LJ Idol - Week 22 - Hiraeth
It has come back to me now, that as a child, I wasn’t always the bastion of strength that I mostly remember. It is true that as a kid I spent a lot of time on my own. I roamed the woods, and rode my horse, explored the swamps and paddled and boated all over the river. I jumped out of trees that I shouldn’t have, took risks with 1,000 pound animals, and occasionally I got hurt.
But I got scared sometimes as a kid, too. More scared than I should have been given my relatively stable life. I remember lying in my bed, with the river that I loved flowing not 50 yards away and feeling waves of anxiety wash over me. What if I disappear completely from this world when I die? What if aliens are real and they come for me first? What if I can’t calm down enough to sleep?
Sometimes I would creep into my parents’ room and watch them sleep- wanting comfort, but not wanting to wake them up for nothing. We all had lives to live, roles to play in our community the next day. I also used to lie in my bed and tell myself stories, usually of long epic adventures that I took with my dolls and animals, until I finally fell asleep.
I worry sometimes about my girls’ anxieties and fears when they seem illogical or extreme, but then I remember that I wasn’t without similar feelings in my youth. I didn’t have the same vocabulary for them that we have today, but the feelings and fears existed.
***
I’ve been reading a lot of Charles deLint lately. At some point in the last couple of years I was searching for one of his books on Abe books and the only way it was available was as part of a large set of used volumes. The set was expensive, but it had a lot of books in it, several of which looked intriguing, and so in the long run I justified the splurge figuring I’d want to read them all eventually. Now I think it was like the universe knew I was going to need some magic over the next months of a specific sort.
deLint’s characters often seem to have very solid connections to the places they choose to call home. I like the way that they connect to magic that it is part of the land around them. I like the way that a lot of them love the places that they live and the way they create intentional community.
They make me long for that kind of connection. The magical traditions of the British Isles have been featured in so much fantasy that it’s easy to pigeonhole stories involving those traditions. But those traditions are part of my heritage. On my mom’s side, we know the village and even the cottage that my ancestors grew up in. I had a great uncle who played the bagpipes and he would always bring them when he came and visited and we would do a walking tour of our little Florida town, sharing his music. I read deLint’s stories and I want to visit standing stones and wilder, colder coastlines than my current Florida gulf coast. There’s a connection there that I long to explore.
I want to find a connection to magic on a windswept tor, or even through the fireflies outside my warm Florida window. I long for a connection that makes sense.
***
This, I suppose, is the springtime of longing. Winter seems like it ought to be the season of longing for most things in my wheel of the year. I long for warmth in winter. For relief from the responsibilities of work and the responsibilities of the holidays that fill the days and sometimes become oppressive.
Spring is usually a wonderful season of striving and quickening and of actualizing. We shake off the dreams of winter and we do things. I try to get strong and go places to climb. But this year, there’s this extended dreamtime. This extended lack of going. A time of doing things only at home. We’re all trapped in home-shaped chrysalises. But maybe we knit them, not as places for us to transform, but in hopes that the world would transform while we stay locked away from it. I’m afraid that’s not how any of this works.
Are we just going to stay in our homes and keep taking the same things in from the outside and hoping really hard for change, while we still roll the garbage to the curb each Sunday evening? Or is there a way to spin something out of this that will give us the wings we need?
***
Like everyone, I keep working on my house and my yard. I suppose my family is forging a greater connection with this half acre we live on. We camp out in the yard sometimes. I’ve planted some native flowers. We see hummingbirds and bees. The girls play in the sprinklers. We cull through belongings, trying to declutter and get rid of what we don’t need. I keep trying to knock back the jungle of exotic plants that have taken over the backyard. Maybe I’ll get it under some kind of control this year. Maybe it will happen.
A friend of mine with very different political views suggested that we try doing a Jefferson dinner via Zoom. I wanted to feel like I have the energy to try to make this happen, because I enjoy heartfelt debate with my friend, but I know that adding even more people in is a nonstarter for me now. Polite debate is hard enough in person. I don’t think I have the bandwidth to take it online.
Community and connection in real life are hard.
