Summer brings many suppositionally ugly, always beloved (to me), things into orbit. Last summer, there were several weeks where sea cucumbers littered the beach - oft-exploded sausages slowly retracting their organs. This year, June brought mole crabs and baby birds, July brought barnacles in tide pools and mud dauber wasps in the ferns, and August brings banana spider after banana spider. The thrills just keep coming - if I’m lucky, and I am feeling lucky, the snails will return to the garden beds again this month, my eggplants will continue to grow in as curly-qs, I’ll keep spotting centipedes slinking across the parkway on my long runs.

June’s mole crabs were oddly revelatory - here is something so foundational to this place I spend so much time that I just… hadn’t noticed until now? A capsule of legs and antennae when curled into itself; a rocket of claws and fur when mining the shoreline. I have seen signs of them my whole life - tiny geysers from tiny pinholes in the sand. But I’d never seen them until I found so many washed up one morning, recently but definitely dead, stinking and in tact. Here are these beings perfectly constructed for their lives underground, unearthed by chance a few hours before my arrival. Here are their improbably long antennae to serve as snorkels under the sand, their ten legs covered in plumes for eating and cleaning themselves, their tails that double as a carapace, their torpedo bodies retracting into perfect pills for safekeeping. I shoved them all in a makeshift pocket at the bottom of my shirt and they have been sitting on a railing on my front porch ever since.

We had a nest of baby bluebirds in one hanging fern, a nest of wrens in another. I have been too superstitious to share much, lest I jinx their chances of survival. But everyone has fledged now and I feel the pride and grief of a high schooler’s next door neighbor as the kid heads off to college. These tiny, hideous, perfect tots. Their jelly skin, pocked by keratin spikes. Their cartoonish beaks and bulging eyes. They’re outrageous. They’re exquisite.

I checked on the bluebirds every day until they were old enough to hear their peeping, and then I didn’t need to check because they’d grown exponentially and so had their voices. The bluebird parents took turns vomiting meals into these demanding mouths and Harvey, Taylor, and I took turns reporting back to each other about the family’s status. A few weeks into this voyeurism, I saw a fledgling, now fully formed, eyes open and evenly-proportioned, wearing her grey-blue juvenile finery, poke her head up and out of the fern basket. Three days later, all four had fledged.

I’ve spent much of the summer thinking about our culture’s propensity for sameness - smooth your wrinkles, hide your cellulite, straighten your teeth.1 What a rip off. I love the wood stork precisely because she is bald and craggled and so closely resembles a plague doctor. I am drawn to caterpillars because they are round and sometimes spiky and often move in a way that elicits something akin to the creeps. I want to see your haggard and your warty, your oddly-colored and your improbably hairy. If someone calls it ugly, it’s probably for me.

I have to share with you this poem and it is your loss if you skip over it

(I have been reciting this to myself on a loop for the entire summer - it is small and fond and local).

VI. Wisdom: the Voice of God
by Mary Karr

Ninety percent of what's wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but you want magic, to win
the lottery you never bought a ticket for. 
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan, 
no long term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.
It is small and fond and local. Don't look for 
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
i.e. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich. 

Another ugly, almost disquieting, totally amazing thing

A barnacle on a long-dead blue crab shell I saw on the beach this morning. The barnacle appeared to be living but barely, drying out after the tide left it stranded. I put it in a tide pool and it immediately began what I can only describe as panting. A dog in a park on a hot day. I can’t stop thinking about it - a creature reliant on another, now dead, creature’s mobility somehow lives to see another day. How deeply we all work to survive, how different our tools are for survival.

My grandfather and his wife moved to town this past weekend in what is, perhaps, the sweetest twist of fate I’m yet to experience.2 I got to make a group text today of “all my friends in town” and it was just my brother and his fiancé, my parents, my grandfather and his wife, and Taylor and you know what? It felt amazing. I’m off to dinner with all of them and feeling very lucky, very awestruck at the way fate sometimes has it. May your weekend be full of similar warmth, similar delights. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

For the first few days, the impulse to check instagram on my newly instagram-less phone1 felt like sticking my tongue through the gap where a tooth used to be - impulsive, mindless, oddly satisfying. Quickly the gum around it filled in a little, the void became uninteresting. I don’t yearn for the experience of scrolling the apps but do often feel compelled to share my morning escapades the way I oft did on instagram stories. Look at this hawk! Listen to this chorus of crickets! I text my friends directly, try to jot something down in my sketchbook, make Taylor look at every picture of every sunrise, moth, and garter snake. It almost scratches the itch.

I will inevitably log in on my phone again one day, because I like the archival tool of it all. I'm embarrassed to admit that I think about that inevitable day a lot - on long runs I fantasize about posting a summer roundup or the finish line of the Chicago Marathon or if I ever get a book deal. I’m swept up in the bliss of people from college sending me videos of alligators when they’re on vacation, the “who, little old me?” of being tagged in someone’s story, the torpid dissociation that only sitting alone in a parking lot succumbing to the endless scroll provides. I ride on borrowed euphoria just long enough to get to the next mile before the claustrophobia creeps in: will I ever sever my brain from the funhouse that is instagram? Am I adequately recalling the low-grade dread of entering that dimension? Do I remember how bad I feel when I’m in there - a hall of mirrors, an orchestra blaring only Hitchcock cords? That place sucks!

Today I logged on from my laptop to see if a girl from college had her baby (she did) and if my gal pal’s little sister is still doing numbers making videos of herself singing Chocolate by the 1975 (she is) and I realized there are a few things that fully evaded my radar while I was off gram:

I completely forgot about the UFC fight for Tr*mp’s birthday

What a thrill to realize that something so unbelievably asinine, somehow more asinine than usual even, happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and I was spared from the deep, hot rage that awareness would have brought me. But for this week’s New Yorker cover2 I genuinely would not have known about it. What a massive blessing for my adrenal glands - cortisol saved by forgetting about the circus on the lawn!!!

I didn’t know hockey was even happening

I logged on today and saw 7 of my honest-to-god friends posting about “Canes”?? With the tornado emoji?? Upon googling, I realized that the Stanley Cup allegedly happened and North Carolina, a place that should probably not have winter sports, beat Las Vegas, a place that definitely should not have winter sports. Go everyone in the southeast I guess.

Half of the people I have ever met in my life have been to London in the past 3 weeks

You know what, good for them!

Knicks in five!!!!!

I actually did keep up with this because I love New York City and Zohran Mamdani and all my NYC transplant besties who bandwagon fanned HARD this season.

Rosalía gave Ocean Vuong a shout out at her show in Boston before La Yugular

this one is just for me, baby!!!! this is the kind of shit you DO miss when you’re off gram!!!

A girl I went to law school with and also Shane Gillis were at the UFC fight????

ick!

Khadija’s illustration of Hind, Ahmed and Yousef is in the Venice Biennale

The best part of social media is seeing the amazing things your friends are doing 😭 this is in fact a thing I miss. Incredible work by Khadija and so many others in the No Words exhibit. I am in fact left speechless.

El*n M*sk became a trillionaire

Suckling the teat of corporate tax breaks, this nepo baby is worth an unfathomable amount of money yet still can’t buy contentment. I am so glad I missed members of my extended family, living in some of the most economically depressed places in the nation, regaling the ideals of meritocracy this weekend with the announcement of the SpaceX IPO. Genuinely slept better Friday night having only read this headline in the appropriate form: a Breaking News email from the NYT rather than through the armchair analyses of his work ethic by some of the most tenuously employed people3 I have ever met.

Gwynocidal Paltrow promoted luxury apartments in Isr*el

Conventionally attractive white woman who has spent her career spreading the gospel of “clean living” as the celebrity spokesperson of settler colonialism? Grossed out but unsurprised!!!!

Everyone I know is pregnant or has a newborn

And I love that for them!!!!!!!!!!

I didn’t get stuck in Dante’s Inferno during the primaries this month

Look, I care deeply about elections and vote in all that I am legally allowed to but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t an absolute joy to have my exposure to the primaries (mostly)4 limited to: reading articles about candidates, reading candidates’ campaign sites, getting the SC Votes text reminders, seeing campaign signs along the parkway, and ultimately going to the library and casting my vote. I love that people love to remind others to vote, but I am thrilled that I, personally, wasn’t stuck in the gasping-for-democracy-to-prevail feedback loop that is social media around elections. Again, I love that we still find it in us to believe in democratic values, etc., and also, I love that I avoided additional exposure to N*ncy M*ce this election season.

By and large, I have missed much of the Famesick discourse!

My interactions with Lena Dunham have been wholly by choice this month: I rewatched half of Girls when I had norovirus and saw God (more on that in another dispatch, probably), and listened to her first book, Not That Kind of Girl on a flight home from Kansas the following week. The veil between Lena and Hannah Horvath is thin, and I am grateful to know very few other people’s thoughts about this!!!!

I haven’t even thought about purchasing a bird-themed t-shirt or food-themed claw clip since I’ve been gone!

It’s amazing how not being advertised to 86.7% of the day means you’re less interested in accumulating random landfill candy. Sometimes I do fall victim to opening the salesy eblasts from the 43 primarily-advertising-on-instagram companies I’ve shared my email with, but am yet to add anything to cart so that feels like a win.

Overall, being off-gram has been unremarkable except that so many moments have, in fact, been deeply remarkable.5 I don’t think that being socialmedialess has necessarily amplified that, but I do think it has made me realize how compelled I am to share what’s remarkable each day with others. All the world is a stage and I am, apparently, eager to perform! Or really, all the world is a dinner table and I am eager to invite you all over to join me for a meal.

A few other things —

savor it Fridays will be back soon - maybe this week, maybe another one. in the meantime:

I made direct eye contact with this red tailed hawk on Thursday morning and texted my family group chat about it and everyone was like “oh nice” which is just NOT the response I think I would have gotten from people I barely know on my instagram stories. Tragic!

My first roseate spoonbill of the summer - spotted on a quick stop under the bridge near Pinckney on the way home from the gym when I didn’t have time for “real” morningmaxxing the other day. I was absolutely giddy with my luck. Somehow blessings find a way no matter whether I think I’m too busy to make time for them.

I have gotten so into writing this silly ass dispatch that I have failed to feed my family (my spouse, my cat, and me) so time to boil some Banza and say, thank you Lord for chickpeas and sauce and the fact that even when I feel like “we have nothing to eat” our pantry is overflowing with so much more than we need to survive. I will get back to beguiling my small readership with nature-specific happenings soon, but in the meantime, I do have to recommend getting offline. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

The seasons change and so do the birds’ hormones. The skin between the egrets’ eyes and beaks (called lores) becomes progressively greener and slowly, they begin to grow long, lofty scapular feathers (called aigrettes). The males begin elaborate routines in pursuit of a mate, bowing and stretching and snapping their bills and beginning construction on what will become their family homes. They find a lover, practice monogamy for the season, play an equal role in the incubation of their eggs and rearing of their young. For months, egret parents take turns guarding their tender, defenseless offspring from the sun and predators, delivering meals of partially-digested insects and amphibians directly to their children’s mouths. I must pause and editorialize: the whole process is divine and fascinating.

This time of year, many of the fledglings are starting to develop their muscles just enough to interact with their parents and each other, to reach up and ask for food. At the risk of sounding like someone who says “doggos” unironically, the only way I can describe them is “tiny fuzzy muppets” - I simply could not love them more if I tried.

