaptionify it, because the caption settings here are for small, centered, italic text: annoying to read in bulk. Opening WordPress today felt like it used to, back in the bloggity heydey I now gaze wistfully at through glasses so rose-colored they are fragrant. Which is to say, I opened the tab with zero idea what I was going to write.
That really is how it was, most days, during that first ten or twelve years when I blogged almost daily. Very much a practice of discovering what was on my mind through writing about it. The act of writing came first, the discovery second. Or they were simultaneous. It’s too early in the morning for metaphysics.
I’ve completely lost track of the relative positions of the chicken and the egg. Did I write more because I was less distracted? Or was I less distracted because I wrote more? By “write” I mean blog, that clunky verb for a genuinely nourishing practice, the interactive learning-in-public we were doing together in a long-form manner that has almost entirely disappeared from the internet (along with idealism), except, possibly, on Substack (a platform about which I hold cautiously idealistic views).
Is what I’m writing now a Substack post? Like, what even is the difference? What I write over there is, I would say, still more like a blog post than an essay. Obviously there is a great deal of overlap between those two types of writing, which I’m somewhat stubbornly putting separate labels on: many blog posts are/were essays, and plenty of Substackers are writing loose, thinking-out-loud public journal entries, especially on Substack Notes. I think the distinction, in my mind at least, lies in the discoverability baked into the Substack app: writers can’t help but be aware that Certain Kinds of Writing are more likely to be shared and boosted, and words are like those quantum particles that behave differently under observation. (We think. How do we know? It’s too early in the morning for quantum physics.)
One thing I know is that I have never, never known Where to Post the Thing—whatever the thing may be/may have been. I always had side-blogs, some of them public but nichier than Bonny Glen, some of them invite-only where I used the kids’ real names or conducted experiments to see if I would write differently when anonymous. I had Lilting House, Bonny Glen Up Close, Unsweetened. I had a bread blog! (It was called Peace of Bread. I’m so sorry.) I had a LiveJournal. I had a column at GeekMom. I had blogs I don’t even remember now. Which means I have always, always second-guessed myself about where to post what. Patreon was a bit of a torment that way: I’d write something for my treasured patrons and think: wouldn’t this be better on Bonny Glen?
There was a period where Instagram created the same kind of quandary—that interval when the algorithm demanded long captions, and publishers desired a large IG following. I never did acquire a large IG following, because I couldn’t help resenting the implicit pressure to do more than share nice photos. Any long caption I wrote felt like a blog post, which was irritating.
Not just irritating to me: to many writers who felt affectionate about their blogs or newsletters. We understood that social media platforms had changed the game (as early as 2008 readers were shifting their discourse about blog posts from the comment boxes to Facebook posts meant only to share the links), and certainly we had moments of feeling excited about the possibilities of Discoverability. But the possibilities were mostly a distraction, a fragmenting of our powers of attention. As readers, writers, thinkers.
I do enjoy Substack. I like that it gives readers a way to read posts via email, if they prefer, or to read in the app or on the website, if that’s more to their liking. I do both. But I think it’s also wicked confusing to newcomers (there are Posts, Notes, and Chat—three different formats in which conversations can take place, each with its own nuances and logistics), and it only adds complexity to my where-to-post-what quandary. Blog or Substack? Substack post or Substack Note? Paywall or public? Gah. I don’t know about you, but I can’t run that gauntlet of questions without feeling like it’s rather more fuss than the piece of writing in question merits.
Here I am at the bottom (I think) of this post, unsure what my point is beyond: ugh, decisions of little real consequence are nonetheless hard. However, I do have clarity (950 words later) on one small thing: I like having a place (here) where I can write messily and clarity can be the end result, not the starting point. And that (she says, in the sort of arch ending favored by algorithm-driven platforms) is the kind of ‘discoverability’ I’m looking for. (Ew. Lol.)
This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.
My copy of The Dream We Carry (named after a line from “This Is the Dream”) has the original Norwegian on the verso and the English translation on the recto. Rilla, curled up beside me, enjoyed comparing the two versions. She was struck by the lovely image of the mountain springs “jumping up” and reached for Google Translate’s snapshot feature to compare the literal (and much less poetic) translation. That led to a line-by-line unpacking of the language. The Hauge collection Luminous Spaces has an entirely different translation and we got really caught up in discussing the figurative and connotative differences between these variants:
…that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known
that I one early morning will glide
in on a wave I have never known
(Google Translate’s rendering of the original—interesting that it’s in first person singular, when both English translations use we)
Slip into a harbor, glide into a cove, glide in on a wave—such distinct and potent images, each in their own way.
There are buckets more I could say about our Hauge conversations, but the only one I’ll mention now is the Fillyjonk connection. We’re reading Tales From Moominvalley and today we finished the scene in which the anxious, constantly catastrophizing Fillyjonk tries to share her worries with her neighbor, Gaffsie, over tea in her gloomy seaside house:
“…This calm is unnatural. It means something terrible is going to happen. Dear Gaffsie, believe me, we are so very small and insignificant, and so are our tea cakes and carpets and all those things, you know, and still they’re so important, but always they’re threatened by mercilessness…By something one can’t ask anything of, or argue with, or understand, and that never tells one anything. Something that one can see drawing near, through a black windowpane, far away on the road, far away to sea, growing and growing but not really showing itself until too late. Mrs. Gaffsie, have you felt it? Tell me that you know what I’m talking about! Please!”
