In December 2024, I read a book, The Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti, and it gave me a key I have been looking for since 2020: a way to give voice to all that’s changing and evolving and composting and emerging in my life. Sheila Heti took ten years’ worth of her journals and alphabetized them by sentence, then edited it to a memoir-sized manuscript.
Oh my stars.
By the end of the first page, I was overwhelmed by the poetry and the potential of what this technique could do for me, the self-proclaimed Alphabet Queen, who is currently and chaotically working on a half-dozen alphabet books simultaneously, both on my own and in cahoots with our kinship care collective and self-publishing house, Sticks and Stones Press. I have right here in Grace Hall a river of journals dating back to 1980, including one that’s just for the house, one that just covers the days drifting toward my mother’s death, and several for each daughter and now one for our grandson Milo. The ones that were just by me and for me, probably more than 50 volumes (never counted, not even all stored together) have something in common: I haven’t reread them. My journal practice, a steady scrawled truth, my handwork companion for over 44 years, has not shared my insights with me beyond the pleasure and relief of the moment of writing it down. I haven’t listened to the quiet calliope of what I tell myself.
So. Overwhelmed. Intrigued, yes, but where do I begin? And what came to me was something that I’ve been using for the past year or so in other instances of overwhelm, when a mess or a responsibility or a gratitude or a potential was just Too. Much. and I could see the forest, and the trees, and the bark, and microcosms and mycelial networks and how could I ever narrow it down to a sentence or a first step? I am large, I contain multitudes. So I would take a deep breath and tell myself: Start where you are. Simple, logical, and profound.
This time, “Start where you are,” invited me open the Now journal, the most recent volume, beginning with September 19, 2024. I chose to stop for now at October 1st (to be continued; I plan to complete this volume in subsequent posts for October, November, and December). This is the most fun I’ve had with writing in a long time. This is the most grounded I’ve felt in a long time. This is the most self-acceptance I’ve felt in a long time. This takes “I feel seen” to a whole new level. I feel seen by myself.
Sometimes I use my journal when in a zoom meeting or taking an on-line course. I’ve footnoted when I felt like I was quoting directly from one of my teachers. I’ve eliminated only one sentence so far, about someone else’s health concerns that don’t need to be made explicit here. And when three year old Jasper and I spotted an opossum walking along the side of the garage by moonlight, she exclaimed, “Oh, there’s Rump-a-dump!” which is how we have referred to this marsupial in our household ever since.
September: Indian Summer
A benevolence to Indigenous children. All too possible. Also nasturtium. An Alaskan cruise, a train trip with Holly in October, all the way across Canada, I think. And the next thing I know I am cleaning the bathroom, and thinking about what Valerie told me about cleaning the bathroom: do something in there every day, and try to do something every time you are in there. And I want to leave them with behaviors, traditions, funny habits, and a sense of curiosity that outweighs any material inheritance.[1] And I want to paint. A practice. A tree is a body of living relationship, a whole, an exchange.[2] At first, I tore out pages for the words, and the front and back envelopes. Autumn Equinox update. A wild love affair with systems.[3]
Because older women asking these things of their lives, crones with questions, are what they are all about. Being in charge of myself. Blog essay for Kindred World. Books: Days of Wonder. Breathing Through. Breathing Through practice: When difficult input comes in, you breathe it into the body and through you into the compassionate earth—you let your compassion through you.[4] Big aha moment: 90% of our serotonin is produced in the gut, so stress can definitely affect our digestion, which of course affects our mood…
Building houses both large enough to hide ourselves in and in miniature. But I do want this nine to noon habit, writing and creativity. But I loved summer. But it was good while it lasted. But there are only so many hours in a morning and I want to use all of them in abundance and creative spark and outside and learning and on my computer. Buy time. By noon I was dancing half naked on the back porch in the soft gray slash.
Chard and backyard mingles. Collecting sticks and stones.
Competitive Detachment
- No evolved nest offered
- We become dysregulated in body and psyche
- We are easily triggered into threat, not openminded, not openhearted.[5]
Cooperative Companionship
- Optimally aroused
- Safe in body, mind, and spirit
- Holistic full-body experience in childhood[6]
Cosmologies of belonging to western separation.[7] Couldn’t remember (since last week) what ALS was, or why it was significant that I had lunch with Michelle. Crimson and Clover, so orgasmic.
Dana showed us that way. Dave and I wrote at the table for a bit… Dolls, including Abuela and the Puttis (Angels). Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems. Don’t even get me started about the obstacles of cords casements kanthas and the occasional yoga ball or heavy foot pillow.
