Writing – Lofty Minded in Alaska

An October letter

Hello dear friends,

It’s been a while since I’ve sent a letter out into the world. Not that I haven’t tried. Over the past month or so, I’ve started writing a letter on three different occasions, but in the end they didn’t feel right. There wasn’t anything wrong with what I’d written, per se, but they didn’t really do what I wanted them to do.

I don’t think this is just me being a perfectionist. Writing those unsent letters was time well spent as they got me closer to being able to write this one. We’ll see if this one will make the cut. I feel good about it so far, like maybe I’m finally getting back to center after a summer that knocked me out of balance.

In the letters I didn’t send I wrote about all the summer things. Most everything about my summer was good – camping trips, family visits, farmer’s markets, music festivals, late night dinners with friends, gardening, making fireweed tea – but there were some tough moments, too. Times when I didn’t feel quite as happy as I was pretending to be, and those times are harder to write about. Leaving them out didn’t quite feel honest, though. So I had to rethink my approach to this kind of open letter.

The site of this summer’s family camping trip. Kenai Lake, AK

What I’m realizing now is that these letters aren’t meant to be me telling you about how I’ve filled my days. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) They’re not meant to be newsletters. Rather, I’d like to think of them as connecting points. A moment for me to sit down and say, hey, I’m still out here. My life is busy and full the way yours probably is too, but there’s a whole side of life that isn’t about how busy we are. There’s a side that feels things and tries to make sense of all the nonsensical things we’re witnessing. There’s a side that tries to cope with difficult situations and hard realities.

Of course there are authentically beautiful moments, like this morning: It’s not yet noon as I’m sitting down to this letter and I’ve already spent a few hours reading and writing. Before that, just after rolling out of bed, I took our pup out for a walk in the dark. I forgot to charge the headlamp before we headed out, so I switched it off for several minutes during our walk in order to conserve the battery.

It was quiet out except for a couple of owls hooting back and forth to each other and our feet stepping on the wet gravel and dirt road. The air was cool and damp, no wind. Close to home I could see a few lights from neighboring houses, further away I could see boats on the harbor and the Homer Spit. And stars. In the dark I trusted my pup’s nose to warn me if he noticed anything that I couldn’t see or hear. It was a hit to my senses, considering I’d been snug in my bed just ten minutes earlier.

When I got back home there was a hot drink waiting for me, and Dean had lit a fire in the wood stove. After filling his belly and a walk, our energetic pup was ready to curl up and sleep for a couple of hours, which allowed for the uninterrupted reading and writing time. A rare gift, these days.

Now the sun’s out after two days of intense winds and rain and I’m sitting at my kitchen table looking out the back window at blue sky and the fall landscape, which is beautiful right now in mid-October.

This blissful morning feeling is heightened, no doubt, by the fact that I have nowhere I have to go for the next three days.

You see I feel my best when I have plenty of time at home to read and write, when I have time to get outside and get my blood pumping. I’m happiest when I have time to cook good food and make things from the wild things that grow around here, when I have time to play and listen to music, when I get to choose what I want to do by my mood, the weather, by what sounds most interesting. There’s always plenty to do here, but I when I get to go at my own pace on projects of my own choosing, it doesn’t always feel like work.

I can rise to the occasion when life pulls me in directions that take me away from my center – the way it does here in the summer – but I deeply appreciate when I can center more of my energy toward home. I guess I appreciate a simple life.

I’m not sure that adding a puppy to our lives at the height of summer was the best idea as far as simplicity goes, but that’s what we did. His name is Zuki and we adopted him on July 4^th. Our routines have been adjusted to fit his every need and in return he makes us laugh on days that might otherwise remain very serious. He’s easier going than our previous two dogs and as much as we loved them we’re thankful Zuki likes everyone he meets and wants very much to be a Very Good Boy. He gets us out walking multiple times a day, too, which has its benefits. Watching Dean interact with him has confirmed to me that I am married to a man who should probably always have a dog.

Last month marked 21 years of me working at the Homer Public Library, and lately I’ve been thinking about how the one job has taken me through so many different versions of myself. When I first started my job I was the mom of two adolescents trying to juggle work and parenting and finishing up my bachelor’s degree. My passion at the time was learning to play fiddle. Over time, my kids grew up and went to college and Hawaii and Canada and have had various other adventures. I earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. Dean earned a couple of black belts and changed jobs a few times. Now we’ve got a small garden business.

All of this happened while my day job has pretty much stayed the same. It’s funny how life can look the same from year to year on the surface, but really there’s a lot going on underneath. I guess that’s true of the library, too. Most of the books that were on the shelves when I started there all those years ago have been replaced with new ones. The staff has changed. The things we offer and the way we go about doing things is different than it used to be.

There have been times when I’ve wanted to mix it up, when I’ve kept an eye out for a different gig, but this morning when I was reading I remembered the one unchanging thing I’ve loved about my job from the very beginning, which is the constant exposure I have to so many incredible books; books that I might never have seen if I hadn’t spent so much of my life at the library, books that people have dedicated years of their lives to researching and writing, books that have changed my perception and deepened my empathy, books that have taken me to places that my physical body will never visit, books that have put words to truths that I myself couldn’t quite articulate.

There is no end, really, when you start down the book path: it’s endless, expansive, multi-layered, always unfolding. And that’s just the books. Add things like the ocean, and mountains, and human innovation… Add something as big as the idea of God.

You can see why I need some quiet time at home and out in nature just to let all of it settle into my being, to help me discover who it is I’m supposed to be in the enormity of it all. You can also see why I’ve stayed at the library for twenty-one years.

A view from our daily walk. Kachemak Bay, AK

Since books are on my mind, I might as well mention a few standouts that I’ve read since the last time I wrote.

