Things I Think About Every Day
A random collection of inner monologues
Hello, this is a Peace of the Whole letter. If you haven’t read my last missive, the short of it is I took a multi month break earlier in the year and have now decided that I basically just want to write letters about whatever I want whenever I want. Fun! Mostly this will be plants, our planet, collapse, birds, cycles, and love. If this sounds good to you, great! All letters are free and not promoted on social media. There are no subscribe or share buttons. Do as you please. I might make a “tip” button in the future because capitalism’s still happening, but we’ll see.
It’s hard to know what to write about anymore. So these are some things I think about every day.
One.
Daily, at the tender age of thirty-one, I think about getting old.
I don’t care about aging in terms of wrinkles or how my face looks. I’ve got a lot of anxiety but none of it is about that. In a way, I look forward to that part of aging because with wrinkles I can finally call everybody sweetheart and honey like I would like to and it won’t be weird.
Instead, I think and worry about keeping my body working.
About keeping my toes spread and my feet stable. About continuing to grow the nice thick calluses on my feet so that I can keep walking barefoot until I die.
I hear my sixty-some year old yoga teacher talk about making our bones strong. I think about what more I can do about that. I work hard to eat enough protein.
I wonder: Am I moving my body enough now? Am I doing enough for functional strength? I need to reduce the tension in my neck and face. Am I sitting as well as I can? I already sit on the floor most of the time and we got rid of our couch. But my posture still needs help. I also need to lift weights. I need to keep my hands working well somehow. I need to go to yoga more. Maybe I should start biking…
My grandmother will turn eighty this year and soon she won’t be able to walk. This didn’t happen because of an accident or other trauma. She just stopped moving her body. So every day, already, I think about this for myself and my body.
I spent my twenties caring about what my body looked like. Now, I’m concerned with how it works.
Two.
I know in my bones that collapse is happening. There is never a day I don’t think about this.
I’ve met very few people who are willing to talk about this. Even less who will talk about it seriously and not just as a dark a joke. I live in a place and grew up in a religion where a lot of people deny climate change. So most days I’m left to think about this on my own.
Some days I think we will be ok. And some days I wonder how ugly we will see it get and how we will get through that. Am I seeing birds and butterflies that will not exist by the end of the century? Will there no longer be snow in the place I was born by the time I die? Sometimes I can look at climate models and read articles. Sometimes I have to pretend like it will always be the way it is now even though I know I am pretending.
Right now, I’m listening to the wonderful new podcast We Are the Great Turning. It’s beautiful and brilliant. I highly recommend it. And some days I can’t even stand to listen to that. Sometimes it’s all too much and too big to consider, especially alone, with my earbuds in, washing dishes, staring out the window at the birds in my yard.
Three.
Why are we still prioritizing how our bodies look over how they feel? Why are we still wearing uncomfortable clothes and shoes?
I mean, I’m not wearing uncomfortable things anymore. I slowly dropped all that a bit ago and now everything I own is elastic, drawstring, breathable, in some way non-constrictive, zero drop or minimalist, and made of cotton, linen, silk or wool. In all honestly, I stopped wearing even my stretchy, cotton Arq brand bralettes (RIP Arq) when I realized it is, in fact, nicer to have a fully unbridled diaphragm than it is to have a band of elastic around my ribs. That’s just simple math, folks, but it took me a while to realize it. I also stopped wearing make up because I don’t like how it feels on my face. These, I think, are some gifts I’ve been given from neurodivergency, sensitivity, and severe gastrointestinal problems.
But why—particularly as women-people—have we put up with so many things that create physical discomfort for our bodies? I wonder how many years of my life I spent subconsciously dealing with the physical discomfort of skinny jeans, an underwire bra, a polyester shirt, shoes that squeezed my feet and made my pelvis tilt incorrectly, and sticky black goo on my eyelashes. What brain space was lost to all that? Why do we do this?
Maybe you are comfortable as you are, in whatever aesthetic choices you have made. Good on ya then, I say! Do what works for you! I hear sometimes a bra can provide something nice for the wearer, or make up can cheer up a person. But there’s also so many jokes about finally taking our bras off at the end of the day. I’ve always thought that was weird. Why is how a part of the body looks more important than how it feels? We only get to experience this body once. I hope we can all do that with as much comfort as possible.
I wonder what more we can accomplish when our bodies feel good.
Every day I’m grateful for how comfortable I am now in my linen pants, naked face, and shapeless cotton dresses. And sometimes I even ask my body how it could be more comfortable yet. What a rebellion! I think. A woman seeking to be at ease! What a wild thing!
Four.
The place where I currently live in the mid Atlantic US feels very unsafe to me. I can’t shake this feeling. I feel weird disclosing the name of the town because I’m an increasingly private person and you have undoubtedly heard of it. All I will say is: something historic went down here, and as a society are still arguing about what it meant and what we do in light of it. There are references to this event everywhere in this town.
