It’s been six months since I last posted here. I’ve known for nearly that long that I’d be putting this blog to bed. It’s time to write a few words about why.
“Putting this to bed” is a term I probably learned in my first weeks of journalism school when I worked on the copy desk at The Post, Ohio University’s student newspaper. Every night Sunday through Thursday, we’d write the last headlines, give everything one more look after the layout guys completed their work, pile into a car, and take the pages — safe in a big flat box — to the printing plant. After that, we’d often pile into a booth at a late-night diner. We’d do it again the next day, yet in the news cycles of the 1980s, each day had an ending: a chance to say, OK, that’s done.
Endings are a lot blurrier these days. It’s been months since I’ve felt compelled to write here. But how do I know when I am done? How does anyone know when anything is finished?
The easiest answer is that I am practicing something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life, and especially my professional life: letting go. For a very long time, work was a big source of meaning for me. Now it’s not. For decades, I have processed things by “writing out loud” about them. Now I’m more likely to do so while walking alone or talking with friends, and often while traveling — my greatest source of meaning and revelation.
As I wrote last summer when I turned 60, I likely have a third of my life ahead of me. I want to spend a steadily decreasing amount of it looking at a screen of any kind. I also know that the media landscape I grew up in no longer exists and I have little taste for the frenetic new one; I have no desire to build a platform, launch a podcast, or even spend much time on social media.
With my good health and modest means, it will be wise and necessary for me to keep working most of this decade. But I have already arrived at a place where being content is more precious to me than producing content. My part-time job in guest services is the work I love the most, yet I’ll have no trouble completely giving up a paycheck of any kind when I know the time is right. Meanwhile, I will keep doing good work, but steadily less of it, as I continue on the glide path toward that time.
And so it is — and it has been — time to put this blog to bed. In this complicated world, may we all embrace and enjoy closure when we find it, without regrets and in the spirit of curiosity. That goes for love, for work, and ultimately for life itself.
Hello, friends. Although I haven’t been writing much, I’ve been living plenty. Today’s post comes to you from a tiny room in a rambling 115-year-old inn on Vashon Island, and I have a feeling I’m going to ramble a bit, too, but that’s OK.
Until Monday, I’d never been to Vashon, even though it is a 20-minute ferry ride from West Seattle, and plenty of people commute from here — remotely or twice a day on the ferry. It remains mostly rural, and it is graced by many parks and laced by miles of trails. I’ve already hiked many of them on this brief visit, about 15 miles over the past two days, mostly through forests but also along the shores of Puget Sound.
My new apartment in Seattle is great. It has the quiet I crave, but it has little natural light and no views at all. So as long as I live there, and I hope it will be a few years, I will have even more incentive than usual to go outside — not that I need much incentive. That’s why, when I saw the forecast for plenty of sun and little rain for a few days early this week, I decided to make a quick trip somewhere I could spend most of the daylight hours outdoors. Vashon has not disappointed me.
How I wound up in the Marjesira Inn is a mystery, but it’s clear I was meant to come here. I went to Airbnb and looked at a little beach shack I rented on the Washington coast last February, but it wasn’t available. I zoomed out, saw a $45 listing, and landed on Vashon Island. Why not? As I said, I’ve never been here. The reviews and the price point made it clear that the Marjesira isn’t for everyone: It’s a funky blend of hostel and rooming house. You’re sharing a kitchen and bathrooms. You hear your neighbors. But it’s a magical spot steeped in history, and I’m sure I’ll be back.
In my last post, I mentioned the Free Will Astrology horoscope I found on my last trip, during my January stay in Astoria, Oregon. “You will receive substantial assistance from life whenever you work on the intention to clarify and define the specific longings that are most essential to you,” Rob Brezsny wrote. A quiet place to live was my most specific longing, and now I have that. But my longest-lived longing is my desire to travel — and I travel frequently because it helps me keep my eyes and perspective fresh. At sunrise this morning, alone in the inn’s front room, I spotted a book, Pronoia is the Antidote to Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings by … Rob Brezsny.
