April 11, 2023

Flowers, a story, and seasons

• a new story
• some things I've been reading, playing, thinking
• flowers and gardening! crocuses are up! seeds!

I finished my bears sweater before the cold days ended! I posted about it on Mastodon and wow uh people were into it. You can go take a look too, regardless of whether you have any prehistoric megafauna to your name. There's pictures! (And a link to my pattern modification notes.)

This month for a song let's go with this stripped-down cover of "I Love You Always Forever" - this group (stories) always does excellent covers but the harmonies on the guest vocalists on this one are just top-tier frisson makers. A+ no notes.

"Live off the Land"
Last week I had a short story come out for the first time in a long while! "Live off the Land" is free to read in The Future Fire. This is not exactly a ghost story and not quite a horror story, a little more intimate, but those woods are for sure haunted. Full of moss and yearning. I pulled the textures and aromas and foliage from forests I know local to me, here. (They are different from what appear in the accompanying art, which, well, so it goes.) Content notes - implied past violence; risk of starvation/exposure.

The Future Fire were my first story sale, back in 2015, when they bought "Morphic Resonance" for Accessing the Future. It was my first submission, ever, too, and the fact that it sold felt like an actual miracle. I'm happy to be back in their virtual pages again :) 

If you like "short, strange, and kinda creepy depending how you look at it," good news, there's more coming soon! Publishing is strange. "First submission first sale" is very much the exception. Last year I went over a year with only rejections and then three pieces sold in a short window and for a moment looked like they'd all be dropping in the same exact week. Schedules seem to have shifted around a bit though and I am glad each will have the chance to breathe on its own as it comes. When will the next sale be? Who knows.

(Speaking of publishing, have you had a chance to read "what cannot be held"? I know it's had some downloads, but I'm so curious what people think about it. I'm still really proud of it, even if it did not so much "launch" as "slip quietly into the world". As we enter the fourth year of pandemic and the glziuxdoink-th year of fascist nonsense it's very much what's in my heart for and with my people.)

Reading and Restoration
Here are some things I've been reading that you might enjoy:
"The Werewolf and the Fox Spirit are Neighbors", poem
Muneera and the Moon, a collection of short stories inspired by Palestinian folklore
"Always Left Behind", a short story from nearly a decade ago that I went back to read recently, about those of us who are left behind as not worth it, and the kinds of worth we maybe make for ourselves in their absence. It balances bitterness and the intimacy of interdependence just about right for me.

Yesterday I started playing Terra Nil, which I'd been keeping an eye on for a while. It is an extremely satisfying little video game. Some folks describe it as a "reverse city builder" - not because you dismantle cities, but it uses the same kind of mechanics as a lot of "city-builder" games to build ecosystems instead, on land that starts blighted and barren. It is very beautiful and very satisfying to play. I had, and still have, some reservations about it; people are oddly absent, there only by implication. My partner was treated to quite the speech when we saw the demo: starting with "oh, if only soil restoration was this easy" and culminating in "how can you have restoration without history, or future??" with a side of "placing humans outside of nature or ecosystems is Problematic". (He listened very patiently.) I don't think the game is going to address "how did the land get like this" and "what will humanity's relationship to it be in the future", but perhaps it will surprise me. I did already get one surprise, when I switched from looking at the demo to playing myself. I forgot that games have players as a dimension of meaning. In one sense, the "relationship to human experience" that I was upset about missing in demo footage is supplied by the player. The first time migratory birds came through the tutorial zone and ferns grew and rain fell I cried. Maybe getting the player to think about their own relationship to the ecosystems they experience, to see growth and balance with wonder, is enough for this one small piece of media. Maybe it's a start. Maybe even though restoration is hard we can have a little simplified utopian version now and then, as a treat, to keep the dream going.

By pure coincidence, if such thing exists, yesterday was also the day I reached the section on restoration in Braiding Sweetgrass. It is one of those books that I have to read slowly - there is so much to feel and absorb, I have to take breaks before I can come back and take in more again. I need to read it outside, where it can live. And it took me a while to get to it, despite many recommendations. (If you're in the same boat, let me add to the stack of gentle nudges. It's good.) I have a lot a lot a lot of thoughts and feelings about it (and look forward to diving into the various expansions, contextualizations, and critiques from other indigenous ecologists), and my relationship to the land I now care for, but I will table that lengthy digression for now.

