I opened my poetry spinner this morning and it thought for a second and then gave me 19 poems on joy and youth. This is a little joke the poems are playing on me, you see, since I have been feeling so tired and just all worn through with holes, markedly less youthful and joyous than I probably should be. Too small for my skin and lightly blue.

One of the offerings was Whitman's "On the Beach at Night," which is the story of a little girl learning astronomy with her father while a storm rolls in and upsets the girl by covering the stars. He tells her not to cry, saying,

The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,

They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,

Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,

They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,

The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,

The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

 So, fine. I am not one to ignore the universe when it is telling me something, and evidently this is one of those times. We will weather this dimness the way we have weathered all the ones in the past, with soups and deep breaths and all the jokes that can fit in two hands. I don't have many skills, but I do have that one.

Perhaps it is only natural in the summer, but I have been thinking about that Mary Oliver poem about peonies, the one that goes,

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

I have been thinking about looking back and about going forward, about the traps that we set in our memories and the hazy islands just over the horizon. Thinking about turning 32 next week, I guess, and how much better 32 is than 22. 

Peonies are omens of good fortune, so it's lucky that they're everywhere. Other lines of that poem say, "Do you love this world? / Do you cherish your humble and silky life?", and of course the peonies stand there, nodding sweetly yes. The thing about peonies is that they are perennials, and can be wild and perfect and rest, before coming back to do it again. No flower is nothing forever, and the next beautiful thing is just as lovely as the last. Maybe more, I have been thinking, because the next one is filtered through the last one in kaleidoscopic beauty, shattering and reforming and expanding. Forward, I think, is better.

If you ask the locals about the whales, they all have a different story. It's because of the barnacles and the shallow depth of the bay, says one. The whales come there to scrape off their barnacles, and that's why one whale has kept worryingly close to shore all morning. It could also be that the large number  of seagulls that spend time on the aptly-named "seagull rock" nearby produce a scent that Orcas find off-putting and which therefore makes the bay a refuge for mama whales teaching baby whales the mysteries of the sea. It could be both! That's the thing about whales; whales don't feel the need to tell you all of their secrets.

A few days later, up on what used to be a mountain, we saw a forest fire starting in the near distance. The clouds that had passed off in the distance had dropped lightning in among the brush, but we had just driven through all of those forests and seen the ways that the trees were ready for them, how they created layers specifically to be burned off. A hour later we drove straight into that storm and it gave us buckets of ice, thrown down so hard we worried for the integrity of the windows.

I have lived in the Northwest for 11 years now, but the thing I have noticed is that there is always more Northwest just behind the Northwest I was just looking at, even for people like me who do not even remotely qualify as outdoorsy. (Although I did recently buy hiking boots and a raincoat, so there's that.) A couple of months ago we wandered over to Cape Flattery, the northwesternmost point in the continental US, which goes along with my vague notion of going to all of the most places that I can get to comfortably.

Cape Flattery was named by Captain Cook in the year before he got himself killed because it flattered them with hopes of finding a harbor, which is not the least interesting way a Washington place was given its name.

Anyway, there is a lot of this West Coast that I have not seen, so soon we're going to see a bunch of it--down the coast to California and up again by Crater Lake. Crater Lake is a most--it's the deepest lake in the US--and the redwoods are the tallest, so we're covering some significant Northwesterly ground. I don't love the woods like John Muir did, and I don't particularly wish to, but I do agree with him on a lot of counts and mainly this: "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."

I have been trying an experiment and waiting to write something until I felt like writing something, which is simultaneously the long history of this particular space and a new way of going about it. Forced/notforced. My brain is full of thinking but not so full of thoughts.

Through a complicated series of unfortunate events we found ourselves in the nonhours in the LA airport, which was not a place I had intended to be. It was there that I sat through my first earthquake, too tired to be anything but tired, rattling slightly and exchanging exclamations with the people around me. I have spent so many years waking in the night hallucinating earthquakes, waiting for the car alarms to start and the ceiling above to give, that it's only appropriate it happened this way, with a whimper. In most things, this is the case.

E.B. White was a great writer of letters, and his response to main who felt bereft of confidence in his fellow humans was thus: "Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right." If you were to guess at my activities recently--and I suppose, always--a guess at the watching therewith would be right. Thinking thinking, if not thoughts.

We are heading back to my alma mater tonight for a few days, which is great because I sure do need a break from all the long hours and leaking shoes. I haven't been back in nearly 11 years, and it is funny to be planning to be a tourist in a place I take so for granted. As though it isn't where I learned how to learn how to be a person.