***
I have a recurring nightmare where cruise ships have come too close to the shore in the keys. It’s something that has actually happened, resulting in reef destruction far off the coast. The physics of what happens in my dream aren’t even possible. In the dream, giant ships chew great channels through the shallow sea grass beds near the shore that are only a few feet deep, leaving muck and destruction in their wake. People come out on the decks of the ships, delighted with their proximity to the islands, hoping to be able to see more. Maybe they can jump to shore or come into the water.
***
One of my best friends works in the office of the inspector general for an agency I won’t name. Both of us vacillate between frustration with and gratefulness for the jobs we enjoy. Both of us want so much to be part of solutions that actually makes things better.
She is a short lady with small feet. My girls are quickly catching her in height. But for now they are close in shoe size, so she gives us her old running shoes. She only lives a couple of miles away, and she’s always logging miles, running and walking through our two neighborhoods.
On Thursday she texted me after work because she had a couple of pairs of shoes to give the girls and then she walked over to drop them off. We chatted from a safe distance in the yard, like we do from time, and we each consumed a beer. At a certain point I told her, not for the first time, “This is not what I thought end-stage capitalism was going to look like.”
It’s still true. I still think this is the beginning of the end of an era that was built in large part on unsustainability. We haven’t yet figured out how to base a society on anything other than exponential growth in a finite space. And now we’ve got this disease running through it all too. We shouldn’t be surprised. I had a biology professor who was known for his great talks on the specter of evolving disease almost 25 years ago, now. It makes me wonder which other cautions we’ve been blithely ignoring are about to rise up and remind us of them.
***
I had just fallen asleep after a good Saturday evening of reading with Roger and the girls, and watching some episodes of the final season of the new She-ra and some episodes of Babylon 5 last night. Rog was asleep in his chair in the living room. I was sweating in my bed with the windows open to the cool night air. Soon we will have to give in and turn on the air conditioning. I hate closing the windows and buttoning up the house. But we’ve had several days of temperatures in the 90s now.
I woke with a start and a little yelp. Jasper isn’t usually my child that gets scared in the night, but she’s there in my bed. She touched my shoulder. She isn’t saying anything. But I tell her, “Hey it’s okay. You’re okay. You can stay in here with me.” And she worms her way under the sheet.
As my adrenaline starts to fade, I think about how we’re all longing for something. I hope I’m taking the best steps I can to deliver what we need most.
But I got scared sometimes as a kid, too. More scared than I should have been given my relatively stable life. I remember lying in my bed, with the river that I loved flowing not 50 yards away and feeling waves of anxiety wash over me. What if I disappear completely from this world when I die? What if aliens are real and they come for me first? What if I can’t calm down enough to sleep?
Sometimes I would creep into my parents’ room and watch them sleep- wanting comfort, but not wanting to wake them up for nothing. We all had lives to live, roles to play in our community the next day. I also used to lie in my bed and tell myself stories, usually of long epic adventures that I took with my dolls and animals, until I finally fell asleep.
I worry sometimes about my girls’ anxieties and fears when they seem illogical or extreme, but then I remember that I wasn’t without similar feelings in my youth. I didn’t have the same vocabulary for them that we have today, but the feelings and fears existed.
***
I’ve been reading a lot of Charles deLint lately. At some point in the last couple of years I was searching for one of his books on Abe books and the only way it was available was as part of a large set of used volumes. The set was expensive, but it had a lot of books in it, several of which looked intriguing, and so in the long run I justified the splurge figuring I’d want to read them all eventually. Now I think it was like the universe knew I was going to need some magic over the next months of a specific sort.
deLint’s characters often seem to have very solid connections to the places they choose to call home. I like the way that they connect to magic that it is part of the land around them. I like the way that a lot of them love the places that they live and the way they create intentional community.
They make me long for that kind of connection. The magical traditions of the British Isles have been featured in so much fantasy that it’s easy to pigeonhole stories involving those traditions. But those traditions are part of my heritage. On my mom’s side, we know the village and even the cottage that my ancestors grew up in. I had a great uncle who played the bagpipes and he would always bring them when he came and visited and we would do a walking tour of our little Florida town, sharing his music. I read deLint’s stories and I want to visit standing stones and wilder, colder coastlines than my current Florida gulf coast. There’s a connection there that I long to explore.