Early morning appointment with Dr. Persmark. Eco-confettis. Emergent properties: Hope within a system.[8]
End of September. Embodied play. Equinox. Evening pages. Everything is this.
Evolved Nest book.
First day of fall. First rain of the fall—post equinox, in the liminal space between the lunar and solar eclipses. From now on, I am going to celebrate the Indigenous people of Turtle Island whenever there is a last hurrah of summery weather after the fall equinox. Funny how I kept fantasizing about our cottage with a greenhouse second story, so much sky…and a big clawfoot tub.
Georgia is in the house. Going to have an echocardiogram. Got four blue butterfly peas, will keep trying. Gotta think about the bees, though. Graduation to simplicity. Great Turning. Group living.
Hanging out in the shade or in the woods, or on porches when it got hot. Harvested cilantro seed (coriander). Harvested potatoes and beans from the Adirondack bed. Hedge. Hedgerow. He just went into this long rap of his own creation, rhythmically tight and often melodic or in harmony with what was being sung. History of the Womb, Linda Hayes-Cooper. Holding actions. Holonic shift: Starlings (amb), schooling fish. Hope I didn’t leave the hose on! Hot dusty long ago.
How do I play an active role in crafting my children’s inheritance while I’m still very much here?[9] How we will be remembered, how we will move forward.
I am content to let it—my mind—bounce from one topic to the next, one book to the next, one series to the next, one writing project to the next. I am having lunch with Michelle today. I am Montessori interrogating itself. I am moving—so slowly but so steadily—into the next phase of my life. I am not Lou interrogating Montessori. I am ready to sell the confetti.
I can hear Dave greeting the neighbors—he is going to clean the cottage gutters ahead of seasonal rain—and I am impatient to be out there. Identity shift. I didn’t know the racist and pejorative and ugly meanings of the term. I found some great sticks or roots back there and removed a little bit of ivy, morning glory actually, the huge green zumpkin and plastic trash.
If I had the money I would get a round Fair Isle rug from them (Garnet Hill) for the music room and a large dark cat’s paw for the dining room and maybe a big one for the south den with the floor painted white…If we root in the miracle of being here, then we are resourced for our life work.[10] If you are not relaxed, or not joyful, it’s not the kind of play that can be a portal to connection, laughter, self-regulation, release, creativity, concentration. I got the shallots planted in the celery bed, but the four yellow ones didn’t separate easily like the red ones did, so I left them whole.
I had a really normal poop today—followed by diarrhea after an hour or so. I had dinner last night with Dave, Shawn and Greg for G’s 58th birthday—Lisa joined us for dessert, bread pudding with peaches, omg. I hope not and I hope that they are able to see their way into a makeshift solution. I just hope she enjoys every single minute of it. I know I feel clearer every day that I do it. I liked many aspects of school, the books, the art supplies, the other kids. I liked the idea more in theory than in practice. I loved doing it and want to start again. I love doing the hedge too. I mean, Jo deals in magic cards, Tracy in blood! I’m going to honor the reader I am for a little while now. I’m going to throw myself into Sticks & Stones Press, as a way to healing, as medicine, as kinship. I’m going to write. I miss that. Indian Summer. Indian Summer—today. It came to me after I spilled seed on the kantha-draped not yet sunny front porch, what I want to share is my petal practice and I want us to share each other.
I really want them to redo their bathroom but it’s possible that they won’t yet. I sang for hours to the Milo playlist every day—oh I meant to say the other day.
It had been put under there in 2021, holding a large pinecone wreath and now it also held many dry oak leaves and a medium sized possum, who eventually strolled away to the hedge in full view of GG, Dave and I. I think what will work for me is some writing every morning, not necessarily three pages, but at least one! It just stays clean easier and longer this way, never gets so gross that it’s depressing. It’s not rewriting history or whitewashing the term, it’s infusing the words with a new spirit. It was just such an unexpected gift, to see a little bit of what dwells in and around Grace Hall. It will be hedge time pretty soon.
Ivan is going to build her an elevator so that she can stay in place in their remodeled upstairs bedroom with windows on every wall, I think, and a green clawfoot tub with a view of the woods…it’s so gorgeous up there and no wonder she wants to keep it forever. I wander through the garden of my own life and marvel at each sunflower, the seven shiso we’re not eating, letting myself be sun-ruled as is my nature..