*My favorite book of the year so far is Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape by Manchan Magan. There is so much I could say about this book, but ‘expansive’ is the one word that comes to mind that best encapsulates it. It’s a series of short essays about the Irish language—its history, its origins, its depth, its magic. I borrowed the library copy for my first reading, then I ordered a copy for myself and for a friend so that we can discuss it. If any of you have read it I’d love to hear your thoughts because I’m wondering if this book was uniquely impactful to me, or if it has hit others with a similar strength.

*A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain. This book, as the subtitle suggests, is for writers, and I’m not sure why it’s not more well-known. Cain is excellent at naming the things that writers do that often go unnamed, and she gives examples—one after another—of novels, plays, films, paintings, etc., that illustrate what she’s naming. If I were teaching a creative writing class, I’d use this as one of the required texts. (Note: This is one of the ones I read from this morning. I found it a couple of weeks ago when I was looking for books to weed from the library collection. It was purchased in 2023 and had never been checked out! How many other gems are out there, hidden in the library stacks?)

*Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf & Christian Wiman – True confession: Sometimes I read theology books for fun. That’s because I am consumed with big questions about God, the Universe, Divinity, etc., and in fact I find it soothing and hopeful and challenging to contemplate such things. Reading the letters back and forth between the two authors was akin to listening in on a private, honest, and heartfelt conversation between two friends that are seeking deeper truths. There is so much good material in this book for the right person.

*And the last book I’ll mention is Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. As you can probably see from my book list, I tend to read more nonfiction than fiction, but when I do read a work of fiction as lovely as Small Things Like These, it grabs hold of my heart in a way that nonfiction rarely does. This book is short and I read it in a couple of afternoons when we were camping this summer. It’s beautifully written and it made me want to try my hand at writing fiction again, but more importantly, it’s about a man whose moral compass gave him no choice but to do the right thing. It seems like the kind of story the world needs right now. Some of you have probably already read this book, or seen the movie by the same title? I’m curious about the movie, but I don’t want to watch it if it’s not excellent.

Alright, this letter is already longer than I meant for it to be. (See what happens when I don’t write for a long time?) I’ll wrap it up now with a sincere hope that you are well. Thanks for being out there and for clicking on the link that brought you this letter. I’d love to know what’s been on your hearts and minds lately, what you’ve been reading, or anything else you might like to share. (my email address is tsundmark@protonmail.com)

And now after full day of writing, I’ve finally got a letter that feels like maybe it’s the right one to send.

I’ll post it now, before I change my mind.

With love,

Teresa

Here’s a song I heard randomly on Radio Paradise a few weeks ago. The lyrics are what got my attention. – Two Twins by Switchfoot

February 2026: A Snow Moon Letter

Dear Friends,

Since my last letter, I’ve received so many kind notes and in-person condolences. I’ve had phone messages and emails and a few hugs that cut through all the layers of talk and went straight to the heart. Something inside me must have known that I needed all of that, but now I know for sure that I did. To not feel alone, to not have to carry the heaviness of loss on my own, to know that grief is something we all share… it’s made me feel like I’ve got a place among you, and what we all need is to belong. So, thank you.

It’s an interesting thing that I’m doing, writing a letter to anyone who will read it, and I’m still trying to figure out why I feel compelled to do this. Maybe it’s an experiment in community. Maybe it’s just a free form way for me to write when I don’t always know what I want to say. Maybe it’s me reaching out a hand in invitation, saying, let’s do this thing together, let’s find something in common, let’s go wherever this takes us.

I don’t know why it took me so long to discover this, but in the last couple of years I’ve learned that I have a hard time looking people in the eye. I can have a conversation with just about anyone, and obviously I’m not afraid of sharing things about myself with others, but looking at someone else’s eyeballs kind of freaks me out. I watch people’s mouths when I talk to them and if I happen to make eye contact it almost stings. I immediately avert my gaze. Since becoming aware of this I’ve been working on looking at peoples’ eyes when I talk to them, but it’s not an easy thing for me to do. It feels like a fragility on my part. What is it I’m afraid of seeing? What is it that I’m afraid others might see in me?

There’s that whole notion of eyes being the window into another person’s soul, and I think there might be something to that, and that might just be what’s jarring to me about looking someone in the eye. When I make eye contact with another person, I sense that there’s an energetic connection, like a spark, and it startles me. Maybe I need to learn to stay in that uncomfortable space until it’s no longer uncomfortable. Maybe I need to learn to trust myself with that kind of energetic exchange because it feels kind of powerful. I’m curious to know if anyone else experiences this.

I think I’m going down this rabbit hole because writing these letters feels a lot like baring my soul, and yet it doesn’t freak me out. Maybe letter writing is my love language. Maybe it’s my attempt to make eye contact.

Anyhow, I hope there is something about these letters that makes you feel seen.

It’s been more than a couple of weeks now since that life-altering day I wrote about in my last letter. Without a dog, our house is quiet in a way it hasn’t been in the 35 years that Dean and I have been married. The temptation is to rush out and get another puppy but we’re trying to make ourselves wait a while. There are a few trips we’d like to take before we take on the responsibility of another dog, and this kind of quiet might actually be good for us to experience. At least that’s what we’re telling ourselves.

Also in the two weeks since I last wrote you, I’ve been to Florida and back. I’m still recovering from the trip and feeling a little raw from the mix of emotions that came from gathering with family to say goodbye to my nephew. After being with his mom and sisters and attending his memorial, I know more about him now than I knew before. The thing I heard over and over again from his family and friends is that Ellijah was a person who showed up for other people. When people needed him, he was there. It made me think about the people in my life who show up and it made me think about what it means to be a person who shows up.

