Summer Reading

Some highlights and recommendations from the summer (aka Reading Season) so far:

BOOKS

This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

The Sport of Kings by CE Morgan

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle

Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

At Home in the World by Tsh Oxenreider

The Sacred Enneagram by Christopher Heuertz

Virgil Wander by Leif Enger

ESSAYS/ARTICLES

“Joy” by Zadie Smith

“On How to Grow an Idea” by Jenny Odell

“The Last Days of John Allen Chau” by Alex Perry

“If You Should Find Yourself in the Dark” by Debbie Weingarten

POEMS

“From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee

“Poem to My Child, If Ever You Should Be” by Ross Gay

“The Voice” by Jeanne Murray Walker

UP NEXT

The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

Getting Involved with God by Ellen Davis 

Tijuana Book of the Dead by Luís Alberto Urrea

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

On Resting (Or Not Resting) and Growing Good Things

We are lying in the grass inside Pamplona’s citadel, a retired-fortress-turned-park shaded by trees and bisected by walking paths. Davis is dozing next to me, listening to music with his eyes closed and shirt pulled up to allow the sun on his stomach. We’re breathing in the ripe smell of grass as clouds arrange themselves across the sky. The sky is more clouds than blue, then the wind shifts and it’s more blue than clouds.

The sun slides from behind its blanket and I watch the light rush toward me on the grass as shadows form like images in a polaroid. The light presses on the tops of my feet, heating them to just the point of discomfort. I flip to my stomach and the sun covers my soles like a hand.

As I read and dip in and out of sleep, I feel a looseness in my body. It’s the kind of receptivity or porousness I feel during certain kinds of pleasures, similar to the way my body goes stock-still when someone scratches my arm or the sun heats my bare skin or I hear poetry read aloud—all nerves and concentration focused on a single sensation. It’s the experience of total attention.

——

One of my friends recently told me she wished I was blogging about these months of travel. I’m too self-conscious to do that, but we’ve passed the two-month mark and this seems like a good time to do a temperature check. 

The longest stays of our four-month trip are behind us. We’ve already spent three weeks in Mexico and a month in San Sebastian, Spain, with some domestic travel to see friends and family in between. From this point forward we are on the move, hopping from country to country each week: Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Israel, Turkey, Greece, England. Home.

This trip is something we’ve planned for and saved for and waited for over the course of almost a decade. Davis and I got married young and told ourselves, even while dating, that we would take time off for extended travel sometime in our twenties. We had a few false starts—seasons in which the timing was almost right, but then I started grad school or Davis took a new job or I liked the job I had or we just weren’t ready to leave San Diego. 

Given the years of build-up, I shouldn’t be surprised that these four months were saddled with more than their fair share of expectation.

——

In Jenny Odell’s excellent (and very short! Go read it!) essay, “On How to Grow an Idea,” I read about do-nothing farming. I immediately like this idea, just as I like most garden/farm metaphors for the creative life, possibly because I’m really a 70-year-old lady who just wants to enjoy morning coffee in a garden.

For example, I like the idea of practicing crop-rotation in your art. That is, taking periods of time to let a patch of land lie fallow while you cultivate a different patch instead: throwing pottery, running, cooking, writing music, surfing, etc. The idea that there is value in rotating crops—value in not constantly extracting from a particular area—appeals to me, because it sounds like permission to rest. It reminds me that seasons without planting or tending or harvesting are okay. Are not just okay but necessary for good things to grow.

In the 1970s, Japanese farmer Masasobu Fukuoka pioneered “do-nothing farming” after noticing how one of his fields, left dormant for year, had become fruitful without interference. The conditions were right for the land to produce, and so it did. From that point forward, Mr. Fukuoka gave careful attention to the condition of his fields, making sure it was “tilted in favor of his crops,” and then sat back and let good things grow. It required his attention and presence, but not the constant work and frenzy he’d known before.

Jenny Odell writes: “Ideas are not products, as much as corporations would like them to be. Ideas are intersections between ourselves and something else, whether that’s a book, a conversation with a friend, or the subtle suggestion of a tree. Ideas can literally arise out of clouds (if we are looking at them). That is to say: ideas, like consciousness itself, are emergent properties, and thinking might be more participation than it is production.”

——

A few weeks ago, when we were still in San Sebastian, Davis and I took a bus to the next town over to hike a portion of the Camino de Santiago. The day was pitch-perfect summer, and summer in Spanish Basque Country is something else. Locals wait all year though the gray and damp to arrive here, and the reward is turquoise and cerulean water, leaves shining like jewels, everything wild and rugged and glittering.

