We are suspended in a bubble of summer that does not know how to end. The echinacea petals are faded and ragged, the artichokes are dry brown pincushions full of spiderwebs, and the sunflowers are listing, slowly pulled over by their heavy heads. The air is dry. The sun beats down and we can see smoke from the forests burning south of us. The rhythm of the world has gone off. It takes all of our creativity and self-discipline to make small quiet spaces in the midst of this, to find rest and restoration, so that we can continue our work and our living. But we do.
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When I was in my early twenties, there were like two books about fat liberation, and that was a miracle. Today, there are a bunch of books and podcasts and blogs and articles talking in truly radical ways about fat and body liberation. The backlash is trying to keep pace, but people are getting freer and freer every day, in all kinds of ways.
I'm trying, y'all. I don't even think bees are cute today; it's that bad. We are about to get another week-long heat wave with 95+ temps, on the heels of this mini heat wave, and and I'm kind of losing my shit about it being that hot again for so long. Like, panicky and not handling basic life tasks well. I feel like I have a million ideas and essays and projects that I really want to do but I cannot get a single thing done because my brain is just cooked. It feels like these really hot days are just blank days; like I'm not really living them. I was trying to remember what is good, something to anchor myself in, and I remembered that tarot is okay and pretty good. So I pulled a card, and then another. I pulled the Seven of Stones and The Guild, both reversed. The Seven is saying, you are trying to grow so fast and checking and checking and checking to see how you've grown and you're running yourself ragged. Growing takes time. Slow the heck down, friend. "The Seven of Stones reflects the technical, aesthetic, or even spiritual contemplation of the craftsperson rather than the strategist. It encourages us to see understanding and acceptance as the fruit of this contemplation. This practice can be difficult because most of us have not been conditioned to savor pauses. Since we are given so few opportunities to rest, we may not know how to accept what rest offers when it finally comes. We may get frustrated because our rewards don't seem proportional to our efforts, tempting us to work further in a frenzy." Slow Holler Tarot, little white book (multiple authors and it seems like the intent is to credit a group and not individuals--please feel free to correct me). The reversed Guild is saying, remember what you have learned from your teachers, and don't let this difficult time pull you into old patterns of behavior/learned ways of being in the world that did not serve you. Your productivity is not the measure of your worth.
That helped a lot. It's gotten hot again, and the world is scary, and it's hard to think of good things. I went to the river yesterday, and I will write about that soon but now it's too hot.
What is sweet today is that time keeps moving no matter what we do, and change always comes. It's just over three weeks until the autumnal equinox. The Earth continues inexorably in its journey around the sun, and the tilt of its axis is already leaning towards coolness and dampness and ingathering. We will always be starting over, and there is as much sweetness as there is bitterness in that. The other day, I noticed my butt in the mirror as I was getting dressed and it was just a regular fat butt and it was totally fine and good and not a horrifying, dreadful specter that's not just unsightly but also destroying the American way with its fat fatness.
... ... ...but seriously what if I could destroy the American way with the fat fatness of my butt? WHAT IF In my therapist's bathroom, there is a plant with delicate, glowing yellowgreen leaves, almost translucent, like the thinnest of porcelain cups, growing up the wall. Its vines have pairs of tiny stabilizer tentacles on either side every few inches, and I imagine how they would sink themselves into the bark of a tree if the plant was outdoors. Indoors, they flatten themselves against the cool white wall like frogs' fingers, ready to hold on.
The eclipse started a little after 9 am, on a Monday.
