1. Rita. My “Aunt” Rita died Wednesday night. We weren’t biologically related but she’s been a part of my family for as long as I can remember, is/was one of my mom’s best friends. She and her husband John and two boys moved in across the street from us when I was maybe three or four years old, and my mom and her became fast friends and stayed that way for the rest of their lives even after they moved away, regularly writing letters and visiting.
Just before they moved away, the boy’s aunt got them a puppy to soften the blow of moving, a tiny black and gray cockapoo they named Muffin. If you’ve been reading my blog for long, you know that Muffy was the first dog I loved big. They moved about four hours away and at least once a year we went to visit. As much as I loved seeing Rita and her family, the biggest draw for me was that sweet little dog who loved me as much as I loved her.
When they moved again, it was to a house by the beach in Washington a little over three hours away. At that point, my brother’s girls were old enough to go with us, so it became their summer trip to see Rita and her two grandsons at the beach too. We’d spend our days walking on the nearby beach looking for shells and heart shaped rocks, taking the bus to the nearby town of Long Beach where we’d walk along the boardwalk and visit the little tourist shops, playing SkipBo or doing puzzles, reading and taking naps, eating good food (she made the BEST pies) and making each other laugh. Those trips are some of my best memories.
For the past few years, Rita has been in memory care and in the past few weeks in hospice, so her death wasn’t unexpected and yet, when someone has been a constant and beloved part of your life for so many years, it’s hard to imagine the world without them in it. I’m so grateful to have known, loved and been loved by her.
2. Colorado sky. I haven’t been able to go on morning walks, am still working my way back up to that, but I’ve gone on short walks and sat in the backyard and got to see the sky doing what it does.
3. Naps. In the comfort of my own bed with my blackout shades and sleep mask and various pillows and blankets and clean sheets and something playing on my phone, a podcast or a music playlist. As much as walking and getting in the pool and sitting in the sunshine these naps are essential to healing, to being well.
4. Spring, in particular the green and the blooms.
Inside joke 🙂
5. My tiny family, tiny home, tiny life. As I sleep in most mornings while I’m healing from surgery, Eric has been flooding me with kitchen counter love notes, along with all the other ways he’s loving and caring for me. Ringo got to go play with one of his favorite people this week, Teri his physical therapist. He doesn’t really need to keep going, he’s doing so well, but he just loves working with her so much and she has all kinds of cool “toys” to play with.
Bonus joy: the hydromassage chair, the pool, sitting in the sauna or the backyard with Eric, good books, good TV and movies, listening to podcasts, practice, being able to rest, not having to rush, seeing Janice, hanging out with Mikalina, a warm shower, peach sorbet, green grapes, muffins, how warm Ringo’s fur is when he comes inside after lounging in the backyard, the riot of birdsong in the morning, birds at the feeder, reading in bed at night while Eric and Ringo sleep.
1. When We Remember To Be Alive. “In praise of the late award-winning composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto” from Frederick Joseph. Because this: “We have been conditioned to believe that speed is synonymous with progress, that a life lived in haste is a life well-lived. But as we take in the world around us, as we cast our gaze upon the brilliant mess that is our human existence, we must pause and consider the wisdom of our now ancestor, Mr. Sakamoto, who understood the virtue of stillness and the importance of deliberate contemplation. For it is only in the calm of such moments that we may truly appreciate the poetry that lies hidden within the seemingly mundane.”
2. Wisdom from Lucian James’s latest Kō Strategies Newsletter(a reminder which felt perfectly timed): “Do you know the concept of ‘killing the Buddha’? It’s a recommendation with which Linji Yixuan, a 9th century Zen monk, used to shock his disciples, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him’, he would say. What does that mean? It means that we shouldn’t blindly follow any set of ideas or ideologies – including those of Buddha, but follow our own ideas, and stay flexible. We need to avoid the trap of falling into fixed, old ways of seeing, and outdated ways of thinking. Ultimately, killing the Buddha means that your best teacher will always be yourself – not any kind of guru, in any kind of guise. When you kill the Buddha, you see from your own perspective, you’re undivided against yourself, and you see more clearly.”