There's a gift in those years, one that I was too eager to leave behind because as fast as possible is for a while the only way we know how to run. But for a while everything was still and time stretched forever and in hindsight I'm pretty sure that all we ever did was laugh and write poetry. (To be fair, that's essentially all we do now as well.) All of which is to say that I am very much looking forward to seeing my friends, and my old town, and eating a Cuban sandwich, and introducing this girl now to that girl then.

A few weeks ago I started folding origami hearts for Valentine's Day with no real purpose in mind, figuring that once I folded enough a plan for what to do with them would show up. In a way I suppose this was a devotional act--I was making them to transform some moment for one person somehow--but mostly I was just folding. If we try a little most of our motions are devotional anyway. It's one of the best parts of getting to be people.

My friend passed away this weekend, and I am feeling a familiar jumble of things. It is sad that she is gone at the same time that it is a relief that she is free of so much pain. It is sad that she has left behind a family and would have been sadder if she hadn't. She died a month before her party, and this is perhaps the thing that is sticking with me the most--how often she asked everyone to dance with her, how completely she defied her disease and all that it tried to take from her. I've been thinking about a lunch, just before we knew for sure that she was sick, sitting on some steps in the sun.  She was on a cleanse, eating nothing with flavor, but all she wanted to talk about was things that would make us laugh.

She's been on my mind a lot the last few months and I though about her now and again while I was making all of those hearts. It was a gesture she would have approved of, going forward with more love than plan. It is just one more way of thinking that we had in common.

It feels like I tend to tally up our pluses and minuses more in January, as though I am using it to predict the year. One impending marriage, one impending baby. One new case of brain cancer. A city swept by the football madness and just adorable amounts of enthusiasm. Compared to Januaries past we are certainly on the plus side, or maybe it only feels that way because my own pluses are more than my minuses. Either way I will take it.

Last week I read a story about a plan to bring more dietary iron to a community suffering from iron deficiency. Giving the world a cast-iron skillet would be the obvious solution, but one that is prohibitively expensive. Adding a small block of iron to a cooking pot would be cheaper and easier but, when given a small block of iron, the village women found them to be rather more useful as doorstops.

But it turned out that there was a fish in town that stood for good luck. And if you turn a block of iron into good luck, people are more likely to cook with it and eat up all that luck. No matter where you go something is lucky, and of all the ways to make everyone healthier I do not think that a little bit of luck in your soup is the worst way.

I suppose we could create our own luck, but it seems like a better idea to make it for someone else, given the option. If we need a motto for January to make one for the year, it seems to me like that's the one to use.

Hello, 2014.

When you got here I was in a room filled with people that I like, waiting for fireworks from a Space Needle too fogged in for them to get out. We retreated back to the television to see if the fireworks were there, but it turned out that even from the Space Needle you couldn't really see the Space Needle fireworks. Score one for the fog. But as always fireworks are just a bonus for events with friends and champagne and kissing at midnight, and I wouldn't trade the fun for fireworks. Probably.

This morning I walked to work on sidewalks just caked with streamers and confetti, shining in the gray from empty champagne bottles with their tops snapped off. I'm sure it will all get smushed together into brown soon enough, but I appreciated how bright everything had remained through a night and a day and a night.

I'm not usually one for resolutions, but I appreciate that my horoscope for the moment says this:

I predict that you will commit no major acts of self-sabotage in 2014. Congrats! I also foresee that you will be exceptionally careful not to hurt or damage yourself. Hooray! More good news: You won't be as critical of yourself as you have sometimes been in the past. The judgmental little voice in the back of your head won't be nearly as active. Yay! Even your negative emotions will diminish in frequency and intensity. Hallelujah! Whoopee! Abracadabra!

All of which sounds just fine to me. Let's go with that, 2014. If we work together, we just might get there.

Love,
me

2013, I have had a nice time being friends with you.

I moved this year, for the first time in 10 years, in with my nice boyfriend. I changed jobs for the first time in almost as many years. After a few years of revolutions like growing new skin from knives and glitter it has been a nice change to move forward instead of just away. I wandered a little, to Hawaii and Asheville and twice to New York, back to magic Orcas. I met babies and celebrated engagements and learned how to make flatbread.

We lost my nan this year, unexpectedly, and while we are no stranger to loss in these woods it's a unique experience to lose someone who has been gone for so long. Still, as we go along we find ourselves riddled with empty places, pocked with holes, and that's never any easier to accept. Even when we grow back around what is gone.