I went to Florida because I needed to go, and somehow I thought that need was for my sister and her girls. In retrospect though, I needed to go for myself. I needed to remind myself that I belong to a family. We all started out in Colorado together, but over time we’ve scattered around the country. We’ve moved away from each other in non-geographic ways as well – politically, religiously, culturally – but when we were all in a room together I felt at home, and at peace. I didn’t know I needed that, but I did.

One highlight of the weekend was when we gathered for brunch the day after Ellijah’s memorial. Cousins, sisters, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, parents, grandparents, friends, brothers, aunts, uncles all together around one long table. The little boys ran around the table with their toy car and dinosaur, and my niece’s beautiful baby got passed around to anyone who wanted a turn holding her. The waitstaff at the restaurant were endlessly patient with us, and kind, and for a few hours we had the time to just be together. None of us took it for granted, because who knows how much time will pass before we’re all able to share space like that again.

It’s mysterious the way things work; that tragedies can bring about healing, that new and beautiful relationships can blossom after loss, that priorities can come into focus when your heart is broken. It’s true personally and I have to hope that it’s true collectively.

And how are you holding up? What are you doing to take care of yourself these days? Do you have any good books to recommend? Any podcasts or music that’s helping you get through the intensity of this particular moment in time? I started listening to The Overstory by Richard Powers when I was traveling. It’s been recommended to me more times than I can count but I put it off because I haven’t been drawn to reading much fiction over the past few years. Of course it’s as good as everyone said it is and the writing is a miracle. Maybe it will launch me back into a fiction reading phase again. I hope so.

We’re in the middle of a dreary weather pattern here with no sunshine icons at all in the ten day weather forecast. I’ll try to dig deep and find some of that inner light to get me through; lots of hot tea, yoga, jumping on the rebounder I bought last winter, and as many beach walks as I can fit in. It’s a good time for garden planning and tea packaging, and of course for writing. We’re halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox now and we’re gaining almost five minutes of daylight every day-even if it is behind a thick layer of clouds. Already our slow days of winter are feeling numbered, so I might as well embrace them.

Have I told you yet that I appreciate you reading these letters? I hope this one finds you engaged in something meaningful and encouraged about some aspect of your life. I hope it finds you rising above the intensity of current events. I hope it finds you well-cared-for and well-fed and at peace. But if you’re not feeling or doing your best, that’s okay, too. Don’t be hard on yourself. Let yourself rest. Know that I’m rooting for you.

Thank you for being out there and for reading my ramblings, and if you feel so inclined, I’d love to hear from you. And if this letter encourages you to reach out to someone else, that’d be cool too.

Take good care until next time.

With love,

Teresa

And just a few more things:

*I’d love to share these letters with as many friends as possible, so please feel free to share this with some of your friends. Also, if you’re not already subscribed to receive an email every time I publish, please consider doing so. It’s free and will remain so.

* The family brunch I described above reminded me of this song and it’s been playing in my head ever since. ‘Crowded Table’ by The Highwomen. You might enjoy it, too.

*I’m a sucker for note cards and stationary and just because I write these letters online doesn’t mean I won’t find an excuse to go to the Homer Bookstore and buy pretty things to write on.

Peter Pauper Press, Inc. Copyright 2020 Illustration by Terri Foss

Illuminate: A ten-day journal series

I count myself lucky to work in a place that’s a three minute drive to the beach. Often on my lunch break I pull on the mud boots I stash under my desk, grab my sack lunch, and head down to the shore. Most days I eat in the car and then head out walking. As soon as my feet hit the sand I feel like I’ve entered a different realm.

A person might go to the beach for any number of reasons. Sometimes after a big storm people drive out and fill their truck beds with coal for burning. Between September and April people might show up with buckets to collect seaweed for their garden beds. Friends of mine go to the beach once a month to plunge into the cold ocean. I say I want to join them, but haven’t mustered up the will quite yet. I usually go to the beach just to wander, and see what I might find.

Each beach excursion is different. There might be a calm drizzle or a raging wind, brilliant sun reflecting off the water or dense fog. The tide is either high or low or somewhere in the middle. Some days I might only have a few minutes, other days I might have a good long time. One day the beach will be crowded with people and dogs, other times it’s nearly empty.

It’s often cool and breezy and I find it tempting to stay in the car to keep myself separate from the elements, but always, even on the rough weather days, once I’m out there I don’t regret my choice to feel the ocean’s influence on my body and soul, even if it’s only for a moment. That’s because the beach is a place for receiving gifts. Some of them are physical, but more often I come away with something that’s much more difficult to articulate. How do you describe the effect of fresh salt air, the sound of waves on rocks, the company of birds, the long expanses, the being near something so vast and alive as the ocean?

When I go back to work after spending time at the beach, I’ve brought some of its offerings with me. I breathe easier. I’m better able to focus. I have fresh ideas and a new perspective. I’ve got color in my cheeks and a sense of calm and connection.

What do I feel connected to? Myself, I suppose, but also something beyond myself. I’m not just a person who goes here and there and exists on the planet alongside everyone else, I’m a part of the whole big system, and for me, puzzling about the whole big system—what it is and what my role in it might be—is the stuff that makes life interesting. It’s the driving force behind my writing.

And that brings me to my journal.

I do a lot of writing, and I share a small percentage of it here, but I consider the writing I do in my journal as the real writing. It’s the place where the inner work is done. It’s where I suss out questions and consider multiple answers. It’s where I question my beliefs and test the soundness of my opinions. It’s where I vent my frustrations and scheme about new ideas and imagine a brighter future. It’s where I give myself pep-talks and muster up the courage to do the things that are required to live the kind of life I want to live. It’s where I toss around new business ideas and evaluate their pros and cons. It’s where I’ve found empathy and ultimately forgiveness for the people I’ve needed to forgive, including myself.

