By you I mean me.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who need to marshal their time and attention.
A little introspection (actually the whole thing is introspective)
Practical writing and its discontents
Trying to let attention and trust flow
A question and practice for attention and trust
The moss in the sidewalk cracks is still bright green, despite a few nights of ferocious cold. Snow fell the day before the solstice, and outside the big windows of my quiet office it looked slow. While it fell, I put in my application for paid leave from that job, for a spring—2026—that I frankly cannot imagine. I’ve been handling things badly, including things that matter to me.
These days, the writing I’m doing the most and that makes me feel most alive is for the Neighborly Actions listserv, or in a comment to OSHA or my state’s Department of Environmental Management about what they should or shouldn’t do, or in a text exchange with a friend who’s going through it. In writing these things I feel intentional, purposeful, potentially effective; I’m looking for the magic words, the spell, the certainty. Writing that leaves room for ambiguity, which I used to love and do a lot of, makes me furious these days: Don’t you care? Don’t you want to move someone, change something? But I resent the practical writing too: Why can’t you be beautiful, a pleasure to be with and make?
A few friends and I are researching options for getting our city to take better care of its people in the coming year, finding the levers and openings that seem likeliest, preparing people to talk directly with their councilors (possible in a small city like ours—Providence residents, that Neighborly Actions listserv I just mentioned will offer you some recommendations soon). The council minutes and the state tax code are as intricate, but not as interesting to me, as a patch of moss and lichen, or a page of writing that I love. Recent works by students of mine trace, illuminate and complicate community disaster preparedness, the possibility of land return, how somatic practices might reveal ways to feel and share Jewish joy and grief that don’t feed into Zionist justifications for genocide. The relationships, the complications, the intricacies, the indwelling personalities are present in the official laws and documents as well. I wish I loved to follow them, trace them, travel their roads, see by their light.
When I was learning to sing for the third or fourth time—have I written to you about this before?--Chrissy, the singer and composer who was teaching me, pointed out that I was trying to pick up the note with my vocal cords and move it physically to the next pitch. What was I supposed to do instead, I wondered grumpily. Chrissy said (I’m paraphrasing) that if I breathed from down in my crotch and let the air flow out toward the note, it would get there. This did not seem to me to be true. But it is. That’s how I sing now, when I remember. It sounds better than the other way and feels better too. In a certain way, I am still angry about this.
Like many of you, I’ve been dizzied by systemic cruelties, and my failures and shortfalls these past few months have mostly been failures of attention and presence: failures to behold what someone’s saying, failures to pause when a pause is needed, failures to read the fine print. When I come to the thing I’m looking at, the ordinance I’m reading, the meeting full of people I’m hearing, I want to come with concentration, with green-lit presence, like being inside the moss. I want to let what I’m seeing, what I’m hearing, flow through me, so that by paying attention, I know what’s actually there.
At least, I want to want to. The strenuousness of having to make the sound, to be the light, to keep coming back, keeps coming back. Even when I’m not actually a light, when the effort is not only wasted but unwanted. Even when I should probably just shut up. Every time I try to do anything I fuck it up.
The BFF recently sent me a photo of a gift from her parents (who I also love). It’s a method for leaving a candle lit, if you want it to stay lit for ceremonial reasons, while you leave the house or sleep:
You put it in the sink.
That’s it. If it falls over, it falls over onto wet nothing, and when it’s ready to go out it goes out; in the meantime, it burns, doing its work of meaning. But the secret is, you’re not the candle; you’re the one who places the candle. You’re the one who creates the conditions where constant vigilance and strain aren’t necessary in order to do what you have decided to do.
By you, I mean me, though possibly not just me. That’s how I’m trying to be, to think, to feel, to write, to work in 2025: to go easily, openly, toward what’s necessary and what works. To pay attention and to be prepared; to trust the preparations. To put the candle in the sink. To live to tell the tale. This may not be the only planet that has moss and mistakes, never mind candles and sinks, but this is the one where we are. If we fuck up, we fuck up here. If we love each other, here is where we do that too. Here is where we live until we die; here is where we tell the tales we tell.
QUESTION: How will you assist the living world to care for itself, and for you as part of it, in the coming month? (An intention for the year feels like a little much, in this economy.)
PRACTICE: Light a candle (or ask someone to do this for you), declaring—out loud if possible—your answer to that question. Put it in the sink. If you live with people, let them know both your big intention with which you lit the candle, and your small intention of putting it in the sink so that it can burn without needing to be watched.
Then take a nap or a short outdoor excursion.
When you notice that the candle is out, if you’re able, make a small donation to the Amazon Labor Union’s solidarity fund, through Taawon, or to some effort toward care and survival where you live, as your exchange and release for the intention.
LONG READING: Elizabeth Sawin, Multisolving, for when you’re ready to turn outward again.
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.