"Ready to See"

I learned that Joanna Macy had moved on from our realm—peacefully and at the impressive age of 96—while choosing a podcast episode to accompany an epic dish-doing on Wednesday night. On Being (a nighttime favorite, since I no longer listen to or read news at night…my sleep thanks me!) had re-posted a past interview with Macy and her co-translator of Rilke, Anita Barrows. Soon enough, I was sniffling over the sink with thankfulness that such people exist. I never had much direct engagement with Macy’s work, and yet, she’s one of those names invoked so often by other teachers and artists I respect that it just lived in my mind. Her work on despair, climate grief, and loving the world has informed generations of ecologically-oriented thinkers, artists, and activists. You can read about her life and life’s work here.

When I was interviewing activists and organizers for many years1, I liked to close by asking them about hope. What is bringing you hope despite all…this? “This” being the ravages of empire, the destruction of the planet, the violence of the state, the ways we treat one another when we absorb such an atmosphere. I don’t know that’s a question I would ask if I were to start doing that work again today. I generally interviewed people who were engaged in action to change the way we live, and I understand now that taking action implies hope.

Hope feels like such a fluttery word, sort of passive. Like disembodied prayer, a bit flakey. I think about that Frederick Douglass quote that gets remixed and wrangled, but seems to have been originally delivered at a Quaker meeting in these words:

“We want practical religion—religion that will do something. When I commenced praying with my legs, I felt the answer coming down.”

Praying with your feet, then, is the action that implies hope: hope that another way is possible.

The idea of action has been challenging me too, though. I alluded to it in my last missive, wondering about the point of writing, studying writing, avoiding writing, and going about workaday life while things fall apart. It’s especially challenging from the vantage point of a rural community where things feel calm most of the time, where, if you’ve also escaped from social media, it’s easy to not know for an entire day that, in nearby cities, your friends are being arrested while resisting ICE. It’s hard to see thinking and having conversations and, as Macy says, “just being present,” as any sort of appropriate action against such a backdrop.

Now there’s a characteristically gentle (yet firm) interpretation that I might be able to use: “investment of energy” as distinct from “action,” at least my limited notion of what might count as action. And while spending two years learning to write better might not have felt like action, it certainly constituted an investment of energy. I hope (with my feet, of course) that it will be an investment that allows me to better contribute to the swirling body of ideas and inspiration that will help sustain us.

My last post here was called “On Completion,” but now it’s actually, really done…I have graduated. During my final in-person residency at the end of July, I participated in a couple of final workshops, scrawled notes in panels and seminars from faculty and guests, gave a reading from my thesis and taught a seminar of my own on the generative work I’ve been doing with archival materials. While in the beautiful seaside setting of my MFA program’s gathering, I was grappling with the same feelings I shared in that last letter (about AWP and the “point” of being a writer or an artist) and wondering how to engage with them while navigating a packed schedule and a series of events meant to be celebratory of collective achievements (as in: how to avoid being a Debbie Downer).

I fretted about what portion of my work to read for my professors, fellow students, and family who came to the ceremony. I hadn’t really considered that I’d have to find a portion of a book written largely about my family to read in front of my family until it was too late. So I carefully chose some other sections, more abstract, further away, that would share a sense of what I’d been up to these years. It was a nice selection that fit into my allotted time and that leaned more on the poetic and dreamy, faraway portions of the work.

Then, two nights in a row, two of my professors read and both read raw, passionate pieces about how it feels to be alive right now, particularly as artists. (If you’re an AWP member, you can read Susan Muaddi Darraj’s selection here, and if you can’t you should read some of her work elsewhere because she rocks. When I get a link to Adriana Páramo’s piece, I will add a link here, too.) They both put themselves on the line, sharing vulnerable personal experience and coherent moral analysis of the world around us. I wish that didn’t feel like such bravery, but here we are in a situation in which speaking freely and honestly about the world around us, saying the forbidden words we aren’t supposed to say, does carry consequences.

So I changed my mind about what I’d read and opened with part of the essay I previously shared with paid subscribers and some other close folks about what it felt like to try to write about settler colonialism while watching a genocide on my phone in real time. I shifted around the other selections I wanted to read to include some of the more “political” portions, too. I’d already decided to add a section to my presentation on finding inspiration on the archives about the political importance of archives during a time of cultural erasure—in Gaza and the rest of Palestine, in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Mali, Myanmar, Syria, and here at home in the form of censorship and the attempted re-whitewashing of our history. These were small actions, but they made me feel more like myself, and closer to the real-life mentors and writers I admire who refuse to self-censor or play nice.

Dear darkening ground,
you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built,
perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour
and grant the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor—let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven,
before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.
Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they’re worthy of you and real.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows

This is the poem to which Joanna Macy responded, “So, I feel like that. I’m ready to see.” To see, meaning “to love the things/as no one has thought to love them.” I’m so glad that over the dishes the other night she (and Krista) helped me point back in time to Rilke, to his violently turning century, to point at this poem and say “I feel like that.” I hope (there it is again) to mostly use the tools and habits of art that I’ve been generously gifted these couple of years just to notice, which is another way of loving things (loving the world, as Macy would say) to the level of their inherent worth. Just give me a little more time!

And I am being given the gift of time this month, time to work in a couple of different settings during my annual layoff from my day job, within a couple of writing-specific opportunities. One of those, folks in the Spokane area can join in on.2

Right after the podcast-dish-crying episode sponsored by the late Joanna Macy, I received a sweet little update from my housemate, who’d just been to Seattle to catch up with some of the City Gays(TM). As some readers here know, we send out an annual new year’s letter that reflects on our little country life. Because we share a single piece of paper, people I don’t know but who know her read my reflection. At the event, she met some friends-of-friends who’d ended up on the mailing list and they told her that they received it just in time for their own move to a rural place. They said our letter had been on the fridge, that we (strangers, essentially) had accompanied them on a difficult adjustment and given them, yes, hope. That they’d find a way to create a new way of life, or something like it.

So, I guess that means that we must continue, and offer our presence to the world and each other. Not being any “right way”, because there is no right way to be, now or ever, but just being the best we can, remembering (as Joanna Macy did with such impact and beauty) that our being is part of a much larger process of being and becoming.

Til next time, when I really will write about the internet again like I keep saying,

TRW