llbwritesto.me

You can say that now. Because I felt like writing to you. And you decided you felt like reading.

Nature

Wineberries, Journalists, and Jasmine Tea

By

Dear—,

It’s been a while, I know, and you are patient with me.

This morning I have made you a little dew pot of jasmine tea. I am not sure why this tiny periwinkle pot is called with such a fanciful name, but I like it so. Have you ever held a teapot that fits perfectly in your two hands? This one does. And its smoothness makes you feel that all is well with the world, and always shall be.

I had forgotten about the consolation of wineberries. And of making a date with myself. Until yesterday.

Do you have children? I do. And they are no longer young, but they are not yet old. In the way, I mean, of somehow looking at you and understanding you have feelings too. Well, sometimes they do, very much. But sometimes they very much don’t. Yesterday was one of those days.

I went on a date by myself, because the wineberries are in fruit. Wineberries, I told a friend recently, when I wrote a little note one lazy Sunday afternoon, could save the world.

Yesterday I had also read this article I really liked, about a woman who mostly gave up being a journalist to mostly be a farmer. Apparently this is a thing now. To exchange our bottled-up indoor, techie existences for the solace of earth.

I’m not giving up my indoor existence anytime soon, but I do (mostly) have a healthy outdoor existence as well. Especially when the berries come.

Starting in late spring, it’s red currants. As the days grow warmer, they give over to blueberries and bush cherries. And then I’ve got my hands full (rather literally) for weeks on end. Just when my hands seem to be approaching idleness, the wineberries come, too. And, if I remember to go find them, I cannot empty the world of their abundance. There are simply more than anyone could ever need. More than the birds and the deer and, if there were bears here, more than the bears could eat, too. Wineberries, like I said, could save the world.

The article I liked, about the journalist farmer woman, had this phrase in it about wrestling food from the earth. I believe that’s what she’s doing. It’s what many farmers have set out to do, in growing exactly what people want when they want it. This I understand. And I depend on it.

But wineberries need no wrestling.

There is an Adirondack chair here on the side porch with me. I am putting my feet on its seat. My jasmine tea, in fine china rimmed with navy and gold is on one arm of the chair. A small white bowl (not fine china—perhaps stoneware?) is on the other arm, and it is filled with wineberries. Chilled. Yesterday, when I picked them, they were warm beneath my fingertips. So very warm. And the day itself was almost unbearably hot, except that there is a special consolation to walking through endless fields and beneath the cool of trees, in search of the best set of bushes with the biggest, sweetest berries, minus the poison ivy that sometimes likes to grow beside this edible treasure.

Wineberries look like jewels. Red, and almost lighted from within. Like fire opals. Or those glowing emeralds that people used to think were animated with a god at their heart. And no matter what has gotten you down on any given day, wineberries will cheer you with their jeweled sweetness. They simply will.

The other thing I read yesterday was a poem I decided not to acquire for Every Day Poems, because I thought that even though the poet had a good point about language being a chalice for grief, I also thought that her idea about nature being indifferent meant this: she was looking at Gerber daisies on a day when maybe it would have been best to seek the consolation of wineberries. And, if the wineberries were past season, or not yet in season, she would have felt instinctively that nature itself was a little sad, with those red arcs of wineberry canes, all thorns and prickles, not currently giving their gift to the world.

There are days when I really feel all will not be well with the world. And days when my own little world most definitely feels tilted and turned. So there is this: when the wineberries are in fruit, I must remember them. These treasures that grow in sun or shade, with no wrestling required. (Though, Dear—, you must take care for the thorns. They do ask of you care.)

So whatever you are facing today, Dear—, whatever kind of day you are having, I wish you wineberries, maybe even graced with morning dew. They are the best consolation. Or, they can be simply a gift to crown your day, if your day is already going well. And, if you’ve never had a wineberry, I wish you a future where you will.

As always,

L.L.

