It’s hard to tell the truth, and I think I struggle more than most people do. Sometimes who knows what the truth even is. But it’s still important — essential, even — to try.
I’m writing now mostly in response to Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing.The chapter I am reading is about practices with attention. She wrote more eloquently some of what I am writing here, in better words. She used art historians and abstract paintings to inform her writing. I am using a seagull and a lifeguard and a zoo. And I am remembering, and wanting to put in writing, something I learned in a class taught by Chris Ware.
In my 33rd year, clarity is harder to come by, and grief is given a guest room so it can stay as long as it needs.
There is a plover controversy in Chicago. The plovers are a small thing, but they are so purely good, and it should be so easy for us to take care of them. If we do, that will say something about humanity that is so rarely said: we can make kind and gentle choices, and maybe, in fact, we are wired to.
Our baby chick died. That is part of life. Coming back to life is not normally part of life; so what does one do when it is?
There are many things in my life right that I am waiting to watch grow out.
We are on the precipice of a new era of journalism, and it is our responsibility, as people with privilege and/or power, to usher it in gracefully.
A whole post written on a treadmill.
“Those old notebooks (plural because, I guess if we’re being honest, there’s also the dream journal I haven’t really done much with; and then that nature / prose book I was going to do little watercolors in) represented a past self. A WORSE self.”
Another word for “extracted,” in this case at least, is “stole” — we didn’t make the honey, and the bees from whom we took it weren’t thrilled to lose it. It wasn’t a victimless crime. A lot of bees went down with the ship. For those of us who hopelessly anthropomorphize anything that makes decisions, insects included, it was a brutal affair — albeit sweet.