We hiked past vineyards and apple trees on a path edged by wild roses and the heavy heads of hydrangeas. Davis patiently let me stop to admire families of cows chomping grass in the shade, the calves like oversized dogs with knobby legs and long lashes. As we walked we talked about this trip and what we’re learning and what’s been good, what’s been hard.

Given the long time it was in arriving, we both came into the season with articulated and unarticulated hopes. Perhaps me especially, because I’m great at forming highly specific and often unmatchable expectations. But what has caught me by surprise is realizing how much I hoped to get out of this trip; how much value I planned to extract. How much I wanted to make of it. I had things to accomplish, is what I mean to say. 

These things weren’t career-related, necessarily, but they were notches of accomplishment all the same: spiritual revelation, relational growth, discernment about our next season, and, especially, a deepening in my writing (Essays! Articles! New artistic heights!). All of them in the vein of achievement and constant productivity. It turns out even when I rest, I don’t believe I should stop producing.

On our hike, Davis in all his wisdom said something that I’m hoping is true: the impact of this trip will continue after it’s over. We will continue to be changed after we come home. This is such a hopeful thought for me because it alleviates the pressure to wring out every last drop of value I can right this second. The writing and essays and articles and poems can come later, growing out of the soil we’re building up now. The discernment and wisdom planted during our quietness here can continue to guide us when we’re back.

Our job now, we’re both sensing, is to give attention to the day before us. (When is this not our job?) Our “work” is to be porous and receive what comes without needing to make art or meaning or to track our growth on a chart. The word I’m holding in silent prayer these days is this one: Now. Now. Now.

——

I think a lot about rest. Not sleep—though boy do I love my sleep, and am firmly in the Nine-Hours-a-Night Camp—but deep, nourishing rest. The kind that doesn’t exclude activity or creativity, but adamantly excludes hurry, frenzy, and a transactional insistence on productivity. (My brain, constantly: What do you have to show for this experience? Make something out of it!) 

Maybe that’s quicksand for all artists: We get to make meaning, and making meaning through art requires ambition and sweat and swinging for the fences. But good art—and more to the point, the people behind it—need the other side of the coin too: the do-nothing farming. The stepping back so the soil of our lives might be reinvigorated.

When I think of it this way, I remember that I’m happiest when I’m dreamy and unhurried: a kid on summer break, someone lying in the grass with a book. That’s not realistic much of the time. But an absence of frenzy is.

Thomas Merton equated busyness with violence. Dallas Willard spoke of “ruthlessly eliminat[ing] hurry from your life.” Ruthlessness, with its violent implications, seems like an apt word. Hurry and frenzy are fatal to cultivating a nourished, creative life. That means they’re also fatal to making work that nourishes others. Constant production zaps the good and beautiful elements that I need to survive. I want to be ruthless both now and when we return by protecting spaces for stillness and pure, nourishing attention.

I guess it comes down to choosing nourishment over depletion, even when depletion appears productive and nourishment doesn’t look like much on the surface. A note I wrote to myself last week: “Trust that ideas are germinating and things will still grow. Trust they will grow more lush and wild and insistent than before, when you were forcing production and depleting your very best asset.” In farming terms, that asset is the land. In creative terms, it’s my attention. 

So I’m off to go stare at more cows, and not feel the need to write anything else about it. I’ll let it be a seed or a few drops of rain in a field left to rest.

Spanish Lessons

One of the best Spanish idioms I know (not that I have a whole roster tucked up my sleeve, ready to deploy at the opportune moment) is the dismissive, vaguely religious, and appropriately morbid (I did learn it in Mexico, after all, a country with a fondness for dark humor), “Tú no tienes vela en este entierro.” In English: You don’t have a candle at this burial. I’ll get to what that phrase implies, but first, the background.

My Spanish instructor Alberto starts at the very beginning, as he likes to do, by talking about the verb velar. Literally translated it means “to ensure.” But back in the day—I mean centuries ago—it meant “to look after” or “to care for” (someone, something), with the specific connotation of caring for this someone or something at night. In the daytime, your brother would watch over your aging and infirm abuelo, Alberto explains, pulling his lips over his teeth to suggest a doddering, toothless grandpa. But at night, it was your turn to velar por abuelo.