Sharing a bit of conversation with Marjesira’s caretaker this morning as we made our breakfasts, I mentioned how, although I am a dedicated minimalist, I was enjoying the century’s worth of accumulated stuff packed into this old inn. As always, travel was helping me see with new eyes.
As we talked, Jacqui was braiding her hair — something she hadn’t done in a while, she said, but she was on her way to a school visit as a wilderness educator and she wanted to feel like a kid again. She wanted to see the world through their eyes.
The world is in a world of hurt right now, big time, and there’s one man who certainly is not conspiring to shower it with blessings. Travel is a tonic unless it’s a forced march, and my heart is with the refugees streaming out of Ukraine toward an uncertain future. It’s hard for any of us to know what is going to happen next: with this unnecessary war, with the climate, with the pandemic, or with baseball. (Sorry, I know that the breakdown in the sport’s contractual talks are far from a key global concern, but my part-time job at the ballyard is a big part of my income and my social life.)
Yet I do know this, and I mainly know it because I travel: The world is a beautiful place, my stay here is finite, I am here for the adventure, and I am bound by the beauty. This gorgeous song from Jane Siberry pops up in my head every so often when I am feeling especially deep gratitude for the world. Enjoy — and to those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, happy almost-spring.
A few housekeeping notes: Two recent posts have disappeared off the main feed here at Surely Joy. It’s a mystery, but you can find them here, if you missed them:
I was at the Fred Meyer in Warrenton, Oregon, gathering picnic supplies yesterday morning when I realized I’d left my phone at the hostel in Astoria. Did I really want to backtrack to get it? Surely I could live a day without it. But of course, it wasn’t really the phone I wanted. It was the GPS, so I could keep my bearings on an unfamiliar trail I planned to hike. It was the pedometer, so I could record my mileage. It was the camera, so I could capture some images of my day on the coast. It was the music I had downloaded to play on my drive. I went back and got the phone.
For the past several years, in lieu of resolutions and inspired by a practice shared by Tim Atkins, a fellow writer for the Braver/Wiser website, I’ve chosen a word of the year. For 2020, it was learn. In 2021, it was a wonder. This year, I’ve settled on present. As wonder did for me, I hope present will have many lessons I can learn within its myriad meanings as 2022 unfolds.
My main attraction to the word is for its adjective sense, its “be here now” meaning. I want to be present in my life much more than I sometimes seem to be. So even though I went back for my phone, and even though I consulted my trail map and took some pictures en route, I left the gizmo in my pack most of the time because I was on a trail where I really needed and wanted to be present. Mud, roots, and wind made the going tough, but the reward for my focus — a sweeping view at the edge of our continent — was more than worth the effort.
I want to be present for family and friends, to hear and see them and help them feel heard and seen. I want to live and love deeply. I want to continue to prize experiences and people over things.
I want to stay in the present and avoid thinking too much about the past or the future. I want to multitask less — and worry a lot less. I want to be present to the pain that is omnipresent in my neighborhood, my country, and the world without being consumed by it.
And I also want to pay attention to the verb form of present, to tune into opportunities and experiences that present themselves as gifts (or presents, if you like. Isn’t language great?). Of course, some experiences will present themselves as obstacles, unwanted and difficult, but I will learn from them, too.
I would love to know if you have chosen a word for 2022 — what it is and why. Meanwhile, here is a little video from my morning walk today. I’m grateful I was present for this. (I can’t embed it here via my iPad, though I will do so when I get home.) Or to share a Maya Angelou quote a friend reminded me of the other day, “This is a wonderful day. I have never seen this one before.”
Two years ago feels like forever, doesn’t it? Two years ago tonight, I was a few days into a complicated-but-worth-it two-week travel odyssey that saw me fly to Idaho for an early Christmas with my daughter and jet on to Chicago to spend Christmas Eve with one set of cousins and Christmas Day with the other. It was the first time in decades I’d shared Christmas with my extended family, the folks with whom I celebrated nearly every childhood Christmas. One of my cousins is no longer with us and I’m not sure when I’ll see the others again, so I’m glad I made the trip when I did.
