Dear Staunch,
I woke up this muffled August morning to thoughts of and your night garden. How are your lacewings, your earthworms? Your bats, cats, and barn swallows? Salt about the slugs at the entrance. Sing praises.1
Time expands slowly in the hidden, in the shadow, doesn’t it? At least, that’s my experience. Tell me, do you want this growing season to go slack, or is it time to hurry up and be done with it? Cut down the garden, make one final turn of compost before the hard freeze and burrow back under your featherbed already? Of course you do. Me too. But first, let’s pause to look at the fleeting night!
In the smolder of these high summer days I find myself barricading against the Earth’s burning fury; heat, fire, rain, flooding. Little good it does: She will not be ignored. I listen as well for the trickster, but my attention wanders. He hides deep in the soft tissues of my body, yet every August he can’t help but reveal himself. And what a wonder, what a scream, what a soundless cry, what an invitation he is. This is my month for birth and death and I’m weary of both at my age, an ever thinning veil.
Passages to and from those two portals include a blinding, debilitating clarity—a ferociously impatient life force. Owls practice their curious call-and-response all day and night. Healing, trust and fret endemic. Today, every threshold crossed—every step out into the world—is an expedition; logistics well-planned with map, compass, snacks, snake bite kit. Shovel, spring water, tissues, battery packs and reflective wear, securely at the ready. The trickster lies in wait within me. So it’s that way I go with attention and purpose.
Hello. How are you today? May we?
Permission granted: Leg up, swing over, seat settles, easy wide breaths, hips open, soft knees, hands, gaze. Ride. Ride. Ride. An ancient + rhythmic Let-it-go-let-It-go-let-it-Go…
So, my staunch reader, before I unhorse, please see four things below at the close of this letter. I find they’re helping me arrange flowers and shovel sh**.2 In them you may feel small tonnage and incandescence. Taste scent and rot, seductions both. Easily packable for the day tripper as well as the night gardener and the cook, like you. Or for those on the long trail.
Listen: I raise my teacup to you, to us! With berry, bark, root, herb and honey, here’s to the awakening of our presence not persona —this, a jaunty little phrase I picked up along the way and it took. Milk?
Life and death we are since the day we were born.
I’m so glad we’re here together.
Strength is self, come passion.3
It can’t be helped.
oxoxoalice
Four Things:
Put By Blueberries. Vinegar recipe by Sherri Brooks Vinton’s Put’em Up Fruit! The Bleu Matin Jam in Camilla Wynne’s Jam Bake, and Blueberry Lavender Ice Cream from Jeni Britton Bauer’s Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home.
Brew Water Kefir. A probiotic practice in effervescences flavored with the likes of lemon/lime or grapefruit, orange and vanilla, sweet corn, ginger, coconut. It’s your kitchen…
Cook Sticky Sesame Tofu. Recipe by writer/producer Ria Elciario from her Kitchen Gems Substack. Serve with rice, sides of kimchi or cucumber, to feed four around your kitchen table with one block of extra firm.
Read Someone Who Isn’t Me by lead singer and song writer Geoff Rickly of Thursday and No Devotion. His first book is the #001 release from Rose Books. Impeccably translated from Turtle language, this is an unbridled, life-affirming guttural generosity about Geoff Rickly’s harrowing hallucinatory journey inward. Drop the needle. Attend.
Kathleen Dean Moore
Thich Nhat Hanh inspired
Jessica Dore inspired