For the past few years, I’ve tried to take a walk around the Ibis Pond at Pinckney Island (hallowed ground for nesting heron species, and also for me) at least once every other week, particularly this time of year. The richness of each lap is never lost on me - somehow this place I know so well produces real novelty, real wonder no matter how many visits I make. But this season is particularly holy - the circle of life in its fullest form. It’s beautiful and so loud - new generations of flocks scream their demands for survival, assert their place in their nests, on their little island in the middle of this lagoon.2 It’s also gruesome - blue speckled eggshells oozing orange yolks litter certain spots along the trail - raccoons and other predators have had their way with a nest or two; a fledgling or several clearly malnourished and on her way out of this world again. Grief and joy in a constant loop - as in all the most meaningful parts of being alive.

Great egrets aren’t the only species raising their young this time of year. The Ibis Pond is rife with tender newcomers and their parents, and other species beginning their nests in the same trees. There’s a depth and sweetness to this experience that words cannot do justice, but if you come visit this May or next, I will be sure to show you in person.

Unsolicited Recommendations

I read this piece about how the founder of Mother’s Day tried to abolish it and I have shared it with so many people since. Full disclosure, Raisa Aziz was my first ever “boss” at a DC internship and I have all-but-worshipped her since I was 19. Her substack, hyperfixation, is my hyperfixation - an anthology of great art and design.

I have never been to a Savannah Bananas game, despite my geographic proximity, but I am fascinated by the entire industry they created around an otherwise kinda boring (to me, you’re allowed to like it) sport. I am even more fascinated3 by the (white) man in the yellow hat (no, not that one) who compares himself to PT Barnum now deciding to revive a Negro Leagues team as a Bananas opponent. Somehow Josh Levin’s article about the Indianapolis Clowns came across my desk earlier this week and I have not been able to stop thinking about it. The Clowns effectively created what’s now more or less “banana ball” and deserve credit where it’s due, AND, much of what drew in (white) audiences was that the game was effectively presented as a minstrel show. Is it cultural acknowledgment or exploitation when we resuscitate something that was both the first of its kind artistically and athletically, and directly tied to segregation? If the Clowns have a role to play in Banana Ball, should a white guy own the league? How do we pay homage to this kind of history while maintaining historical honesty?

I am once again reminding you that volunteering is IT. Last night was our last ESL class of the year and, per usual, I am feeling such tenderness and pride about my students. Want to combat your ennui? Go be of service to your neighbors.

I forgot to include The Drama in last week’s Unsolicited Recs section and that was a mistake. I cannot say more other than that you must see it. And once you have seen it, this piece by Frederick Joseph is an excellent follow up.

I deleted The Apps™️4 from my phone for the summer and unfortunately, life5 is already better. There is something so humiliating about acknowledging that yes, I genuinely love scrolling instagram so much that I cannot be trusted to have it on my phone without risking it derailing most afternoons, but the first step of recovery is what? Admitting you have a problem.

Taylor and I have been really into 60 Minutes Overtime lately, which I’m not convinced isn’t just their correspondents saying “hey, want to go somewhere cool and expense it?” but honestly good for them. Anyways, I have thought about Soon Dong cave for weeks now and this video of Anderson Cooper birding in Colombia is exactly how I expect all of my friends to feel by the end of their first time birding.

Happy Mother’s Day, in the purest, most “I see you, I hear you, I know you’re working so hard and I love you so much” to my friends in the trenches of potty training or grieving their own moms or navigating stepparenthood or going through it maternally in whatever other way this weekend. And for the rest of you, I still see you, hear you, know you're working so hard and love you so much. Mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

I pause a work call because I spot a yellow bellied slider trotting through our yard after laying a clutch of eggs in the pine straw. She’s headed in the wrong direction - toward the street rather than back toward the lagoon. I lie and type in the chat that I need to step away because there’s someone at the door, turning off my video and audio to go on a quick expedition. I weigh the harms: a fib to skip a few minutes of idle chatter about a CRM vs. the life of this roadkill-or-entrapment-bound creature. Last weekend I found the shell and skull2 of another mother turtle who had gotten overturned trying to make it back through the fence - I cannot let this one face such a fate. She pees for a full minute when I pick her up, her only defense mechanism aside from retreating inwards. I laugh out loud. What an honor to be misunderstood in this particular way - I know so little about anything and yet in this one singular case, I’m a tiny bit omniscient. I place the turtle on the lagoon side of the fence and later turn my camera off again, briefly, to watch through my binoculars as she splashes back to safety when the threat of my presence is cleared.

There’s a garter snake in the henhouse, coiled within the egg cartons, and I let her stay for the day. She’s already eaten all the eggs and, frankly, I don’t want to get skunked.3 I look at her and she looks at me and we decide to stay out of each other’s way while I sweep and feed and flit around. I think about the mice that used to squat in this coop, the feral cat slinking into the woods at daybreak who I’ve credited for the newfound rodent population control. I realize I owe this garter some credit too. We’re all just doing what we can to stay alive. The mice, who sought the coop’s warmth and its all-you-can-eat buffet all winter, the snake, the cat, and me.

Again, running late for work, I am enraptured by a horseshoe crab spawning along the shoreline. She’s been here for hours, slowly depositing thousands of eggs into the sand. She’s been here, proverbially, for 450 million years; evolution’s magnum opus. Along other parts of the shoreline, red knots and laughing gulls and ruddy turnstones congregate at what I presume are other patches of eggs, feasting on another horseshoe crab’s offspring. There will be hundreds, maybe thousands more of these clutches this summer, each with thousands of chances of one day growing into this ten pound fossil before me, or, at some point, becoming lunch. The red knots flute their exaltations - hallelujah, we are fed.

On my 32nd birthday, I wake up in a tent,4 window flaps open, under a sky punctuated by red maples and Virginia pines. There’s a creek nearby that has drowned out all other noises through the night, but just above its steady flow the chipping sparrows trill their morning greetings. I realized that tears are streaming down my face before I get my eye mask all the way off. To be alive, to hear and see and feel and taste and smell it all - what a wonder. We crack eggs the hens laid the day before on a griddle over the fire. By 10 am, a kaleidoscope of tiger and pipevine swallowtails has fully swarmed the nearby creek. I am absolutely stoned by it all before anything even happens for the day. I wind up to skip a rock and it skiffs the top of the water four times before sinking. Later that day, we hike to the top of Mt. LeConte, through a cave and a tunnel and along the edges of slick, damp rock faces. We eat uncrustables on top of the world. I can’t believe this is how I get to welcome a new year - panting, filthy, bleary-eyed with delight. I can’t believe I’ve ever thought about my graying hair or my love handles when I’m here, doing this, a mile into the sky eating the best snack of my life. We get up close with a mole, a brown squirrel, a coyote on our way back. We rinse off in the creek and the butterflies return. I hold a swallowtail on my finger and it runs its proboscis along my skin, foraging for salt. We eat chili over the fire and recount our perfect day until the skies crack open just after we’ve finished washing the dishes and put up the rainfly. Another miracle - we all stay dry, fed, warm.

I am teaching ESL on a Tuesday night and realize, for the umpteenth time, that my students are deeply confused. I have spent at least one class each week asking them to read “como palomitas,” by which I mean “popcorn read.” They are, after months of this charade, telling me they have absolutely no clue what I’m talking about. H acts out my motions explaining “popcorn reading” each time I bring it up and we all laugh so hard there are tears rolling down our faces. I cannot imagine loving a group of people more than I love these 9 individuals who choose to spend these evenings wading through Spanglish with me, and then I remember how much I love so many other people, too. I drive home still giggling, giddy about one of a thousand mistakes I have made that day blaring Peso Pluma’s dopamina, my own dopamina absolutely pounding through my bloodstream.

Taylor spots two black bellied whistling ducks communing under the bird feeders. We watch them giddily - their bills skimming the grass for fallen seed. We both remark that we’ve never been so close to ducks before. We tap on the window for Harvey to see them, and he chirps in delight, mewing to go outside and chase them. We deny his request but stay glued to the scene together. Their pink webbed feet trot through the yard until they spot the cat on his hind legs and two humans squatting behind him, 3 noses pressed against the window. They fly off whistling.

I’ve never felt exceptional at anything but this - loving so deeply, with such dimension that it makes my throat ache. I have a few degrees and a few credentials but have never stayed long enough in a job to feel any level of expertise. I am a professional at nothing - a hobbyist, a rookie, a tinkerer, a fledgling in so much. I don’t know my left from right, don’t know how to whistle, don’t know the names of most of the shorebirds or trees I’ve grown up alongside without the help of an app or guidebook. I am an adequate worker, decent only by way of asking for help early and often. I’m fine at most of the things I enjoy - fine at gardening, fine at teaching English, fine at painting and linocut and stitching things together. I’m objectively bad at crocheting, piss poor at baking, a liability at any and all sports. I can cook a meal but can’t follow a recipe to save my life. I can run for miles but it will be slow and unimpressive. What I’m saying is - I am just okay, just a beginner, just fine at most things. And what a gift that has been.

There’s no glory in being medium, but there is so much joy. I wear my badge of “amateur” with such honor, with such satisfaction. Amateur from the French for one who loves. Amateur meaning just starting out but having a damn good time doing it. Amateur, meaning, giving it my best and often getting it wrong. Amateur meaning just happy to be along for the ride.

Unsolicited Recommendations

I learned the origin of the word “amateur” last week while reading North Woods by Daniel Mason, after Makena and then Logan both recommended several times. I got the audiobook first and listened; then Libby came through with the ebook and I realized I simply had to read it with my eyes to soak it in again. As someone who feels so connected with place, with home, this generations-long novel about the occupants of a single plot of land over 400 years is just…. everything I want in a book and more.

We had our fourth installment of Dinner Around the World5 this week and the random country generator pulled Laos. We learned, though never enough, about the land and people, the tens of thousands of lives lost to US imperialism during the “secret war” wherein Laos was bombed repeatedly and used by the CIA as an outpost to get after the Viet Cong. We talked about slow lorises and clouded leopards and “the land of a million elephants.” Among other dishes, I made thum mak muang (green mango salad), which I’m adding it to the rotation in our household.

Last month, I got really into Anita Ward’s Ring My Bell and danced to it (picture: Dee Reynolds meets inflatable tube man at a car dealership) for all 8.5 minutes before what could have been an incredibly stressful meeting and you know what? It was fine! And whether that’s coincidence or the placebo effect or 432hz as the tiktokteens say, I don’t care! Abundance comes through many channels, my friends! Might as well try as many as you can squeeze in!

April’s poem of the month was Mahmoud Darwish’s Think of Others and yes, of course, I recommend it. I had high hopes of memorizing Aracelis Girmay’s You are Who I Love at some point this year but I am so daunted. It is exceptional and gutting and truly, in the spirit of being an amateur, so on the nose. Obviously I recommend reading it, but it is very, very long for memorization’s sake. So I don’t think it will be May’s poem considering I am in a season of Taking Things Off My Plate™️. That being said, tell me your favorite poem. I am seeking YOUR recommendations for May.

