Aftermath.
Wandering as re-orienting after a crisis.
In the last newsletter I talked about the health emergency that prevented our trip to Berlin, where I hoped to research more about the nature of forgetting and memorializing. Thanks to everyone who sent messages of love. Your care helps us experience and know our community, and we felt supported by many of you. In the aftermath, we’re noticing that there’s nothing like being newly high risk for a heart attack to re-orient one’s life.
After our return from a week at the hospital, we rested and walked, made great food, cried and talked a lot. We spent much of that time dreaming up a plan for even more adventures in the years ahead. This is an ongoing conversation, but in the last year, we began to notice that on trips to national parks and heritage festivals and unfamiliar cities, we wanted to linger, to get to know a place and what created her, to go past where the tourists went, and be in communion with the more than humans in the forests, seas, mountains. By autumn, (after I’ve finished editing the book I’ve been working on for years,) we hope to take off for a long journey. We don’t know where. We don’t know how. We don’t know anything other than we are being directed to dislocate from what we know, and that it’s going to take some big changes in our lives to make this happen.
Have you found yourself wanting to ditch the complications of daily life and stay out on the road where things can be simple? I enjoyed my friend Meagan Ward’s reflections on simplifying her life on a journey to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and I admire her devotion to slowing down, seeing what’s in front of her, and experiencing her daily joy.
When I told my friend Lisa about the wandering that was up for us so soon after the trauma of the health emergency, she said, “I’m blown away by your ability to stay open to what can be!” Really though, this was a kind of calming ourselves through reassembling notions of living, and this felt like a natural orientation—to figure out what’s happening by scrambling predictability.
In my family I’m known as the wanderer. Not only because of the ways I go out on journeys, but because I like to try out places by living in them for a while. In the time that I’ve been married to my more desiring-of-roots partner, we’ve lived in seven cities and towns. We’ve moved homes over a dozen times. Richard’s chaotic childhood made him adaptable to many circumstances, and post brain injury, he isn’t inclined to many preferences. Though we each tend to like certain comforts, and we sometimes fall into our habitual cycles, the choices we’ve made in our lives have made us explorers.
When I first got sober, people had things to say to me about my wandering as a form of exteriorizing a fresh start. They meant that they believed that I was using a tactic to be prone to change the environment rather than doing the inner work. When I talked about wanting to move in my first 90 days in recovery, people mouthed back—“wherever you go, there you are.” As I’ve grown to know who I really am, I know that I’m eager toward self-awareness. I realize that avoidance isn’t what I’m doing when I travel for short or long term. I’m outrageously curious about people and the choices that make them who they are, as well as the environment that forms them. I’m on an adventure not to find identity in that strict sense of armoring myself with status or power, but I want to dilute overly rigid ways of perceiving. I often have to locate myself in a place for a time, sometimes calling it ‘home,’ in order to know what it is I came there for. Home is mostly a cadre of ancestors, animals, land, spirits, art, activists, lovers, as well as kin and chosen kin, and these can be shaped across time and imaginally, as well as exist physically. Home and the creation of home in another space are not separate. Even when that home is for an hour or days.
One of the favorite kinds of wanders we do is for birthdays. We went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival several years ago for Richard’s 60th, and I fulfilled my lifelong dream of seeing live and in concert those old bastards, Aerosmith. But the real surprise was our kids taking me dancing to that queen of joy and empress of peace, Big Freedia. I love that Maurice Carlos Ruffin wrote a piece on her in The Bitter Southerner.
Wandering Friends & Companions:
In the next months, I’ve asked several humans I admire to be interviewed for Wanderland and will invite them to answer Nine Questions about their wandering. I hope to introduce them to you soon, and to see how we each might be incredibly unique (and not cliché) in the ways we choose to go out on a journey.
Writing Prompt:
What’s the adventure you’d most like to have?
How would society need to change so you could do this?
Is there a way you can ally with others doing work to help make this happen? (Here in Canada, I work towards universal basic income for artists and others; in the United States toward socialized medicine and health care for all, but there’s many options for activism toward a vision.)
Food, Glorious Food:
I’ve been looking for meals that can transfer to a hospital for a friend who is recuperating there. This Za’atar chicken is delicious (I added some white wine to make a lusher sauce.) You can make this vegetarian with potatoes, peppers and chickpeas.
Fish can be meh for me unless it has a great companion. Grilled Fish with Artichoke Caponata is a delicious boost of flavour.
Richard made me a batch of these this week, and at my request, topped them with black sesame seeds. (Got to love a giving top.) He makes his own peanut butter and adds a handful of fresh raw peanuts from Rancho Vignola, one of our favorite suppliers of nuts, seeds and fruits.
Books, Essays & Thinking:
Content warning: Potential triggering of eating disorders, body hatred on images below.
My home in Kentucky nearly always calls me. Especially as I’m writing a book set in my birthplace. This piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom was so very necessary to my heart, to “keep one’s eyes on the South.”
Do you have time to wander? I’ve been listening to Jenny Odell’s talk on the relationship of time to power, and am looking forward to her new book, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock. On the recommendation of a few people, I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and though I sometimes find these principles could fit into a pamphlet, I’m inspired by the notion that focusing only on what matters helps me orient to the life I want. Less email and more luscious food and sex and love? Yes, please.
My dear friend the writer Suzanne Morrison and I have been hanging out in advance of our retreat for writers here in the Canadian Rockies. We while away many afternoons with talks on art and story, and one day she introduced me to the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. Some critics regard Schiele's work as being grotesque, erotic, pornographic, or disturbing, focusing on sex, death, and discovery. Like other critics, I read his work as gender fluid and queer. I’m off on a binge of his art and researching another trip to where these paintings might exist. Vienna? New York?
Do you take adventures to see a specific work of art? To be where the artist created? To see artists whose work is in response to artistic tropes? I’m also intrigued by Carrie Mae Weems, and her work in “charged historical sites over many years, as a means of addressing complex issues around race, gender, and class, while also subjecting the signature paradigm of Romanticism to radical, politicized revision.” This exhibit drawn to the act of looking and who gets to look, is fascinating, and if you’re in NYC for this and go, tell me all about it.
I’m Reading:
Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood, because that title, and am crazily drawn to stories of loss and memory.
The Laughter, by Sonora Jha — This is a Seattle writer of a wry novel that’s receiving lots of great press. The New York Times says “Clearly writing across experience, she captures the clueless voice of a supremely privileged man to intense comic effect.”
Loved hearing Melissa Febos say this in a recent interview: “The important part is that moment of pause where, instead of looking outward to assess what the other person wants, I listen inward to what I want. But it’s a challenge because it can be very comfortable to be estranged from yourself.”
Tracy Clark-Flory’s Substack is a gem. Here she is on the recent Love Is Blind take-down [SPOILER ALERT] on a man’s judgment of a woman’s capacity for motherhood— “...I don’t have enough time to fully unpack the wife/whore dichotomy, where men see women as pure and virtuous (mother of my child) or licentious sluts (hot babe I wanna fuck). I don’t have time to summarize Freud’s take on the “tendency to debasement in the sphere of love” (“Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love”). I’ll just say: We dichotomize motherhood and sexuality. To be sexy is to not be mother material.” More of what’s real in sexuality and desire here.
My book — Wondering Who You Are
Such a kindred wanderer, you are! Motivation to be where tourists are not - check. Staying in one unfamiliar place long enough to “feel local”, observe and participate in a flow of life different from what we call home, just be there…check. So much else. Ready to write and reflect.