On the pages of my journals are prayers for the people I know and love. Prayers for the whole of humanity, for the state of the world and for the planet that supports our existence. There are to-do lists, recipes I don’t want to forget, and anecdotes and snippets of conversations I’ve overheard. There are poorly written song lyrics and descriptions of places I wish I could teleport back to. On the pages of my journal I’ve imagined conversations with my dad and my grandparents who’ve been gone from my life now for a good many years. These conversations are made up, but often they bring back memories that are real, the sound of a voice, a specific gesture, a funny trait, a remembrance of what it felt like to be in their presence.

What I’ve discovered is that the way I feel after writing in my journal isn’t so different than the way I feel after I’ve spent some time at the beach. Each day the writing is different, but always when I’m done I feel a sense of calm. I feel connected. And often I’ve been given a memory or an idea or a vision of the future that feels very much like a gift. Where does that gift come from? What is it I feel connected to? Well, those are the kinds of questions I love asking on the pages of my journal.

For me journal writing has become a practice, and without hesitation I can say that it’s made my life better. I could continue to go on about it, but what I really want is for you to try it for yourself, or maybe get back into the habit. I want you to experience the way writing can change the way you see the world, the way it can open your heart and inspire your attention, even if you never share a word of it with anyone else.

I’d like to invite you to join me for ten days of journal writing, starting on the first day of November. Early each day I’ll send an email that will include some writing prompts along with a bit of encouragement, and then you’ll take it from there. That’s all there is to it.

If you’d like to participate in this ten day journaling series, let me know you’re interested by sending an email to tsundmark@protonmail.com and I’ll add your name to the list and send you a quick confirmation. Then you’ll hear from me again just before we get started. It’s free to join and there are no strings attached. At the end of the series there will an opportunity to offer a gift payment if you’ve found the experience meaningful, but absolutely nothing is required. For me this is about connection, and I’d love to have you join me.

Five-Acre Almanac: Eastering

Week 37

I don’t think about it much anymore, but when we bought this property we were recovering from a bad decision. Without going into too much detail I will just say that before we landed here we had a bed and breakfast in town. It all looked good on paper when we bought it and we did our best to run it for a couple of years, but we were young, we were in over our heads, and the stress of trying to maintain it and keep up with the demands of guests and two small children nearly tore us apart. We reached a point where we had to make a choice between getting a return on our financial investment by sticking it out, or count our losses before we lost more than just money.

Our daughter was born at our bed and breakfast home on Thanksgiving. It was a fast and easy birth and after our midwife and doula left, Dean and I found ourselves sitting on the couch with a newborn and a toddler and it was there in the dark hours of that early Thanksgiving morning that we decided we had to make a change. It took a while to extricate ourselves from that house and business, but when we finally did we were nothing but relieved.

When we saw this simple house on five acres of land it seemed like a place where we could begin again, and thankfully we still had enough money left to make a down payment.

There’s a lot of shame involved in losing money and it’s not something we’ve talked much about with other people. But as the story goes, we had a chunk of money from an inheritance and then we lost most of it and then we spent a lot of years of our lives beating ourselves up over those losses.

Once I took a writing workshop from Luis Alberto Urrea and he said that forgiving our former selves is one of life’s most difficult tasks, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard truer words. But I can say that it’s worth the effort it takes to do so.

Now our lives seem so sane. Our children are grown. We have steady jobs and enough time to pursue the things we love. The dreams we had when we bought this piece of property have been slow to come, but they are coming. I say all of this because sometimes the way it’s all working out still surprises me. Our grown children still seem to love us despite our imperfect parenting. While money is not growing on any of the trees we’ve got around here, we can pay our bills and afford the inevitable car repairs and winter tires. We’ve got steady jobs and friends and family members who’ve got our backs. We’ve still got each other too, which wasn’t always a given.

One of my favorite novels from the last couple of years is This is Happiness by Niall Williams. Besides being exquisitely written, it’s an homage to a simple life. It takes place in Ireland and it’s told from the perspective of a young man living with his grandparents in a small village during the time when electric lines were making their way to the rural parts of the country. There is a custom in the springtime of the year in which all of the villagers’ household belongings are taken outside and set in the yard for a good airing out in the sun. Then the empty houses are scrubbed clean. The cleaning and airing out is to prepare for the Easter holiday and the custom itself is called Eastering.

We’re not quite at that stage of the game here. Our yard still has too much snow and where the snow has melted the ground is mushy. But the scene from that book stays with me. I imagine the house would smell like freshly laundered sheets and sunshine after that kind of a cleaning. And I try to imagine a life so unencumbered by stuff that it would be an easy enough task to haul all of our belongings out into the yard in an afternoon. Mostly I love the idea of letting air and sunshine work their way through all the indoor things that are prone to dust and darkness.

Journaling for me is a form of Eastering. With each entry I haul out something from inside myself that could use a little fresh air and sunlight. When it’s laid out on the page I can see the dings and the dust. More importantly I can see how small it is when it’s juxtaposed against a larger landscape. Once it’s no longer cluttered inside the shadowland of my interior self, there’s space for me to do some cleaning. Or forgiving, as the case may be.

Then, once I’ve looked at whatever it is in a different light and from a few different angles I can decide what to do with it next. I might choose to let it go or I might decide to hold onto it differently. I might file it into a new category or I might connect it to things that at one time seemed unrelated. But after each airing out I’m ready to begin again, which is what we all do. We begin, and then we begin again, and hopefully as we look at the pieces of our lives that brought us to where we are now, we’re able to offer ourselves and each other some grace.

Fire safety/improved view/next winter’s heat all wrapped into one job.

Five-Acre Almanac: Winter Ready

Week 11

Today has been a chicken-soup sort of Sunday. The two inches of snow that we woke up to is turning to slush in the rain and while that’s the sort of weather that’s not welcome in January, I’m just fine with it in October. Most likely we’re going to have plenty of snow for several months and I’m not in any hurry for it to pile up. Plus I’d still like to rake some leaves and dried grasses to store in the greenhouse for chicken coop bedding.