I hope you all enjoy a weekend of amateur antics. Do things that you’re okay-at-best at and feel something. Love you, mean it.

see ya later,6

emilgator

I have always been a Stargirl™️2 but after accidentally catching the Perseids in August, my appetite for lying flat on my back & trying to identify the constellations has become near-gluttonous. I spend no fewer than four clear nights each month prostrate on my front lawn, causing the neighbors to drive by slower to determine whether there is a corpse strewn across the grass. The urge to stare into the abyss feels primal and uncontrollable; I have to interrupt whatever conversation I’m having each time I get out of the car and am greeted by the stars, lest I miss the chance at one more glimpse at something we’ve all been watching since the dawn of time. I have probably offended many people shouting “WAIT, LOOK UP REAL QUICK” mid-story. I can’t help but hope that this habit of forcing your loved ones to acknowledge the heavens, too, is a tale as old as time.

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Skywatching, as NASA calls it, is a practice as old as the earth itself. For millennia, humans have stared into the great beyond and derived meaning — from how we move across this rock in space to why we’re on it in the first place. There’s a divinity in this, the guidance of the stars in both a navigational and metaphysical sense. Their movement through the skies marks the passage of time, our location and direction, and perhaps even our fates. Whatever your feelings about the Zodiac3, there is a proof-is-in-the-pudding nature to the interactions between the stellar bodies and our own. Polaris determines our positioning: the cardinal directions themselves. The basis of our understanding of our place, in the world and in the universe, is because so many somebodies looked up.

Humans aren’t alone in their consultations of the cosmos. Dung beetles use the glow of the Milky Way to orient themselves and conduct their labor in straight lines. Harbor seals use celestial clues for navigation by identifying lodestars and patterns in the sky. Indigo buntings, among other migrating songbirds, develop a “stellar compass” to track the pattern of rotational movement around the North Star that leads them on their 1200+ mile journey south each winter. Bearing that in mind, respectfully, I am supposed to value more the remote work options of people living #vanlife4 than the continued survival of species that depend on the stars’ visibility?

There are pros to Starlink — Palestinians’ ability to share their on the ground experiences during an ongoing genocide topping the list. But am I supposed to believe that El*n M*sk, actual N*zi, is prioritizing the connectivity of the most vulnerable among us? Please.

The cons of Starlink aren’t limited to diminished star visibility and the continued enrichment of one of the greatest nemeses to the planet and its survival. Since the first launch in May 2019, there have been over 9,300 Starlink satellites launched (in addition to ~4000 other active satellites already in orbit). In less than 6 years, SpaceX has catapulted nearly ten thousand hunks of aluminum and rare minerals into the atmosphere, the mining of which produces up to four tons of toxic waste and seemingly infinite human rights violations per ton mined. Notably, Starlink satellites only last for 5-6 years, meaning that every single one of the first generation are now space debris or decommissioned intentionally to burn up in the atmosphere on their descent back to earth. Also, Starlinks fall out of the sky at a rate of one per day, raining metal particles known to deplete the ozone layer. This rate of Starlinks de-orbiting is expected to hit 5 per day if SpaceX continues scaling up operations at its current pace. And it goes without saying that the fleeting nature of these devices necessitates more mining, more satellites, more dependence on technocrats to solve the very problems their innovations create.

The juxtaposition of the entirely disposable nature of these devices, against the backdrop of the all-but-permanent nature of the cosmos, is staggering. We are limiting our ability to the view the heavens for the chance to explore the seemingly-endless terrain of a far worse place: cyberspace.

There’s a poetry in these sky-cataracts’ purpose being access to the internet. Look away from the stars, from the idea of a world bigger than this one, and instead turn your gaze toward a more limited landscape, where your thoughts are shaped by the whims of the very selfish, the very insecure. On this planet, continue to mine away the mountaintops and descend into the algorithm. Keep drilling. No need to preserve a single resource for tomorrow. A drought? Who needs potable water when you can satiate your thirst with an AI chatbot. No need for creativity, curiosity, or compassion — there are apps to scratch those pesky human itches, bots to share and shape our innermost thoughts. Forget the trees, the rivers, the ocean spilling with your Amazon hauls. Forget the songbirds, the dung beetles, the harbor seals. Forget igneous rock, bugs preserved in amber, the stars themselves - you don’t need connection, you need connectivity. Right? Right?

It’s astounding to me that space is conflated with the future when it is the most fixed, most primordial thing we know. The needle of the compass holding us in place. I guess that’s part of the gag, too. The belief that something out there holds more for us than the Eden we were born into is an easier sell than what we know for certain about these pursuits: a few rich men stand to get much richer.

All this to say, I will continue to savor my time gawking at the skies, and, I will continue to emulate white hot rage each time I’m duped by Starlink. The urgency of staring at the stars, of learning the names of the constellations, has never felt more palpable. Much of moving into this next stage of planetary disease feels like this: there will be trash in the marsh but aren’t I lucky to see the creatures who still live there, too? The summers will be scorching and the seas will rise, but how lucky to get to dunk in the ocean in the meantime. In the words of Margaret Renkl, “are we all, generation upon generation, destined to mourn what seems in this moment impossibly abundant but is already far on its way to being gone? The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty. Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again.”

What a privilege to get to stand in awe of it all, even if sometimes distracted by blinking space debris and the occasional plane overhead. What an enormous gift, to watch Orion in the winter and Hercules in the summer, and the dippers all year round. I cannot control the impression technocrats are making on even the most subtle parts of our existence, I can control my exposition to wonder regardless. Go look up.

Unsolicited recs

By popular demand,5 this month’s memorized poem is again by Wendell Berry. This time, The Peace of Wild Things. A forever favorite (and this month has been a blur) so committing this one to memory feels both attainable and ever-timely. I, too, go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds, Wendell! I, too, feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light!

I have been absolutely devouring ’s Teenager. A boy and a girl on a Bonnie-and-Clyde style journey across the states, but with so much heart and so little self awareness. It’s got all the fixings of a doomed love story: all the tension of adolescence, all the carelessness of a joy ride. I never want it to end.6

I recently learned about 19th century painter Thomas Cole’s series “The Course of Empire” and have thought of little else since seeing his final piece. Cole’s premonitions about what empire could and would do to the “undefiled work of the Gods” that was the American landscape is just…. so staggering against the backdrop of KFCs, Walmarts, and Tr*mp hotels that litter this sacred land.

Taylor and I stumbled across this video the other night during the usual “not quite ready for bed, not planning to be up long enough to justify a whole episode of tv” scroll. First of all, Mauricio Silvera, ornithologist icon. Second of all, the urutaú. A sweet glimpse into a young birder’s process and the utter magic of adaptation and camouflage.

When I visited Maddie and Meesh a few weeks ago, Maddie had materials for putting together vision boards — the first I’ve ever made. I brought recipe magazines from Andrew’s dad and New Yorkers and something from the SELC, which Michelle noted was a “very Emily choice.” We didn't get to finish them together so for whatever reason, making a vision board became my entire personality for the week that followed. I cannot describe in words how cathartic and fun it was so cut out little strips of paper and glue them together. No wonder people do this every year. The end result is nothing artistically noteworthy but —reader, I love her!!!!! Maybe in honor of the Lunar New Year you should make one this week, too?

We had our ELEVENTH (11!!!!!!!) formal this past weekend and I just — my heart. It is so special to have a weekend on the calendar to get wrist-deep in a chocolate fountain and chambong red wine with people we love. Taylor and I won a lava lamp and a magic 8 ball at the silent auction this year and I have consulted one or the other when making every decision this week. I painted a formal-themed jacket that sold for big bucks and all the money went back to El Refugio, which feels good because I love their work but also feels good that we have conned our way into making this event mean more than rotting in a hot tub by day and mainlining cheap cab sav by night. While at formal, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror — the silver streaks in my hair, the creases alongside my eyelids. I had one of those cliche but earnest moments thinking about how I’m older than I’ve ever been before, younger than I’ll ever be from here on out. I was awash with gratitude. It is so wildly sacred to grow older but not up.

Uh oh she’s making reference to Hanif Abdurraqib again! As if his name on her vision board wasn’t enough! But he shared something about fellow Italian-American baddie Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters and I made up an achievement for myself (“good meals this week”) to justify purchasing a copy. I will leave you with the first letter today:

Hope you get a light pollution-less glimpse at the stars this weekend of love. Keep on looking up. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

1. Three additional eggs in the outside enclosure,3 laid sweetly by three different hens, and

2. The varying offspring-to-be of several species of plants that overhang the coop itself.

In an attempt to stave off my winter ennui, I’ve spent much of this month wandering around head toward the dirt, looking for seeds. Seedsploring, if you will.4 My collection on our kitchen windowsill seems to grow each time I walk outside - a few acorns, a sycamore buttonball, small longleaf pinecones, a sweetgum’s spiny bur. I’ve brought in several (what I realize now was a mistake) male pine tree pods, also known as pollen cones,5 that leave a thick coat of yellow dust along the ledge. I’m a treasure hunter to a fault, what can I say? I can’t help myself - have you looked at a seed pod, any seed pod, recently?

I have spent the past week or so rolling the spiny bur from a Sweetgum tree between my fingers just off camera while on work calls. An acupressure mat for my fingers, I guess. I love its clear purpose: protect the goods until seeds are mature. I love that it was picked clean by hungry creatures and all I have now is its skeleton. I love this coat of armor, love its persistence in existing even after it has served its stated purpose. I love that sometimes this strange, spiny, woody things is called a gumball, love the oxymoron of the term against its tough exterior. I love that even outside in all the elements, this gumball would persist for at least another year, slowly broken down only by the traction of feet and tires.

This winter, as many of the trees are laid bare and the seeds are splayed out across their roots, I’m spending a lot of time figuring out what they are - the trees, their seeds, the pods that hold them. I’m embarrassed, and ecstatic, to admit that I never took the time to learn the names of each of these critical components of my surroundings, these building blocks of my very world, before now. What a gift to know so little about so much; what a gift to get to learn it day by day for the rest of my life.

I come by a seed fascination honestly. Some of my earliest memories are of schlepping acorns across my Nanny’s front yard, bringing them into her house to inspect more closely. I can close my eyes and harken between my fingers its smooth egg shape, the spike of its style protruding from its end. I love that shade of green - Granny Smith fading into ochre. I loved stepping on them just enough to crack them open, investigating the bright orange pulp inside. When I was maybe 6 or 8, I snuck a nibble, the pulp so bitter I immediately spat it out - a feast for other creatures, but not for me. Regardless, I loved watching squirrels dig for them in the piles of oak leaves, sometimes hiding them under the shingles of Nanny’s condo roof. When we moved into her condo at the height of the pandemic, we could hear the squirrels digging, digging, digging each night to bury and retrieve their bounty.

It feels late in the year to be noticing seeds, but then again, I have the luxury of not wading through inches of snow to find them. I also have the luxury of spending a lot of time beneath ancient6 trees that all seem to be th their descendants this month. But also, finding them now has me sleuthing through the annals of peer-reviewed publications for answers to fairly simple questions I never thought to ask before - are there benefits to seeds enduring frosts? Yes7. Are there evolutionary advantages to different pods’ shapes? Yes.8 For the fourth night in a row, I find myself on seedsheets dot com trying to distinguish between the latest additions to my collection - papery, crackly, spinny, flat wisps - a red maple? An elm?

The drama, the chainmail of some of them is such a BABIES ON BOARD sticker in the natural world — such a brilliant, stark reminder of the preciousness inside. Seeds come enclosed to protect from desiccation, or drying out. The pod provides nutrients and sometimes superpowers, as it helps them fly, float, burst, or multiply. Some seeds, tucked safely within their pods, can still germinate after (drumroll please) 32,000 years of dormancy I hear the whimpers of Silicon Valley executives begging to live forever; their hubris could never out rival the innate wisdom of seed-bearing9 plants.