The section on restoration comes after the section that goes deepest into the material, cultural, and relational harm that has been done to the land by colonization & capitalism. A lot of (american, european) environmental media leave you there, a dire conclusion. The documentary showing you the splendor of whole ecosystems ends with the sorrow of the lonely polar bear and the unsettling color of the toxic liquid in the strip mine that will persist for generations.

But Kimmerer does not leave us there.

"What could such a vision create other than woe and tears? ... It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again." The world is still here. "Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy." We can try to return the gift in kind.

"It's true that these victories" - such as helping salamanders cross a road, or leaving stems and leaves in the garden - "are small and fragile ... but their power moves as inspiration. Your hands itch to pull out invasive species and replant the native flowers. Your finger trembles with a wish to detonate the explosion of an obsolete dam that would restore a salmon run. These are antidotes to the poison of despair."

In my letter about the nature of despair and survival in January, I very intentionally did not talk about how to make it stop. The last thing a person in the depths of true despair needs is a presumptive lecture on how they should just fix it already. But everything goes on, as I said then. The seasons change. We change. Time is change.

When not at rock bottom, we do have some choices about how we keep going. One of the bullet points that didn't make it to the final letter was about choosing creation. When there is a choice I can make, I want to choose the option that makes something a little better, something new exist in the world, or nurtures something to grow. Maybe that "better" is just "I wash my body." Maybe it's "start native seeds" and maybe it's "sew two pieces of fabric together, that will someday get sewn to others, to become a blanket that someday after that comforts someone." Maybe it's "text someone a picture that will make them smile." Maybe the being you comfort or make happy is a tree or an insect; I am grateful for the reminder that those relationships are real, too, and engaging in reciprocity with your world can help you both keep going into whatever the future is, and maybe together heal.

Effie Seiberg got it just right in "There's Magic in Bread" - a short story about bread-making in the pandemic, and the Holocaust, and about how to keep going, though also, hey, about a bread golem. The narrator's bubbe advises, "even if it doesn't help, it'll help." It feels so much like the paradoxical truth of despair - everything keeps going and this is unbearable but how you survive. You can't keep going, but you do. It doesn't help, but it helps. So do something, make something, be in relationship to bread or earth (where the bread comes from, after all) or people (sustained by the bread from the earth), and it won't fix everything, and it maybe won't fix anything, but it'll help. 

Seeds and Bulbs
It's easier to think about movement at this time of year. The sun is back at my latitude. I can actually wake up in the morning. Every day when I walk through the yard, something new is emerging. Last year it was a series of daily discoveries - not all of them pleasant; this land has been badly treated in its last two centuries and is riddled with invasive species - but this year I know where to look, and where I have started to make changes, and I can see even more. Plants that look dormant enough that you'd walk right by - if you get down to dirt level, they have tiny leaves, tiny stems, growing under the protection of the leaf litter, nubbins or spikes, red or pale green or purple, fuzzy or fingered. I also planted a bunch of bulbs last fall, heirloom varieties in the gardens nearest the house, where the plans are more contained-garden than naturalization, and they are coming up, including the very first flowers of the year. The snowdrops almost got there first but the yellow crocuses caught up and bloomed with vigor before the snowdrops quite got there. They're amazing: 

The day the first one open it was like a whole room of my heart unlocked. Like suddenly I remembered how to be happy again. This winter was so hard, harder than most, cold and painful and isolated, but first the sun came back and then the flowers too. I try to think of time in seasons - it helps me to not be locked into the numerical model of calendar time, rigid and suiting the ends of state and economy, chopped into uniform bits, instead letting things fade and ease, with time to come into their own and time to rest. Artistically I can feel writing season ebbing, and movement season coming back again. This year it maps to indoor season and outdoor season, but it doesn't have to. It goes as it needs to go, when I can let it, anyway. But even still, I forget. Even though I watch the movement of the light and the changes in the plants as summer becomes fall becomes winter, and the changes through the winter of the snow and the direction of the wind and the quality of the light, I forget. It feels like forever. It never is. Everything keeps going. 

Are you growing seeds this spring? Growing, making, nurturing something? If you would like to grow some marigolds, by the way, I saved absolutely way too many seeds last fall - I was so excited to do it I got carried away - and will happily mail you some (if you are in the continental US). They're a vivid dark orange heirloom strain, grew 18" tall and bushy in full sun with moderate moisture, bloomed through multiple frosts, and would no doubt be fine in containers. The ones that I am starting for this year are already germinating :D

Time to go sit outside and ogle the birds,
toby