Gaffsie, a practical and restrained creature, doesn’t get it. She’s uncomfortable with the Fillyjonk’s demonstration of emotion, and she doesn’t have much use for a dramatic recitation of all the terrible things that could happen—because none of them have.
The poor Fillyjonk! Hauge’s dream is utterly closed to her—so far, at least.
Today this chapter sent me leaping (like a mountain spring) to read Hauge’s poem “We Don’t Sail the Same Sea”—
We don’t sail the same sea,
though it looks the same.
Rough timber and iron on deck,
sand and cement in the hold,
I ride low, plunge
headlong through breakers,
wail in fog.
You sail in a paper boat,
your dream fills its blue sail,
so soft is the wind, so gentle the wave.
Hauge struggled with depression and had to endure some very dark periods. Some of his poems acknowledge a sense of bleakness or of brooding menace—Fillyjonk feelings. I think the two of them do sail the same sea. But Hauge has the promise of that dream, the promise that some day the doors will open to a world where mountain springs jump up and and the wind fills a blue sail. I have hopes that the Fillyjonk, too, will encounter that dream—perhaps through an encounter with the Moomintroll family, or with Snufkin, later in the book. Right now she’s wailing in fog—with a kind of raw courage, the kind it takes to “plunge / headlong through the breakers.”
Well. At the end of lessons today I said we’d be moving on from Hauge next week, and such a clamor arose! Scott and the children think not. It seems I’ve been remiss in hoarding Hauge to myself all these years. I’m so happy they find him as compelling as I do.
Gotta be quick today: it’s a birthday in these parts. Y’all, my baby is 14. That’s bananas.
In lieu of a new post, here’s something delicious: my father’s family recipe for biscuits with chocolate gravy. When I was growing up, this was the star of the meal whenever we had breakfast for dinner (eggs, bacon, fruit, and biscuits with chocolate gravy—heaven on a plate). After Scott and I had kids, it gradually became our special birthday breakfast. Maybe that’s why we wound up with such a big family—more birthdays!
Okay, I thought this was going to be a quickie. Turns out that old post 2007 had an image hosted on my original Typepad blog. I didn’t know that was even still around! I had to update a bunch of old links and images and now it’s about time to go make dinner—Huck has requested paninis. We’re all about the food today!
A somewhat grainy photo of my four oldest children taken at the Point Loma Lighthouse in 2007, not long after we moved to San Diego. The Pacific was still quite new to them. When I coined the term “tidal homeschooling,” we lived in Virginia and the image was entirely figurative—but when I think back to those early tidal-learning days, this pic is the one I see.
I remember writing here long ago about how my favorite category of post was connections. The serendipitous links of thought we encounter when something we’re reading or experiencing echoes or relates to some earlier conversation, book, film, experience.
Today, for example: we read another Hauge poem (“Winter Morning”) and had a really rich discussion of how much is going on in those four simple lines—a discussion that incorporated some of the conversation we had in the comments here about yesterday’s poem. We talked about the way Hauge uses simple, crisp, concrete images (frosted windowpanes, the glow of a good dream, a woodstove “pour[ing] out its warmth/ from a wood block it had enjoyed the whole night”) to describe a moment, and something much bigger than the moment. And from that rather animated discussion we jumped to Linda Gregg’s “Art of Finding” essay:
I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically “see” things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become “old men with snow on their shoulders,” or the lake looks like a “giant eye.” The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck.
But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, “the mirror with nothing reflected in it.” This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.
Okay, here’s the thing. I had planned to read this excerpt of Gregg’s essay, and to introduce a new practice for the four of us—Huck, Rilla, Scott, and me. We have a spiral-bound sketchbook that, at intervals, we use as a shared family journal. In 2020 it was the whole family chiming in with quips, sketches, and interesting tidbits. It went dormant last year, and when the Linda Gregg passage resurfaced in my Readwise review over the holidays, I decided to appropriate the journal for this practice. Maybe not daily, but several times a week, we’ll jot down things we’ve seen or heard.
But weeks have passed since I reread the passage, and I’d forgotten that last line—the “marrying of the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.” That’s exactly what we’d just been talking about with the Hauge poem, and what we talked about yesterday. The way he expresses a single image that speaks vividly both as a literal description (in a way that makes your breath catch) and as a reflection on some aspect of human experience. “Marrying the sacred to the world” is what Hauge does best.
So: part intention, part serendipity. The best kind of high-tide morning.
_____________________
A postscript added after I made today’s recording—listening to the Linda Gregg passage read aloud, I got to “the art of finding” and went Oh of course! And made a note to let tomorrow’s poem be Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Another connection.