I want to find a connection to magic on a windswept tor, or even through the fireflies outside my warm Florida window. I long for a connection that makes sense.
***
This, I suppose, is the springtime of longing. Winter seems like it ought to be the season of longing for most things in my wheel of the year. I long for warmth in winter. For relief from the responsibilities of work and the responsibilities of the holidays that fill the days and sometimes become oppressive.
Spring is usually a wonderful season of striving and quickening and of actualizing. We shake off the dreams of winter and we do things. I try to get strong and go places to climb. But this year, there’s this extended dreamtime. This extended lack of going. A time of doing things only at home. We’re all trapped in home-shaped chrysalises. But maybe we knit them, not as places for us to transform, but in hopes that the world would transform while we stay locked away from it. I’m afraid that’s not how any of this works.
Are we just going to stay in our homes and keep taking the same things in from the outside and hoping really hard for change, while we still roll the garbage to the curb each Sunday evening? Or is there a way to spin something out of this that will give us the wings we need?
***
Like everyone, I keep working on my house and my yard. I suppose my family is forging a greater connection with this half acre we live on. We camp out in the yard sometimes. I’ve planted some native flowers. We see hummingbirds and bees. The girls play in the sprinklers. We cull through belongings, trying to declutter and get rid of what we don’t need. I keep trying to knock back the jungle of exotic plants that have taken over the backyard. Maybe I’ll get it under some kind of control this year. Maybe it will happen.
A friend of mine with very different political views suggested that we try doing a Jefferson dinner via Zoom. I wanted to feel like I have the energy to try to make this happen, because I enjoy heartfelt debate with my friend, but I know that adding even more people in is a nonstarter for me now. Polite debate is hard enough in person. I don’t think I have the bandwidth to take it online.
Community and connection in real life are hard.
***
I have a recurring nightmare where cruise ships have come too close to the shore in the keys. It’s something that has actually happened, resulting in reef destruction far off the coast. The physics of what happens in my dream aren’t even possible. In the dream, giant ships chew great channels through the shallow sea grass beds near the shore that are only a few feet deep, leaving muck and destruction in their wake. People come out on the decks of the ships, delighted with their proximity to the islands, hoping to be able to see more. Maybe they can jump to shore or come into the water.
***
One of my best friends works in the office of the inspector general for an agency I won’t name. Both of us vacillate between frustration with and gratefulness for the jobs we enjoy. Both of us want so much to be part of solutions that actually makes things better.
She is a short lady with small feet. My girls are quickly catching her in height. But for now they are close in shoe size, so she gives us her old running shoes. She only lives a couple of miles away, and she’s always logging miles, running and walking through our two neighborhoods.
On Thursday she texted me after work because she had a couple of pairs of shoes to give the girls and then she walked over to drop them off. We chatted from a safe distance in the yard, like we do from time, and we each consumed a beer. At a certain point I told her, not for the first time, “This is not what I thought end-stage capitalism was going to look like.”
It’s still true. I still think this is the beginning of the end of an era that was built in large part on unsustainability. We haven’t yet figured out how to base a society on anything other than exponential growth in a finite space. And now we’ve got this disease running through it all too. We shouldn’t be surprised. I had a biology professor who was known for his great talks on the specter of evolving disease almost 25 years ago, now. It makes me wonder which other cautions we’ve been blithely ignoring are about to rise up and remind us of them.
***
I had just fallen asleep after a good Saturday evening of reading with Roger and the girls, and watching some episodes of the final season of the new She-ra and some episodes of Babylon 5 last night. Rog was asleep in his chair in the living room. I was sweating in my bed with the windows open to the cool night air. Soon we will have to give in and turn on the air conditioning. I hate closing the windows and buttoning up the house. But we’ve had several days of temperatures in the 90s now.
I woke with a start and a little yelp. Jasper isn’t usually my child that gets scared in the night, but she’s there in my bed. She touched my shoulder. She isn’t saying anything. But I tell her, “Hey it’s okay. You’re okay. You can stay in here with me.” And she worms her way under the sheet.
As my adrenaline starts to fade, I think about how we’re all longing for something. I hope I’m taking the best steps I can to deliver what we need most.