The Spanish word for candle is vela, still used today, which also comes from the verb velar. Picture watching over grandpa’s bed in an earlier century, your candle sinking lower in its wax and spilling over the sides of its holder, which of course has a finger loop for you to grab so that you can slip out of the bedroom once he began snoring and sneak back to your room in your night shirt, dressed like Ebenezer Scrooge (or perhaps like me as a child in my Felicity-the-American-Girl-Doll-night-dress ensemble, which I loved very much and wore with the ribbon cinched tight around my throat).

“But, uh oh!” Alberto says now, eyes widening. “One night you forget to velar por abuelo and—que triste—he dies.” Alberto drops the toothless grandpa impression and invokes a mourning Mexican mother, pulling an imaginary black shawl around his head. “So you have a wake at the local church, a mass for the body, and if you’re a family member, you bring a candle—a vela.”

Picture it: Everyone is standing around mourning abuelo, preparing to put his worn-out body in the ground, where the following October it will be led back home to your family’s altar on Dia de los Muertos with a trail of marigolds and all of abuelo’s favorite foods set out so that his spirit can snack on pan dulce or tamales or tlayudas or whatever it is abuelo loved most to eat in life. At the mass and subsequent burial—Spanish word: entierro—one would be able to tell family members from non-family members based on who held velas. And so when a busybody neighbor or ex-lover of abuelo’s or second cousin thrice-removed steps into the huddled circle of vela-toting family members and tries to assert their opinion about coffin style or funeral hymns, abuelo’s widow could turn on them and hiss, with those round vowels and snapping consonants native to Spanish, “Tú no tienes vela en este entierro!”

Which is to say, You don’t have a candle at this burial! Which, more to the point, is to say, It’s none of your business! And which is why this phrase is still employed today even when there are no velas or abuelos or entierros in sight.

Childish and Grateful

One of the most potent human pleasures is sitting outside, en puro sol, preferably on a warmed rock wall above a body of water, and eating ice cream, preferably on a cone to preserve that childish summer delight of holding a treat by hand instead of using utensils/plates/napkins (and probably, sitting at a table rather than that warmed rock wall above water).

There it is: sun warming the top of your head, wall heating your thighs from below, peanut butter ice cream softening in the heat and cooling your tongue with each lick, the water cerulean and glittering beneath your feet which—I hope—you are kicking back and forth against the wall, back and forth like playground swings, heels making satisfying contact that zooms each foot forward again, looking like the happiest six-year-old that you, in this moment, are.

“The delight of a pawpaw grove, in addition to its groveness, which is also a kind of naveness, is in learning how to spot the fruit, which hangs in clusters, often, and somewhat high in the tree. This encourages pointing, especially if you are not alone, a human faculty that deserves at least a little celebration, something I realized when I pointed toward a grape I had tossed in the direction of a dog to no effect, and then a few days later pointing at a bird for a baby to notice, same result. The pointing skill, pointing and following the point, is acquired (I wonder if there is a pointing stage), and is a miracle of cognition. A miracle to know there is an invisible line between the index finger and that barely discernible trio of fruit swaying way up in the canopy, blending into the leaves until they twist barely into the light, and out of it. There’s one, you whisper, lest they fly away.”

— Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

Sailing

Because travel is just regular life, displaced, regular things go wrong. A missed flight in Guadalajara, for example, is a lesson in how quickly expectations can plummet. You downshift from being annoyed at a delay—convinced the airline will have to do A LOT to win back your favor—to begging said airline for any ticket out of Mexico, at any price. There are pleading conversations in Spanish at every airline counter in which you learn that the next flight to Tijuana doesn’t leave for three more days, and eventually there are hundreds of dollars you didn’t plan to spend.

There will be other, more minor annoyances: bureaucratic hiccups due to a lost wallet, sitting immobile on tarmacs, the discomfort of long travel days. One morning, shortly after arriving in Spain, you fall under the spell of an unnamed virus. It pulls you down and keeps you pressed flat to the mattress for four days, never able to sleep enough, rolling in and out on the tides of fever dreams.

To be sick in this apartment feels like being seasick. You are wobbly and dizzy in the cabin of a bright white boat, sailing above the surfers and tourists on Zurriola Beach. You float above the world in a haze of half-consciousness. Through the windows you watch life go on, tides following the moon, sun rising and washing the room in too much light. One morning you dream you are bodyboarding a shorebreak and being dashed, again and again, into the sand. The light presses a fist into your head. You wake up sweating in the pool of sunshine, the white bed and the white walls burning in this small ship of a studio.

