One of my Christmas gifts from my spouse this past year was a compact book titled There is No Right Way to Meditate – it’s filled with art and writing by the author Yuri Sakugawa, printed on smooth heavyweight paper, and just generally a pleasure to hold, read, study, and page-turn. This page popped up the last time I had it open. I just went to open it again, still on this page, and decided I just need to sit with this one for awhile longer because its almost exactly what I mean when I think about my stated ‘theme‘ for this year.
Those little black and blue squiggles at the bottom are really what my brain feels like sometimes – so much, too much distracting me and sucking energy away from the things I’d rather put the last few (hopefully) decades of my life toward. Sigh.
Nostalgia: Google and Oxford Languages say: “a sentimentallonging or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” Merriam-Webster brings in a sense of excessiveness and possibly irrecoverability, in addition to sentimentality: “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.”
I find myself, almost always, temperamentally allergic to feelings of nostalgia. At most, I would characterize what I feel sometimes – where someone else might deem themselves nostalgic – as a soft, resigned, affection. The resignation because whatever I’m feeling affection for is almost certainly long gone. (I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately about my time on a small residential campus as an undergrad – I think it’s because we’re starting to think about whether and where my son (a high school sophomore) might go to college. If I think about it too much I could have dozens and dozens of ‘if-onlys’ and regrets about all the wasted opportunities from those four years – but none of that is changeable now, so I don’t dwell on it.)
Relatedly, I finished Maggie Smith’s book Keep Moving today, and it was this short bit near the end of that book that made me reflect on my usual aversion to feeling sentimental about the past:
Let go of the narratives you’ve dragged around for years: you are not who you were as a child, or in year X, or on day Y—at least, not only. You do not have to fit yourself into those old, cramped stories.
Be yourself here and now.
Keep Moving.
Maggie Smith, Keep Moving
Two other song lyrics also popped into my head – this, from Vienna Teng’s latest song “Riversitter“:
you don’t have to tell a tidy story you don’t need a home for every hole you can just sit in the river, let the river run to you you don’t need to trace your last ancestor you don’t need a family name of old you can just sit in the river, let the river run you through
Vienna Teng
And this, from a 35-year-old Indigo Girls song, “Watershed.” A lyric I shout out every time it pops up on a long car drive somewhere because it is so, so true for me.
And there’s always retrospect (when you’re looking back) To light a clearer path Every five years or so I look back on my life And I have a good laugh
Indigo Girls, 1990
Every five years or so (and sometimes more frequently) I do look back on my life and have a good laugh. Five years ago right now was pre-pandemic, pre-lockdown, pre-middle-school for my now high-schooler. I was in a different job, had just begun my first leadership position at my UU church (which mushroomed into an extremely intense set of activities and work that is still ongoing), and we didn’t yet have our dog Colby (who fills up our days with doggy goodness, now.)
The past is important and there’s absolutely lots of learning to be done and that should be done by reflecting on it – but I don’t have time or energy for much regret, wistfulness, woulda-coulda-shouldas, or if-onlys. I’m definitely with Maggie Smith on this one – KEEP MOVING.
I’ve been slowly making my way through the book “Held: Blessings for the Depths.” A wonderful small collection of blessings and writings and prompts and art published by enfleshed, a spiritual organization focused on collective liberation. I really get a lot out of keeping them on my radar. The prompt I worked on tonight was to find a word from each of a set of several short pieces of writing on previous pages, and then to create (write) a blessing of one’s own from it.
I found the words as I read through the pages once again, but decided that the collection of words that I found, in the order I found them, with some additional punctuation, was a lovely found poem. So here you go – the title was added after punctuating the poem.
Occasionally, I can be a bit of a notebook nerd and buy cool (well, cool to me) journals, notebooks, pens, and other such accoutrements. The latest one I bought is a physical version of The Theme System journal (designed by CGP Grey and Myke Hurley.) A few weeks ago I had a small epiphany about how I want to think about and frame my goals for 2024 – I don’t always have such an epiphany near the start of a new calendar year, but this one worked really well, so I thought making an attempt at using their ‘theme system’ was worth a shot. The theme, by the way, I’m currently labeling “Clearing Away and Removal.” There are a number of things that need to be removed from my life (less passively: that I need to actively evict from my life) and there are a number of things for which I need to make space and to which I need to become more open. We’ll see how it goes.