On Questions, Moss, and Domino Towns

By

Dear—,

Let me say, this is what happens when you tell your older daughter you are “going bookless.” She is 21 now, and she gets the verbal joke, and she gives you a sweetly wry smile. She also eyes you with a look on her face that is part fascination (“What in the world is my mother up to now?”) and part doubt (“How long will this last? How will if affect you and me? What happens now that we won’t be bonding through the shared identity of ‘avid reader’? Is the world falling out from under our feet?”).

This is only the beginning of the questions, because you yourself now have them, too. Some of these mirror your daughter’s: questions of timing and identity and loss. But some are more along the lines of, well, moss.

Before you decided to go bookless, you had planned to pick up Kimmerer’s thoughts on the subject. If they were anywhere near as good as Braiding Sweetgrass, you knew you’d be in for a lyrical treat, not to mention some delightful learning about this soft volunteer that has taken up residence between the bricks on your front steps, as well as outside the curve of your little herb garden, just next to the shells you’ve collected from various ocean- and riversides over various years.

Will going bookless mean going mossless? You do not want that. But you also decided to swear off reading for a while, so here you are, wondering what will happen next.

Your other daughter has questions, too. Do audiobooks count? Can you keep listening to Harry Potter, which you are only halfway through? She invokes the weight of promises and says that regardless of whether an audiobook counts as “reading,” you might need to keep listening, come the day when you start driving her to college again on an almost daily basis and are alone in the car on the way back, which is the perfect time to re-invite Harry to your world. This is only weeks away, and you don’t know yet. Do audiobooks count? Will you keep your promise to her? What happens when promises collide? Technically, you’ve promised no one you’ll go bookless, but your own soul has asked for it, at least until your own soul stops asking for it. Conundrum. Already.

On Sunday, you declared it your official Day 1, even though you stopped reading in December. It felt like a New Year’s thing to do. It felt like a challenge. Or maybe an invitation. You love a good chance to become something unexpected, to test the limits of your comfort without careening down mountains or jumping out of airplanes. Identity runs deep. It might look like nothing to the outside world for you to go bookless. But books are who you are. They are what you do. They are how you start revolutions.

And they can give you the secrets of moss.

But now it is Sunday, and you don’t have Kimmerer, and you don’t know how long until you can rely on her, and you suddenly realize how books have inserted themselves between you and the world. Plato (Socrates?) was right. In some significant way, you lost something when you began to rely on the book, above all, to touch your world.

On Day 2, you played dominoes with your daughters. You never played dominoes before, but you’d given them for Christmas, and you couldn’t read books, and you weren’t (yet) in the mood to play the piano (you started this on Day 1, because you had so much bookless time on your hands), so you emptied the dominoes box and learned how to do more than topple and stack these black-dotted ivory bricks.

After you finished playing dominoes, you made a domino town with them, because the other thing you did on Sunday was begin to sketch, starting with moss you plucked from near the herb garden, and now you wanted to sketch the dominoes and it seemed whimsical to organize them into a town in order to do so. Just like on Sunday, when you drew moss together, your older daughter went off on Day 2 to get her sketch book, and, in silence, you drew dominoes. She drew the box. You drew the town, including the little moss “tree” you made when you put a few stems into a Tabasco sauce cap on Sunday.

Sunday is when the other questions started: the ones about moss. It looks, remarkably, like seaweed. Are the two forms of vegetation related? You wondered. And, when the few little leaves on the—What are they called? Stalks? Spindles? Stems?—began, almost immediately, to shrivel, you placed their ends in the miniature Tabasco sauce cap and sprinkled the tiny greens with water. You got to watch the leaves literally move, as they revived themselves by drinking from the cap.

From there, it was probably inevitable that you’d go searching for a magnifying glass, but you could not find one. A jaunt to the basement produced, instead, the microscope that you and your daughter used to use to explore the world together while you were home educating her so long ago. This was further than you’d meant to go. Now you were looking through special glass, at jeweled kingdoms. You were peering inside walls you hadn’t expected to peer into. You and your daughter did this together, and you sketched together (hers the more colorful and beautiful), and you laughed together.

