1. Morning walks. We are going on shorter ones now, down to two miles. After a week or so of not taking him as far to allow him a bit of rest after spraining his back leg, Ringo seems to have settled on being happy going not quite so far. It makes sense with his arthritis and being twelve that he’s slowing down. He still gets to smell stuff and I still get to see the sun rise, so we both continue to get what we want, are both happy.

We had a close call on one walk this week. I somehow forgot my headlamp, but we’d driven to the ponds so I decided rather than driving all the way back home I’d just walk in the dark, trust Ringo’s nose to alert me to anything I needed to know about. Everything was fine, until… We were almost to the end of the loop, and the sky was lighting up pink over the river so I started to get closer to take a picture. Just in time, I looked down in front of me and saw a skunk waddling towards us on the trail. Ringo didn’t actually see it because he was busy smelling something else, so it was pretty easy to change direction and giddy up out of there. He did catch its scent a bit further up the trail where it must have crossed over to get closer to the river. We’ve gotten close to skunks before, but that was the closest.

2. Practice. Not enough people for yoga this week and I’ve really been struggling to get back on a regular schedule of meditating, but my Friday morning writing group was lovely. I wrote a bit during that session about my morning writing practice:

“Write as if you never talk to yourself. I was surprised at my recent book club meeting, discussing Ian McEwen’s What We Can’t Know, a book that considers what we can know about people from the data they leave behind, including emails, social media posts, shopping preferences, browsing habits, etc, along with paperbased data collected in diaries and journals and letters. I was surprised to find myself an outlier in the group, not just in my daily journaling practice but in my perspective about it.

I am a writer and have journaled daily for close to 15 years, and not so regularly but often before that. I started with the morning pages of Julia Cameron and the free writing of Natalie Goldberg, and because of my growing interest in Buddhist philosophy and practice, I began to view my daily morning writing in part as a way of understanding patterns, a place to consider my habitual ways of reacting and responding, taking a closer look at how I think and why, looking for the origins of these ways I generated suffering. As an introvert who has difficulty in responding quickly, in the moment, who needed more time to process things, my journals also served as a space to consider and get clear about what I think, what I might have to say about important things and how I might turn that into something meaningful or helpful. I also allow myself to write through my initial reactivity rather than possibly speaking without thinking or responding from a less considered place in the moment. It’s the place I can complain and rage, throw a tantrum, say things I might mean but don’t actually mean — if you know what I mean. Now, later, after so many years of reading poetry and wild writing, it’s a place to begin, to discover things worth sharing.

I was surprised that many in my book group thought the only reasons to keep a journal were to have a place to safely be awful, nasty, or petty, or to have a place to brag. Not wanting to waste the paper or the time, the others didn’t get the value of the practice. When they described someone writing all the things they wouldn’t say otherwise, they implied this was a sign of poor character, bad judgment to write down those thoughts, that the better bigger person would leave no record, wouldn’t risk that someone might find and read them, that this omission was a sort of alchemy or magic that erased such things from existence. They couldn’t see any value in writing them down, in considering them — ‘I mean who are you writing that for, who is the audience?’

The alternative reason to keep a diary, from their perspective, seemed to be to leave a record of how awesome you are or were, that there was a sort of arrogance or even narcissism required, that you must in this case also be imagining an audience who would read it and care. Neither of those approaches is true for me, and the discussion missed the point that a journal or diary is a process, a practice, and that you yourself might be the only intended audience, or even something deeper, more magical, like God or your own soul, your both darker and lighter selves. I certainly didn’t share with them that I start each entry (after writing the date and time, marking that with a purple highlighter to make my entries more searchable), that I begin with ‘Dear one’ and I end with ‘Thank you,’ which from time to time accidentally comes out ‘I love you,’ which sometimes means the same as thank you.

I did concede that I wouldn’t be able to write as freely as I do if I had a partner I thought might read them, and even though he doesn’t, I make sure he knows there are things I write in the heat of the moment or when I’m having a bad day or when I’m confused by big emotions that aren’t necessarily true, but they arise like that and I don’t edit as I write and those thoughts need to be acknowledged and then given a place to go, like a compost pile or trash can. Before you do anything, breathe.

Is there more to say about this practice of mine, the scratch of pen against paper as I follow it where it leads, as I consider what matters, remember who I am and what I used to know? It’s like the thing Buddhists say, that enlightenment isn’t so much about becoming as it is remembering who you already are, that it is our fundamental basic state, that our primordial mind is clear and sane, both empty and luminous, and through practice we recover our natural state as we allow everything else to arise and fall away, all the distraction, the confusion, the reactivity and habitual patterns. Practice allows me to be honest, not deny or ignore any part of myself, really know who I am and all the ways I generate suffering and am my own obstacle, all the ways I try to fool myself.”

3. Family. The “kids” are doing well. Lia got her basketball picture and is excited to put it up on Papa’s wall next to her mom and aunt’s team pictures. Warren is taking his job as a big brother very seriously and Hallie gained some weight and is eight pounds! Mom is holding steady, still comfortable, being well cared for and having good company, doing all her favorite things — eating, watching the Hallmark channel, organizing her overbed lap table, holding and chatting with the baby.