The UUA every year suggest a ‘common read’ – this year it’s the book On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. I’ve started making my way through it and will be sharing occasional highlights on Goodreads. Rabbi Ruttenberg also has a substack that I subscribe to. Well, she did have a substack – she just recently moved her public writings to a new place because of the ongoing Nazification of Substack.
Speaking of the Nazification of Substack, another writer I read there, Cat Valente, is not leaving yet, pointing out the dilemma of letting the goblin hordes constantly run us off – read the whole thing (link below).
I do not know if I’m going to stay here. I just don’t know. I came to Substack because of the Twitter diaspora. I managed to build a small audience, built mostly on hating fascism and idiocy. I like the community I and all of you have built here and I’m reluctant to migrate and lose people. But I don’t want to support the Badness by being here. And yet, if I go, does that not just abandon another space because bad people are also here, handing them control of yet another hugely-recognized platform, control they could never achieve on their own just on numbers and popularity, while the people who have any moral compass whatsoever have to continually start over from scratch?
Which one helps the goblin horde more, staying or going?
Trying out a feature I think I’ll call “Journalesque” – short little journally bits here relating to things that are happening in real life. 😆
Journalesque: This morning, I dumped hot coffee ☕️ all over myself twice before I figured out that the travel mug was not working as designed. Fortunately, I hadn’t left the house yet. I also took a nice nap with my puppers this afternoon (who is truly the absolute best napping companion). This photo is from a different nap, but you get the idea.
I mean, would you ever get up from a comfy nap if you had a snuggler like that? You see my challenge!
One of the things I’m trying to be deliberate about again, is intentionally reading regularly and also updating my reading progress on various books in Goodreads. This is part of what I mean by “reading in public.” I also mean writing about, or reflecting on the things that I’ve read now and then – – in public here on this weblog.
If you go to my Goodreads page, you’ll see that I have a dozen or more books that I am partway through or currently reading. This is almost always true, but I’m gonna try to get through some of them this calendar year that have been on that list since even before the pandemic. I seem to almost always have a combination of speculative fiction; religious, theological, or meditative offerings; productivity guidebooks; and very occasionally some regular old literary fiction. (I also read a bunch of smut/romance that I don’t track on Goodreads, because who needs to see all that and, besides, if we know each other and you read the same kind of smut I do, we probably already know that about each other and share recommendations elsewhere! The tropes, people, the tropes are endless! Who knew? Reading modern romance novels is a habit I picked up again during the pandemic, after dropping it when I was about 14.)
Today I finished a speculative fiction novel called The Goblin Emperor. It wasn’t bad. I give it three or four stars — it was definitely readable, definitely enjoyable, but I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll pick up the next book by this author in this world which is why I’m keeping it at 3 or maybe 4 stars.
Some stuff I’ve read or listened to lately that seems worth sharing:
On Chris Hayes’ podcast “Why Is This Happening?” (WITHPod), he interviews Robinson Meyer, executive director of Heatmap about the state the climate crisis, trends in fossil fuel use, S-curves and possible inflection points, and more. Really well-informed but also accessible discussion. Too many interesting ideas to find a good pull-quote – go have a listen.
Recently read an sf novel about cognition and AI and cephalopods that was well-done modern sf: The Mountain in the Sea. I highlighted a few things as I was going along – visible in my Goodreads account.
A question I found very provocative from adrienne marie brown’s book “emergent strategy“: How do you show up in the world? And, related: How do you want to show up in the world? How do others close to you perceive how you show up in the world? What about those not close to you? I love this for its emphasis on action – showing up. If justice is love in action, if generosity is gratitude in action, then I think how one shows up in the world can be seen as character in action.
Not to belabor the point, but why oh why, nearly 25 years after I first started writing words on the Internet, am I back at this blogging thing again? Mostly, I think, it’s because Twitter – once and future Twitter, but Twitter no longer – used to allow me to scratch that itch of tossing ideas and links out into the void and occasionally interacting with others tossing around their own ideas and links.
But Twitter imploded. Facebook is and always has been useless for real weblogging (in addition to perpetually toxic and occasionally genocidal). I’m not hip to the TikTok or the Snapchat. In fact, in general, BigTech, ad-driven, social media just doesn’t suit me for much of anything. And although my small personal chat groups and slack groups help, I find I still I want a space where I can put stuff; you can read it (if you want); and maybe we can chat a little about it in the comments or on the ‘don.
That’s all.
Welcome – and if you’ve been around these here intarwebz with me for awhile – welcome back!