The odds of an acorn becoming an oak tree, even with all of these adaptations, even with all of the armor and the dynamism and the utter magic of plants, are less than one in ten thousand. I’m stricken by the miracle it is that we have oak trees at all. That, once they’ve beaten such stark odds, their biggest threat is us, paving paradise to up a parking lot.

It bears worth mentioning that seeds themselves are embryos - with a tiny root (radicle) and shoot (plumule). I can’t help but circle back to the eggs I’m collecting - the chance at life contained inside them, the brilliance of their packaging, outfitted with nutritional provisions regardless of whether they have a shot at hatching. I think about sea turtles’ leathery clutches, the yolk sac in tow. Of mammalian follicles around ova, the formation of a placenta. These humble, sacred beginnings link us all. It’s all so extraordinary, really, that we’ve evolved to envelop our offspring in the best sheathing we can muster, and that any of us grow into sycamores or leatherbacks or armadillos or wrens after all.

Unsolicited recs

I just finished Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations, wherein our protagonist sets out to find the last of the arctic terns on their final cross-global migration. I was touched and galvanized by it all. I downloaded the audiobook just so I could finish it on the way home from dropping Taylor at the airport the other morning and nearly had to pull over because my glasses were so fogged from a few big walloping tears. Loved it.

Taylor and I watched Eva Victor’s directorial debut Sorry Baby the other night and holy hell. It was everything I had hoped it’d be and so much more. The tenderness; the humor; the scenes that stretch long enough to feel like you’re there in the bathtub with Agnes. One million awards for this movie, academy!

I’ve had the honor of being a part of ’s book launch team for his upcoming release, Hope for the Mission, a compassionate critique of the gospel rescue mission model that has so long been the Christian default response to unsheltered neighbors. This book is an exploration of proven solutions and what’s going right in the fight against homelessness and an earnest call to action to let evidence and dignity guide our nation’s response. It releases next week! Five stars!

I loved this piece in Orion that questioned Annie Dillard’s celebration of weasels, rather than groundhogs. A treat, in anticipation of my favorite holiday10

omg am I going to put this in every newsletter now? is that frowned upon?

Another quick reminder that I am running the Chicago Marathon in October and have the privilege of fundraising for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund in the process. As you know may or may not know, so far all pledges and paid subscriptions to this newsletter have gone to PCRF, too. If you’re feeling inclined to support the quality medical care and humanitarian aid PCRF provides children in Gaza and across Palestine, OR you just want me to (finally) shut up about training for a marathon, feel free to donate here.

Canada (and other neighbors to the frigid north) has sent a flock of geese to our backyard the past few weeks. I hear them honking all day and all night, often waking up to the sound of a just-out-of-tune trumpet at 2:30 in the morning. I am enamored with them: the navigational skills that brought them to this lagoon specifically, their democratic determination of the leader of their V, their heads tucked under their wings as they nap along the bank, the way they ramp up before taking flight - little Looney Tunes roadrunners on the water. Sometimes we’ve gotten geese in other nearby lagoons, but this is the first winter they’ve opted to snowbird at ours. Lucky, lucky me. It’s so fun having visitors of all shapes and species - Taylor’s aunt and uncle are here for a few days on their way to Florida, his parents come Sunday on their way home, my grandfather and his wife show up Monday. And hopefully the geese will stick around a little longer, too. Lucky, lucky me. A real honor to have a steady stream of loved ones — mammalian and avian — who claim ours as a home away from home! All this to say, book your stay at the Gielshire Shuck and Peel Club whenever you need a getaway!

Anyways, hope you stay warm and well this weekend. Send me intel about the seed pods and pine cones and other treasures in your own yard. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

This January, I’ve gotten to talk about what migrating geese and chickadees and mourning doves and parakeets and yellow bellied sapsuckers and chipping sparrows and song sparrows and black phoebes and eastern phoebes and great blue herons and brewer’s blackbirds and brown headed cowbirds — and and and and — mean for the year ahead. Through cups of coffee and voice memos and gchats and one postcard, I’ve been made aware of avian visitors and imparted my predictions for what they mean for the coming year. Prosperity! Abundance! Resourcefulness! Cunning! All of it full of promise, and all of it I fully believe.2

I have to believe.3

Blessed are the feathered, for theirs is the kingdom of my brain, I guess. But also, yes, blessed are the feathered and we that bear witness to them. Blessed are the slimy, the scaly, the tufted, and woolen. Blessed are the stinky and the fragrant, the smooth and the rough. Blessed is the snowstorm and blessed is the sunny day. Blessed is the loblolly pine in my yard, pock-marked by nuthatches chiseling their meals from beneath its bark. Blessed are the tree frogs hiding behind each cushion on our porch furniture. Blessed are the pinecones thumping onto my roof, shaken loose by each gust. Blessed is the school of tiny mullet darting through a tide pool this morning, and blessed is the tide pool itself. Blessed are our neighbors - human and nonhuman - with whom we share this time and place.

I was supposed to be in Indiana this morning, where the temperature is firmly below zero (in Fahrenheit, my London loves! - that is COLD), but my meeting got cancelled and opened a whole new world of possibility for the 30 hours I’d budgeted to be exclusively thinking of work.4 Instead, I bundled up5 and investigated what low tide had in store for me: the usual dread of royal terns this time of year, deer tracks headed straight into the ocean,6 7 several whimbrel fishing along the shoreline, tide pool alleyways teeming with life. It’s incredible, really, the worlds within worlds on this rock in space.

I caught the morning light show long enough to share a nod with a middle aged man who brought his coffee and said, prematurely, “damn, good sunrise this morning,” with a look of such sincerity I thought that surely it had been a while since he’d seen one. It was a good sunrise, but I’m so spoiled. We have so many that glom up my throat with awe, I am so lucky, I sometimes forget how immensely special it is to catch any of it, any time.

On my way out, I heard a familiar drumming over the footpath leading back to the parking lot. I expected a downy woodpecker, a familiar friend on the way off the beach. Instead, I saw a small dinosaur. A pileated woodpecker, standing about 18 inches by my best estimates, flitted tree to tree, hammering away at each small trunk with reckless abandon.

Pileated woodpeckers are indicators of a forest’s good health - they subsist on a steady diet of carpenter ants and other insects that thrive in decaying wood. They need old growth, mature trees, and rot.8 Their nesting supports a complex ecosystem, signaling good conditions for growth, abundant insects, and a rich habitat for other cavity-nesting species (owls, squirrels, bats). By excavating dead and dying trees, they accelerate decomposition, cycling nutrients and fungi for further breakdown and renourishment. Blessed are the pileated woodpeckers, for they will engineer the ecosystem.

Also, they look almost cartoonish in their design. Their scientific name, Drycopus pileatus, means, essentially, capped cleaver. They’re in the woods and they’re gouging holes in dying trees and they’re looking like little flamboyant pterodactyls while doing so. They’ve got these gorgeous red crests, drawing so much attention to themselves whilst they bore holes in everything in sight. Reader, I love them.

Because my bird predictions are top of mind, I have opted to take this brush with the prehistoric as yet another sign from the universe. Some may say I am farming for signs. Some may be right.

I am choosing to believe that this woodpecker does in fact symbolize perseverance, proximity to nature, and spiritual resilience (thanks birdify dot com). More acutely, I am embracing the idea that its tireless pecking is a metaphor for tirelessly working toward a better world, that its role in forest transformation somehow signifies new growth in all of us. A reminder to cleave holes so that others may build homes in them, to continue tapping at opportunities for new growth. A symbol of persistence, resilience, and maybe even looking cool as hell while doing it.

I made the mistake of opening Instagram in the middle of writing this and find myself snotting in a booth at Corner Perk. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart. There is so much I could say about the cruelty of this time, and of all times that empire reigned. There is so much I could tell you about the grief and fear of people I love right now, about the way terror is actively shaping the choices and lives of my neighbors. Instead, I will share with you what one of my students said to me last night: “al fin y al cabo, solo tenemos nosotros otros” - at the end of the day, all we have is each other. Blessed are we, all of us, every single one.

Unsolicited recs

One of my goals this year has been to memorize a poem every month. You can take the girl out of the church but you can’t take the “if you get kidnapped it will be comforting to have verses to recite” out of the girl. This month’s is Wendell Berry’s “The Want of Peace” and each time I try to spout it off, I am panged by a new line coming into focus. Recommending the poem, but also the practice. I haven’t spent this much time with a text since high school.

I’m reading Miriam Toews A Truce That Is Not Peace per Natalie’s recommendation and being singed by each new reveal of Toews’ family dynamics. I looooved her novel, Fight Night, so reading her memoir was an easy sell. Recommending both tbh.

Have you blared Elvis Crespo’s Suavemente in your car recently????? May I RECOMMEND. I swear on Tuesday night it changed the course of my entire week. Adding it to my “break glass in case of emergency” playlist, which is just Radio Ga Ga and Right Back Where We Started From on a loop, basically.

If you haven’t yet watched Marcello Hernandez’s Netflix special, may I implore you to do so? I had tears rolling down my face. Mami don’t make me get nasty!!!!

One more small thing - I am running the Chicago Marathon in October and have the privilege of fundraising for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund in the process. As you know may or may not know, all pledges and paid subscriptions to this newsletter have gone to PCRF, too. If you’re feeling inclined to support the quality medical care and humanitarian aid PCRF provides children in Gaza and across Palestine, OR you just want me to (finally) shut up about training for a marathon, feel free to donate here.

In the spirit of savor it Friday, I leave you with something that’s been rattling around my brain since I read it a few months ago:

Stay safe and warm this weekend. Hope you’re visited by something extraordinary in one way or another. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

All this to say, luck has befallen me in various, meaningful ways this year. Monday, I schlepped at least 50 pounds of chicken manure to the shit pile and saw a family of wrens who had devised a nest just above it, an unlikely warm spot amid the decay. What luck. Yesterday, I found a penny on the blanket Harvey and I were sitting under, the reason for its sudden appearance inexplicable. What luck.

This year has been terror after terror, and luck after luck. I don’t need to recount the terrors. I feel an odd sense of duty to recount the luck.