After a perfect, unseasonably warm Boxing Day spent wandering around the Garfield Park Conservatory and the Chicago Loop — and a rare night in a downtown hotel — I met a friend for breakfast then I boarded the California Zephyr on December 27 to travel across the Plains and Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, on to San Francisco, where I spent New Year’s Eve with my brother and his husband. Jeff and I joined many others in a traditional Golden Gate Bridge walk on January 1, then on January 2, I finally flew home to Seattle. I packed a lot into that trip, and I’m glad I did, for the two Christmases since then have been strange.
I don’t have much to report as dusk falls on this fourth-shortest day of the year. For the second Christmas Eve in a row, I am awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test. Last year at this time, I had no symptoms but I had received an exposure notification, so I hunkered down for what I’m pretty sure was my first-ever solo Christmas before the negative test result finally came in late on December 25. This year, I’ve had cold symptoms since Tuesday and I’m pretty sure that’s all they are, but out of an abundance of caution, I got a PCR test the other day. I’m starting to feel better, but I’ve sadly decided to pass on the only in-person plans I had: volunteering as an usher at my church’s Christmas Eve service tonight and sharing brunch with my stepdaughter and her mom and stepdad tomorrow. I’m spending a second straight Christmas alone, but at least I had plans, unlike the person I found curled up in my building’s doorway this morning.
It’s been a hard year for many of us, to varying degrees, but I am grateful for what I have and what may lie ahead. Ten years ago today, I was sleeping on the living room couch of my house in Boise, recovering from back surgery. Over the next six months, I’d say goodbye to my dad after his long journey with memory loss and I’d move to the West Coast to start a new life. I’ve lived at seven different addresses since Christmas 2011 and I’ll likely add yet another early in the new year, but that’s another story — one I’ll share in my annual “word of the year” another post sometime soon. For now, suffice it to say that this restless soul hopes to find more lasting shelter in both the physical and emotional realms in 2022.
Meanwhile, I wish shelter for all who seek it, and I want to send along my good wishes to those of you who are still here with me. Thank you for reading Surely Joy this year, even as my posts have become less frequent and more fraught. Here’s a song about forgiveness and possibility that resonated strongly with me this time last year and that is ringing even more true in this strange, protracted season of uncertainty for our world. Stay well, and know that the light is coming back.
Update: My test result came in just before 5 p.m., and thankfully (and as I expected), it was negative. Another blessing, another sign of better days, when a head cold is all we need worry about this time of year.
I really need to read some John Keats, specifically the piles of letters he wrote alongside his poems.
For now, I’m reading Stephen Batchelor writing about Keats, describing his concept of “negative capability.” That sounds like something I’d rather avoid, especially in a season when I am simultaneously still sad over the end of a too-brief affair and feeling fresh sorrow over an angry snub from a dear relative. As Batchelor describes the trait in his new book The Art of Solitude, Keats said negative capability exists when a person “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, someone who dwells in equanimity. These are traits I prize and try to live by, but with my emotions running more ragged than usual this autumn, I’ve fallen short.
Why did my summer lover pursue another despite our transcendental times together? It’s a mystery I can’t solve. Why did my relative lash out at me? I may never fully know. Batchelor writes, “In letting go of — ‘negating’ — reactivity, one discovers a greater capacity — ‘capability’ — to respond to life.” In Buddhist terms, Batchelor adds, “to experience nirvana is to experience freedom from those attachments and opinions that prevent your own imaginative response to the situations you face in life.”
Freedom from attachments. In retrospect, I wish I could have more readily acknowledged my friend’s fickle nature so I wouldn’t have spent two months bereft and berating myself over the loss of a liaison that barely lasted that long.
Freedom from opinions. I wanted so badly to explain my passion for open-hearted travel to my relative, but he wanted none of it. Had I accepted that instead of trying to press my case, it may have saved us some serious heartbreak.
