Tag: paradox

New eyes

Julie Fanselow

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:

Presenting my word for 2022

Pandemic postcard #56: Better days

As always, thank you for reading Surely Joy.

The editor steps back

Julie Fanselow

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. 

Trains of thought

Julie Fanselow

“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.

Pandemic postcard #55: Booster club

Julie Fanselow

A story in this morning’s Seattle Times noted how this city is apparently the most stressed-out major metro in the United States, with more than 54 percent of folks here telling a U.S. Census Bureau survey team that they felt “nervous, anxious, or on edge” for at least several days during the preceding two weeks. Reporting the story, Gene Balk noted that the Census Bureau has only been asking the question since the pandemic began, so it’s hard to know whether this is a new development or a long-standing one, but we’ve ranked either number one or number two in surveys taken since July 2021.

Balk deals in data, yet he noted, “This is purely anecdotal, but I see a tremendous number of Seattleites masked up even when they’re walking outside,” at “extremely low risk of contracting the virus.” I’ve noticed this, too, and it’s very strange. Even with COVID-19 cases dropping, I get why we need to keep masking up in stores and on transit; I’m fine with that, it makes sense, and I’ll be wearing a mask on any bus ride or flight I take for the foreseeable future. But at this point — at least for healthy, vaccinated people — masking up outdoors in uncrowded settings seems like so much virtue-signalling hygiene theater, which is actually a very Seattle thing. Lighten up, folks.

My lax attitude toward masking up does not extend to the excellent news that many of us are now eligible for COVID-19 booster shots. On October 21, the CDC authorized boosters for all people 18 and older who’d received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at least two months ago. I was getting a flu shot when the news broke, so I decided to give my arm a rest for a bit, but I signed up online for a vaccination slot at a local pharmacy late last week. It was such a cake walk compared to the months of waiting for my first shot last spring.

When I showed up last Friday, I was prepared to get a J&J booster because I thought, as a healthy 60-year-old, that’s all I could get. But the pharmacy tech said no, I could have whatever I wanted, so I got a Moderna booster, and I now feel like I have the best possible chance at continuing to keep the bugs at bay (or to have a mild case if I wind up a “breakthrough” statistic). As the National Institutes of Health found in a study this summer, J&J recipients who got a Moderna booster saw a 76-fold jump in antibodies that neutralize the coronavirus, the best outcome of all the combinations studied.

All gain, no pain: I had a sore arm for about a day after the shot and that was it, but even people who report losing a day or two to side effects from the vaccine say it’s totally worth it to know they’re protected against serious illness. Meanwhile, many Americans are still holding out on getting this protection, but it’s good to know that their numbers continue to dwindle — not because they’re getting sick and dying of COVID, though that is tragically still happening, but because they’ve decided it makes no sense to remain unvaccinated. Whether we continue to mask up indoors or roll up our sleeves for a shot, we’re all looking out for one another.

As I’ve written before, fear seems to be at the heart of so much of what ails our country these days, and fear has certainly driven much of our response to a pandemic that is running on far longer than it needed to. The trick is to identify what we truly need to fear and focus on what we can do most effectively to mitigate those risks so we can fearlessly embrace everything else life has to offer.

A note about this week’s video: I found this one while searching for a good take of Josh Ritter’s song “Long Shadows,” which — along with Dan Hicks’ “I Scare Myself” — was going through my head as I composed this post. It’s a one-take video shot on an iPhone! Very cool. As I mentioned in my last dispatch, I’ve been on a novel-reading tear this fall, and Josh’s new book The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All was a real treat. He is a renaissance man in a band full of them. Enjoy.

Be/wilder

Julie Fanselow

“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.

I finished Bewilderment on the shores of Deep Lake in Nolte State Park, southeast King County, WA.
Bewilderment is a book to read outside, if you can.

Baseball = life

Julie Fanselow

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.

Summer reading report 2021

Julie Fanselow

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). Tisha is, 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.

Tradeoffs

Julie Fanselow

Hello, world. This is me, poking my head up for what now seems to be a monthly dispatch. It’s hard to believe I was writing weekly pandemic postcards until a few months ago. It’s difficult to fathom I’ve just begun volume #5 of my “pandemic journal,” the notebook I write in almost daily (though that, too, has become a less-regular practice this summer).

So here we are. I want to talk a little about tradeoffs.

Tradeoff number 1: My new upstairs neighbor threw in a load of laundry at 11:30 last night. I’d been sleeping a while, but the thumping woke me up. The neighbor seems to be up all night, so I guess they work a swing shift and probably get to bed around the time I wake up–but I still hear the floors creaking at 6:30 a.m. as I write this, so who knows? Then there’s my improbably loud refrigerator, which runs about 30 minutes every hour. I hoped I’d be used to it after four months, but it’s still annoying, especially in 499 square feet.

Ah, but I like this apartment, especially its east-facing windows and sliding glass door out onto the tiny fire-escape-sized balcony, where I sit and read or listen to music, and where the hummingbirds have been gathering all summer. I’ve enjoyed its evening cool during our heatwaves, and the low-angled light will warm my apartment this winter. I value the fact I’m a quick stroll to the bus stop and the grocery store, yet within a few blocks, I can access miles of more ambitious walking terrain where the city blends into the suburbs and fat blackberries are now ripe for the picking. It’s a tradeoff: the realities of urban living.

