1. Morning walks with Eric and the dogs. There are so many mosquitoes by the river right now that we’ve had to temporarily reroute and walk through our neighborhood and around City Park instead. It’s a great place to walk later in the day in the summer because there’s lots of shade.
Sometimes when it’s hot in the afternoon, Ringo stops in the shade and takes a break (for being Australian, he does terrible in the heat)
The baby geese are so big right now that you can barely tell them apart from the adults
2. My tiny family. My favorite part of summer so far is getting to spend more time with them.
My view from the couch
3. Peonies. A few from my garden are still lingering.
4. Pie season. Peach, blackberry, marionberry, strawberry, and apple are my favorite. The first one Eric made is already gone.
So pretty it’s almost a shame to eat it…almost.
5. Eric. Besides being a master pie maker, he does what he has to in order to get great pictures.
The picture he took of Ringo
What he did to get the picture of Ringo
Bonus joy: breakfast with a friend, the first swimming suit I tried on being the one that worked AND it was on sale, naps, good books, good TV, fish tacos, coleslaw, fresh tortillas, pinto beans, clean sheets, being able to wear my pjs almost all day, some cool weather after too many days of too hot, good podcasts, teaching a surprise yoga class on International Yoga Day, clean water, a warm shower, nose work class with Ringo, sleeping in with Sam, laughing with Eric.
I am officially on Summer Break. This year I have two months off instead of three, and this is one of the summers we stay in Colorado rather than spend a few months on the Oregon Coast. I told Eric the other day that my favorite thing about vacation is I own my time in a way I just don’t when I’m working for someone else. The complication of that ownership is that I get to choose how I spend my time.
I could sleep in, have a lazy morning, take a shower but immediately put on clean pjs, get on the couch and binge watch television shows or movies, only getting up to eat and go to the bathroom.
I could get up early, do some laundry, walk dogs with Eric, go to the gym or a yoga class, shower, meditate, write, sit out in the back yard with Eric and the dogs, read or take a nap.
I could work on all the reading and contemplating and action from the various sources I’ve accumulated it.
I could plan some things to teach or get together with friends.
I could email Amy about using our last two training sessions with the dogs, answer those emails that have been sitting in my Life Wholehearted inbox for way too long, schedule some people to come give us a bid on putting in a new fence for us, recaulk the bathtub, go through the pile on my desk, get texture spray and paint to fix the places on the walls where they put in our insulation, paint the outside of the house, weed the flower beds, make an appointment with the dermatologist, buy a new swimming suit and bras, mail the things sitting on my desk, install the new modem they sent us months ago, clean out the garage.
Or, I could do nothing. No plan, just whatever I feel like doing next, even if it’s absolutely nothing.
I get to choose. I am fully aware of my privilege, and also my anxiety.
1. Notes from the Lower Level an essay from Camille Dungy. Her new book of essays is out now, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History, and is so good. I wrote a short article about it for work, and will write more about it here later because there’s more to say.
10. 5 things you may have not realized are cultural appropriation. I posted this to Facebook this week, with the additional, “6. Using ‘tribe;’ to refer to your group,” and this clearly is an issue people have strong feelings about. For me, there’s still a lot of confusion about what is and what isn’t, but as I said on Facebook, for me it is a compassion practice. I listen carefully and deeply to native people and people of color, and if they say they feel harmed or oppressed, if they are suffering and I can do something to ease that, I will. Especially if it’s as simple, for example, as saying my community, my friends, or my people instead of “tribe.”
14. Jelanii Kabita’s message to families with LGBTQI kids, (Video). “Dancer Jelanii Kabita’s mother rejected his trans identity. After years of devastation, struggle, and growth, he has a powerful message for the families with LGBTQI kids.”
“You can’t honestly address ‘wellness’ – the things people need to be well – without addressing poverty and systemic racism, disability access and affordable healthcare, paid family leave and food insecurity, contraception and abortion, sex work and the war against drugs and mass incarceration. Unless, of course, you are only talking about the wellness of people whose lives are untouched by all of those forces. That is, the wellness of people who are disproportionately well already.”
17. Deported from Trump’s America, (Video). “This family has been split apart as deportations of immigrants without criminal records more than double under Trump.”
