Kaleidescope

This summer: my tooth, my friend’s dad, the Supreme Court, presidential immunity, my sister, my aunt, the former president, the president, the new presidential candidate, my lower back, my softening jawline.

I’m going to spare you the verbs and the direct and indirect objects.

I think you get it.

I’ve been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, in preparation to visit her home in Mansfield, Missouri, and I just read a bit where Pa and Ma bemoan the speed of progress. People can’t keep up! Kerosene! Railroads! Coal! People used to be fine making lights out of bear tallow and grinding their own wheat into flour but we’ve gone soft! Soft I tell you!

It seems healthy that I don’t want to smack Pa and Ma, who were, when described, likely feeling middle aged as I am, but also only 30 years old.

People used to be able to get along without air conditioning, but our buildings aren’t built that way anymore, and our jobs don’t accept that in summer, it’s too hot to do so much.

People used to be able to follow politics and talk it over without fear of violence. Ha, of course not, I grew up here on the Yankee/Confederate border, and not only was the native versus white interloper thing a disaster, also the white people were constantly attacking each other because they disagreed about how poorly you could treat a person who looked black: were they less than a dog, or were they more like a useful barn cat? (Just my takeaway from the writings of white people at the time.)

Lots of things that have happened to me this summer have been joyful: watching an otter float on his back at the zoo, with his little paws tucked under his chin. Filling my friends’ wine glasses. Smoking the three cigarettes a year that I smoke on Bastille Day. Writing with friends. Watching my dear cousin get married through about eight drops of soft summer rain, with his cute as buttons kids alongside, bobbing in their acres of tulle.

Sitting on my balcony for hours just reading.

Snuggling with my cats.

I’ve had several moments I thought, yes, this is getting older. I’m not focused on how I wish I could go to Instanbul or New York this summer, but enjoying like human beings legitimately can enjoy, fresh air, begonias, books, coffee, walking, friends, fretting.

I drove to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for said cousin’s wedding. Eureka Springs is the New Orleans of Arkansas. It’s gay as gay can be, it’s a hippie haven, there are crystals, healing waters still going since the late 1800s. It’s built up a steep, steep hill, so most of your time there is managing your footing. Stairs and slopes and elderly ironwork for handrails.

We were doing the town, stepping inside various doors that looked interesting. Across the street was a bookstore, and you know I was going to go in there. When I went to open the door, I saw this sign that said, “No cell phone use in store. No food or drink.” The minute I had the door actually open, a woman said, “You can leave your drink here.”

And I was like oh my God get over yourself.

Like I love forgetting my phone, but sometimes I wanna check the time, or I have a question about something I see on the back of a book, or let’s say I want to put a book on my Amazon wish list (because I’m a monster). The door was already open, though, so I had to go on in, and the books looked good.

Like everything I saw in Eureka Springs, it was a liberal wet dream. So I’m looking at books about dopamine and the history of land ownership and then I’m perusing Religious/Spiritual, and I saw Steady, Calm, and Brave by Kimberly Brown. It’s been a while since I read a self help or spiritual type book. It’s like I’ve read everything about the stuff I’m interested in, and what I find now, I’m just like, yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. But it’s not that easy, is it, book?

Anyway this book came in 25 little chapters that felt approachable, and the preface explained the author had written it to address everyone’s complete emotional breakdown during the pandemic that people call “once in a century,” though it was actually “first time in the history of the world.” As Brown writes, “My family, friends, students, and the world were in shock and terrified of this unimaginable crisis.” Yeah. People after the flu pandemic of the early 20th century just didn’t talk about it. There are wide gaps in the historical record because people didn’t ruminate on it later, or if they did, they burned those pages.

We tell ourselves stories of this being a “hard time,” but rarely do I chat with people about an “easy time.” Buddhist writers, in my experience, address this well: “even after [the pandemic] ended, there would be another crisis, because, far from being a unique situation, a crisis is a normal part of our lives, one we will experience many times…. It’s an inescapable fact of life that things come together and fall apart, and it doesn’t matter whether you want them to or not.” It’s also true that, as either Vonnegut or Tolstoy (same difference) said, it’s hard to even know what’s the good news and what’s the bad news.

How to know when to construct a story, to make meaning, and when to let it wash over you.

The transition to Harris being the nominee needed a story. I read news and analysis pieces and then I accepted a narrative of what happened.

My life, often I don’t want to construct the narrative. I am just too overwhelmed by the data I have to fit into it. And I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. It means looking at the pieces. Both the full moon we enjoyed on the roof of the hotel the night my cousin got married, and the panic I felt when I realized I was out of my anxiety meds and I was leaving for the wedding the next day.

I’m not sure what is letting things wash over you, just being there, and what needs to be pinned and described an analyzed.

I’ve struggled the past few years to figure out if I even am “a writer,” or “an artist,” thinking about how that’s always been my identity, but also about how making things isn’t necessary, can be ego driven, can lead to the plodding shame of not getting read, published, bought, whatever.

I don’t know.

If I feel like my previous patterns, journaling regularly, always working on a longer piece of writing on a weekly or more frequent basis, aren’t necessary, is that depression or liberation?

I don’t know.

I know I decided to buy the book, and then the lady told me they only took cash.

Then I wanted to legit murder her.

But I just happened to have cash.

I paid her, and she commented on my book.

I commented on how stressful it was to be alive right now (this was between the assassination attempt and the Biden dropping out, were we ever so young?).

“You have to think of it as a kaleidescope,” she said. “The pieces are all there, falling around, making different pictures.”

“Whoa,” I said. “That helps me.”

She talked about her faith in younger people, generational shifts (and some stuff that was a little too woo woo for me), and I felt deeply encouraged.

Back to the Zen wisdom: creating art is critical, and creating art doesn’t matter. Creating a narrative is neurotic and grasping, and creating a narrative is a beautiful act or an act of solidarity and healing.

It’s all true and that’s frustrating.

It comforts me that the Ingalls moved around so much. Far from being some peaceful “good old days,” their days were loading up, moving on, figuring it out, having someone go blind, almost starving to death, having Ma and Pa tell stories that must have soft-pedaled and restructured various terrors that they came close to. The books portray a world of constant uncertainty. Farmers are often portrayed as conservative, and pioneers are portrayed as stoic, but farmers gamble and lose, and pioneers cry and kill each other and become hermits and die alone and get eaten by their own horses.

Stories, see!

I don’t think horses eat people. Very often.

The feeling I have of weightlessness, of nowhere to land, you may also have. I’ll feel calmer in the summer. When school starts. After Christmas. I have to fix this feeling of falling. Alice has to land.

I like how Pa and Laura are mystics, conflating the fiddle tones with the wind and the wolves, and the scream of the blizzard and every open, gaping fear. I like how Pa sits in a tree and finds the fawn and the doe so beautiful he can’t shoot them, even though they want the meat.