Each of us has our own narrative. As a journalist, I’m naturally interested in helping people share and even craft their stories, and I usually do so skillfully and with great care. Yet as an essayist, I ought to know that my tale is the only one I can tell with any hope of authenticity — and that much as I may want to edit someone else’s experience, I simply can’t do that. I am grateful for the recent life lessons that illuminated this truth for me, painful as the instruction has been.
Speaking of solitude and of travel, I am midway through a 10-day stay in Tijuana, happily ensconced in a cheap Airbnb near the ocean, easily forgetting what day it is. It is good to be here, good to have even more unstructured time than usual to read, write, think, sleep, and walk (but not sleepwalk). I’d hoped to have company for a few days and nights when I booked this spot in September, but it is fine, if sometimes lonely, to be alone. We live, we love, we learn, each of us ever-evolving, if we are lucky.
I wrote last week about how we are never sure when we might be doing something for the last time. Since then, I realized I had a very narrow window of opportunity to ride Amtrak along the Puget Sound south of Tacoma before passenger rail service stops taking the long way around this Thursday. So I did, catching the 2:20 pm train from Seattle today for a quick round-trip to Centralia.
There was so much to love about this stretch of tracks: the brief glimpse of a waterside village that’s only accessible by boat. The soaring Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The stark beauty of Chambers Bay Golf Course, and of cormorants in shadow, sunning themselves on pilings along the Nisqually Reach. The ferry from Steilacoom to Anderson Island. Families strolling along the beach, waving at a train that won’t be by again after Wednesday.
Amtrak had planned to abandon these tracks four years ago. On December 18, 2017, trains were slated to begin using the Point Defiance Bypass, an inland route intended to shave a few miles and minutes off the schedule. But the very first train to attempt the new route that morning derailed at a high rate of speed, killing three people and injuring 62.
Given the thorough investigations and the pandemic, it has taken a while for everyone involved to ensure that the bypass is safe. I’ll actually be back on the train this Thursday, boarding one of the first trains scheduled to use the newly resurrected route as Amtrak tries again. I didn’t plan it that way, having booked a southbound ticket to California several months ago, but I guess I’ll help make some history.
Am I afraid? I am not. Am I happy I made time to take the train on one of its final trips along the Sound? Indeed I am. I’ll miss that run, and of course I will always question the wisdom of forsaking sublime beauty to save a little bit of time. Rest in peace, long way around.
“I’m taking the train to take time for my thoughts …”
I’ll never forget the first time I heard Gabriel Kahane, toward the end of 2018. I was standing in the kitchen of the house I’d shared with Tom, and Kahane was a guest on the late great radio show Live From Here. The songwriter explained how, the day after the presidential election two years earlier, he’d climbed aboard a train to ride 8,980 miles around America. The idea was to see people face to face, talk with them, turn their stories into songs, and see whether music could maybe bridge some of what divides us as a country. Transfixed by that introduction, this rail devotee eagerly sought out Kahane’s work, especially Book of Travelers, the album based on his post-election trip.
In January 2019, Kahane came to the Triple Door, my favorite Seattle club. I sat by myself at a table for two, off to the side of the room, but still feeling awkward and adrift in the small venue where I’d seen many shows with Tom. It didn’t matter; I needed to hear these songs live, and Kahane — onstage alone, with no backup band and minimal patter for the audience — seemed a bit lost at sea, too. He let the music do the talking for him, as he did later in the year on a rainy fall night at the University of Washington’s Meany Center, one of the last concerts I’d see before the pandemic.
Kahane was back at the Meany Center last Saturday, so of course I was there, seeing him for the third time on another rainy November night. He opened with a song that posed the question, and I am paraphrasing: What if this were the last show I ever get to play? More personable now, married and the father of a three-year-old, full of songs and stories of a year spent away from the Internet (the basis for his next album, due in 2022), Kahane played for 75 minutes, all of us except him masked for the duration, all of us grateful to be there hearing live music. He ended his set with the same song with which he’d begun, prefaced this time with its backstory.