I wanted to tell you, Dear—, this is what happens when you tell your daughter you are going bookless. And then you do. And the world comes to you. I am not recommending you do what I’ve done. But, if you take a break from books, say, for a week, I wish you the world, rich as a page beneath your fingers.

As always,

L.L.

P.S.: I promise I will share some of my Bookless sketches and other photos with you in my newsletter. Then you can join the journey with me, to domino towns with Tabasco moss trees.

At the Window, White Shells, and the Grey Dress Tree

By

Dear—,

I am writing at the window, because someone asked me to. But I am also feeling as if Charlotte is onto something (which she will share with us soon at Tweetspeak), so I am going to speak as if watching, or speaking mythically, which is part of what happens when a writer moves into the second person.

Second person is the name of the viewpoint, but the use of it also, uncannily, creates the sense of a second person being in the scene. A listener, a watcher, a prophet, or maybe a priest. Someone who is one step removed from the writer, but strangely intimate with the workings of her inner mind as well. Someone who might help the writer ferry from one shore to another, on a drift of once-removed words.

Enter the ferryman. The switch. Here we go. I will herewith be “you” as I continue this letter. Bear with me. Or, would that be, bear with you?…

You are writing at the window, because someone asked you to. But you are also feeling as if Charlotte is onto something. You are going to speak as if watching yourself, or speaking mythically. You might become your own prophet, or priest. You might ferry yourself from one shore to another, on a drift of once-removed words.

You used to care more about the past, how it formed and shaped you—the stepfather who fed you hunted deer, the mother who planted geraniums every spring, how she dressed the glass sliding door with crystal beads of jewel-like colors, how he nailed you out of the house at every window. These people, these acts, these days long lived at the edge of the woods, maple and fir mixed, under the full moons and the Northern lights— they held a kind of power over you, because, within you, you still had, like Cisneros’s Rachel 11, 10, nine, eight, seven, all the years down to when your mother first held you in her arms and named you Laura (against your father’s will, who wanted you to be a Laurie), though your mother had also considered Susan, your eyes were so black, like the wildflowers she’d loved since she was a child.

You used to care about writing this past. But it’s been a long time, and many words, and now, at the window you are more interested in what is right before you and how it is framed. Sometimes you spend whole afternoons looking out this particular window, the one you are looking out at four-o-clock in the afternoon, this window with its Moorish side arch and center point, open to the air, to the maple and the hemlocks and, past house and house and house and house, to the river beyond.

You went to the river earlier today, and looking out this window now, you can find your way back to the leaf-cupped shore, where tiny white shells, clean as a brilliant linen and water-soft, crowded the shore beneath your feet, each one carrying their past upon their backs, but each one also blissfully collected in pockets and ridges of eddied sand as if all that mattered was right here, right now. Tomorrow they might be carried out to sea. Except, of course, the few you collected.

You collected, too, what you named “the grey dress tree,” tried to memorize its every curve and curlicue, watched the way its bronzed leaves lightly clapped with the wind, clapped against each other, and looked remarkably like little turnstiles which, every so once in a while would detach, then fly into the river, to join the journey of the little shells. If, you thought, some designer made a dress with the pattern of the grey dress tree, and it’s moveable leaves, like flat bronze bells or little turnstiles, you would accept it as a gift if someone wrapped it up for you in paper as light and smooth as the day’s wind, in paper as subtly silver as the river that lapped and lapped with a sound as mythic as forever and mirrored a sky of smoke and pearl.

Yes, you used to care about the past, about how the windows, looking out, or looking in, could recall something that seemed important to tell to the world. But now it feels like the best thing you could do is memorize the changing world, and, like your mother before you, love it, and call it by name: silver river, white shells, grey dress tree—and simply open each day new.

As always,
L.L.

P.S. Speaking in the first person now, Dear—, I wish you a day of windows onto the gifts of this beautiful, beautiful world. Yes, beautiful, despite the many cares of its people. If I could give you a grey dress tree (or a grey suit tree, for you, Sir), a handful of white shells, a silver mirror of water to ferry your soul to somewhere you need to go, I would. Here, now. Here is my open hand, full with the vision of it. Take it, if you wish and will.