Some sad family news: my Uncle Bruce died. He had Lewy’s Body Dementia, most likely caused by chemical exposure during his military service, so it’s a mix of feeling glad that he’s no longer suffering but also, dang it, my heart is broken. If he could, he’d tell you his favorite story about me, the first time he met me. He’d driven through the night from California, so was napping on the couch in my Grandparents’ basement. At five years old, I went down, having never met him before but I suspect I knew who he was, hopped up on his belly and started to bounce up and down until he woke up. When he did, I told him, “you’re fat,” not intended as a criticism but rather more a compliment for having such a bounceable belly. He loved telling that story. He was one of the good ones, and I also can’t help but be aware that Mom will most likely go next, and I’ll feel the same mix of relief and grief.

4. I finally unpacked my suitcases. It was hard because there were things I brought home from Mom’s and it was the last trip I’d be spending at “her house” but it also meant I cleaned up a bunch of piles around my own house and found places for things I’d brought home and that felt good.

5. My tiny family, small house, little life. It’s good to be home. We spent yesterday deciding on a new mattress, trying out a few in the store and looking online, researching and considering. After much thought and discussion, we are going back to our roots and ordered a nice futon and wool topper. When we were first together, our bed was a cotton futon on a pallet on the floor, then we later “upgraded” to a “real” bed frame but still a futon mattress just a bit nicer with a wool core. When we bought our first place, we upsized to a king and it seemed the right thing to do to also get an actual traditional Western mattress. That first one was good, but the two we’ve had since then have been progressively worse, and we both hate the new trend towards memory foam, so we decided to go back to where we started. I was teasing Eric that while a new mattress might not seem to be a romantic Valentine’s Day present, it’s actually perfect, when you think of all the things that happen in our bed and all the time we spend together there. We also made a reservation for a house on the coast in Waldport for a few weeks in June, the same one we’ve stayed in the past few trips.

Bonus joy: the kid in the pool this morning who was having the time of their life making waves, the hydromassage chair, getting in the pool, sitting in the sauna, pickled red onions, onion buns, the laundry being done, a warm shower, napping with Ringo, texting with Chris and Chloe’, other people’s kids and dogs, poetry and poets, libraries and librarians, good TV and movies, listening to podcasts, Teddy Swims and the mix Spotify makes based on his “style,” a big glass of clean cold water, neighbors, the field at the end of our block that people use as an unofficial dog park, flowers blooming (even though it is WAY too friggin early), bird song, our hardwood floors, down blankets and pillows, making each other laugh, when one of “the girls” texts me back, a warm mug of tea and a hot cup of coffee, clean sheets, reading in bed while Eric and Ringo sleep.

I start the morning on the couch with the only light coming from the golden strings of twinkle on the Christmas tree, left up later than usual and also soon to come down, so I linger and savor the moment, still and quiet but lit up. It’s one of the things that gets me through this, the darkest season of the year — lights on the Christmas tree, battery-operated candles on the shelves and along the floor, a tall skinny LED light in the corner that can be set to multiple colors and patterns, the twinkle lights strung around the window, the light on my nightstand shaped like a tiny moon, our “alarm” clock set to slowly get brighter over time to mimic an actual sunrise hours before the real one appears, my light therapy lamp that imitates real sunlight, the candle on my meditation shrine.

I arrive at this day at the end of a week that held so many dark, sad things – Eric’s mom’s birthday, the first one without her here with us; the anniversary of January 6th, a day to mourn or to celebrate depending on your perspective; and on January 7th, a woman peacefully protesting at an ICE raid was murdered by one of their officers.

The good they murdered was a writer and a poet, a wife and a mom. She was 37, not so much my lucky number but the number that reminds me of impermanence, of love and loss, a call to keep going, to not give up, the age Kelly was when she died. Renee’s wife was there with her but not in the car. She’d gotten out and was standing next to the passenger side, recording and heckling the agents, challenging them to take off their masks and telling one to “get yourself some lunch, big boy.” Their dog, who looks exactly like my Sam, was riding with them that day and in the backseat when Renee was shot.

The last thing Renee said to an officer, before he reached in and tried to open the door demanding she “get the fuck out of the car,” before she cranked the wheel to leave was “That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.” It would be the last thing she’d ever say. An ICE officer stepped out from in front of the vehicle and around to directly in front of her and shot her point blank in the face and then two more times in the head. As the car rolled away with her dying at the wheel, her wife screaming and her big black dog in the backseat, one of the officers, maybe even the shooter, muttered “fucking bitch.”

Renee Good and her wife were there to disrupt, to protest, to be an obstacle to injustice — the very things U.S. citizens are called to do as a matter of pride, are promised by democracy itself we are free to do, seeing as we are united in the “land of the free, home of the brave.” Late U.S. Representative and civil rights icon John Lewis urged us to “make good trouble” in this way, encouraging us to take action and speak out against injustice, to challenge systems that are neither fair nor just. While John Lewis insisted this effort happen through nonviolent means, he himself was brutally beaten by state troopers as he lead the first march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965. Renee and Rebecca Good were there in Minneapolis on January 7th as citizens, as neighbors, as good humans to “make good trouble” and one of them was murdered for it — a death sanctioned and supported by our government, clearly no longer a system “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

In a statement released later, Rebecca Good described her wife’s belief in the essential truth that “we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.” I cannot tell you at this moment exactly how the light comes, but it does, even here, even now. Maybe one way is to do what Rebecca Good suggests, to “honor her [Renee’s] memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.”

Rest in peace, Renee. May your willingness to show up with an open heart, along with your heartbreaking loss, open the door a little wider to the light. May we open and open more and open still and sustain the light that guides those who are lost back home, back home safe to the people they love. Stay tender, kind and gentle reader. Keep your heart open. And please, don’t give up.