I broke my foot and my parents brought over crutches and a jigsaw puzzle. It snowed in the Lowcountry. Natalie came to play Bohnanza in my kitchen for a week. We had formal in our living room again and there were zero leaks this year. Taylor finally brought me to the Everglades and I cried for weeks about it (the terrors! the luck!). I saw an alligator yawn. We had Taylor’s entire family for Easter and we ate every meal in the backyard. Bruno Mars the cat showed up in our backyard (the terror, the luck, etc.). I cosplayed as a biologist and joined real, actual scientists on several early morning dolphin and sea turtle expeditions. The butterfly house was overcome with swallowtails. The side of the parkway was overcome with gulf fritillaries. The sand dunes were overcome with monarchs. Friends had babies and in so doing gave me new friends. I sat a two-day vigil with a sperm whale who washed up on the beach (the terror, the luck). I ran fewer miles than I planned and more than I ever would have thought possible years ago. I watched barnacles extend their cirri to catch plankton prey and sea cucumbers explode their innards to escape predators. I watched horseshoe crabs roomba their way to the sand dunes and then spawn at the shore’s edge. I watched the snails in my yard glide and eat and feel each other up. I ate at least 52 pizzas, drank at least 1000 seltzers courtesy of my partner. I ate hallacas and pears and tres leches cake and Takis courtesy of my students. I ate lasagna and wings and deviled eggs and jambalaya and good ranch courtesy of my dad. I got to be a part of Sarah’s birthday surprise on a Brooklyn rooftop, wearing a sun costume courtesy of Yussre. I saw friends in Boston and Chicago and New York and Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Columbia. I went tidepooling along the edge of the Puget Sound and found two whale vertebrae that had washed onto the rocky shore. I flew to South Bend and Seattle and Little Rock and the plane never fell out of the sky. I started hundreds of crossword puzzles, completed maybe half of them. I made new friends and spent real, meaningful time with many of my old ones. I watched Taskmaster on my couch with Taylor and Harvey and thought “this is it, everything I could ever ask for” over and over again. I heard the trills of red winged blackbirds, the honks of great blue herons, the varied songs of cardinals in the backyard. I was visited by hundreds of egrets, tens of wood storks, and a consistent kettle of black vultures throughout the year. I watched the moon shapeshift each night; texted friends about her enormity, the luck we all felt to catch sight of her. I watched the constellations each morning, their slow shuffle through the changing seasons. I watched all five Twilight movies (the terror, the luck), all eight Mission Impossibles (again, the terror, the luck), three of four Planet of the Apes (these were good, actually). I read 92 books and many of them were good enough to remember to read again. I saw horror after horror unfold just out of reach, said prayers I didn’t know were still in me while brushing my teeth. What luck to have a bed to sleep in and a car to go places and loose leaf tea to brew each night.3 What luck to see and hear and smell and taste and touch the millions of miraculous everyday things that happen whether I realize they’re happening or not.

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Real ones may remember that black vultures were my first bird of the year. They continued to show up through nearly every major and minor experience. One landed on our car in the Everglades and refused to leave, a particular kettle flew above me on every parkway run, and most notably, this wake descended at the front of our neighborhood to feast on a fish kill in October. True waste management heroes.

Recently, I had the very regular experience of finding a not-quite-dried necklace of whelk eggs washed up on the beach. I scooped it up to show Taylor, and then realized that one individual pouch had a hole in it, where I am choosing to believe a few whelks had begun to hatch.4 Despite years of sneaking dried egg cases into my home museum,5 I hadn’t ever looked inside one. Holy hell, reader. I feel like once a week I bring up something to someone about the miracle that is mollusks growing (and then growing with) their shells. And somehow this was even more miraculous than I expected. This individual pouch must have had 50 teeny whelks suspended within it. And each of the other 100+ pouches seemed to, too. I inspected each limpid membrane to sneak a peek at more of them. The holiness of each tiny creature, less than half a centimeter, and its shell. Their whelk mother shimmied under the sand, found something solid to act as a substrate for her thousands of offspring, and spent days creating each individual whelk in each individual shell in each individual pouch. I can’t. There are miracles everywhere if we only have eyes to see them. There is luck everywhere if we only decide to feel it.

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Unsolicited recs

I have fallen off the wagon (in many senses of the expression - the holidays have me mainlining Malbec and writing far less than I’d hoped), but while I’m waiting for Taylor to finish his work day so we can hit the road to Asta and Shermie, here’s what I’ve been watching, reading, listening to, etc.

I’m reading Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li and wow. I read one of the essays in the New Yorker earlier this year and have been on the waitlist at my library basically since. A wholly non-euphemistic account of her immense grief after both of her sons died by suicide. Ripping me open!!!

I recently finished Emma Pattee’s Tilt, a novel about a nine-month pregnant woman shopping for a crib in Ikea when a massive earthquake hits. Again, frothed it. Really excellent exploration of the impossible choices at what feels like the end of the world. And now I have added earthquakes to my list of biggest fears.

At Thanksgiving, my cousin Luke made a comment about how I would probably enjoy Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. He was spot on. A 1949 account of the changing landscape of Leopold’s Wisconsin home. I read “there are two spiritual dangers of not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace” and said yes, actually, I do have a duty to garden and compost (and change many other behaviors, too) in 2026. Madison, if you’re reading this, let’s book club about it.

Radiolab continues to churn out bangers and my subscription to The Lab just gives and gives.6 The best episode of the year was Quantum Refuge, where a quantum physicist in Gaza explains how he, living through the genocide that continues to ravage his home and his loved ones, to the outside world is Schrödinger’s cat.

Taylor had me watch Klaus this holiday season and he was right - it rules. Typically I think “wow, the world does not need more Christmas movies, actually!” when he makes me watch newer holiday releases. This time, I just felt thankful. Just wonderful.

I’m switching from Spotify to Qobuz but it’s a journey. Pangur shared this resource of ways to quit a few months ago so I’ve finally been taking the steps to change my ways, etc. I chose Qobuz, in full transparency, because that’s what Hanif Abdurraqib has switched to and I want access to his playlists. UGH. Why must corporations do evil shit with the money I pay to listen to Rosalía’s LUX over and over and over again. Also I read Mood Machine by Liz Pelly last month and I have things to SAY about Sp*tify so it’s high time I just pull the trigger. Will report back if others are interested. Idk.

SPECIAL REMINDER: PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR FIRST BIRD OF THE NEW YEAR

Used big font for that because it’s a big deal (to me). I will certainly be making my friends stop and notice their first bird tomorrow morning and I hope the rest of you do the same to whomever has the fortune of spending new year’s day with you. If you want my (very unscientific and very unproven) analysis of what your first bird might mean for the year ahead, I would obviously love to weigh in.

May your new year’s eve be filled with whatever traditions even make sense for you. Me? I’ll be wearing green underwear and kissing each of my friends and shoving twelve grapes in my mouth at midnight. I hope luck finds you in every kitchen and office cubicle and hospital room and airport and body of water and house of worship and wooded path you walk into this year. Holding each of you close in 2026.

See ya later,

emilgator

Run your fingers along a whelk shell you brought home a few summers ago. Attempt to prick your fingers on its knobs. Memorize its ridges, the subtle textural changes across each tubercle. Draw a mental picture of the creature who made it, who inhabited it before you relocated it to your desk. Google whelks, google hermit crabs, google tide pools. Write a story of the long saga of homes this shell has had, this shell has been. When you can’t sleep at night, rub your fingertips together, conjuring the shell between them.

Walk outside on a cold day with a hot cup of coffee. Hold it between two palms, searing your love lines or your life lines or whatever the hell they are. Wonder, actually, whatever the hell they are. Wonder, actually, whatever the hell that palmreader even meant at the sixth grade dance when he said one of those lines was “sturdy but mysterious.” Pivot from this mental detour and be back with your coffee alone on your porch. Nose dive into the steam, the bitter comfort of the first sip.

Make conversation with another woman in line at the packed deli counter. Learn her name is Elaine. Let her tell you about how she’s getting lunch meat before her granddaughter comes to town - how she isn’t sure what the girl eats besides turkey sandwiches. Reach for her hand when she tells you about her son, who died of a glioblastoma last year. Memorize the way her lower eyelids fence a single thick tear. Tell her it’s an honor to hear about her son. Tell her you’re sure this turkey will be perfect for her granddaughter. Tell her you hope this weekend creates only good memories. Mean it.

Read Robert McFarlane’s Is a River Alive? and ask yourself that question about every body of water you encounter: the lagoon in your backyard, the Mississippi River and Puget Sound and Lake Michigan when you visit for work. Start more carefully observing the ocean, assuming that yes, of course, in and of herself she is a living body, who contains seemingly unlimited other living bodies. Note the days when the ocean is glassy and still; count the colors reflected off her surface. Note the days when the ocean is wholly unbridled; become hypnotized watching the spray as the waves crash into themselves. Get at least knee-deep in the ocean once per month, dunking your whole body quarterly at minimum. Baptize, shiver, repeat.

Run further than you knew your body could take you and then turn around and run back. Inhale. Exhale. Count each step and then lose track after 26 and start counting again. Take note of the heat in your lungs, the salt on your brow. Ride a wave of nausea and keep going. When your left foot hits the ground, swear you will never go this far again. When your right foot hits the ground, swear you will go this far every single Saturday morning until you die. Cry the entire final mile because you’re depleted and exhausted and so damn proud of your body for carrying you through this run, through this life so far.

Buy: tap shoes, another blank notebook, owl pellets, a beer for the guy who sits outside the hardware store.

Sell: all of the clothes that don’t fit your ever-changing body, the heavy and fancy grill you never use, everyone you love on that John Prine song.

Notice the stripes on the wasp as it taps against your window? Do you see the yellow band on its belly? Do you see that its thorax is more brown than black (contradicting a belief you didn’t know you held about wasps)? Do you hear the single decibel tick-tick-tick as his legs bump the glass?

Memorize the sun spots on your grandmother’s hands, the webs of pleats and creases in her skin. Memorize the shape of her nail bed, the way she scrapes away her cuticles, the bend in her fingers. Memorize the way she uses one of those bent pointers like a maestro’s baton, holding her iPad with the other hand to play the same Queen songs over and over. After she dies, watch her hands projected on the backs of your eyelids each night, conducting an orchestra of one.

Find yourself in front of the tree that houses the white breasted nuthatches. Investigate each hollow, the bark’s corrugation, a cicada killer ascending with its namesake prey. Peel a cardstock-thin sheet of bark to investigate. Count the colors in this two-inch parallelogram - fourteen distinct shades that five minutes ago you would have just called “brown.”

Pinch a few stems of rosemary to bring home each time you pass by the overgrown bush. Stick the stems in your car vent for the drive home. Wonder how the perfume industry stays afloat when rosemary merely exists. Keep a sprig in your car and roll it between your fingers until it becomes brittle and loses all its needles. Make a mental note to go back to the bush soon.

Go to the beach with the purpose of watching the sunrise. Instead, find dried whelk eggs, worm castings, a perfect horseshoe crab molt. Watch the biggest ghost crab you've ever seen sneak from its hole, a hermit crab scurry from one tide pool to another, a sea cucumber explode its insides. Sit on a rock slack jawed as the pelicans slice through the lowest hanging clouds and the shorebirds fly in for breakfast in the tide pools. Commit to learning the names of every shorebird, of every shell.

Go to the beach with the purpose of watching the birds. Instead become wholly entranced with the pastels behind the moon, a 180 degree turn from the highlighter orange of the sun peeking out behind the earth. Wonder if the birds take delight in this, too. Assume that at least some of their swooping is for pleasure, at least some of their flocking is for communal joy.

Bury your nose in your cat’s neck and absolutely huff it. Tune your ears to his purrs, imagine the vibrations against your sternum are a hard reset on the days before. Feel his paws adducting on your chest, the warmth of his body on the better part of yours. Blink at each other slowly, this language you only know because of him, so much you only know because of him.

Accept the gentle rope of conversation tossed your way by eager strangers. Talk about hot beef soup, their drive cross country, their favorite vintage store on the other side of town. Hold tight to the life vest of chatter, convert yourself from strangers to friends for even just a few moments.

Spend the better part of an afternoon watching the shadows of your houseplant, the pinpricks of light from the disco chair Sarah made shapeshift and migrate through the room as the sun moves across the sky. Trace your retinas along the contours of the monsterra shadow over and over again, taking note of the ways the leaves grow and shrink, the pocks of light multiply and fade as the day goes on.

Sit at a bar by yourself and order every local oyster on the menu. When they arrive, ask their names twice just to be sure you can add them to whatever subconscious rolodex you have of delicious things you might one day recognize again. Opt out of dressing them up with cocktail and mignonette - they have enough zhuzh on their own. Hold the brine and earthy sweetness on your tastebuds as long as you can, ordering one more of each when the bartender returns.