On the fourth day the fever is gone. When you stand up from bed your legs don’t shake; the floor has stopped rolling beneath you. The day is washed clean again after a rainstorm and sea air gusts down the narrow streets. You walk a slow circle around the neighborhood and duck into a corner store with crates of fruit stacked outside. You buy four peaches for one euro and carry their fragrance home in a paper bag. Standing at the window you eat slice after slice of peach, early summer breaking on your tongue.

Ciudad de Oaxaca

This is where we begin. Four months of travel stretch ahead and we start here, southern Mexico, in a city I’ve loved recklessly and disproportionately for years. Before we landed I wondered if the city could live up to the one I’d built from memories, but it was just like I remembered. Oaxaca feels like someone’s imagination of what Mexico is like: men carrying bouquets of spinning pinwheels and teenagers singing ballads on the terrazas and clusters of balloons waving among the zócalo’s trees; dust and heat and color and the smells of cologne, cleaning solution, tortillas cooked over the comal.

One night we left a mezcal tasting feeling light and buzzy and stepped into the warm evening. Crossing the street toward Santo Domingo church, we ducked through vendor booths selling gauzy blouses and the straw hats worn by every expat in the city. I was looking up at the trees, their flaming blossoms that fringed the plaza, then at the sky and its thin nail of a moon hanging high above. Wildfires smudged the sky brown during the day, but now that it was evening the smoke and low sun turned everything gold.

We paused at the edge of the plaza behind a crowd that extended for blocks. There was the murmur and movement of waiting: women bouncing toddlers, people with cameras raised, and a young man pulling plastic garlands of lollipops out of a box and distributing them benevolently to outstretched hands. In the center of the crowd, standing in the street, kids and teenagers stood at attention, dressed in white. They carried signs and flags and whirling shapes. It was a parade, just about to begin.

I looked at Davis, his hair getting long on top and a beard already growing out. He was wearing a shirt I loved: the navy one with a collar, the single “nice” shirt he packed on this trip. He turned to me and we shrugged at each other. “Want to watch for a bit?”

As we turned back to the parade the music began, a brass band led by a trumpet playing something that was not Banda and not mariachi but unmistakably, wonderfully Mexican. Two small boys with larger-than-life puppets on their shoulders began to spin, and the puppets seemed to dance in time with the music. Then the stream of people in the center of the crown surged forward, processing down the cobblestones to the cheers of the crowd. Davis and I cheered too, and became the same crowd holding our phones aloft to film, reaching out to catch the candy that parade members tossed into the air like jewels.

The group who garnered the most cheers was a group of children with Down syndrome who marched together, dressed in white linen shirts (the boys) and traditional dresses with red lipstick (the girls). They beamed at those of us watching, exuding delight, and I thought of the parents who had helped them dressed, who had braided hair and applied makeup to set their beauty on display.

The whole parade took just twenty minutes to pass us, and most of the crowd—likely family members and friends, followed the music and noise toward the zócalo. A blur of color and horns and candy and then it was quiet. Only in Oaxaca, I thought. We could only stumble on something like this in Oaxaca. Davis and I looked at each other, smiling, shaking our heads, and I knew he had felt it too: the city’s enchantment that resists words.

We walked up the steps to the plaza and sat under a tree facing Santo Domingo. A group of high school graduates dressed in robes and caps posed for portraits as a group. Then, as one, they took off their caps and tossed them into the air. Above us: moon, caps, sky. The caps rose like a rush of pigeon wings, spinning and then falling as the church bells tolled.

One Hundred Thousand Flames

My favorite story that I’ve written this year. I came to Greece to see refugees, and instead I met the people who will disciple Europe. Here’s an excerpt—you can read the full feature on Nations Media.

//

“On my first day in Athens, I climbed to the Acropolis with Easton, a photographer. On our way up the hill we stopped at a rocky outcrop overlooking the city. The outcrop sat in the shadow of the Acropolis and offered a panoramic view of Athens. Turning slow circles, Easton and I took in the cyprus trees, the flat sea of downtown, and the ruins interspersed between cafes and markets.

As we stood on the rock, we debated where Areopagus Hill—also called Mars Hill—stood. Areopagus is the hill where Paul preached his Acts 17 sermon to the Athenians. There he spoke about resurrection of the dead, liberation in Jesus, and a God who knew people intimately, a God not bound by temples made by human hands. Easton and I wanted to see it, having been told it was an essential stop in Athens. So with that very hill under our feet, we scanned the city, wondering if we could see Areopagus from our vantage point. No kidding. Standing on the rock itself, we were looking at the wrong thing.