Mostly you were quiet, 2013, a nice year for breathing and thinking and laughing. I think of Jane Kenyon's "Happiness":

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone. 

Or, I suppose, the most important part, like this line from Mindy Nettifee, "One look from you and my spine reincarnates as kite string." I think you're pretty alright, 2013.

Love,
me

I read Cry, the Beloved Country around the same time most people do--maybe 9th, 10th grade. In Wuthering Heights Catherine Earnshaw says, "I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind." At some point I adopted that as the best way of explaining the books that come to you just when you need them and forever alter the alignment of your brain, and Cry, the Beloved Country was just that kind. It was the first time I had heard of apartheid and it came to me as I was starting to realize for myself the startling breadth of injustice and hurt in the world. And so it was subsequently because of Alan Paton that I read about Nelson Mandela and started thinking deeply about the startling breadth of kindness and light that is also possible in the world. This is the side that I have tried to fall on ever since, and part of what led me to this life as a public servant.

I spend a lot more time thinking about South Africa these days than one would think, but I work in HIV prevention research and that is one of our battlefronts. It's one of those funny through lines that happen in life all the time, how I spend half of my days thinking about this place that was so abstract to me as a young teenager but still, for a while, a place that I spent half my time thinking about. Like wine through water.

“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

Tomorrow is my favorite holiday, and while I can sometimes get a little Proustian in the long-winded the thing right now is to get Proustian in this way: "Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Just now, nothing could be better than this.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine lost his father quickly to an unexpectedly aggressive batch of cancer, and then a few days after that in a different part of the country another friend's wife had their first child. Sometimes I wake up wondering about their molecules and if they crossed, these two people who would never have known each other, related to two people who will never meet. I wonder if wondering makes it easier or harder.

Recently there was an article about how some Civil War soldiers after the Battle of Shiloh were surprised to find their wounds glowing softly in the dark. The soldiers with glowing wounds tended to heal better than the average Civil War wounded, and so the mysterious light was nicknamed "Angel's Glow" and everyone left the story there for 140 years. It turns out that the soil at the Battle of Shiloh had a kind of nematode living in it that hosts a bioluminescent bacteria that could live in a hypothermic body long enough to scare off the pathogens growing there. And so while falling wounded in Tennessee is not the best outcome that could have happened, it turned out to be better than most. A glowing wound is better than a dark one.

It has been a while since we've gone to Orcas, the magic a little depleted by a series of small interpersonal earthquakes out there two Thanksgivings ago. But the island was still there, just like it's been for all this time, gathering beauty and calm.

So when the car we were riding in broke down before we could make it to the ferry, in a pocket of road without cell phone reception, it seemed reasonable to at least consider just up and living there forever. There aren't any simple ways to get to or from the ferry or out of Anacortes on the other side, but we could probably find shelter and make enough driftwood art to live off of. Until the next big idea came around, at least. Until someone noticed we were missing and came looking for us.

While we waited for the tow truck to arrive we watched two bald eagles wheeling above the trees. Not hunting, from what we could tell. Just dancing.

Our mornings and evenings have been heavy with fog, and on my way to work I passed the last of the dandelions all nodding with moisture. I worried, walking by, about all the wishes sitting there sodden, too heavy to lift through the air and plant themselves somewhere new. All those wishes that might never get off the ground.

Someone I like very much has an unpleasant diagnosis, and over the last few days I have watched something very private turn into something very public and inspiring, and...I just can't really think about it, friends. I feel outpaced by all of the losing this year and buried under trying to find what is light inside of what is dark. I am feeling fragile and worn thin and lucky and angry and tired.

Last week I read an article about a bunch of scientists out in the Australian desert taking x-rays of trees sitting on top of an unmined gold deposit. They've always known that that thing growing over gold ended up with gold in them, but they couldn't be sure if it was coming up from the ground or if it was kicked up by the wind. The x-rays show that the trees gather it through their roots and thread it all along themselves to their leaves, where it concentrates in the highest amounts. You can see it there in the x-rays, little spots of difference all along its veins. You could cut the tree open to find the sparkle laced inside, of course, but why would you? We have always known that the ground on which we plant ourselves makes up the nature of our bones.

I am thinking mostly about cooking this fall, about keeping my small family fed and safe and healthy. There's little else that I have any say in, with this world being a basket of yarn and three kittens most days. I keep finding myself reading memoirs about kidnappings and mental illnesses and wondering how much of becoming paranoid is just good common sense.

