Volume 3, No. 32: Two Rituals

Greetings, book and treat people!

As usual, this week’s essay isn’t about what I said it was going to be about. One day I’ll write an essay about the fabulous book We See Each Other by Tre’vell Anderson, but today is not that day. I watched Red, White & Royal Blue over the weekend and I hated it, it was so bad, I could hardly finish it, there was not one thing I liked about it. I wasn’t expecting much from it because I love the book, but it was even worse than I imagined. Happily, it doesn’t matter! I watched it, it’s over, and I never have to watch it again. I can just keep rereading the book forever. The book is The West Wing, but make it super gay. What can I say, it’s my ultimate escapist comfort read.

Anyway, I cannot think about queer media, queer representation, and the discourse around any of it for one second longer, so I wrote about something else.

A few other things:

• What is happening in Maui is just so devastating. There are a lot of ways to help, and I’ll collect some resources for next week’s newsletter. For now, I want to share that Paige, who is a wonderful and thoughtful bookstagrammer, and who lives there, is collecting funds via Venmo and distributing them to families in need, prioritizing Native Hawaiians who have lost their homes.

• Yesterday I read Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez, a Chamoru poet who lives with his family in Hawaii. This is one of my favorite poems from the book (though the version he reads in this video is slightly different from the printed one).

I usually don’t send out previews of paid newsletters to free subscribers, but a lot of you are new, so I wanted to give you a sense of what to expect from a paid subscription. I’ll only send out a preview every six months or so, don’t worry.

Last weekend I finally made it to the Ashfield Lake, a place I’ve been hearing about since I moved here. It was a cloudy morning and hardly anyone was there. The lake is small and lovely, surrounded by hills and houses tucked into the woods. My bestie and I swim way out into the middle and floated. To put my body into water: the most extraordinary gift.

On the way home, I stopped by one of my favorite spots (Wells Provisions, if you’re local) and sipped a rose cardamom lemonade while reading my daily poetry (Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan, which I loved). It was a simple, magical Saturday. It filled me up with big love for this place where I live.

I still hate August. August is one of my two least favorite months. The other is July. Together, they form an intolerable stretch of heat. Summer makes me grumpy. The heat makes me tired. Bone-deep tried, snap-at-everyone-I-see grumpy. When the temperature gets above 80 (which is most of the time), I struggle to leave the house. When it’s really hot, I sometimes can’t even find the motivation to take myself to the river. “Just revel in tomatoes,” friends tell me, when I ask them how they survive summer. But I have to drive to the farm to get tomatoes, and a lot of the time, I just can’t. I want to make extravagant meals with glorious summer produce but I’m so tried and so grumpy. I want to garden but after forty minutes on my knees in the dirt, in the heat, I’m swearing at the sky. I want to hang out with friends on my porch but it’s too sunny. All summer long, all I want is for it to be over. From June until the leaves turn, from those first itchy, sweaty, horrible July days until the blessed, biting winds of October, I’m waiting for it to finally end.

I am never going to love summer. I used to think this was some kind of character flaw—being a person who loves winter in a society that mostly despises winter is a strange and often surreal experience. It feels like constantly being gaslit. When I go into town to do errands on a cloudless, blazing day, people constantly tell me “how nice the weather is” and I cannot even nod in return anymore. “I hope you’re getting to savor what’s left of summer,” someone wrote to me in an email the other day, and I thought, okay, this is how I’m going to end all my emails in February.

Summer is a season I get through. I get through it, and, in the midst of getting through it, I find pockets of immense beauty. In the midst of getting through it, I am sometimes so in love with the river, the hummingbird on the bee balm, the pale green of a new oak leaf, the glossy purple eggplants, the wood-green smell of tomato plants in the sun, the sparkle of the lake in the late afternoon, the water all around me, drinking me in—that simply to be alive in that moment, in this season, feels like too much, too immense, a gift too expansive to hold in my hands.

I am no longer trying to get myself to like summer. Instead, I am trying to center my life in summer around those moments. I am celebrating every tiny moment of wonder like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Slowly (so slowly), I am creating rituals that make space for awe in the midst of exhaustion, delight in the midst of devastation, joy amidst the anxiety, the grief, the wanting-it-to-be-over-so-we-can-get-to-the-good-part. It’s a process. Sometimes I sink into the rituals with ease, and my days open up and blossom around me. Sometimes I skip them, and work is hard, and I have an unsatisfying slice of bread with weird cheese bits from the back of the cheese drawer for dinner, and I feel lonely and gross and fantasize about leaving everything and everyone I know and love to live in a remote cabin on the coast of Iceland.