We had arrived at the farm on Saturday, six of us in our party, and about 30 other guests by Sunday. We pitched our tents in one of the spiky new meadows mowed into the field of cover crop. The field was in a flat space between the blackberry bushes at the foot of the fir-covered hill to the east and the blackberry bushes that marked the beginning of the descent to the cold, rocky river in the west. (We ate a lot of blackberries. There is nothing more delicious than a sunwarm blackberry right off the bramble in late summer in the Pacific Northwest. It would never make it to a store—too fragile, almost disintegrating with ripe sweetness.) The meadow was about 20 feet wide, and the green, green, broad, chest-high blades of the grassy cover crop rippled in the wind on either side of it. At 9 am the sun was well over the hill to the east and it was getting hot. We were sitting in our borrowed meadow, and I was sweating in a short sleeveless dress, putting on sunblock. A. kept checking his watch and announcing the time, and we broke out the eclipse glasses so we’d be ready. We speculated about why the shadow would move from west to east instead of vice versa and learned that the moon actually does move (appear to move, fellow nerds!) from west to east; it rises in the east and sets in the west because the earth spins faster than the moon orbits the earth. Then someone looked and said, it’s starting! I put on my glasses and looked too, and there it was, a tiny nip out of the sun, in the upper right corner. I started to get excited. The weather was perfect—there was a band of wildfire smoke to the south but the sun was clear of it. I thought, I’m actually going to see it! That sense, you know, when something long anticipated is finally happening, and you are on the leading edge of something inexorable. We inspected glasses for scratches and traded out a questionable pair, and then made a pinhole camera. We didn’t have a pin, but I poked a hole in D.’s paper with a blackberry thorn (ovoid, not round!), and we adjusted D.’s tent to make a better projection surface. A. found a metal poking thing, and we made more holes in the paper. It actually worked! It was really cool. I wanted a colander so we could see lots of little crescent holes, but we didn’t have one. We kept watching as the bite out of the sun got bigger. It went pretty slowly. We took eclipse portraits (“show me how you feel with your face!”) and tried to take pictures of the sun. D. got one, and taught the technique to J. and L. When the eclipse was at about 30%, we decided to go down to the river to see if we could find dappled tree shadows and see crescents in them. We climbed down and looked for weird shadows, but they just looked normal. The rocky ground was rough and it was hard to see any patterns at all. The light was getting weird, though. Someone said, it looks like sunset! And I said, but the colors are wrong, it’s not golden or pink, it’s so weird! We had this same exchange at least 30 times over the next hour. We climbed back up and the eclipse was at about 50%. It was starting to get cold, and I got a sweater out. It was at least 20 degrees colder—enough that it was uncomfortably cool in a summer dress. It was mindboggling that it could be so much colder with just half the sun’s light blocked out for less than an hour. It was getting even darker (like sunset! but the wrong colors!). D. thought it looked like sun through wildfire smoke. We saw that the bugs were coming out, like it was evening. I don’t remember if the swallows were out snacking on them. We were quiet then, just watching. I was thinking about how glad I was to be there, glad that I hadn’t taken the apocalyptic warnings so seriously that I hadn’t come at all, glad that I had taken them seriously enough that I hadn’t just tried to watch it from Salem at work, glad I wasn’t missing it all to sit in some goddamn meeting, glad I was with lovely friends, glad that this impossibly beautiful farm existed and that the farmers and C. had invited us to be guests on the land and made us feel so welcome, glad for the social connections that brought us together, glad that I had said yes when the opportunity came up—just really, really glad to be in that place at that time with those people, to be part of this spectacular event, feeling so small but so connected. Then the eclipse was close to 75% and L. said we should go to the fields by the farmhouse, where other people would be. We all agreed to go, but I was worried we would miss it, so I walked as fast as I could. It was much darker (but the colors were not right for sunset!) and it was still chilly. We were almost there when L. pointed out that the trees’ dappled shade over the path really did make crescents! It was so neat. I have no idea how that happens. How can that even happen? It was the coolest thing ever. I felt like, it’s happening, it’s really happening! We got to the farmhouse and the fields and stood with a small group of people that I didn’t know. There was a kiddo who had a welding mask and offered it up for a look, and I looked. You could see more of the sun’s rays. People were putting their arms around each other and we were all excited. We knew it was almost time. Two new people came up and they didn’t have glasses so we gave them our extras. I watched the crescent thin. I did peek without glasses for like a millisecond, and it was pretty cool to see that slender crescent of sun. (Don’t do it! I am still 100% not blind, don’t worry.) I kept looking around because the light was so strange (like sunset! but not!). The farm house was behind us, and the fields to the right to us were like something out of a picture book, all black dirt and neat rows of different plants with different textures and colors and heights, big but human in scale. The green of the plants was intense and saturated in the weird light. To our left, there was a small orchard and then more fields, and in front of us, to the south, another tall hill covered in black-green firs. I put my glasses back on and watched the crescent thin and thin. I was waiting for Bailey’s beads, but I didn’t see them. I felt a thrill of excitement and thought, it’s happening! I am going to see it! Then the glowing gap closed and it was completely black behind the glasses. I took them off and