This general geographic region is literally increasingly unsafe due to the climate crisis, because everywhere is increasing unsafe for this reason. According to this new U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index, it’s not looking good, but we already knew that. Now we just know that with more specificity. (If you feel regulated and supported, I recommend going to the link and typing in your zip code. Know that it is a lot to take in.) I live with a former environmental scientist, who has done his best to explain it to me. But my brain largely simplifies it to: here, the air will be increasingly undesirable for breathing, everything will be hotter, the storms will be less predicable, and the community is not woven well enough to withstand all this. Our growing zone was recently updated to denote that it is more like what locations south of us used to be. My grandparents, who live nearby, just put central air into their 160 year old home because the summers have become unbearable otherwise. It was fine for the fifty years previous; now suddenly it’s not.
There are other things too. The town where I live, in 2020, was a place where very large guns that civilians don’t really need to have were brought into public spaces en mass. Meaning, a bunch of men decided they thought it would be a cool idea to go to a small town they don’t live in and show everyone their powerful weapons, just ‘cause. It seems important to say these were open air public spaces where the Confederate flag is regularly flown not just for educational purposes (although I find that weirder and weirder) but also with a spirit of what I guess is called “pride.” (No, this is not in the south; we’re north of the Mason Dixon.) That summer, I remember seeing a man carrying a large gun in the downtown area with an American flag over his other shoulder. He was right by the cute little polish pottery shop my sweet mother-in-law loves to go to.
No one was physically hurt when these men with guns came to town, which I only say so that you have that detail, not because it makes anything ok. This all happened the same summer we moved here. We went to protests organized by friends to get guns off these public lands. It didn’t work. It failed rather miserably. So now I’m aware that on my walk tomorrow I could run into someone with a AK-47 in hand. I would be alone in a field, walking past a man (because, it’s always a man) with a tool that does something for which there is no purpose in this situation or location. That, at a minimum, is very very strange.
There’s been no reoccurrence, to my knowledge. But I walk past the location where there was what we’ll call a kerfuffle during the same summer of 2020. It wasn’t over the guns, per se, but a matter tangential to that matter. A matter tied up in the history of this place. There were videos of the event, which happened at the foot of a monument glorifying a prominent Confederate leader. It seems important to tell you that the encounter was between an older white man who I had regularly served when I worked at small, local library and a black professor. No one was hurt, and again that doesn’t make anything ok.
My favorite three mile walk takes me past the monument where this happened.
I wonder what the living world thought as they witnessed that. What did Cedar, Red Tail Hawk and Red Winged Black Bird—all of whom I greet around this area often—see and hear that day? What did they feel? Do they still, like me, remember it? What does it do to them? What does it do to me?
I think some people don’t like this town because of its connections to history, its cultural background, and the fact that it’s littered with monuments to the Confederacy. When we moved here I wondered if I could look past all this, if I could maybe love the land the way I love another places. But the land is still the land. It was living and dying and living before humans started doing ugly things on it. It’ll be here if the hate can die away too.
I just hope I can be safe enough while I live here.
When I started to write this letter I didn’t think I would include that story. But there it is.
Five.
I wonder: Am I doing enough? By whose metric? What is enough? Enough for me? Enough for the planet? Enough for the many many many people suffering in ways that I can’t fathom? Should I donate? Where should I donate? Should I protest? How could I be doing enough for when sometimes I don’t read the news for days because I know what it’ll do to me and I don’t think I can show up well if I allow that to happen to my nervous system?
Is it “enough” to love what is in front of me right now, if that is all I can manage?
Seven.
Should I get training as an herbalist? As a midwife? As a fertility awareness instructor? Should I learn more about first aid, how to stop bleeding, how to stabilize someone is an emergency? Should I invest more time in learning to preserve food? Do I know enough about disaster preparedness? (The answer is no I do not.)
All of these things seem imperative in the coming future. I don’t know where to even begin and I’m so overwhelmed that I don’t feel like I’m making progress on any of these things.
But then I remember that I do know a lot more than I did before and I try to keep going.
Nine.
Thank goodness for birds. Thank goodness Yarrow. Thank goodness for Chamomile. Thank goodness for Pine. Thank goodness I live in a world with these beings.
Ten.
What a struggle it is to live Now.
What a gift it is to live Now.
It is both of these things. It is more. What a strange thing it is to have in your line of sight both wonder and tragedy. To have my eyes opened up to the beauty of a goldfinch but you see also that they’re flying across a sky of wildfire smoke. To have the opportunity to put my words out to thousands of people without really much effort at all but wondering if this technology will lead us somewhere darker and less humane. To be able to meet like minded folks over the internet but not be able to connect with people nearby because they’re swallowed up into their phones.
I was recently listening to a podcast (I forget which one) and someone said that when they see paradox they know that’s where God is. That gave me some comfort because what is Now but a bundle of paradoxes?
Ema, again with the direct line to my head and heart.
"Is it 'enough' to love what is in front of me right now, if that is all I can manage"?
So many of your stories and experiences in this post resonate with me, but these words especially.