On rainy days, give up on caring what your hair looks like. On humid days, give up on caring what your hair looks like. Generally, try to have a healthily low level of caring about your hair’s appearance - you’re gonna die one day and when you do, you will not be thinking about frizz.

When gifted a few free hours in a city you’ve never been, go for a long walk. Stare at a public art piece long enough that you no longer understand it. Compare the size of these birds to your lighter, smaller birds at home. Ask a security guard the name of the neighborhood you’re in and where you came from. Ask people in stores about what they think are must sees and receive a litany of unexpected intel: the big tree in their favorite park, a particular transit line, the spot where they once saw thousands of crows roosting, the university library. Jot them all down and pursue them heartily.

Plant a lemon tree and wait a year before your first lemon arrives. When it does, wait several more months for it to turn yellow. When the day finally comes to pluck it from its stem, wait for your partner to come home and twist it off the stalk. Slice it into small parts. Suck the juice out of one wedge and squeeze another into your seltzers. This perfect tartness, this perfect brightness that came into your world with just a little assistance - isn’t that what magic is?

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Did ya miss me?

Probably not!!! Which isn’t self deprecating, it’s merely factual! I’m not so vain as to believe you’re waiting for these emails with bated breath. But in case you did and wondered where these were, the answer is merely “I was swamped!” which is boring but true. One weekend I was on a plane to Cincinnati, the next I was in Clemson, the next Taylor’s parents were visiting. I keep writing for myself - garbled little notes in the margins of work notebooks and my notes app and my planner. But none of it really made it here. So it goes!1

I’m in Seattle for work this week (and contemplating blowing up my life and moving here - I shan’t but I fantasize nonetheless) and writing this from a hotel bed Thursday evening. Pacific time is wild - I can’t wait to go to bed at 9 pm.

Unsolicited recs

If you have talked to me at all the past week, you have heard an earful about Rosalía’s latest album, LUX. To paraphrase Hunter, I don’t think I knew what music was before this album. The week before last, all I could talk about was West End Girl, Lily Allen’s scalding account of the end of her marriage. Actually, the past few weeks the Touch Tunes in my brain has been BUMPING2 with new songs. Khurangbin has a new album that is sending me into orbit. I am still not over Sudan Archives’s October album release. The Charli xcx releases from the Wuthering Heights soundtrack are haunting me. Raury’s October single has me frothing at the mouth for more. Point being, I think the TikTok teens were right about recession art. And for this one small thing about our modern times, I am grateful.

Taylor and I came across this video the night before I left for this accidental marathon work trip and I have giggled about it every day since. I cannot decide if this is a bit or in earnest. Either way, I am grateful for its existence.

A few other things I have enjoyed lately include: this new-ish PBS Nature documentary on pigeons, Fern Brady reading the audiobook of Strong Female Character, and a Crows and Coffee I went to last night at Birds Connect Seattle.

May your weekend be full of unexpected delights - a dash of truffle oil on your fries, the perfect book in the neighborhood Little Free Library, your kid learning a new word. I leave you with this Kurt Vonnegut quote that I want to tattoo on the insides of my eyelids:

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

See ya later,

emilgator

Without hyperbole, I am overcome with joy. Words simply fail - the elegance! The prestige! The honks!!!!! There is a palpable magic in the sudden descent of hundreds of beautiful creatures1 - and the fact that they picked MY YARD?!?! Sorry, I am letting it get to my head, but…. let’s just say my gratitude journal2 is getting its fill of inky thank yous this week.3

Now that this has happened two years in a row (that I am aware of), I am officially declaring this the best possible part of fall anywhere on earth. Here is what I have deduced: migrating great egrets from the Northeast are making their way to South America and by some miracle, my very own backyard is the perfect stopover point for just a few days of respite. Great egrets can be short or long distance migrants - your guess as to where they’re coming from or heading to is as good as mine. But there’s a good chance that they are the same flock from last year, remembering the bounty of this particular lagoon, and THAT is a theory that will fuel my “I can’t believe I get to be alive on this planet at this time” tank for the rest of the year.

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Alongside the great egrets comes a congregation of their smaller, somehow even daintier counterparts, snowy egrets. They arrived a day or two after the mass of great egrets and have done their fair share of fishing and kark-kark-karking, between bouts of gliding just above the water’s edge and landing in perfect arabesques. Despite their size, they hold their own against the larger great egrets, gulping down fish half their height and squawking away greedy competitors.

In addition to the egrets last year, we had a pair of wood stork visitors. This year, the rest of the wood storks seem to have gotten the memo as well - there are upwards of 20 in a muster that's descended in my neighbor’s yard each day this week. I am so tempted to call them a coven - their stark black wing tips and long beaks feel so witchy. They are plague doctors, sorcerers, crones. I could not love them more if I tried. I can’t stop listening to witchy music because hello??? Wood storks in October??? A perfect fit. Look at them and tell me I’m wrong:

I cannot deal with how deeply I love them. There are necromancers among us and they are wood storks. If I ever have a baby shower or whatever next life event becomes a whole to-do, please make sure the theme is wood stork.

For whatever reason, a family of bald eagles has also timed their arrival to OUR SPECIFIC YARD during the same week as the egrets two years in a row. Last year, a juvenile bald eagle landed on a branch outside my window and I felt the blood drain from every artery in my body. Have you ever seen one up close!? Because I have exactly once during a work call and I should have logged off immediately to take it all in. All the other times I have seen them, they are racing each other just above the tree line, assessing their kingdom from on high. Bald eagles don’t get their signature bald heads until they’re 4 or 5. But they are still ENORMOUS and daunting and love to scream. This year, a family of four (two juveniles and two adults) are terrorizing the egrets and wood storks, as bald eagles are wont to do.4 Despite their thievery, I can’t help but love their shrill, daring presence in the yard. They add such Ben Affleck in The Town energy to the soap opera unfolding between the other birds. For bald eagles it’s always robbing season. And you know what? I can’t help but love them. Even if our entire bald eagle mythos is a LIE.5

Amid all of this, the sudden temperature drop resulted in a pretty significant fish kill in one of our neighborhoods’ other lagoons, which brought in a wake of my first bird of the year (and another favorite): black vultures!!!! I have been taking many lunch walks to visit them as they gorge on dead fish. I have little of substance to say about this except how THANKFUL I am that vultures exist. Such a vital player in the waste management game. I love what they’re called (vulture is just such a fitting word for their entire being, no?) and that a group on the ground is a kettle, in flight is a volt. Also their little hops when they’re grounded? I get cute aggression when I see them. I can’t help it - I’m in love!

All of this to say - I apologize to anyone and everyone who has tried to get my attention this week while I was starstruck by avian visitors. As I have said to Taylor at least forty times since Monday, I cannot believe I get to live here, to see them, to experience the visual pleasure of forty egrets’ ivory glissade reflected over my backyard lagoon for a whole week each year. I cannot believe I get to look out my window while I peck-peck-peck away on a computer and see twelve wood storks levitate and land, their featherless heads sifting through the lagoon’s briny silt. It is, without exaggeration, an absolute thrill to be among dinosaurs in this way. Come to my house this time next year if you want to FEEL something.

Unsolicited recs

My gal pal Madison was on the Kitchen Table Sauce podcast about enduring, expansive friendships and 1) I love Madison and her place in my life and her thoughtfulness about all things, and 2) I am perpetually reminded that friendship is the best gift life gives us. I am only halfway through (learned of its existence only this afternoon), but I can say with confidence that it is a treasure. Immediately thought of Carson in the first few minutes, and also so many of my decades-long friendships, the joyful work of showing up continually for people over the years, how Joann always reminds me that you just can’t make old friends. God, I love my people. Give it a listen and remind yourself how much you love yours, too.

I started Percival Everett’s The Trees this week and am struck by it. An effigy to lynching. If you haven’t read any Percival Everett, here is a plug for James, too (a retelling of the Adventures Huckleberry Finn from the lens of the enslaved Jim’s point of view). After Service 95 interviewed Everett about The Trees and the power of memory, and historical honesty in their book club, I said yep, of course I will be reading that next! If you dive in, let’s book club.

Jenan (who, let’s be so honest, I want to be bffs with) went to a Clint Smith III event at the International African American Museum and was so thoughtful as to send me an autographed copy of Above Ground, one of Smith’s books of poetry. I have been reading my way through it this week and was gut punched by the titular poem, about Smith’s children’s experience with cicadas & the world they will inherit in the time between this brood’s exhumation and its next, toward the end of the book. I just keep thinking about the final lines:

Maybe treasure is in what dies almost
as quickly as it rises from the earth.
Maybe treasure is anything that reminds you
what a miracle it is to be alive.

Hope your weekend is chock to the brim with reminders of what a miracle it all is - our beating hearts, birds overhead, this pale blue dot. Happy Savor It Friday to all and to all a good night! Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

But! There’s a new (to me) meaning for the word. And that’s what we’re talking about today.

On Tuesday, and several mornings over the past few weeks, I watched as a near-murmuration of royal terns took to the skies in synchronized concert. I had googled “royal tern murmuration” after returning to my car several mornings prior and never managed to read past “no, this is not a murmuration because they are not starlings.” This week, however, compelled by the sheer size of this flock, I read on. Lo and behold, these congregations are called dreads.

Royal terns1 return to my beloved beaches each fall to snowbird on Hilton Head, after spending their breeding season in the northeast. Upon their homecoming, their unharmonious shrieks fill the beaches until, all at once, they fall silent and take off - a coordinated performance, a corps de ballet along the seashore. This rapid, unified response is puzzling and gorgeous - all at once, they just know to sync up and get moving.

The terns, while performing their dread, are soundless. It seems as though their intention is to draw as little attention to individuals in flight as possible. Scientists haven’t quite figured out why these flocks turn into dreads. There are hypotheses about merging into a singular form to confuse predators, about building stronger social bonds, about practicing coordination of their flight patterns for their next long-distance migration.

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I am yet to see the terns on their respective sandbar without also witnessing a dread this year. At least three times per each hour I spend watching them, they ascend into dread, taking their positions for five minutes2 or so, swooping through the skies in synchronicity. Sometimes those that look to be younger get off track, forming a sub-dread (which, for what it’s worth, is also called a panic), but prior to concluding their display, they integrate into the larger flock again.

I can’t help but find new meaning, clear instructions for collective action within the word “dread” now: coordinate with your neighbors, move in silence when necessary, create stronger bonds with those around you, practice this daily. Dread as a handbook, dread as an imperative, dread as an art form.

Unsolicited recs

Carson implored me to listen to this episode of Search Engine, which is really an episode of Talk Easy, a podcast which I had not heard of before but will be adding to my queue now. In it, host Sam Fragoso interviews (the) Terry Gross and, as Carson explained, it is “just two masters at their craft.” We both struggled to articulate just why it was so wonderful, but listen for yourself.

Mary Roach, sci comm writer extraordinaire, has a new book out that I have been absolutely relishing (and squirming through at times). Replaceable You is about supplements to human anatomy - prosthetic limbs, skin grafts, and so much more. I will read anything she writes and this is no exception - her wit, miles-deep research, and laser-precise descriptions make it so fun and fascinating.

This Ann Lamott essay in the New Yorker has sat on my desk all week and I just keep thinking about it. It’s a sort of excavation of her grief and its contours after losing loved one after loved one.