4. Wisdom from the latest Wellread newsletter: “The many accelerating crises we are facing are coming at us fast and furiously. And while they can feel ‘too big to fail’, they also affirm our interdependence. Thriving in the face of this will demand a commitment and capacity that none of us can muster on our own. We will need the depth of our courage and the width of our connections if we stand a chance against extreme inequality, mutating pandemics, climate calamity and mass migration. We must reach outside ourselves, across divides, beyond borders and towards one another – not just to ensure our collective survival, but to realize our full potential. Here’s how you can play your part:
Locate yourself. We are all a part of this mess we are impacted and implicated in different and disproportionate ways. Locating yourself allows you to show up with skill and find your right role and responsibility in whole of who we are.
Pull the thread. From your location, how can you disrupt and dismantle the spaces and systems you are a part of? Personally, ho can you pull the threads of your conditioning so as to make more space for freedom and possibility?
Weave a new world. Even while systems collapse, new worlds emerge. What is the world you are dreaming into being? How can you help bring it into being?”
7. They Don’t Give a F*ckfrom Robert Jones, Jr. Because this: “I’m exhausted from repeating myself about the rank evil and hypocrisy of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and its collaborators and supporters from every demographic.
One of the things I’m tired of repeating is how much they don’t care. They don’t care that they are evil. They don’t care that they are hypocrites. They don’t care about justice. They don’t care about fairness. They don’t care about democracy. They don’t care about the Constitution. They don’t care about civility. They don’t care about our outrage. They don’t care if we march. They don’t care if we protest. They don’t care if ‘we go high’ (they prefer it, actually; we go high, giving them all the room they need to keep going lower and lower, while we go so high that we eventually run out of air). They don’t care about morality. They don’t care about religion. They don’t care about children—not theirs and most certainly not ours.
THEY. DON’T. GIVE. A. FUCK.
All they care about—all they really care about—is money and power. PERIOD. And they will do anything—ANYTHING—to hoard both. Even if—especially if—they have to step over our bones to do it.
The only question left to answer is: Knowing this, what is our counter-strategy? Because it can’t be repeating what’s already failed.”
13. The Broadest Portal to Joy. “All sorrow is, on some elemental level beneath cause and circumstance, an act of forgetting our connection to life, to one another, to the grand interbelonging of existence. All joy is the act of remembering — the hand outstretched for reconnection, for felicitous contact between othernesses. This awareness emanates from poet and gardener Ross Gay’s essay collection Inciting Joy — a tendril unfurled from his infinitely life-affirming Book of Delights.”
14. What Really Makes Us Happyon Lion’s Roar. “As a Buddhist teacher, psychiatrist, and leading researcher, Dr. Robert Waldinger studies life from three very different perspectives. But he says they all come to the same basic conclusion about what really makes our lives happy and meaningful, and what doesn’t.”
19. The Path of Joy and Liberationon Lion’s Roar. “The Buddha’s four noble truths include the truth that the eightfold path is a way out of suffering. It’s not just the path to happiness, says Sister True Dedication. It’s happiness itself.”
26. Sorry for getting old. “In the protracted superficiality that passes for existence in US-style capitalist society, skin wrinkles and other perceived female defects are cast as failures of the individual. And according to capitalist logic, such failures can only be rectified by buying beauty products, paying for cosmetic adjustments, or otherwise contributing to a landscape fundamentally dedicated to corporate profit rather than human wellness.”
29. Japan’s ‘evaporated’ people: Inside an industry that helps people disappear. (video) “In Japan, as some 80,000 people go missing every year, according to data from the National Police Agency. Some are later found, but others vanish completely, becoming what’s described as an “evaporated person” or johatsu-sha. The phenomenon is common enough to have an entire industry built around it of specialists who can help you disappear in the night. In this SCMP Film, we go inside a neighbourhood that’s a powerful draw for those who want to stay hidden and meet a yonige-ya, or night mover, who braves stalkers, gangsters and knife-wielding exes to spirit his customers away to safety.”
31. Commonplace Podcast Episode 109: Joy Harjo. “Rachel speaks with Joy Harjo, internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation about jazz, grief, second sight, teaching, and so much more. Joy Harjo served three terms as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is the author of ten books of poetry.”
36. Taken Flight, “the collected works of the late poet, Bennett Nieberg. The collection explores topics of transgender identity, socio and gender politics, coming-of-age, familial trauma, and mental illness. As Andrea Gibson writes in the foreword, ‘… a gorgeous and devastating prayer for their own survival, as well as a prayer for our world.’ Andrea also shared this piece from the book that is so beautiful, brutal in light of their passing: “I have heard stories/of grudges let go on deathbeds/a final grip loosening/all i know is i want to be buried/with my arms already open.”
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 