30 Days, 30 Poems Eco-Challenge Merge

By

Dear      ,

Right now I am cleaning the dining room. I mean, I was cleaning it this morning, and I’ll get back to it soon.

If you were here (in my dining room), you’d see me sorting through a stack of handwritten lists and copying them over onto one new list. I make a lot of lists. Things get done. Things don’t get done. I make decisions about what undone things to carry forward. I drop things. I celebrate the finished tasks with a momentary smile.

For the 30 Days, 30 Poems Eco-Challenge merge, I decided I need a list. You might not find this very interesting. Or you might. (I just found it very interesting to see what one of my teammates has chosen to do for the Drawdown Challenge!)

Okay, so here’s my Challenges list. Undone. And done. Maybe once I do some of them, instead of “checking them off,” I’ll add links to where I found resources to help me accomplish them. That could serve as my “done” check mark.

Buildings & cities

• I will spend at least 30 minutes researching other Drawdown Buildings and Cities Solutions

• I will complete an online energy audit of my home, office, or dorm room and identify my next steps for saving energy

• I will spend at least 15 minutes researching heat pumps to see if installing one makes sense for my home/building

Electricity Generation

• I will watch a video about methane digesters (also commonly known as anaerobic digesters)

• I will spend at least 15 minutes learning more about the energy generation potential of Micro Wind

• I will spend at least 30 minutes learning more about the energy generation potential of biomass

• I will spend at least 30 minutes learning more about the energy generation potential of wave and tidal energy

• I will spend at least 30 minutes learning more about the energy generation potential of geothermal energy and consider investing in this technology

Land Use

• I will spend at least (___) minutes finding out if anyone is working on perennial biomass projects in my region and how I can get involved

Food

• I will spend at least 30 minutes researching other Drawdown Food Solutions

• I will spend at least 30 minutes watching videos and/or reading about the environmental benefits of silvopasture

Challenges Already Completed Before The Eco-Challenge, As Part of My Ongoing Interest in Life

• I will enjoy meatless or vegan meal(s) each day of the challenge

• I will use smaller plates and/or serve smaller portions when dishing out food

• I will spend at least (___) minutes learning about the need for more regenerative agriculture

• I will buy from organic and local farmers who have made the decision to not use synthetic nitrogen fertilizers

• I will start a compost bin where I live

• I will spend at least (___) minutes researching the impact of my diet to see how it contributes to deforestation

Dear——, my 18-y-o daughter has chosen just three challenges. You could choose just one, if you want to join us. The number doesn’t matter. It’s about choosing doable things that might interest and inspire you.

Also, I’m going to write poems to go along with my challenges. Being creative feels important as a part of this. My daughter? This is what she made. Video is her art.

Today, whatever challenges you are facing, I wish for you a creative response of your very own. Art, beauty, creativity. This is what helps us stay energized—and hopeful.

As Always,

L.L.

The Heart, Waterfalls, and Making Poems

By

Dear      ,

I truly believe that it all begins with the heart. If our heart isn’t in something, then it’s a wisp, a wish, a passing distraction we’ll never turn into something we pursue with… all our heart.

What do you love? What makes your heart just fill with that inexplicable sense that inspires forward motion?

This year, I read a book that explains, in its way, why we use “heart language” like this—why we say our heart is in something. Or not in something. Or broken. Or warmed.

We say this because our nervous system causes us to literally feel things “in our heart.” This is the seat of compassion, of positive forward motion that can link us to others. At the very least it’s a survival mechanism. I like to think of it, though, as something that makes us beautifully human and capable of kindness, poetry, art, song.

When, the other day, I saw stunning pictures of waterfalls pouring over the sides of melting Arctic ice, I felt something right in the center of my heart. The waterfalls reminded me of magical childhood secrets that were mine in the woods, on the creek, so long ago. I felt a sense of forward motion.

But? I also felt a nervousness that traveled deep into my bones. A feeling of coldness washed through my body again and again, like waves. I could almost feel myself, my own very self, careening off the sides of that majestic, melting, Arctic ice.