I jotted down this Emily Dickinson poem the other day and now have it memorized, a tab in my brain permanently open:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, 
One clover, and a bee. 
And revery. 
The revery alone will do, 
If bees are few.

May your dread be instructive and your weekend be filled with revery. Me?? I have a house full of friends ready to eat many, many slices of Mary Reid’s birthday cake. Hope there’s a cake at arms’ length for you this weekend, too. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

Turn and face the strange, babes! It’s fall! The days are shorter and so is my attention span! It probably also has to do with the IV drip of headlines I wish were from the Onion infused through my retinas and straight into my cranium each day. A less fatalistic, more seasonal take from my dear friend Katie is that we’re supposed to slow down in the fall. I think she's also right, and I should probably take her advice.

I’ve been throwing a few pity parties over the past few weeks.1 I won’t get into it.2 The siren song of despair has been trilling in the distance. I have tied myself to the mast, though, with the sounds of pine warblers, the flowering of spartina, the return of the most-shy alligators to my line of sight.

Living in my hometown as an adult, I’m constantly reckoning with the hubris of my younger self. I spent so many years in my beloved Lowcountry yammering on about the lack of seasons, yearning for warm-colored leaves and jacket weather. No more! For so long, I failed to be astonished by what fall here offers. And reader, it offers a lot. Enough deprivation - I am trying to LIVE. I am trying to REMEMBER THE SEASONS. And so, I present to you, my fall observations (so far):

• The proliferation of butterflies (along the Atlantic Flyway Sand Dune Super Highway, as I have been calling it) this time of year rivals any leaf peeping in the northeast.3 Along the roadsides, we’re up to our eyeballs in tiny white asters being feasted on by gulf fritillaries.

• The soundscape alone is just remarkable. (The proverbial) We talk(s) a lot about the sounds of a South Carolina summer - but the sounds of fall? Unparalleled. The shrieks of cicadas are slowing down, but the crickets are ramping up their mating season and thus, their love songs can be heard out every cracked window and in every ditch along the parkway.

• Fall blooms have my full and undivided attention this year. Goldenrod and aster instinctively flowering side by side to draw in pollinators??? HELLO?? Not to get on my soapbox about the inherent wisdom of nature but…. I MUST PREACH! Purple and yellow flowers appearing in close proximity - a billboard advertising an all you can eat buffet for bees and butterflies and bats and birds?! Come on. Brilliant.

• The alligators in the lagoon behind our house are finally showing their faces again now that the terrestrial temps have cooled, making exposing themselves to the sun more desirable than in the summer. I almost had to go off camera on a work call Wednesday afternoon because I was so wide-eyed, mouth-agape as these once-strangers revealed themselves through my window.

• Frog-and-Toadville, USA, population: me. I am talking about personal style this time of year, sure, but also the increased presence of my amphibious neighbors. This might be a fluke but the amount of eastern toads and green treefrogs appearing on my doorstep or clinging to my windows this time of year feel unrivaled by the summer surge. Shout out to later breeding seasons and a wet August, I guess!

• The birds are back in town, baby. It’s migration season and three million birds are flying overhead each night. The part-timers are making their ways back to my literal and proverbial backyard: pine warblers trill alongside the permanent residents at our feeders each afternoon, plovers trail alongside the full-time wading birds through the tide pools each morning.

• I have shared about this before but what the hell, I’ll share it again. I have become so entranced with spartina blooms as a subtle demarkation of the seasons’ change. October brings a few caramel-coated reeds amidst the delicate petals in the swaths of green. If this is the only flora color change I get, I’ll take it!

• I am cautiously optimistic about the return of Egret Week, wherein nearly one

  hundred wading birds descended on the lagoon behind our house last year. This week, I have spotted at least seven separate egrets, two great blue herons, three snowy egrets, and a wood stork visiting our growing (albeit temporary) rookery. I am holding out hope that we have another week of what can only be described as unfettered avian magic this October, too.

  

  

I saw a tiktok yesterday (I hear myself, but stay with me) where a girl mentioned that people who live in seasons remember more because they have compartmentalized their time around the weather and natural happenings, allowing them to remember periods as distinct. She went onto say that the amount of time we spend scrolling creates these voids in our memory - the minutes fade together into hours into days. We need goosebumps from the crisp fall breeze, to let our hair frizz from summer’s hot breath, sneeze our way through spring bloomwatch, warm our ungloved hands by holding someone else’s all winter long. In my attempts to yank myself out of screen time’s abyss, I am trying to keep careful notes this year of the elusive differences of each day - the phases of the moon, the critters in my garden bed, the neighbors on walks. If you’re somewhere the leaves change, lucky you! And if you’re not, lucky you that you get to find other things to celebrate about the earth’s rotation around the sun.

A non-comprehensive list of lucky things that have happened since a bird shat on my arm three weeks ago

I took four separate flights that all took off and landed at their scheduled times. I saw a rainbow driving over the bridge. I won a raffle4 at the David Sibley5 event for the Carolina Bight Birding Center and in it was the best hat I will ever own. I caught myself at the last second before absolutely eating it doing a box jump. I gave several presentations and all of them went well enough. I remain employed. I remembered the names of the men who work at Masala Mantra. I found the very last pint of Half-Baked at Harris Teeter behind the other flavors. A robber fly landed on me during the David Sibley event and I got to learn what a robber fly was. There have been two hummingbirds regularly visiting the backyard feeder. My partner remains employed. The residents of St. Helena maintained their CPO after staying at a County Council meeting until the wee hours of the morning. The mother rat in the rooster coop came back for her nest, even after I relocated her pinkies.6 I brought my mom to watch the sunrise and we found pirate coins under a brick marked “treasure.” The hurricanes did not hit land, did not uproot my little island home. There were volunteers to let us in when my mom and I swung by the cat sanctuary. My family remains healthy. I had time to walk around an art museum. I forgot the charger for my electric toothbrush on a five day trip and the battery lasted until I got home. I finally kayaked the lagoons at Palmetto Dunes. I ran into a friend from preschool on a long run. I watched the sunrise at least 10 times. A pod of dolphins emerged from under the bridge at the exact time traffic was stopped. I had binoculars on hand when a northern flicker visited the tree outside my office window. A massive snail visited our front porch and stayed for an entire day. I saw the constellations on my way to the gym most mornings. Harvey fell asleep in my lap most afternoons.

Unsolicited recs

I have so many backlogged from the past month of not really writing so I will try to share in some semblance of order:

BOOKS: I absolutely devoured Aiden Arata’s You Have a New Memory. I wish I could read an essay by Aiden every single week. I had no idea who she was before Kelsey posted this book on her instagram story and tbh I still don’t know who she is in terms of “internet presence” but wow, her surgical finesse in describing the modern world is just… so good. Loved it. I’ve also been reading Karen Russell’s The Antidote for the past month7 and now I want to read everything related to Black Sunday and the Dust Bowl. Against the backdrop of a supreme leader hellbent on rewriting history, this book is rubbing alcohol, burning and cleaning the wound.

OTHER READING: Whelmed’s latest, and everything Bridget Gamble shares with the world really, is a joy. Because of her recommendation, I have become absolutely smitten with Frederick, a 1960s series of books about a gray field mouse collecting the colors and magic of the world as provisions for winter. I have thought of Frederick endlessly for the past week. Read Bridget’s newsletter, for this and so much more.

LISTENING: Radiolab’s had some absolute bangers lately. The Spark of Life reached into my chest and wrung my heart like a kitchen towel. The literal light in us all. Terrestrials’ recent episode on beavers had a similar effect - cannot believe they’re real. Cannot believe we consider these architectural geniuses anything but the greatest engineers of the Anthropocene. Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat and Hrishi Hirway has a new season out and all God’s people said AMEN! Young the Giant came out with In The Open Volume 1 (implying there will be a v2????) on Sp*t*fy and I feel a magnetic tug toward it the way I did the YouTube series when I was 18 and living in Uganda, paying my friend Yusuf to burn the videos onto DVD-ROMs so I could listen to these versions all the time. Sudan Archives has an upcoming album and I froth at the mouth when I think about running to it in its entirety.

MY BIGGEST UNSOLICITED ADVICE YET: A few weeks ago, this girl I LOVE on the gram shared a video about scribbling to a song. Reader, this practice has changed my life. The past two weeks, when I have felt overwhelmed, I have whipped out a marker and a scrap piece of paper and scribbled along with exactly one song. It has reset my day in a way that very few other mid-day habits have. HIGHLY recommend.

Harvey is demanding my full attention so it’s time for me to sign off and get this scheduled, I suppose. Thanks for being on this weird voyage with me, around the sun and around our neighborhoods. May you see signs of the seasons changing all around you and may it feel mostly good. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

And then, the thwack of the obvious - holy shit, this is actually what life is about. Holding it all.

The summer that followed, as horror after horror flooded our retinas, so did names of birds I never paid enough attention to look up before, trees I’d spent my whole life glancing past. Someone dear to me was dying. The ospreys returned to their massive nest and taught their chicks to fly. People taking to the streets were arrested and teargassed for asserting that Black lives do in fact matter. An alligator bellowed outside so loudly & so near my window each morning that the panes rattled. I kept thinking “isn’t it amazing that this, too, is the real world?!”

Five years later, I am dissociating in the mirror while I brush my teeth until I remember that one of my ESL students spelled their whole name, without mistake, in English on Tuesday and god, that is so cool. I wake up at 5 am gutted and enraged by the genocide funded by my tax dollars, and then walk outside and straight into the Milky Way, a sky so clear I can see every constellation. I spend so many afternoons gnashing my molars into a solid enamel block only to be interrupted by a steady hum of a cricket crescendo and the giggles of a small neighbor learning to ride a bike. It can all be true at once.

I am not sharing this to say “things are fine, actually!” - they are deeply, truly not fine. We live in a nation that’s riches were hand carved from the bodies of those it deemed dispensable. That adds insult to injury by making it national policy to lie about it. The world is watching while bombs dismember children, while people who sought safety in the country that destabilized their own are ripped from their loved ones and shipped to places they have never heard of. Our ability to speak about these things publicly is becoming riskier. The meager protections for our planet are being rolled back, extractive colonialism continues to ravage the Global South, the sharks are quite literally changing their nursery patterns because the planet is too hot. Things are not fine and will not be fine for a long time and I think we are all coming to grips with the extent of how not fine they will be.

But tides persist and for the time being, so do chickadees. And isn’t amazing, that they, too, are part of the real world?

I have a running hypothesis that the most seemingly heartless among only peacock as victim-bigots because they haven’t been overcome with awe since early childhood. When you’ve opted into a life of suspicion, poking and prodding to find the worst in others because you can’t cope with your own shortcomings, you don’t make time to marvel. If your entire sense of self is built upon a desire to conform to the most milquetoast of styles, the most callous of personalities how do you justify curiosity, astonishment, sheer delight?

I just don’t think human brains can simultaneously process the momentarily world-stopping magnitude of wonder and hating people they’ve never met. I don’t think one can look out at the wilderness, actually take it in, and say “yep, seems like a great spot for a concentration camp!”. Sorry, but there is just no way that some people have actually sat with the miracle of their children’s giggles; if so, they wouldn’t be actively constructing a hell on earth for those kids. But if you haven’t recently quenched your thirst for wonder, you don’t know what you’re missing. Cruelty is a piss poor substitution for critical thought, but when you haven’t investigated anything beyond the first taste of it, lead is sweet enough to bake with.

