On sleeping better, inviting creativity, and the summer choruses of the fauna
July 23, 2020
Dear Eva,
I just reread your letter from last week, and I was inspired to take my laptop outside while I write this evening. I do not have a cider, but my sparkling water with a slice of lime is doing the trick. The air is thick, but there is a cool breeze and the cicadas and locusts aren’t too unbearably loud just yet. (I used to find their sounds kind of charming. Lately it has occurred to me just what an awful noise it really is. Do you get subjected to this screeching chorus in Minnesota?)
I have been thinking about the sameness you wrote about in your letter, and the way in which it can both comfort us and weigh us down. I have been trying to reframe the predictability and smallness of life right now so that I can see them as the kind of constraints you can use to invite creativity. If there are so few options in my day—same house, same people, same scenery—what can I do within those constraints to grow, find joy, and live according to my values? Is there some way in which I can view this as a challenge? Some days that seems to work.
Update that the insect chorus is now officially just plain loud. What are they communicating to each other? Can’t they do it quieter? Also, I am getting mosquito bites. Darn it, nature, you are supposed to be peaceful! I am moving inside.
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The outdoors writing was fun while it lasted. Now I am on my end of the couch, Marlowe on his end. I am wishing that I had some interesting tidbit to share, maybe something I read in a book or something I am mulling. Sadly, it feels like the main thing occupying my brain this week is the same ole COVID. We have one more week before we have to complete the school registration and make our decision about hybrid vs. virtual for the fall semester. We have one more week before my niece goes back to college, leaving us without childcare three days of each workweek. Decisions abound! We need to make them so we know our constraints, and then we can work around and within them. Especially after our blissful staycation (it turns out life without work is quite nice!), I find myself leaning more and more toward wanting to keep the children here in our nest. I have no illusions about school and socialization not being important, but I keep going back to something you said a few months ago about how maybe kids who live through this time will be less bound by the structures and routines of school. Maybe they will be more comfortable with carving out their own ways of filling and spending time. This thought warms me because it feels like a means to resilience, and there is nothing I want more for my children.
On a different note, we put up a bird feeder last weekend, a birthday gift for Jonah from my parents. I thought of you this week when the first creature we saw partaking in the seed medley upon it was a pesky ground squirrel (or as it is called in Des Moines, Iowa, a “squinny”). I know your particular rodent pest was a tree squirrel, but I laughed as I remembered the various ways you had tried to foil the ambitious little varmints. Didn’t they end up jumping from nearby trees? We may have to get creative with our defenses as well; so far, we have seen more squinnies than birds enjoying the bounty. Assuming we get that situation under control, I am excited at the prospect of seeing birds feasting outside our dining room window. We are also considering a bird bath because what is more fun than watching a little bird frolic in water? As you can see, Jonah and I are forging ahead with our new mutual hobby. For his birthday, he also got a field guide to the 112 most common birds of Iowa and a notebook to keep track of our sightings, as well some nifty binoculars. On our first birding hike with the new gear, he spotted a red-bellied woodpecker, which was a pretty good find!
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It is now Friday. I wanted to let the letter steep to see if anything insightful popped into my brain that I might fold in. Shockingly, the answer is no. So this may be a lighter letter than some. That is okay; some weeks we must be okay with being a tad boring! I am very much looking forward to our pizza and movie night ritual tonight. Although it has only been two weeks, it feels like a lifetime since we did a proper family night. I have found myself even feeling a sense of longing for it, as if it is some distant memory of a simpler time. Now *that* makes no sense, but yet it is what I have been feeling. Boring and non-sensical both! I’m on quite a roll this week.
To more cogent and remarkable weeks/letters ahead! I hope you have been having a good week. I look forward to hearing what is on your mind.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday July 24 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’ve said it at least once before and I’m sure I’ll say it again: this week I feel completely different than I did last week. These letters have shown me how much can transpire in a week, just how much mind-time can pass, body-time, emotion-time. Our letters as a form of documentation of the passage of time show this. I have occasionally kept notes from a letter one week that didn’t make it into the final version, thinking I’ll probably fold this into some future letter, will do more with this idea next week or soon, and what that usually means is goodbye to those ideas for now, and maybe they will reappear at some future moment. But not necessarily in a way that flows from my notes; rather, the ideas get reabsorbed into my being and present themselves differently in a different light, the root of an idea flowering in another way altogether.