And, Dear——, I felt unmoored. More than unmoored. I felt myself falling.

The waterfall picture was in a Scientific American article called Meltdown. The statistics were so sobering I wanted to cry. Best case scenarios place the complete disappearance of summer Arctic ice at just 22 years out. My daughter is about to be 21. In one more daughter-lifetime, the ice will have died, disappeared.

We know only some of the consequent effects, like sea levels rising 13 to 20 feet, which means the loss of Miami, the naval base in Norfolk (VA), large portions of New York City and London and Silicon Valley. There’s Venice to lose, too. And Shanghai. New Orleans (and all that great cooking and culture).

There’s gravity to be messed with. Gravity? Yes, unbelievably, this was first picked up by satellites monitoring the effects of receding Arctic ice. I have no idea what it would ultimately mean to mess with gravity.

I do have some ideas of other effects. All interesting. Some strange. Some perplexing and complex and hard to parse. But must I know any more, understand any more deeply, before I take my artful life and put my heart towards mooring prodigal carbon back here on earth—drawing it down, back home?

Sometimes we know enough to take steps. Sometimes we know more than enough. Sometimes the real issue is that our hearts must be captured by a waterfall—of love, of fear, of vision.

Mine is captured, Dear——.

So I’m going to take a few Drawdown challenges and write poems along the way. I promise to tell you what they are. I’ve written them down. But, for today, I offer a simple poem…

Melting,

my heart is.
Falling.

Careening

over the edge
of what is

and what will
be.

Come with me,
friend.

The sea

is rising,
in a daughter’s dawn
of time,

to meet us.

Today I wish for you vision, Dear——. Not fear, but vision. Make poems with me? And embark on explorations? Let’s put our creative hearts together and bring carbon home.

As Always,

L.L.

Ailing Bees, Energy, and Missing The New Yorker

By

Dear      ,

I’m wondering. Do you know what a skep is? I did not know until Alexander Langlands told me.

He wanted to make one for the bees.

I wanted to go hear Rachel Aviv yesterday and tell you about it here and maybe in an exclusive on Patreon. Rachel has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2013. I have never been a staff writer at The New Yorker, and I had questions for her.

I did not have questions about skeps or bees, but this is the beauty of reading—it expands. And I know you know this about reading, but I just wanted to say it, because it’s sort of like something else I know you know—listening can expand your world in ways you hadn’t expected. This is why, when Alexander Langlands was talking about bees and skeps, though I didn’t have questions about either of these things, I thought maybe I’d take the time to listen.

Okay, technically, reading is not listening, and I promise I have also been listening in the ordinary way. So last night I went to Rachel’s house—not Rachel Aviv, mind you, but a dear friend who’s been letting me park in her driveway so I can stop getting $30 parking tickets (due to the car disaster, I vowed not to park the remaining car in the driveway until the wayward maple could be trimmed, and The Town has refused to listen to my pleas for a street parking exception due to extenuating circumstances, and it feels very sad not to be listened to and to feel alone and uncared for by The Town, but Rachel graciously let me park in her driveway, and so last night we had tea, and I listened.)

The skep, first made as early as the 8th century (mid medieval times) is fashioned of willow or hazel, or from straw that’s been twisted and bound by cane. It looks like a 60’s up-do you might expect to see on one of the B52s. Just add bees, and you’ve got honey.

If you listen to Rachel, you’ve got honey, too. Maybe if you listen to anyone at all, you’ve got it. There is something strangely magical (or, at least surreal) about concentrating on the voice of someone and listening with every part of your being, not just to the words, but to the sounds, to the person, and the way they are moving and the look on their face.

Rachel Aviv looks kind of intense, while at the same time looking almost medieval (not that the two need be mutually exclusive). Maybe it was the particular photograph and the way her hair and the neckline of her blouse reminded me of watching the show Merlin. She looked like Gwendolyn, but with fair skin and fair locks and maybe blue eyes, though it can be hard to tell eye-color in a black-and-white photo.