20. Burg’s Place still isn’t fully funded. When Amy made this page and the video, Burg was doing just fine and there was no reason to think that wouldn’t continue. Now that he’s gone, after everything happened so quickly, it seems even more important than ever to fully fund this request.
1. Seeing all the animals on our walks. This week we saw a deer, a beaver, a pair of herons, this turtle (Eric wasn’t believing me that the swirly marks on the trail were turtle tracks, until he saw the actual turtle who’d made them), and two of this year’s baby foxes.
2. Wonder Woman at the Drive In. We try to go at least once a year, earlier in the summer rather than later because even then we can only stay up long enough to watch the first movie!
3. SUMMER VACATION! Yesterday I sufficiently bribed the person who’s going to water my plants for me while I’m gone, ate the last of the good chocolate, and put the out of office message on my email. I need this time off so bad.
4. My tiny family. One of the things I need most out of this vacation is more time with them.
5. Peony season. I just consolidated the six jars full I had in the house into a single one because most of them were starting to wilt. With the heat this past week, there’s no more new ones left to cut. They make me so happy, and I’m always so sad to see them go.
Bonus joy: my Siberian irises (they went crazy this year and had multiple blooms per stem which I didn’t even realize was possible; my friend Ann gave them to me, thinned them from her own garden the year she died, so they mean a lot to me), a cool shower after a long walk, sun screen, bug spray, fresh strawberries from our garden, a dream about Dexter, good books, good tv, good movies, good podcasts, clean sheets, a long nap, air conditioning, stretching, yoga.
1. Roxane Gay Tells Us About Daring to Be Fat. I can’t wait to read her new book! “I did a lot of research about bodies, fat, fatness, that sort of thing. Even if I wasn’t necessarily going to write about it explicitly, I wanted to be informed. I learned some incredibly interesting things. The measure for Body Mass Index (BMI), for instance, is so fucking arbitrary. They decided on 25 because it’s a nice, round number. A bunch of generally white men are in a room somewhere making decisions about millions of people. That really was informative and infuriating.”
4. One carry-on bag and one personal item by Camille Dungy. I just finished and highly recommend her new book, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History.
1. Only one more week of work! Then, I get to be on summer vacation for two months. This past month has been about doing just the bare minimum, because even that was really too much, so a lot has slipped through the cracks or piled up. I’m looking forward to more space in my days, less responsibility, more reading and writing, answering some lingering emails, finally getting to some house projects that have been put off for too long, puttering in the garden, really taking care of my body, spending time with friends, long naps and walks with Eric and the dogs.
One of the house projects I need to get to: painting the house. It’s so faded now it looks almost blue when it should be a deep green.
2. Our front garden. We’ve been getting lots of strawberries and my flowers are all coming in so good this year.
3. Walking in the morning with Eric and the dogs. It’s one of the very best things.
4. Opportunities for learning and growth. The Social Justice Leadership Institute I attended the first part of the week, the Coaching as Activism program I’ve been in that has only one week left, the Creating Inclusive Excellence Program I’ll start in the fall, all the super smart and generous women (of color, in particular) who keep showing up willing to resist, write and teach and do their work in a way that I can easily access and benefit from.
5. Peonies. It’s that time of year, y’all. My garden is overflowing, which means so is my house. They just are so gorgeous!
Bonus joy: working from home, a meeting that went well when I hadn’t expected it to, clean sheets, a warm shower, clean water, a long nap, good books, good TV, good movies, some great shows coming up at the Lincoln Center so that I can go to concerts and shows at night like a grown up but still be home by 10 pm cause it’s only ten minutes from my house, bees, fresh strawberries, ice, pinto beans, good tortillas, meditation, yoga, writing, sleepy dogs with stinky feet.
Bonus joy: working from home, a meeting that went well when I hadn’t expected it to, clean sheets, a warm shower, clean water, a long nap, good books, good TV, good movies, some great shows coming up at the Lincoln Center so that I can go to concerts and shows at night like a grown up but still be home by 10 pm cause it’s only ten minutes from my house, bees, fresh strawberries, ice, pinto beans, good tortillas, meditation, yoga, writing, sleepy dogs with stinky feet.