Earlier this week I started making a plan for myself for the winter. I don’t typically get depressed or experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD), but that’s not to say that six-month long winters aren’t hard. It doesn’t hurt to go into the season with a few intentions.

One thing I’m going to do is try to get outside every day for at least twenty minutes. I realize this doesn’t sound like much, but it can be tricky when it’s dark before and after work. And it’s so easy to be a wimp when it’s super cold, or raining sideways, or when everything is covered in a sheet of ice, or when the snow is too deep, or when it’s just gray and dreary and I’d rather be inside by the wood stove. But I always feel better with fresh air and often it’s not as bad outside as it looks like it’s going to be. And even when it is bad, I think it’s good to experience a little weather now and then. It can wake me up, shift my energy, change my mood.

The next tool I’m going to use to help me through winter is yoga. I’ve tried doing yoga in the mornings but between a cold house, demanding dogs, and a job I have to go to, evenings work best. It feels good to put on some music and stretch out on the floor in a cozy living room after a long work day, and it almost always leads to a good night’s sleep. I’ve done this for the past couple of winters and now it’s a part of the dark season I look forward to.

One of the simplest and most satisfying aspects of recent winters has been incorporating the food and herbs that we’ve grown or foraged during the summer into our daily lives. Whether it’s adding black currants to our oatmeal, drinking a cup of nettle tea in the afternoons, or simmering garlic and hot wax peppers in chicken broth for a good long time like we did today, we’re able to take in good Jing from the garden with nearly every meal. It’s satisfying and nourishing on a deep level. It keeps us feeling connected to our land during a time of year when it’s easy to fantasize about selling it all and moving down south to where winters are short and where a day’s light and darkness are more evenly balanced.

There are other things that help with winter. A couple of hours of standing around a fire pit with friends can reaffirm that we’re glad to live where we live. Taking Vitamin D regularly keeps us from wanting to sleep all the time. Music can change the atmosphere in the house, which is especially helpful during long, dreary stretches of being mostly indoors. And after the frenetic summer season I appreciate that winter offers time for deep dives into things more cerebral.

I’ve been learning about herbs for the past couple of winters, and this year we’ve got a new one to try. Rhodiola rosea is an adaptogen which means its main medicinal purpose is to assist the body in adapting to stress. According to Beverly Grey’s informative and comprehensive book The Boreal Herbal: Wild Food and Medicine Plants of the North, it’s also supposed to help with fatigue and depression and can “bring relief to people who live in extreme climates.” In nature it grows in harsh alpine conditions and for the past four years we’ve had some that’s been growing and thriving in our dry and often-neglected hugelkultur bed. It takes a few years before Rhodiola is ready to harvest, but finally this fall it was time. We pulled its long and tentacle-like roots out of the soil, chopped it and dried it, and now for a month we’re going to engage in a little citizen science and drink a cup of it daily to see if we can see any noticeable effects.

Rhodiola rosea’s roots are yellow and they smell like the wild Sitka roses that grow around here. The decoction that’s made from simmering the roots is rose colored with a mild citrus flavor. It’s a little dry too, like dry wine. Because it’s so tasty it would be easy to drink too much of it, which I think I might have done earlier in the week because for three nights in a row I woke up at 3:30am and had trouble going back to sleep. When I cut the amount of tea I was drinking in half I slept fine.

Learning about herbs from books is a good place to start, but I’m equally as interested in the traditions and stories that go along with them. Trying them out on myself is a lesson in paying attention to subtleties, asking questions, making adjustments, and still not knowing definitively if a specific herb is having a specific effect on me. But it seems like a good way to practice honing my intuition and getting to know specific plants. If I were truly committed to scientific testing I’d give up coffee and just drink the rhodiola tea to try to isolate its effects, but coffee is another thing that helps me through winter.

For now I’ll study the two together, and I’ll try to get enough sleep and exercise. I’ll try to consume plenty of good jing but hopefully not too much. I’ll keep showing up here every week too, because writing this feels like movement, like I’m heading somewhere new. And sharing it feels like I’m throwing out a net, gathering people to travel along with me for a while. I can’t have you all over for a cup of coffee or a pot of herb tea, but I can write you here. And when we’re done with our imaginary drinks we can put on our rubber boots and rain jackets and head out into the storm. I’d love nothing more than to show you around.

Morning tea beside the old birch, a day before the snow.

Something to Say

You’d rather write about the charming side of your town, and for the most part you do. But this week your town has shown its not-so-charming side. Two brothers aged eighteen and twenty were arrested for sexual assault. A number of other young people are afraid that they might be next because they were at the party where the alleged assault took place—with cameras in hand. A young person was victimized; his life altered. And so you want to write about your town and what it’s going through because people are shaken up about it. But where do you start? Your children are the same age as these children. They’ve known some of them since preschool.

You want to write about the mother you spoke to today whose fourteen-year-old daughter was groped at her first high school dance, a place you’d expect her to be safe. You want to write about how strange it is, adolescence. How that window of time between trading Pokemon cards and being hormonally charged is so small, so small that you barely have time to catch your breath. You want to talk about this terrible thing that happened in your town like it’s an isolated incident but this is nothing new and your town is not unique. You write about your town and you write about every town and a culture that has allowed it to go on and on and on. You write about how it was going on when you were in middle school and the boys chased you at recess and knocked you onto the grass and stuck their hands up your shirt and you write about it now because back then you didn’t tell anyone because you had it in your mind that it was just playful playground fun—even though it didn’t feel like fun to you.