I want my end-of-life legacy to be joyful peace-forward acceptance—I want the celebration of all the abundance and gifts that I have known, body mind and spirit. I wanted music but didn’t want to discourage him. I want to be aware of what I’m living and creating in the moment.[11]
I want us to write about us. I went right to novel in my head, and even more to my inner elementary kid, six to twelve or thirteen or so. I will check when Milo wakes up.
Jas has to take some on-line training. Jenny Joseph—“intermingle young and elderly.” Jo’s treasure trove at Plumfield.
Kinship book.
Language emergent. Legacy. Left blank for your brilliance.[12]
Letting Go the Fledglings: These are your racoons. Leverage points, trigger points.
MacKenzie’s box: Botany book with many mingleleaves, camellia confetti, lavender, many seeds, petal collections, Spring 2024, and jasmine, bachelor buttons, sweet peas), two of Dana’s books.
MacKenzie is an end-of-life doula. MacKenzie should be in it. Maybe I will put borage in the pot by the cellar door. Mingle and Tyler Hilton ducati. Milo dancing and chanting is quite a trip. Milo having a peaceful nap in the couch in the north den, let me sing him to sleep for the first time in a long time. Mind is anywhere there is an exchange of information.[13] Morning pages need a rhythm to emerge for fall. Mornings. Morning smile. Murmur still audible. My Brilliant Friend. My doll knew more than I did.[14] My sunflower table.
Napped in the sun after weed trimming with an audiobook of The Outsider by Stephen King. Nested hierarchies: trunk, branch, leaves, roots, birds…[15] New and Remembered Gaian Systems.[16] Nestedness is our daily lives, connected to the natural world. [17] Nesting ambassadors.[18] Neurobiology and the development of human morality. Nice meandering walk home, sunny and windy day. Nights are not without challenge—my right shoulder, cradling my pillow for these past 60 years, no longer welcomes my heavy head, and my knees must be bent in the night periodically, and my hips don’t always favor sleeping on my side. No doubt Rump-a-dump Redux will return—they know the way and obviously they have an entrance. Normalizing nurturing.[19] Not having to be somewhere on time. Noticing the words they use to sell their wares: comfort, heritage, legacy, heirloom.
Oh and song. Oh I love them. On Kindred World site: Leading cause of death for new mothers in U.S. is suicide. Opening the Garnet Hill catalog on the back porch on Sunday morning, before Brian and Nicki and Reza and Safa are outside. Orientation: a precursor to movement. On the equinox, Dave dragged a box out of a storage crawlspace under the back porch.
Petal Practice. Picked some beans. Picking things, grass, dandelions, ash berries, flowers. Picked up yellow leaves. Planted garlic in the pot where the cannabis was harvested. Planted the chives in one of Sue’s pots. Plant magic. Play is the perfect place for us to dwell in the divine, because we are relaxed and joyful. Put iris mingles out to dry.
Radishes popping up all over. Reading all day, reading outside, playing, playing, playing, swimming in the neighbor’s pools in Bridgeport, and in our own in Oxford. Realities were suppressed because we couldn’t stand our empathic reactions…we were not allowing our pain for the world to transform us.[20] Replanted some of the walking onions too, several little clumps. Restock something. Right now she is the one most capable of change—and her pregnancy is, of course, changing her capacity and tolerances and insights every day. River of Dreams, Billy Joel.[21] Rump-a-dump is in the house!
Seeds. Self-paced learning.
She is just gorgeous with grace. She is right! She radiates joy. Shifts in consciousness. Signed up for Joanna Macy’s course. Silent windchimes. Slow down harm.[22] Sprinkled leeks and borage in the place where the potatoes were—which was absolutely bone dry.
So that little bonus summer used to get appreciated by the Indian kids back before the white kids lived there, before there were schools that everyone, white kids and Indian kids alike, would have to go to. Sue came outside yesterday, picked 25 cherry tomatoes, not counting what she ate, picked red lettuce leaves (gotta be bitter), took zucchini and broccoli from Dave. Sticks and Stones. Sticks and Stones, a family story. Sticks and Stones: A Grimoire. Sue says there are squirrels in the squirrel house. Sunflower summer. Sweep up a bit with the dustpan. Systems theory, deep ecology, The Work that Reconnects, Buddhist studies, Rilke.[23]
That just seemed like an important insight. The ancestors. The bin was in the middle of the street too. The cashmere sweater, the fluid dress, and the rugs. The celery bed was pretty dry too, and loose. The legacy of our stuff our words our inheritances our books and movies. Then I started tearing out rugs and bedding pages for the patterns and prints.