It was early March 2020 and he had to take two planes to get to a small-town show. After the concert, a nice woman named Lisa drove him to his motel — nothing special, she said, except for the cows. Make sure you see the cows. The next morning, after making a waffle at the breakfast bar, Kahane looked out the window, saw 25 cows, and turned the scene into a bedtime story for his daughter: Let’s count the cows. His little girl couldn’t get enough of the story, and neither could her papa, who told it countless times during the pandemic. It put his kid to sleep, and it gave him a chance to relive that last pre-COVID show one more time.
It’s human nature to hope we haven’t experienced our last time doing something. I recently wrote a magazine story about how many of us have lacked physical contact during the pandemic, starting it with a line I penned in my journal in March 2020: What if I never get to hug anyone ever again? Twenty months ago, for someone living alone as the world shut down, that was not a rhetorical question.
Amid his new work, Kahane sang three songs from Book of Travelers. I know every note and nuance of these songs; they sustained me as no other music could in the second half of the first year after Tom died. He started with “Baedeker,” a hymn to travel and to maps, then he segued into “Baltimore,” a song about loss and reckoning. As soon as he sang the line with which I started this post, I found myself weeping softly into my mask, ambushed by the first sneaker wave of grief I’d felt in a long while, my emotions swirling past me into a present in which I’m missing both Tom and my summer companion amid a new season of overly complicated romantic geometry.
Four times during the first two years after Tom died, I took long-distance trains as a means of connecting with my memories of our life together: how we’d squeeze into a tiny Amtrak roomette, make a list of all the train songs we could think of, watch movies on his laptop, and just watch the world roll by. How we’d talk with strangers during communal meals in the dining car, holding hands beneath the table as we waited for our food. My memories and tears continued as Kahane played “Little Love,” a song about two people who hope to simply fade away together, the kind of life I wish I’d been able to experience with Tom, except he prematurely disappeared into the long gray silence.
I’m still here, vaguely restive with a reawakened desire that has left me feeling lonelier than ever for a specific set of arms. I could use some time on a train.
Fortunately, I’ll soon be climbing aboard the southbound Coast Starlight for a 23-hour ride to California and my family’s Thanksgiving gathering. I could make the same journey in a few hours by air, but I’d rather take the train to take time with my thoughts, to be in motion while sitting still, to be rocked to sleep, and to be grateful for all the experiences that I may or may not have again.
This week’s videos are of “Baltimore” and “Baedeker.” You can learn more about Gabriel Kahane and his music here. (There’s a lot to know.) Enjoy, and in case I don’t get back here before November 25, happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reading Surely Joy.
“Which do you think is bigger? Outer space or inner?” — Robbie Byrne to his father, Theo, in Bewilderment
Have you ever finished a book and wanted to immediately read it all again? I’ve just had that experience with Bewilderment, the new novel from Richard Powers. But because I have so many other books waiting, I settled for re-reading its first few pages and its last few pages, savoring those passages for now. I had the same impulse with Powers’ previous book, The Overstory; as soon as I finished it in 2018, I wanted to read it again, preferably over a few days in the woods. But it was a much bigger book that originally took me weeks to read, and it’ll be a while (maybe next summer?) before I get back to it.
Bewilderment is, at its heart, a love story about a father and son and the woman whom they both loved, a woman who loved them both but not quite as much as she loved the world and all the things in it. I read it quickly over a few days mostly spent outdoors, taking in its final 50 pages or so sitting by a lake yesterday afternoon, leaves falling all around me. It was the perfect book to read on the cusp of a summer I was sorry to see come to an end and an autumn that I tentatively welcome, as if I had any choice in the matter.
That’s not to say it is an easy book to digest. Powers finished this book mid-pandemic, shortly before the election last fall. The uncertainty its characters feel is palpable, because it is what we are all living through: environmental devastation, authoritarianism’s creep, and the way our market economy seeks to define and solve every malady with a diagnosis and a pill.