looked, while people exclaimed and cheered. The moon was a perfect dark gray circle in the exact middle of the pearly gray sky, surrounded by the sun’s glow and corona. The corona slanted around in all kinds of irregular patterns, to the left at the top and every which way, as big again as the sun-moon. The sky and the moon and the corona were all gray and white and glowing and it was the most beautiful, strange, majestic thing I have ever seen. I wanted to look at it forever. It was so quiet. The colors were just exactly right and the dark, glowing moon and its borrowed, magnetic corona were so perfectly centered in that gray, gray, gray sky above the black firs. I felt a wave of emotion, choked up throat and tears in the back of my eyes and nose, that something so beautiful and otherworldly existed in this world and that I got to be part of it, that everything was so perfectly aligned and suspended in this tiny moment of joy and wonder and awe. Everything got bigger, my imagination grew ten sizes, and it was so, so quiet. Then J. said, look, it’s like sunrise in the west, the shadow has passed there! I looked at that, and it did look like sunrise, all golden yellow, and I looked at the fields, and I tried to look at everything in that strange light. It was not dark like night; it was dark like dusk, but just barely dusk, after all the colors have gone out of the sunset. Then someone else said, look, it’s Venus! And I looked up, and Venus was right overhead, shining so brightly in all that grayness, shading to lavender at the top of the sky. It was the only star I could see. I looked back at the quiet, glowing gray sun-moon and watched it for what seemed like only a second or two longer, and then there was an explosion of blue-white light in the upper right hand corner. It was shocking and invasive. It was like taking a walk on a summer evening, slipping quietly through the soft darkness, and then suddenly being pinned by an obnoxiously bright motion-detector light, leaving you scared and blinking, with all the peace of the night shattered. I turned away and then looked back again, as if it might be gone and the gray world back again, but the light was even brighter. I felt so sad. I wanted more time, it felt like it had been only a few seconds since totality began, and I wished I had not looked at the sunrise in the west or at the fields or at Venus, so that I could have looked at the moon and the glow and the corona and the gray for longer. I thought I would have more time! And then everyone was talking excitedly, and the chickens started to do their morning yelling, and the light crept back. The second half of the eclipse gets no love, someone said. Folks started going back to their meadows to pack up their tents—C. told us later they were mostly farmers who needed to get back to the harvest. The kiddo with the welding mask said, I’m going to watch for a while! They were so excited and happy. We were all comparing notes and impressions, and we made weird crescent shadows with our hair and fingers, and everyone crowded around this old Subaru parked in the driveway of the farmhouse, to see the crescent shadows the trees cast on it. Our group started back towards our meadow, talking with other people, and I picked a peach from a tree. A peach tree is the prettiest thing in any light, but the returning eclipse light made it glow especially, all green crescent leaves and gold-blush fruits. The peach was a little bitter. We walked past a field planted with basil and dill and the air was full of the smell of them; much stronger than it had been when we walked by earlier in the eclipse. The light came back slowly, and it got hot again. People were hugging, and then they packed up and pulled away. The folks in our contingent that had to catch a flight in Portland left. Then it was just D. and me, looking out at the flattened grass in the hot meadow from a scrap of shade near the blackberries on the river side, with the irrigation pipe sweating at our feet. We ate vegan tacos for lunch and then we spent seven hours driving back to Portland and D. SAW THE ZEBRA TOO (there was a zebra, I am not making this up). (I missed a few days because I was camping and waiting for the eclipse, and I couldn't figure out how to update from my phone and didn't really want to. I turned it off and only took one picture! I want to write more about it later, but here's what was sweet today:
My body told me very loudly that I needed a rest day, so I rested all day. At first I felt grateful to have the opportunity, and I thought I should say so here so I wouldn't seem like a privileged, entitled jerk. But then I realized that would be some performative bullshit, because what I really feel is that I am entirely entitled to rest when I need to, and that entitlement applies to all of us, and I am/we are/we should be pissed as hell that we've been conditioned to believe rest is a favor or a reward for which we should be grateful (while being shamed for needing or wanting it) and that realization strengthened my resolve and my picture of the the world that we are building. And I really did feel grateful for that. On my way to the bus stop, there is a squat, muscular sunflower with a stem almost as thick as my wrist, about waist high. It hasn't bloomed yet. It is putting all of its energy into being fat and strong and deeply rooted.
There is a sunflower across the street from my house that is at least twelve feet tall. I have never seen one so tall. I think it is reaching for the light. "What we pay attention to grows." adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy. "Transform yourself to transform the world." Grace Lee Boggs Yesterday I looked out the window at sunset and the sunlight was reflecting pink off the bottoms of the clouds, just barely touching them, so you could see all the details of the very tips of them.
I turned on the fan that goes to the outside and suddenly I could smell the outside air, not just the outside scent, but a particular smell that goes with the temperature; I couldn't quite feel the coolness but I could smell it on its way. |
AuthorBitter Water
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Archives
June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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