A month or so ago I read a news item about magic in the Maldives and how a coconut was arrested on suspicion of election tampering. Coconuts are inscribed with spells in the Maldives, it seems, and no one was sure if the coconut was being used to rig the vote. The police brought in a magician who cleared the name of the coconut, and I think it seems like a good idea for us all to have a magician on staff. Just to be on the safe side.

On our last night in New York we took a sail boat ride out into the Hudson River, just about sunset. I wrapped my bare legs in a green blanket and my hands around a glass of champagne and watched the city get further away and come into view in the way only a city can. Once out in the river they cut the engine and raised the sails, and we watched the Statue of Liberty approach, the sky ringed in rainbow, silence all around. I could have moved, I guess, walked around the boat and looked at all the angles, but it seemed like a better idea to stay part of the stillness and the quiet.

From the water, all the lights in all the windows kept their secrets.

On a rooftop visible out the window of our rented apartment stood some kind of statue, arms raised above its head. We probably could have guessed at its location and gone looking to find out what it was, but I like to think that it wasn't a statue, that it was someone who lives in the building regularly taking to the roof and greeting the sky.

I am heading back to New York this week for a vacation with my nice boyfriend. Historically, New York and I are in love like Bonnie and Clyde, all high spirits and total destruction--last month's trip left me unable to speak for almost a week--and I am itchy with the zugunruhe as usual.

Sometimes it feels like a waste of my bones to go back to the same places when there are so many other places to go. In my daydreams we go in search of the rarest--the flowers in Jamaica that only bloom every 33 years (2017, friends), and the ocean jasper. Ocean jasper is a kind of orbicular jasper--a stone seeded by needle-like crystals--that is only found by boat off the coast of Madagascar at low tide. Most jasper stands for healing, and we could make bouquets of the stones and cure all the world if we could just get there first.

More recently I read about a town in Bavaria called Nördlingen that is built from the stones of an impact crater made something more than 14 million years ago. The meteorite that made the crater hit a graphite deposit and birthed stone laced with tiny diamonds, and it is these stones that the townspeople used to make their village.

On my first trip to New York, in July of 2001, we walked out of a Broadway show to sidewalks laced with mica. I had no idea how it was possible for the ground to shine so much, but I was enchanted with that night and everything that surrounded it.

One of my favorite things about going places is how much of the world sparkles, and how frequently you can find what is rare.

They're digging up Neruda to see if he was poisoned, which is one of those things that you know but don't think about until the weather starts to turn and everything is the greenest it might ever be. I like to think that on top of the murder or not murder they might find will be the discovery that all the poems he left unwritten will have worked themselves out of his bones. That his gravesite will be littered with words. Above the ground it starts to rain and the air tastes like Neruda, all love mixed up with nature. "At night I dream that you and I are two plants/ that grew together, roots entwined,/ and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,/ since we are made of earth and rain."

Sometimes in recent years I can feel a four-leaf clover before I see it, sure that one is in the grass nearby. I think in general the odds are in my favor, but mostly what I think about is all the luck I'm not finding, snuggled down there in the grass. 

In Japan the practice of repairing a cracked vessel with gold is called kintsugi, which is a way of making something broken more valuable than when it was whole. I like all these pots and cups that wear their cracks on the outside rather than trying to hide them, to fit everything perfectly back together but weaker at the joins. There's nothing wrong with having once been smashed.

Here we are now, 31 but still also kind of five years old. There's a Dzogchen tantra that I mostly forget about that goes, "As a bee seeks nectar from all kinds of flowers, seek teachings everywhere. Like a deer that finds a quiet place to graze, seek seclusion to digest all that you have gathered. Like a mad one beyond all limits, go where you please and live like a lion, completely free of all fear." Which might be right and all, except I'm not sure about that part with the lion, since all these years of nature documentaries have taught me that nothing at all lives completely free of all fear. And rightfully so.

Lately I've been thinking about this poem that talks about flies and the way that their brains rewrite themselves when they accept the pheromones of another fly, that talks about reincarnation and the possibility of committing enough injustices in this life to be reborn as flies in the next. That talks about loving to the fullest extent of our brains.

The other morning I looked at an app on my phone that randomly selects two categories of poems and brings up what fits beneath that. That morning it gave me almost 200 poems on contentment and life. Today it is contentment and youth. Both of these are true.