The beauty of Bewilderment is how it resists despair and ameliorates anxiety. It insists that each of us is perfect in our imperfection; that although we can never fully know another person, empathy is possible; that our interior lives are full universes unto themselves; and that a rich inner life can help us survive the pain we’re inflicting on the world. Bewilderment is a book to read in the spirit I think it was written, a mix of hope, resolve, and wild abandon — which seems like a good way to live right now, too.
Bewilderment is a book to read outside, if you can.
In my adult life as a baseball fan, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as excited as I do now. As I write this on the last night of September, my team — that is, my home team these past eight seasons, the Seattle Mariners — is tied for the second wild card slot in the American League. (For those of you less than familiar with baseball’s playoffs, it works like this: Each league has three divisions, which means there needs to be a one-and-done wild card game between two non-division-winning teams to have four teams ready to compete in the rest of October’s post-season games: first the league divisional series, then the league championship, and finally the World Series.)
There’s been big buzz in baseball land this week over how tight the American League wild card race has become. As of tonight, the New York Yankees are 91-68, with a two-game lead on the top wild card spot, so they’re likely in the game. The next three teams have nearly identical records: the Mariners and the Boston Red Sox are tied at 89-70 and the Toronto Blue Jays are one game back at 88-71. Between now and Sunday afternoon, a variety of scenarios might unspool to determine who will get to play in the AL wild card game next week and quite possibly a tie-breaker “play-in” game (or two) beforehand, depending on how many teams finish with the same record.
As a fan of baseball and good writing, I enjoy reading Lookout Landing, a Mariners fan site. The site’s logo shows a lone dejected man sitting slumped, head down. I’ve only been here for eight seasons, but that’s long enough to know the perennial pain that Mariners fans feel. Ours is the only team in Major League Baseball that’s never been in a World Series. We famously have the longest post-season drought in major professional sports, nearly two decades without a playoff appearance. Why should that change now?
It should change because change is inevitable, as is chaos, which is what the Mariners have been riding all year. Last April, no one gave this team a chance to make the postseason this year. As of tonight, the Mariners have scored 48 fewer runs than their opponents, and yet here they are, poised to make the playoffs anyway — or not, and in many ways, it hardly matters. Whatever happens these next three days won’t diminish the fact that this has been a magical year of shattered preconceptions and us-against-the-world camaraderie: of rookies toughing it out to learn what it takes to be in the big league … of a widely derided trade at the end of July turning out to be a brilliant move … of 33 games won by just one run … of an 11-2 record since mid-September … of 17,366 people at last night’s game sounding like twice that number.
Yesterday morning, I took a walk with the person I’ve mentioned a few times in my infrequent recent posts, someone with whom I shared some stellar days and nights over the past few months. Alas, we mutually and a little sadly agreed that our summer fling apparently wasn’t meant to last. I went home and got ready to go to my job at the ballpark, where the contrast couldn’t be more apparent, where those 17,366 fans were showing what it means to be all in, to be vulnerable, to accept risk, to risk failure and foolishness in the pursuit of something worth remembering.
I was already scheduled to work Friday and Sunday. This morning, I asked to work Saturday, too. Baseball has a habit of breaking hearts, and by Sunday night, mine might be shattered. Or not. Either way, the ride has been worth it.
It’s Labor Day, the unofficial close of summer, and the season’s passage feels especially acute this year. We’ve had a summer, but it has seemed at turns precious and precarious, fulsome and fleeting. There’s a chill in the air many mornings and a few leaves are turning, and I am nowhere ready to trade my T-shirts and shorts for sweaters and jeans.