This is how ritual-building goes. Here we all are, in our lives, in this burning, breaking world. Here we are, in every season. Isn’t this all we can ever do—jump into the river, slice the tomato and sprinkle it with salt, walk up the hill to watch the sunrise—anyway, despite, in the face of?

A Ritual: Sunrise Poetry

I don’t know why The Sealey Challenge happens in August every year, rather than in some other month, but I’m so grateful that it does. This is the third year I’ve participated. Every time, it remakes my month. The challenge was started by poet Nicole Sealey in 2017; the goal is to read one collection every day during August. Poetry lovers all over the world come together to revel in poetry. It is truly glorious.

My Sealey ritual goes like this: Every morning, I wake up, feed my pup, and take her out for a walk. I try to get up in time to watch the sunrise from the hill at the end of my road, though I don’t always manage it. After my walk, I make myself a cup of tea, select the day’s collection, and settle down to read. I usually read my chosen book in one sitting, but even if I don’t, I spend this sacred morning time with poetry—before breakfast, before looking at my calendar or opening my computer, before picking up my phone.

I don’t know what it is about the challenge specifically that makes it so easy for me to fall into this ritual. I love structure, so maybe that’s part of it—having a goal, to read one poetry book every day, and thus needing to make time for it. I don’t know why it’s so easy for me to allow myself a few glorious hours of being, deeply, in the world—up on the hill, with my hands wrapped around my mug of tea, steeped in the words of beloved poets—before I turn to my screen, start scrolling, let all the muck come rushing in. I’m not sure it matters. This is how my mornings go, in August.

I feel softer and more generous in these early morning hours before it gets too hot. I’m happier and more grounded when I start the day with poetry instead of Instagram. I make myself better breakfasts at the end of this morning ritual. Everything about my August morning ritual is luxurious. I wake up each day and give myself this daily joy. Every day, even in this month I hate. It doesn’t matter what comes after; the sweetness of the morning is enough.

I often carry this ritual into September—not reading a whole poetry collection every day, but the rest of it: the walk, my tea, a book, all before looking at my phone. Then, inevitably, I give it up. Mornings contract again. The first two times this happened after the Sealey, I wasn’t kind to myself. Why couldn’t I maintain this good thing for longer? If I knew how good it felt, why couldn’t I make it a year-round ritual?

I don’t feel this way anymore. This is something I need in August. It’s the thing that makes August sacred. October mornings are sacred already.

I’m documenting the everyday beauty of The Sealey Challenge here if you want to follow along.

A Ritual: Library Earrings

My town has a new library and it’s everything. I wrote a little bit about how much I love it last week. I got dressed up on my first trip there and put on celebratory library earrings:

Since then, I have been to the library nearly every day. It is the workplace of my dreams. Everything about it is perfect. To have this space—free, cool, filled with light, quiet, not my house—is an incredible gift. I can already feel it shifting the shape of my days, making them easier, calmer, more exciting, less frazzled. The library isn’t going to fix all my problems. I’m still in the middle of a yearlong career tangle. Many parts of my life still feel uncertain and scary. But the library helps.

It’s hard to explain how happy earrings make me. I don’t own or wear any other jewelry. Earrings are my one accessory. I delight in them. And yet, working from home, it rarely occurs to me to wear them. I know this is silly. If I’m wearing earrings to please myself, why don’t I put them on when I’m alone in my house? What’s stopping me? Oh, nothing much—just the voice in my head that says earrings are for public consumption, why bother putting them on if no one’s going to see them, who cares, it’s so silly, blah blah blah blah blah.

I put on earrings to celebrate my first visit to the new library, and I put on earrings the next day when I went to the library to work, and when I ran out of bookish earrings, I put on my chicken earrings, and then my favorite big beaded circles. Now I put on earrings and go to the library at least three days a week. My getting-ready-to-go-the-library ritual includes putting on earrings.

Getting out of my house in August is an event. It’s a whole thing. It feels like I’ve left my house more times in the past week than I did during all of last August. I love the library, and loving the library makes me want to put on earrings, and putting on earrings makes me happy, and before I know it, I’m out the door.

Going to the library in the center of town means I might stop at the bakery, or run into a friend, or pop into the bookstore to browse. I might treat myself to a creamie or stop on the way home pick up milk and eggs from the farm. This little ritual makes it possible for me to be a part of the world I love. Even in August.

And if you’ve been wondering: yes, I’ve started wearing earrings every damn day, even when I’m working from home.