I made notes last night for my letter today, sitting out in the backyard again, listening to a bird squawking (and spending a fair amount of time figuring out how to spell the word squawk — is it squak? Skwak? Some combination of the two… is it squawk? IT IS) in such a way that I wondered if the bird was throwing its voice: is it far in the distance, or near me, squawking quietly? I could not figure it out but it cast an interesting glow over the spirit of my evening writing.
I started my notes as such: I am not so tired this week! I think I am sleeping better now that I am reading before bed again — bridging television time and sleep time with the soothing presence of words on the page, bedtime stories I can deliver to myself. For a while I was going straight to bed after watching television and was trying to relax without words on pages, and I was having a significant flare-up of my dramatic recurring dreams, things I “forgot” to do flashing into my brain in the middle of the night, coupled with a lot of half-asleep interpretations of the shadows and trees outside my windows as meaningful characters, hybrids of what I saw on television and the recurring dream-beings coming to remind me of what I had forgotten, the blending of my dreams with television with the play of moonlight or neighbors’ bulbs backlighting the brushy greens between our two homes.
Thinking about your letter from last week — how many of the 400-plus water balloons were deployed in battle? Happy birthday again to Jonah! It sounds like you all had a lovely week and a lovely birthday celebration.
You mentioned the question Krista uses to close out her interviews — What does it mean to be human? — and I found it humorous that you would have a distaste for the question, that it feels too big to be answered. Perhaps so, if you mean that in order to be answered in some definitive, all-encompassing, correct way, it is too big… or perhaps it is (it definitely is!) too big to be answered completely in the space of an interview — you would forever be finding new ways to answer the question, thinking of things you wished you would have said in those few interview moments. Seems like an interview with Krista would be daunting in that way! But my sense more generally is that the nice thing about big questions is that they offer room to be answered infinitely, differently every day by every person if we each wish, no answer more correct than any other. As many possible answers as there are humans on the earth, multiplied by the days and hours and minutes of our time with our thoughts and our intersections with each other, because no one is consistently the absolute same from day to day or week to week (as evidenced at least by my groggy letter of last week!).
I was also thinking about your thoughts on compression, your feelings about your tendency to compress. I think I have some of these same tendencies, and to see them playing out with you and your project gives me new information about how to think about those tendencies in myself. I think compression is a process for ourselves, the synthesis of information; I would agree with you that it is a personal process of remembering the highlights or takeaways of our lived experience. It seems that rarely do people need pure synthesis from others; instead, people are looking for stories. Can there be a compressed story — perhaps a compressed story is a fortune cookie, a koan, a piece of advice. But how often do we want just the advice? Tell me how you got there, so I can know if I want to trust this advice, believe this advice, take this advice. You were making your way through this thought process similarly in your letter, as you noted the reader is not in your brain; the writing must do all the work. This is hard to remember! It is hard to remember to assume that your reader, depending, may know nothing of you at all, or may know less than you think about how your mind travels what feel like the well-worn paths of ideas you’ve trod hundreds of times before. No one knows you and the way you think like you do! This is a lesson to me, too. As a young person I assumed the special qualities of myself were qualities everyone had in some form or another; I assumed we were all more the same than we were different. It’s taken years to realize that telling the stories that come out of my life and head is a process of telling stories that no one else knows in the particular way that I know them. Everyone is largely focused on their own life and their own stories, no one knows everyone else’s stories. All the longest way of saying that I enjoyed reading and thinking and talking with you about your draft of your current project. I am excited for you and your forward-looking months of building out what you’ve begun!
I just peeked into my email and I see that your letter awaits! I was considering laboring over this letter a bit longer but I may just skim it once more and then open yours swiftly! Happy Friday and enjoy your weekend!
Until soon,
Eva