You want to write about all of this and more, but putting it in words is difficult. The thoughts are coming from so many different places and what you need to do is set the thoughts aside for a while and write from that place in your gut that’s holding it all in. You want to write and you don’t want to write because it’s going to take you places you’ve been avoiding. It’s going to take you places that you’ve held in secret for about thirty years and it’s going to make you feel vulnerable because somehow you still have it in your head that it was your fault, that you put yourself in a bad situation and so ultimately you are responsible. You hate feeling vulnerable.

You’re going to say things about boys that have most likely grown in to decent human beings, stellar community members, charitable donors to their local nonprofits. But you decide to write it now because it’s the only way you can express what’s going on inside of you when you hear about these two young men who have been arrested for sexual assault.

You knew boys like those boys in your school days. They were the kids the teachers liked. They were the kids you liked. They played basketball and football. They were witty and popular and you wanted their attention so badly. And so when they gave it to you it felt like a privilege. You with the crooked teeth, that lived on the wrong side of town, that had a step-father who wouldn’t talk to you and a father who never called wanted the attention of those boys and when they gave it you certainly didn’t want to tell them no. And so they asked you to hang out with them after school one day and you said yes and it never occurred to you that you’d be the only girl. And you went with them anyhow because you didn’t know not to trust them. You went to one of the boys’ houses a few blocks from school. His dad was home and so you went instead into their camp trailer that was parked in their front yard. You don’t remember much about the camp trailer, just being shoved down on a little folding bed, and someone undoing your pants and another someone pulling them off your legs and there was laughing and you didn’t know you were crying until you felt the tears running down the side of your face and one of them put his head to your privates and said things and did things that in your naivety you never knew were things to do and the humiliation was more than you could bear and so when it was over you laughed along with them and pretended it was no big deal and then you walked home, alone and ashamed. At home you ate dinner and watched Three’s Company with your mom and your little sister and your silent step-dad. You talked on the phone with your friend for a while and you never said a word about what happened because you thought somehow you should have seen it coming. You should have known not to go with them. You should have been smarter. You should have been prettier because the boys probably didn’t do that to the prettiest girls. You should have, you should have, you should have and it never even occurred to you until several years later that the should-haves weren’t yours to own.

And so you want to write about your town and what it’s going through, because what your town is going through is a terrible thing. But it’s been going on for ages. The humiliating, the bullying, the assaulting, the tricking, the teasing, the hurting. All of is has been going on in varying degrees in every town. Your town is not unique. The actions the two boys in your town have been accused of are not so uncommon. What’s uncommon is their being called on it. Victims blame themselves. They try to protect their dignity and even their assailants with silence because the assailants are the good guys; they’re popular, the teachers like them, they make your town look good on the playing field. But silence is more terrible than truth. It perpetuates the belief that it’s okay. It’s okay to rape a girl if she’s wearing a short skirt. It’s okay to mess with the drunk kid. It’s okay to tease the kid with a learning disability. It’s okay to shame a girl for having sex. It’s okay to shame a boy for not having sex. It’s okay to beat up the gay kid. It’s okay to pull the pants off the girl who was stupid enough to follow you into the camp trailer.

It has to end somewhere. At some point you have to say enough. It’s not okay. And sure, what your town is going through is a difficult thing, but it’s necessary. It’s breaking the pattern of silence.

You write about it now, not because you want attention or sympathy. You write about it now because there is this hope that by not brushing a society’s dark secrets aside, by saying something, by doing something, you’ll make a difference. You write about it now because when you were thirteen you couldn’t articulate the truth of the matter: it’s not okay to hurt someone, grope someone, touch someone without consent even if they’re passed out drunk, even if they’ve flirted with you, even if they’ve wandered off with you. You write because you hope for a future where open communication reigns and where victims don’t feel responsible for the actions perpetrated against them. You write because there should be no excuses and no free passes when it comes to harming another human being. You write, not because you have any answers, but because you have something to say. You believe that when it comes to teaching respect and dignity we all have something to say.

A Gathering of Writers

The Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference happened this past weekend and I’m taking the day to recover and reflect. This year I didn’t just attend the conference; I really did the conference. I didn’t skip any sessions. I went to the evening readings. I even socialized after hours instead of rushing home to the solitude of my home. I wish I had it in me to write up something cohesive to describe the weekend, but since I’m still feeling whooped and I need to save my writing energy for some revising that needs to be done over the next couple of days, I’ll stick to bullet points.

Here are few things that are sticking with me from the 2012 Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference:

Barry Lopez started things off with an incredible keynote address. He asked the question, “What is the purpose of a writer in a pluralistic society?” Then he wound around to the answer he’s come up with for himself which is that the writer’s job is to help. So that leaves me asking, am I helping anyone or anything in any way? Am I telling stories that need telling?

Ann Pancake discussed the tricky territory of writing fiction that delves into political issues. It’s difficult, she said, but when it’s done the right way it has the potential to dispel psychic numbing. I think of The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, a book that I just finished reading for the first time this week. It was relavent when it was written and its relavent today. It’s a book that has helped.

Valerie Miner, one of University of Alaska Anchorage’s MFA faculty members, suggests that we are all literary citizens. She offered ideas of how to keep the literary conversation going, one of which was simply to take one another’s writing more seriously. And that’s one of the beautiful things about this conference; writing is shared, discussed, taught and discovered in a supportive, friendly, noncompetitive environment. Warm fuzzies pretty much all around.

Peggy Shumaker. Alaska is beyond fortunate to have Peggy as the State Writer Laureate. Her generosity, professionalism and kindness are a blessing. In her closing address she admonished us to look out for one another—and nobody looks out for writers the way Peggy looks out for writers.

Back to Barry Lopez. He says to know exactly why you’re writing. It’s necessary to have a solid understanding of your purpose as a base for the rejection you will face. Yikes, but true. This leads me back to the forever question of why do I do this? My answer is forming and changing all the time. He also says that writing is not about intelligence. It’s about telling a memorable story. And for some reason I find that statement incredibly comforting.

