When continental Europe hit 40 degrees Celsius a week or so ago, I checked in on my dad. He’s been retired for more than a decade but still usually spends more than 8hrs every day outside, tilling soil and planting roots, beans, and vegetables.
He prefers long sleeves and pants to their short alternatives, and if the entire world could be made out of flannel or plaid, he’d like that.
He reassured me he was staying inside and drinking his water. We didn’t discuss his fabric choices.
We’ve now been in one kind or another of apocalyptic extremity for so long that I’ve been thinking less about crisis peaks and more about the components of endurance.
Eat real food. Drink water. Stretch. Whatever the soft self needs.
My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention. Yes, her letters said, Dad’s cough is getting worse, we have lost the house, there is no money and no work, but the tiger lillies are blooming, the lizard has found that spot of sun, the roses are holding despite the heat…
The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention. —Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
It does feel odd to be growing during a time that seems more like a collapse than a boom. There’s still so much to pay attention to, and from so many places, on so many channels. Through the noise, though, this season seems to be amplifying my sense of who I am, fine-tuning my sense of who my communities are, and sharpening my hunches about what must yet be possible for us.
Amidst layers and levels of upending, dissolution, and destabilization, I can still imagine a long life of celebration, tenderness, pleasure; fresh-brewed fruit teas on a quiet porch; cuddles and conversation with others who also orient themselves around mutual care and collective futures.
Two and a half years ago, some people had high hopes that that year’s crises might precipitate social restructuring. I wasn’t hearing that from the tank provocateurs, ideologues, and strategists that Naomi Klein writes about in The Shock Doctrine. I heard it from justice organizers and theorists from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor to Arundhati Roy. They imagined that the multiple, networked crises being uncovered then could inspire more of us to reckon with mortality, values, our community ties, and our appetite for deeper, slower lives.1
That’s what these years have drawn out of me. And I think that those potentials and limits I’m now more aware of were always present, just latent, just awaiting the right conditions to bubble up.
We each enter periods like this already knowing much of who we are, and perhaps being all too familiar with the places we’ve gotten stuck over and over again. The good news is we can also meet and shape more of ourselves along the way.
More of who we are wants to emerge. It is easier, as long as you’re alive, to grow than to stay static. And so our daily invitation is to cultivate how we unfurl to meet the worlds emerging around and alongside us, to unfurl not only for ourselves but also for those who’ll follow us.
This doesn’t have to be grand or dramatic work at all. It’s enough simply to live, to learn, and to share what you know.
A year or two ago—perhaps it was another pandemic diversion like porch-potted herbs and electric skateboards—I hopped onto the ancestry website Family Search and started plugging in data, looking for my folks.
Family Search is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, which, because of its beliefs about the family, has invested millions of dollars and volunteer hours to digitize civil records from all over the world.
The LDS Church teaches that legal family members sealed in the temple are family to each other in this “one precious life,” that we’re connected as spirits in the premortal before, and that we can, through fidelity to faith and covenant, continue to be family in the eternal after. Family transcends both time and death, and our responsibility in this age is to offer our ancestors care.
This is an incredibly intelligible idea, globally. It only seems strange to me through the lens of Seventh-day Adventism, which originated in New England in the mid-1800s and teaches that death breaks relation, that there’s neither consciousness nor communication between ancestors and descendants. I imagine this teaching gave the first generation of Adventists some solid guardrails during the 19th Century heyday of mesmerism, Spiritualists, and Theosophists.
As I’ve moved through Family Search anyway these past few years, it’s been surreal to see family trails in time: tables of clerk notes on my ancestors’ births, marriages, children, and deaths; a signature here or there; and Xs to mark the testimonies of elders who couldn’t read or write but had plenty of new life, love, and loss to testify to.
On some records, my great-grandfather Henry marked his presence at several of his children’s births with an X. So did his father. Each X, two simple lines, tells me nothing of their personalities but does make me curious about who after them became the first in the family to read and write, to fall in love with the word and the worlds that words open up.
Other records, like my great-grandmother’s death registration, don’t exist at all, but tokens of her life persist in the stories my mother and aunts and uncles tell about her. We have just one photograph of her that a cousin wrangled 50-something years ago. She looks like she plaited her hair with no-nonsense and hid mischief in the folds of her skirt. I never got to meet her, but I’m meeting her now through her imprints on others and the few signs she left in ink-scrawled registries. I’ve heard she was formidable.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? —Mary Oliver, from “The Summer Day”
Last week, I scrolled through records from a genealogist, records that exist only because the British were fastidious record-keepers of whatever and whomever they considered property.
The year my great-great grandfather was 4 years old, he lived on an estate2 with twelve other enslaved people including his mother and two sisters. He became part of the last generation of enslaved Black Kennedys by the time he was 25 years old, and his descendants came to walk the same red dirt his family did for 200 more years: through emancipation and four generations beyond.
On that dirt, my grandparents joined the Adventist church and raised their ten children. Sixty-five years later, I taught the prophecies of Daniel and learned the right way to chop salad tomatoes (my great-aunt Lydia was convinced there was only one). In the backwoods, in his 90s and not so far from where he’d once gathered his kids for morning and evening worship, Grandpa returned to plant pineapple suckers and reap perfectly sweet citrus.
For generations, my elders made lives on that land; they built homes, planted trees, trained leaders, told stories, and lived long enough to become characters themselves. I don’t know all they dreamed of or how far beyond the horizon of What Was they could see.
But I can see and feel how distant-yet-close 1788 and 2022 are, and I give thanks for these generations and all we’ve become.
5 Things
Jamaica celebrates both Emancipation and Independence this week: August 1 and August 6. I’ve also been thinking of Grandpa, an August baby.
In this YouTube video, Jamaica’s prime minister Andrew Holness talks about how Jamaica has evolved since enslavement ended in the 1830s. [9 mins]
The US is barreling toward another major election season, and the current of Democratic Party email carrying us along is… uninspired.
Dr. Lara Putnam and Micah Sifry talk that through and explain some of the gaps in progressive political organizing: “Fed Up with Democratic Emails? You’re Not the Only One.” (NYT, August 2022)
We’ve all lived long enough to see global warming become climate change or climate crisis, both in terminology and in experience. This is the world that PR companies on the payroll of oil and gas industrial giants made; they successfully marketed the idea of doing absolutely nothing to stop disaster.
Jane McMullen tells the story of how it all went down: “The audacious plot that seeded doubt about climate change.” (BBC, July 2022)
Audible makes me feel like authors are reading their work to me, in my house. This week Viola Davis is reading me her recent memoir, Finding Me (2022).3 I’m learning so much about how her childhood shaped her sense of belonging and place in the world.
My favorite audiobook is still Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2020); check both out.
What do Silicon Valley leaders and wilderness mystics have in common? Plenty, it turns out, especially when charismatic influence and visible lifestyle strictures are enduring criteria for compelling leadership.
Read “The ‘Shamanification’ of the Tech CEO” at WIRED (July 2022), and let me know what about its descriptions of leadership seem familiar to you.
In her “The Pandemic is a Portal” essay (Financial Times, April 2020), Roy wrote, “We can choose to walk through [this portal], dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
“Estate” is British English for “plantation.”
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