Tradeoff number 2: The pandemic is still very much with us, and like most people who chose to be vaccinated, I’ve lost patience with the arguments of those who’ve opted to keep the virus spreading. At the same time, I know that no good comes of castigating people for their doubts and fears, so I’m opting, as usual, to give them grace. I do know that I will live my life as the delta variant runs rampant. I’m masking up again indoors, but I never saw the need for outdoor masking a year ago and I don’t now, unless you’ve chosen not to get the jabs. I’ve been traveling and will continue to do so, and for sure I’ll take that booster shot just as soon as I can get it, thank you.

It sounds like we may all be destined to get the delta variant, vaccinated or not, though it is much worse if you’re not. I’ve finally heard of the first breakthrough case among two people I know personally; they’ve had flu-like symptoms for a week, but as vaccinated people, they’re pulling through. I mostly fight despair over my relatives whose faith-based fear causes them to doubt science, and over the plight of children who have little protection as they go back to school. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is what it is. I’m grateful we had a few months of relative freedom from COVID earlier this summer. It’s been nice to go maskless at the ballpark, where I love to give fans a welcoming smile. It’s been delightful to get to know my new companion, to hold hands and hug and kiss without worrying too much about making each other sick. Yet it seems likely we’ll all need to be vigilant over this thing for a lot longer than any of us had hoped.

Tradeoff number 3: I don’t know what I want to write about Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban. My country has been involved in Afghanistan for decades, but never with a clear, cogent mission. People — in this case, the Afghani people, working toward a shared destiny and the quest for human rights — need to hold each other to account. Just as we can’t beat a virus if people don’t accept shared moral responsibility, there are limits to what one country can do for another.

Thanks for reading Surely Joy. By the way, if you get these dispatches via email, my previous post from about three weeks ago seemingly never went out that way, so you can read it here. And if you’d like to get future dispatches via email (since I post so rarely these days), you’ll find a link to sign up elsewhere on this page.

Be well and don’t despair. There is much good to celebrate, even amid this unsettled, uncertain season.

Remember ‘slow’?

Julie Fanselow

As a city dweller, you learn to walk defensively. That’s why I saw her glance to her left — but not to her right — before she turned out of the medical center parking lot, her right hand on the steering wheel, a big yellow bowl with a spoon balanced in her left. (It was about 7:45 a.m. Breakfast cereal, maybe?) She never saw me, but happily I saw her, so I’m here to write this.

The Seattle Times reported yesterday that traffic levels have rebounded to near-normal levels statewide. I remember how I wished last spring that cars might stay parked a lot more once we returned to “normal.” No such luck. Even though the kids are home from school for the summer and many people are still working remotely, most of us have reasons to drive somewhere. I get it; I actually drove to my walk this morning (since it was in my old neighborhood and I needed to get gas and groceries afterward), and I’ll be driving to a campsite later this weekend to beat the 100-degree-plus heat forecast for Seattle.

Still, I’d like to put in a few words for mindfulness, for taking a few minutes to enjoy breakfast at home, for savoring every sunrise and sunset, and for going slow when you have the opportunity. As the hardest part of the pandemic ends, maybe we can pretend we still have all the time in the world.

Thanks for reading Surely Joy. Enjoy a couple of songs from The Head and the Heart, recorded in 2011 at Doe Bay in the San Juan Islands.

Pandemic postcard #53: Moving right ahead

Julie Fanselow

This Easter morning, I’d planned to be packing my suitcase for a journey to the Deep South, to see two of the only four states I haven’t yet seen. I was going to visit my friend Eileen in New Orleans, drive from Selma to Montgomery for a few days of reflection, and wind up on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Instead, I am packing boxes to move a week from tomorrow.

It’s been a difficult Lent. Right now, things are blessedly quiet because it is Sunday. But tomorrow morning, the crew on the light rail extension project will fire up a generator that will drone on 24/7 until next Friday evening, sometimes accompanied by beeping and scraping during the night-shift work and always with a low-level vibration that seeps into my home and my bones. This has been going on since January, but it’s only been in the past few weeks that I have realized what a toll it has been taking on me.

Worse, I haven’t been able to get a good answer on how much longer it will continue. Another month, perhaps, or maybe a year. The noise level increased last week, when another construction project started to the north. I’ve found myself unable to sleep well, unable to think straight with the constant clamor. Meanwhile, COVID cases are going in the wrong direction and I’m still weeks away from getting a vaccine. The truth hurts, and the truth is it probably is not a good idea to travel cross-country on a non-essential trip.

So in the last week, I made two decisions: I’d cancel my (fortunately refundable) trip plans and I’d use my vacation time to move. The good news is it’s a renter’s market here in Seattle and I was quickly able to find a new place. I’ll pick up the keys in a few days and I’ll have most of my stuff there a week from tomorrow. I’m reminded anew how it is beautiful to live a simple, streamlined life. (Of course, I talked this over with the property manager at my current place, who gave me her blessing.)

I’m a little sad at having to leave this little apartment I’ve had since February 2019. There was a lot to like about it. I chose this place with a gut feeling it would work well for me, which it did — until it didn’t.

I’ve written before about how it’s good to be able to pivot, and how there is rarely such thing as a final decision. I am heading back to the familiar neighborhood I first called home in Seattle, to another snug studio that would have been out of my price range before the pandemic. I look forward to staying more than two years, if the rent stays reasonable.

Who knows? Maybe this rolling stone will gather some moss. Hope springs eternal, and more will be revealed. Here’s to the spirit of Easter, of renewal, and of rolling away the big rock when it’s time to make a change.

Thanks for reading Surely Joy. I write for a living, so if you like what you see, feel free to hit the tip jar.