Then there are the other, non-classroomy things: I got to hear longtime acquaintances from the library read their work at the open mic and in hearing them discovered a side to them I would likely never have known had I not been there. I ran into an old friend—one I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade—and we had the chance to get caught up with each other’s lives. And of course I got to see lots of my MFA cronies.

The last thing I’ll mention is the bonfire. It was just what I needed after three days of sitting. The wind died down, the rain held off and the bay was calm. Children of attendees ran around, drinks were shared, stories were swapped and music was played. Amy brought her ukulele, Ed brought a guitar, TJ brought his banjo and I brought my fiddle. Since the three of them are infinitely more musically versatile than I am we were able to play tunes into the night. It was a great convergence of a few things that I love.

The 2012 Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference was a great gathering and next year will be too. I mean, Naomi Shihab Nye will be the keynote speaker. Can it get any better than that? Hopefully I’ll see you there.

photo courtesy of N. Seely — Kachemak Bay Bonfire

Montana, music and the New Year

It’s the beginning of a new year—one that will be different for sure in our family. Dillon will be heading up to UAA in a couple of weeks and in the fall Adella will be going to high school in Montana for her junior year. The house will be emptying out a little sooner than I had expected, at least temporarily, and anticipating that change gives me a different perspective on the present. Suddenly spending quality time with my family feels kind of urgent, and yet I’m finding that teenagers don’t necessarily feel the same way. I’m trying to guard against being too sentimental.

It was challenging to stay caught up with my writing in December, so one of my biggest goals for the new year is to start acting like a serious graduate student again. I’m not so far behind that I can’t get caught up, but I have to find the time to write and then use that time wisely. I’m not sorry that I took a break though. I had a great visit with my mom and two older sisters earlier in the month when they came to see Homer’s version of The Nutcracker and the holidays, with everyone at home, have been great.

A little break from writing has been nice, but I’m ready to face the new year now. I find that I’m a bit of a New Year’s geek, always getting introspective and thinking about what I want to change about my life with the change of the calendar. I can’t decide if it’s optimism that makes me this way or if it’s chronic dissatisfaction with the status quo. Either way, I always seem to want to try harder, tweak a few of my habits and generally work on self-improvement.

Last year was great in many regards. I started an MFA program that I’m excited about. I cut my sugar consumption way down. Things are good with my family. But I can see that I unintentionally cut back on a couple of things that bring me a lot of joy.

I went a whole summer without going camping or stepping foot in our skiff—and summers in Alaska are way too short to not get out and enjoy the nature that’s all around. I live in a beautiful place, with a stunning view of the mountains and the bay, but sometimes I need to leave my five acres and get out there. That has to be a priority this year.

The other thing that I didn’t make enough time for in 2011 was music. For the past decade I’ve made playing music a huge part of my life, and it’s one of the things that fills me up. It gives me what I need to go about my less than exciting life of driving around, going to work, doing dishes, cooking dinner. And as much as I love writing, it doesn’t do the same thing for me. Music takes me out of my head. When I get together with friends to play tunes I lighten up. I drink a little. I crack jokes. When I’m alone and I work on learning new tunes it’s a lot like meditation. My mind is clear for a while of all my responsibilities.

I love writing, and it gives me fulfillment in a different way, but it’s heady stuff. When I’m concentrating on writing I tend to take myself a little too seriously. I need to find a better balance.

So my hope for 2012 is to make time for music. With it being an election year, I’m also hoping to spend less time reading the Huffington Post. To me it seems like my time will be better-spent reading poetry, playing music and having fun with my family. Of course I want to stay informed, but I don’t want to get worked up this time around.

I’m also anticipating a trip or two (who knows, maybe more?) to Missoula when Adella is down there. I have nothing but fond memories of my time in Montana when I attended the U of M and although I’ll miss her terribly, I’m happy to have a reason to go back. The mixed feelings I have about her going are eased by knowing I’ll get to visit, and by trusting that she’ll be in good hands while she’s there.

Best Wishes for the New Year to you all, and in keeping with my New Year’s wish for more music, here’s a clip of our afternoon old-time session from yesterday. I’m playing one of the two fiddles. (I’m the one trying to keep up.)

Thoughtful reading

One of the things I love most about the MFA program that I’m in is that it requires of me a tremendous amount of reading. Every month I have to read and write a response to three books. This requirement forces me to focus closely on how a book is written, how its essence impacts its readers and how I might learn to do the same sort of thing in my own writing.

When I applied to UAA’s low-residency MFA program I had to choose between fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I ended up choosing fiction; for me personally it is the most challenging. But I want to study all three. So in order to appease myself I have not excluded poetry or non-fiction from my reading lists.

Right now I’m working on writing a story that is about a place as much as it is about the people in it and I’ve tried to choose books to read that will aid me in this process. This month I was lucky to have stumbled upon a new book written by an Alaskan author who does this so eloquently that I feel I could read it over and over again and each time glean a new angle in my approach to writing about the way a place can influence and shape the people who reside there.

I was initially drawn to the memoir, Faith of Cranes: Finding Hope and Family in Alaska by Hank Lentfer, because of its title. Sandhill cranes return to my neighborhood outside of Homer every summer and I’ve always felt honored to share space with them. Their return every spring is one of the most hopeful things I know of. My own teenaged children, who don’t always seem terribly observant of the natural world, take notice of the cranes and are always thrilled when they first see them flying overhead at the end of every long winter. When the cranes leave each September, almost always on the 16^th day of the month, it’s with mixed emotions; we’re in awe of the magic of migration and already nostalgic for the summer days that went by so quickly.