The previous journal brought me from my birthday to the lunar eclipse (which felt big to me, though Sue said that no moon stuff or eclipses ever affected her mood). The purple light birthday. There are still leaves underneath and it smells moldy and musty. There is a normal 55 degree / day difference in when gestation ends in birth.[24] The yard debris with the possum’s wreath box in it didn’t get emptied –the box must have been hindering it. They look scary but I definitely prefer them, insect eaters as they are, to rats. They should bring their own containers! This is part of my beautiful world. This too is part of my beautiful world. Three dimensions of the Great Turning.[25] Three stories: Business as Usual, The Great Unraveling, The Great Turning.[26] Today in morning pages I also read MacKenzie’s response to the email I wrote about movies, and I forwarded everything to Tracy, and I wrote about my health and also about childhood trauma to Jenny Nuage. Turn the World Around, Harry Belafonte.[27] 24 Herb Sauce. 2:00 o’clock pages instead of morning.
Unique utterance.
Valerie’s egg on my mother’s side, Estelle’s egg on my father’s.
Walking Back to Georgia, by Jim Croce. Water a plant, fill the cat’s water bowl with water, dust the back of the toilet. We are asking the questions: What is my legacy? / What will I leave behind me? / Who am I beyond my stuff? / and at the same time: Where, how, when can I get some of this good stuff? We’d have a friend mark where our head and feet were when we lay flat on our backs in the road, the heat radiating into our bones through our summer shorts and t-shirts, the scorch on our bare skin. We had poke bowls—I ate all of mine but she barely did. We had such a body-positive good time at the Oakshire gig, though it meant not really having the evening with Sarah I intended—and then she got sick and left very early, even before we did.
We left the root structure intact…so we’ll see. We put the couch in fall/winter position today…the room got so much smaller and cozier…and moved the big peace lily to the south den, moved Milo’s desk to the other front window, put down Amy’s blue rug in front of fireplace, swept a bit, moved blocks and yellow end table…dusted the mantle…hung a load of laundry outside, watered the pea pod and a bit more. We shall see what happens. We used to draw blueprints of houses on Palmetto Road, floorplans, in chalk if we had it or in sheetrock stealthily broken from the unfinished crawlspace in my little brother’s room, piece by piece, peeling the paper off as we scraped our knuckles on the rough pavement, outlining master bedrooms—ours—and breakfast nooks on the asphalt. We were in there together, me and Chip and Dana, among the eggs of Valerie, half of us anyway, with the other half a generation back from our parents, Estelle’s eggs.
What I thought it meant was that it had all the goodness of summer, all the abundance and the sunshine and the fruit and flowers if it came early enough—but the people of today didn’t get to enjoy it because they were back at school. What she actually built, before she knew how little time she had left. When I was a kid, my favorite season was Indian Summer, the hot but not too hot days of September after the equinox, usually right after we went back to school, when the weather wasn’t fall but there was still a little orange around the edges. When the planet gives us this unexpected beauty, Indian Summer, we are called to honor the first people, the caretakers and lovers and children of this place. Wipe the sink or the mirror. www.worlddviewliteracy.org. Writing and witching and homemaking and of course the storied garden.
[1] Grimoire Girl by Hillarie Burton Morgan.
[2] Lydia Violet, School for the Great Turning
[3] Lydia Violet
[4] Lydia Violet
[5] Darcia Narvaez, The Evolved Nest zoom notes
[6] Darcia Narvaez
[7] I can’t remember who said this and it’s unclear on the page of the journal.
[8] Lydia Violet
[9] Grimoire Girl
[10] Lydia Violet
[11] Grimoire Girl
[12] Crown Plaza hotel pad.
[13] Lydia Violet
[14] Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
[15] Lydia Violet
[16] Essential Joanna Macy course, School for the Great Turning
[17] Darcia Narvaez
[19] Darcia Narvaez
[20] Lydia Violet
[21] https://youtu.be/-UNQW46bvfo?si=DxNS4hjT4S-KF5w5
[22] Essential Joanna Macy course, School for the Great Turning
[23] Essential Joanna Macy course, School for the Great Turning.
[24] Darcia Narvaez
[25] Essential Joanna Macy course, School for the Great Turning.
[26] Essential Joanna Macy course, School for the Great Turning.
[27] https://youtu.be/PeZubMTLaTU?si=bc0Y64D4v4fO0cHL
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