It was snowing in the morning yesterday; regardless, I still thought I’d go see Aviv. The day unfolded with more snow and more snow, and then the sun made a late appearance, the roads cleared, and all seemed well with the world. I could have gone.

Alexander Langlands, when I listened to him, told me something I hadn’t known about bee-keeping. Many of the big keepers kind of forget about the “keeping” part. They feed the bees sugar water, which is a sub-par form of energy. It makes the bees sick over time (I’ve been meaning to say, Dear———, sugar will make you sick over time, too), but it means the keepers can take all the honey they want and push the bees to keep working.

I’ve been working really hard lately. Well, I work hard all the time. But lately I’ve been working even harder, to meet some increased demands in my personal and business life. So, after Monday, I was still tired yesterday. My car was at Rachel’s. I did not have energy to go hear Aviv and ask my questions under the gaze of her intense eyes. I am sure I would have enjoyed listening to her, because I’m learning that there’s honey to be found in the act of creating an extra-special keeping-space for someone else’s words.

But.

There is a way in which we can run our lives that is like living on sugar water. And I thought of Langland’s last statement regarding skeps, and keeping, and bees… “The craeft in beekeeping is not in the meddling of the bee’s affairs but in the preparation of their home.”

In my home, there is actually not even one copy of The New Yorker, though I think it is such a cool magazine because it’s been around for a very long time and even Dr. Seuss had a friend there, once upon a time. I thought about this. I thought about the skep I needed, in order to keep writing to you. It did not include going to see Rachel Aviv—at least not yesterday.

What do I wish for you, then? A skep of your own. With the heartiness of a honeyed life. No sugar water. Because I want you to be healthy for as long as you call the 21st century your home.

As Always,

L.L.

Thundersnow, Energy, and Creativity

By

Dear      ,

Today the world is magical.

Yesterday it was thundersnow.

Today it looks like Walt Disney sent his team of animators to transform the maples, the pines, the mountains beyond the river, anything that sits on the ground or rises up into the air—white, and white, and white, thick-painted, delicious white. The sky is the barest blue. The soft, amorphous clouds are fleece blankets spread across the heavens.

I have never been in a thundersnow storm. Only 6.4 (how do you get half a storm?) thundersnows are reported each year in the U.S. My eldest daughter looked that up last night, after, for the first time ever, we saw lightning in the dark and driving snow.

Lightning!

I wish you could have seen it.

There was no audible thunder. The snow is a buffer. So you would have seen the lightning, but you would not have heard the thunder. It was there, though.

Have you read the book The Geography of Genius? I love that book. It helps explain thundersnow and it helps explain the wind storm that destroyed my windshield (via the beautiful maple who now stands transformed in this magical today-world). It helps explain why someone just my height (tiny lady) can reach the top of the Rose of Sharon tree, which is otherwise inaccessible to me. (She is bent so low in the layers of snow that are leaning her towards the little rock garden.)

Of course, Eric Weiner speaks of none of these things directly. He talks about wars, famine, plague, and, surprisingly, the genius that came of them. It’s complicated. Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. Conditions had to be right. But part of these conditions were a few very unwelcome elements that upended “the way things are.”

When I saw the galaxy of glass-stars inside my car, I knew that at least one part of my life had been upended. For some reason, as much as shattered glass troubles me, it also attracts me. It looks like so many millions of diamond boats upon a silver-blue sea. I asked my younger daughter to please take a picture. The next day, I started this blog. I felt such an unexpected surge of creativity. I can’t explain it.

Thundersnow is so rare because of the way the air currents need to organize themselves. You need a certain kind of void, a certain kind of cold and colder air collision, a certain kind of physics. Then the energy exchange begins, and—lightning!

If thundersnow were a city, we’d have to call it Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. Nature’s rare and beautiful genius.

But back to you and me.

If you are feeling a certain kind of void today, or cold and colder air colliding, if lightning is striking and upending “the way things are,” I wish you a galaxy of stars in return—creativity and genius that otherwise would not have been yours.

I know it doesn’t always work that way, and I also know that we still have to deal with the destruction. But I can wish upon a glass-star for you. And so I am.

As Always,

L.L.