I was also drawn to the book because of the author’s name. It turns out that the author’s parents live here in Homer and are huge supporters and users of the library where I work. The nosey side of me that is always trying to make connections was eager to read the writing of Jack and Mary Lentfer’s son.

Hank Lentfer’s story is a story of coming of age, a story of finding himself trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense but most importantly it’s a story of love. Hank heartbreakingly loves the place where he lives and the wild places where he hunts deer and picks berries and harvests salmon. His story is of coming to terms with his fear of losing the land where he finds spiritual and physical sustenance. It’s also a story of love for the people who share in his connection to a place and the realization that the loss that ultimately goes hand in hand with love is beautiful and hopeful in its own right.

So many of the books that I read, even some of the great ones, are enjoyable and thought provoking in the moment of the reading. But not all of them stay with me. Faith of Cranes stands out because since I’ve read it I find myself mulling it over, considering the choices I’ve made, thinking about the ways I’d like for my own life to be more thoughtful and more closely tied to nature. And it leaves me asking important questions, a few of which are below:

How different would the world be if all parents, before conception, considered the responsibility, the joy, the loss and the beauty of bringing a child into existence? The chapter in Lentfer’s book entitled, “Letter to an Unborn Child” was striking in its honesty and its raw expression of his fears about becoming a father in a world that is filled with war, environmental degradation and disconnection.
How much living are we, as a culture, missing out on by buying into a consumer-driven mentality? By choosing to slow down and live with less we would be giving ourselves more opportunities to develop friendships, deepen the bonds we share with our families and have more time for self-reliance and art. We know this, and yet it is difficult to extricate our lives from the cycle of filling our days with jobs and tasks we don’t find meaningful. Why is it so hard?
As a person who is concerned about things like climate change, wilderness preservation, clean air, clean water and the protection of habitat how do I not lose hope when the news is overwhelmingly bad on all those fronts? And along those same lines how can creativity, love and hopefulness make a difference?

If you are interested in an intimate portrayal of a life in coastal Alaska, if you love a place on this earth, if you feel a connection to cranes or any other kind of wildlife, if you appreciate a well-crafted story or if you simply would like to escape for a while into a sensual, thoughtful world, I highly recommend Faith of Cranes. And if you end up reading it, I’d love to know the questions it summoned for you. I’d also love to know what books you’ve read recently that have stuck with you, caused you to consider changes you’d maybe like to make in your own life.

A Simple Notion

Back in July I was sitting in a room full of fellow MFA students I’d just barely met when Richard Rodriguez was introduced to us. He walked slowly to the front of the room to deliver his keynote address. His appearance alone commanded my attention. He’s a small man, with dark skin and Native American looking features. He wore a perfectly ironed, white shirt—something already out of the ordinary in Alaska, and black trousers. His brown skin against the white was striking.

Before the residency we were required to read Rodriguez’s book, Brown, and discuss it online. I have to admit, much of his book was lost on me. I had to look up lots of his references in Wikipedia. Sometimes I found his prose hard to follow. Because of my experience with his book I wasn’t sure what to expect from him as a keynote speaker. When he opened his mouth though, and started talking to us, any preconceived notion I’d had about the man was gone. In a matter of minutes I was fighting the tears and by the end of his talk I’d long since given up on trying to hold them back. I was a little embarrassed that I’d lost it that way, in front of these people I’d just met, but when I looked around the room I found I wasn’t alone. Any devices we’d summoned in order to protect our egos before the residency, any doubts about the validity of our decision to pursue writing, any worries about entering into a career path that comes with absolutely no guarantees—they all were gone, at least for a while. Richard Rodriguez had gotten to the heart of why we were all there. He reminded us that “there is only one thing that should interest you as a writer: What it means to be alive.”

Why did that simple notion cause me to have such a strong emotional reaction? Well part of it was in his delivery. He’s an amazing public speaker. But part of it was how he made the average life out to be a thing of beauty. So much writing is filled with ostentatious jargon, or it’s sarcastic or it’s shallow. Richard Rodriguez challenged us as students to write about what is real. It’s harder than you might imagine.

So then, what does it mean to be alive?

Obviously it means different things to different people. All I can speak with authority on though, is what it means for me to be alive. What do I spend my time doing and thinking about? What consumes me? What inspires me? What makes me want to carry on?

There is no doubt that sometimes life is hard. For example, right now we are going on three weeks without running water. The inconvenience of not having water is one thing, but the stress of how we’re going to pay for the repair of our well is something altogether different and more daunting. There’s more. Sometimes in my family there are hurt feelings and disagreements. People don’t always behave the way I think they ought to. The house is never clean enough. Time is constantly scarce. There are always chores that nobody else will do. Recently a close friend was diagnosed with cancer. Sometimes my kids are hurting. Sometimes I’m hurting. And the news, it’s full of terrible, hopeless stories of people going through things a thousand times worse than anything in my life.

Is this what it means to be alive?

The answer is yes, and yet there is always another side. Right now, as Thanksgiving approaches, I’m trying to think about that other side. I’m reminding myself of the unconditional love I get from my friends and family. I’m thinking about my husband’s job and how it allows my son and I to get an affordable education. I’m thinking about my house—it’s modest and it doesn’t insulate very well, but when the woodstove is thumping and it’s cold outside, there’s no place cozier. I’m thinking about the freedom I feel to express myself. I know that some of the things I write are hard for my family to read, but the fact that they love me in spite of our religious and political differences gives me courage. I’m thinking of the view out my window—the very existence of the mountains and glaciers helps put my problems in perspective and the bay reminds me that life is a changing thing. Mostly though, I’m thinking about how lucky I am just to be here at all. I get to watch my children grow. I get to live with the man that I love. I get to laugh at the funny things and cry a cleansing cry now and again. It’s worth a lot just to be able to think and breathe and feel.