Only after we returned from the Acropolis, sat down with €4 wine, and consulted Google Maps did we realize that we had stood where Paul stood two millennia before. Areopagus Hill was under our feet the whole time and we didn’t know it. We told each other we would go back later in the week, and that this time we’d know what we were looking at.

This is a story about what you see when you look again.”

Read more here.

For the Terrible Writing Days

Last Tuesday was a Terrible Writing Day. Lots of procrastinating, lots of despairing Art Feelings, lots of heavy sighing. I spent the afternoon “writing” a feature story, by which I mean that I rearranged the same sentences for three hours. Mostly: stops and starts, detours, much inward complaining.

I finally admitted defeat and went for a run to jar the words loose and…same. Starting, stopping, feeling sluggish.

As I plodded through Mission Hills, I passed a park where a little girl was playing soccer with her dad. The soccer ball came up to her knees and she was practically swimming in her Liverpool kit. She was small enough to walk through her dad’s legs without ducking. From the looks of it, he was teaching her to kick without success; girlfriend was not having it. He placed the ball in front of the goal and crouched next to it, windmilling his arms to encourage her forward. I could just picture what he hoped for: his toddler sprinting at the ball, scoring her first goal while he applauded. Instead she shuffled a few steps and stopped. Come on, he yelled. You got this. Head hanging, she managed a few more unenthusiastic steps toward the ball, which sat only a few feet from the goal. I thought, You and me both today.

As I ran, my inner toddler whined. Why is writing so hard? Why is running so hard? And why do they feel so similar? My friend Charlotte wrote a great satirical essay about how much writers who run love to write about running. It’s true, but there’s also an undeniable kindredness to the two. For example:

• Both activities are largely unpleasant while you’re doing them.

• Related: they feel best when they’re over.

• They require a lot of self-psyching-up, procrastination, sweat, and snacks.

• Writers and runners like talking about these activities more than doing them.

• Both train you to pay attention to the world, and to use your imagination.

• In both cases, if you know, then you know. Otherwise you seem crazy.

Halfway through the run I gave up tracking my pace and decided to enjoy the view instead. No epiphanies, but some pretty things, like a tree whose leaves were nearly neon, lit from within by sun. On my way down a hill I was pulled off the sidewalk by flowering weeds that rose up to my chest. A leprechaun hillside, with a path weaving through the weeds. All that green from ground that’s been fallow so long. I followed the trail and watched a chocolate lab’s tail sail through the grass like a ship’s mast. Everything shimmered and tickled my legs. As I walked I reminded myself of something I heard a friend say: A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.

And I thought of these words from a favorite book, even though I didn’t believe them at the time:

El trabajo es bien duro, no?
Si, pero el trabajo es bonito.

The work is hard, isn’t it?
Yes, but the work is beautiful.

Notes from the Munich airport

In February I was gone for what seemed like half the month, moving between Greece and San Diego and Durham and Mexico City and then back home to San Diego again. On one particularly long travel day I sat in the Munich airport, drinking a cappuccino and gearing up for the 12-hour flight ahead, having already taken one flight and woken up at 3:15 that morning.

The airport restaurant was vaguely Middle Eastern-themed, with clubby overtones and, jarringly, Latin pop playing through the speakers. Looking around as I scooped cappuccino foam with my finger, I thought: I love airports. I love the anonymity and introspection they offer, and I love the way they prompt me to pay attention.

Collected thoughts from that solo coffee break in the middle of the Munich airport:

Travel hands you the gift of fresh attention.

• This: Outside the airplane window, rock shelves become sliced loaves of bread dusted in a powder of snow, baked in the brown dusk. The unknown spread before me, anticipation dissolving on my tongue like sugar crystals.

• This: On the Athens metro, a woman stares unseeing at the murals of graffiti that flash by, her pupils flicking over each quadrant of color through the windows. Morning sun liquifies her eyes to amber as they jump back and forth, keeping time with the prayer beads that click through her seatmate's hands.

Travel hands you the gift of expanded imagination.

Moving closer—toward people, into foreign spaces, toward uncertainty—expands my imagination. It makes it impossible to slap generalizations onto the particular, concrete experiences and people I encounter. I’ve been thinking lately about these words: “If you want to change people’s obedience then you must change their imagination” (Paul Ricoeur).

How much more compelling is story, is conversation, is an interaction with a human than any argument one can make.