Tonight is also the start of the Jewish High Holy Days. Last fall, I signed up for Do You 10 Q, which helps participants reflect on life’s biggest questions, including ones that have loomed larger than usual for most of us during the pandemic. Given the vicissitudes of the past year-and-a-half, I’m trying more than ever before to be in and of the moments in which I find myself. This feels a little harder than it was a year ago, when life was less full and less complicated, but also more important as new opportunities and relationships emerge. This is a too-long way of saying I haven’t done as much reading this summer as I did in 2020, but I did read several good books — and interestingly, they’ve mostly been by or about girls and women finding their power and their strength. I’ll recap a few of them here.
I started with The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, a slim middle-grades book that I impulse-bought at the Columbus UU church on my last trip to Ohio back in 2017. Mick Cochrane writes of Molly Williams, an eighth-grade knuckleball pitcher who wants to play on the boys’ team. It’s a good little baseball book, and it’s also about friendship and how our parents never really leave us. It’s funny how long I carried it around, through several moves, before I decided it was time to read it. I’m glad I did.
Early in the summer, I signed on to update my Idaho Off the Beaten Path guidebook for a 10th edition, so next up were two books set in the state. The first one, Daredevils, is a novel by Shawn Vestal. Set in the 1970s, it’s kind of about Evel Knievel and kind of about Loretta, a rebellious Mormon teenager. I recognized many of the places and characters in this story, which made it a fun blend of identification and escape.
Speaking of escape, years ago, while driving through a polygamist town on the Arizona-Utah border, I saw a little girl walking down the street and felt seized with a desire to liberate her from her fate. Daredevils reminded me of that — as did Educated, Tara Westover’s memoir of a fundamentalist-end times upbringing in Idaho, not so far from where I lived. It was a hard book to read; I had to put it aside several times, appalled by the mental and physical abuse Westover endured. Ultimately, though, Westover learns that she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and that knowledge helps set her free.
In late July, I traveled super-light on a solo trip to Alaska, but I made room in my pack for one book (which I’d picked up at the wonderful Bonners Books in North Idaho a few weeks earlier for that express purpose). Tishais, as its subtitle says, “the wonderful true love story of a young teacher in the Alaskan wilderness,” but lest you think that gives the whole thing away, it doesn’t. Robert Specht’s as-told-to book is also a story about active antiracism on the early 20th-century frontier, and it’s yet another story of a girl growing into womanhood and learning that she is capable of handling whatever life throws her way.
That’s a lesson we keep learning, too, no matter what our age or gender. In Mud, Rocks, Blazes, Heather “Anish” Anderson was well into adulthood when she attempted to set a speed record on the Appalachian Trail, and even though she’d already won fame and acclaim for her extreme hiking exploits, she continued to harbor self-doubt. My main takeaway from Anderson’s book (as from my peripatetic journeys into Buddhism) is that everything is temporary, so relish the moments, keep going, and keep practicing gratitude at every turn.
I’ll end with a book that I’ve been dipping into all summer — one I finally decided to buy after renewing my library copy several times (and buying a copy for my daughter), one that, should I ever have a grandchild, I would hand to her to say, “Here, this is what it was like.” There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love is a book of essays about the collision of pandemic, climate havoc, police brutality, and the possibility of change. Most were written in the summer of 2020 but still resound today, such as this from Héctor Tobar, who evokes ash falling over Los Angeles: ash from wildfires and protests, ash through which anthropologists will someday sift to try and understand this confusing epoch “in some future age, when justice reigns.”
All but one of the links above are to my online bookstore, The Optimist, where you can buy a book and support both my work and that of independent bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Win-win-win. I’ll also put in a plug here for one not-quite-yet-a-book that I had the good fortune to read as copy editor earlier this year. One Heart With Courage is Teri Rizvi’s collection of essays that spans decades and continents, a timely and timeless book that details Teri’s blended Pakistani-American family, the power of faith, and the beautiful bonds of lifelong friendships. (Teri and I met at Ohio University in 1979, part of a group of friends that has endured all these decades.) The book is coming October 1, and you can pre-order it now. Finally, here’s a very early link to the next edition of Idaho Off the Beaten Path (even though I’m still writing it!) and another to my 2020 summer reading list. Be well, and happy reading.