It matters that we make space to notice the world around us because it matters that we experience awe. Whether from the deep goodness of others, the beauty of human creations, the vastness of the natural world, the very breath in our own lungs - we must find ways to be awed. Awe broadens our perspectives, reduces the self-focus that keeps us trapped in a fear-shame-disgust loop, expands our sense of possibility. It fosters connection - to the stimulus prompting it, to the broader world, to each other. We are all better when we make space for being wowed by the sky above, the earth below, the bodies that propel us forward.

Awe, defined by Dacher Keltner as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world,” is immune to hedonic adaptation. Unlike other forms of satisfaction, our brains and bodies do not become accustomed to awe in a way that diminishes its impact. Rather, awe begets more awe - joy more joy, delight more delight.

I fear that we won’t stem the deluge of bad news any time soon. But I do think we can build small dams with our own wonder in the meantime. Sometimes, I am a beaver gathering Christmas decorations in an attempt to clog the hallway, sometimes I am a beaver scientists consult to mitigate wildfires.1 Most of the time, though, I’m just stumbling into “wow” just when I most need it. I hope you are, too.

A few recent wow-worthy events

I spent Tuesday morning at Mitchelville Freedom Park to watch the sunrise and meditate on the bravery of generations of formerly enslaved people asserting and reasserting their humanity. I have thought about the importance of telling the truth - for the sake of honoring those killed and maimed by enslavement and for the sake of fortifying ourselves with the memory of those who fought for dignity and justice generations before us - every day since.

The biggest snail2 I have ever seen paid us a visit much of Monday and I could not stop sneaking away from my desk and onto the porch to watch them. At lunch, a frog was visible in the same line of sight and I almost took the rest of the day off because how is a girl supposed to work knowing two small miracles are coexisting just outside her front door?

A highness of royal terns in what I know is technically not a murmuration but damn sure felt like one to me! They did this every few minutes, changing their landing place on the sandbar ever so slightly. What must it feel like to be in unison with your flock.

All this to say, there is always much to savor and there has never been a more important time to look for opportunity to do so. If you haven’t recently, I hope you have a chickadee moment - that, too, is part of the real world. May you be time-stoppingly, perspective-alteringly, breath-takingly struck by awe this weekend. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

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So often I spot a nuthatch darting between trees, a mud dauber wasp turning a cavity in the stucco into its home, yellow jessamine creeping up a pine tree and I am electrocuted by this exact feeling. How have I missed this all these years? How many times has a miracle unfolded before my eyes that I’ve failed to take it in? What else was I looking at that could have possibly been more important than this - the brilliance of the natural world, changing with the seasons? 

I’ve spent 31 years in South Carolina. My parents followed my grandma to Hilton Head from West Virginia when I was 8 months old. I was effectively raised on lagoons and marshes - alligators and pluff mud. And yet, I am constantly reminded of how little I really know about this place and its inhabitants. I run back and forth along a seesaw of gratitude and frustration - I want to see it all, hear it all, call everything by its name; what a gift to learn it now, what a curse that I haven’t yet. 

I’m not alone in my failures of noticing; a new study from psychologist Miles Richardson from the University of Derby found that even the most basic words describing nature, including river, moss, and blossom, have decreased over 60% from books published between 1800 and 2020. The research goes so far as to predict an “extinction of experience,” with future generations continuing to lose awareness of the natural world because of their psychological distance from it. We have built a world inside, foregoing the one that exists right outside the doors to our air conditioned offices and wifi-filled homes. 

Since noticing the color change of the spartina, the camel-colored waves amidst the intercoastal waterway, I have been awestruck by more than its green-to-gold transition. Spartina physically holds together the Lowcountry: its roots are the foundation upon which the salt marsh is held. A single spartina sends out thick, horizontal root systems called rhizomes that can spread 12 to 15 feet, creating a crisscrossing mat - effectively acting as rebar that stabilizes the coastline against erosion. The stalks act as a natural baffle, slowing down the energy of incoming waves and tidal currents, which is especially important in my corner of the world, where the ten-foot tidal change is the second highest on the east coast. While living spartina holds the pluff mud together, decaying spartina are broken down by algae and fungi to create the mud itself and release nutrients to the surrounding ecosystem. As spartina continues to break down, it ultimately results in more pluff mud, growing more spartina and creating more land mass along the coast. 

But wait, there’s more! Spartina isn’t even a saltwater plant! Despite this, it drinks up salt and brackish water and basically sweats out the salt through glands at the base of its leaves. This fall, as its color warms, the cordgrass’s stalks will develop tiny white flowers containing tiny seed heads. The seeds will create new spartina and feed the many species of local and migratory birds that seek refuge in these islands of grass, and the circle of life will continue. 

On Sunday night, I drug several friends (hi angels!!!) on a dolphin tour that ended up being more of a spartina tour. It was windy and glorious and dolphin-less. Our captain docked the boat on a pile of loose oyster shells hedged between a thicket of the cordgrass. And we reveled in a moment of silence. All we could hear was the thud of water hitting the boat, the crashhhh of the waves against this near-pretend shoreline. The spartina seemed to absorb all of the noise of the outside world. We watched, probably literally, 100 ibises take flight overhead, a sunset reflected in the windows of a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the skeletons of a few wrecked boats. It was lovely in so many ways1, but aside from the big friendship of it all, the marsh was the star of the show.

(but also, here is one of the many ibis flyovers)

Thursday morning, I stopped at one of my usual haunts and spent some time with a spartina in bloom, watched its teeny petals waft in the wind. The seasons are changing! Feeling lucky to bear witness as the world turns.

This week, be brave

Last night at ESL, one of my students got a text that someone she knew was taken in an ICE raid on a local Hyundai plant. The absurdity, cruelty, depravity of these kidnappings. Understandably, my students were rattled (but only let themselves be briefly, as one immediately chimed in, “all the more reason for us to learn English,” which broke my heart). I don’t have much to say about these degradations of humanity or the blow to dignity that is the growing ICE presence in all of our communities (and local law enforcement through the deployment of the 287(g) program) that hasn’t been said by someone far smarter than I. And while the human impact is the root of the wickedness of it all, it is also totally absurd that this terror comes through the abduction of working people doing their jobs in industries where there is massive demand for their labor (fiscal conservatism HELLO!?!). All this to say, this week it feels especially important to practice the word “no.”

No, you cannot enter.

No, you do not have a warrant.

No, I will not stop filming you. No, I will not stop gathering information from the person you’re ripping from their loved ones and livelihood.

At some point in undergrad, I watched a BBC documentary on tyranny that pops back into my brain near daily. The central thesis was this: it is obedience and eagerness to please that empowers autocracy. We must all learn to be noncompliant. Down into the depths of my being, I am a people pleaser. I am not great at following directions but damn, I sure want to be likable! For the sake of my community, I have to get comfortable with being disliked, especially by people in power. I have to build a tolerance for my own disobedience.

A few years ago, I made a habit of going to the vendors in the mall who buff one nail or straighten one piece of hair on a semi-weekly basis. The rules for the interaction were as follows: I would treat them with kindness, accept their offer to perform one small service with enthusiasm, and ultimately, politely decline their sale. I say no so infrequently that this felt cruel at first - these were people just trying to make a living! But I tried to be gracious and conscientious, excusing myself as soon as any actual customers might approach so as to not derail a possible opportunity to make money. Slowly, I built a healthy callous - I could recognize the offerer’s humanity without accepting their offer. I could say no, even to these small things.

Yes, of course, this is different than saying no to an armed, masked agent. The power differential between these sweet mall vendors and the sycophants at the command of this regime could not be more stark. But the practice of declining has proven to be a useful tool in my arsenal. I’ve gotten better at saying “no thanks” socially, but more importantly, I have gotten better at standing up against perceived authority figures. When I was a public defender, I was better at pushing against judges’ perceptions of my clients because I was (slightly) more attuned to saying no. When my coworkers at a restaurant were being told they needed to risk infection to come back to work prematurely at the height of the pandemic, I was better equipped to ask why. I feel more ready to say “come back with a warrant” and “I will not let you enter this classroom” if ever I have to, because I have practiced saying no.

So this week’s one small thing is really, truly, start thinking about small acts of defiance. Break some inconsequential rules. Do things that make you uncomfortable simply because they run counter to what you’ve been instructed to do. Build your disobedience tolerance. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions - we’ve got to get better at walking off that job.

A few quick unsolicited recs

If you’ve talked to me at all this week, you know that I’ve been fixated on the upcoming release of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book. I will be waiting until my library gets a copy2 to read it but WOW did I love Jia Tolentino’s piece in the New Yorker about it.

Another reason to get a library card: Hoopla has music! I still haven’t solved the Spotify problem (I still want to listen to less-known artists) but now at least I’ve found a workaround for big albums (Man’s Best Friend is on Hoopla but the Yung Dupe tracks that Garrett sent yesterday aren’t. Progress, not perfection!).

I’ve been making zhoug each time the cilantro in my fridge gets wilty, which is often. I can’t find a recipe by a Yemeni creator (insane L by my algorithm - will report back when someone inevitably replies to this with a rec) but the general gist when I’m making the most of my fridge is: cilantro, parsley, a couple jalapeños or birds eye chiles or whatever hot pepper(s) I have around, cumin, cardamom, coriander, garlic. Real ones would toast the spices and roast the garlic first and then chop the herbs really tiny and glob in plenty of good olive oil. Don’t tell Frank’s but I put that shit on everything.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Dacher Keltner’s Awe. I have only read the intro and I already know that this is up my alley. Would love to book club with any and all of you about it.

Well! I waited too long to draft this yesterday and have been editing on my lunch break. Gotta get back to the work that pays! This weekend, I hope you see a sign of the changing seasons that feels GOOD and EXCITING, actually.3 The stars have been, for lack of a better term, absolutely bananas in the mornings this week. I hope you get a chance to look up at them in wonder this weekend. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

English is hard. Learning anything new is. For my students, the stakes (of speaking the language) are relatively high. It matters that they can spell their names on the phone clearly in English so that they can make a doctor’s appointment. It matters that they know how to fill out a job application or enrollment forms for their kids’ school. And to a certain extent, mastery is wholly optional, which makes it even harder to balance in a world of competing priorities.

And, wow, it is special to be around people trying. There is an alchemy that builds within a group of people doing something hard together, an earnestness and solidarity in each “sí, se puede” whispered when spelling a name, scrolling their mental rolodex of letter translations and choosing the wrong one. There is nothing like being in a room of people opting into doing something difficult, doing it scared and tired and stressed and hungry.1 I leave every class thinking about how brave it is to start something knowing it will take you a long time to master it, how bold it is to do it incorrectly and try again.

I feel the need to be clear here: I am a medium teacher on my best days. As you may recall, I was briefly employed as a teacher (in hell itself) and was not good at it! My students, though, really are great at teaching each other. And holy hell, you want to talk about savoring something? Is there anything more sacred, more special than being in a room with people really trying? Is there anything more holy than the courage of attempt? I am stricken with awe every time I watch videos of marathon runners at the finish line; my students sounding out new words is that feeling, tenfold. The tenacity. The perseverance. Anyways, all of this to say two things:

1. Surround yourself with people who are doing hard things.

2. Opt in to doing hard things yourself.

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I watched a lot of sunrises this week

As someone high on my own supply (read: I morningmaxx), I am typically up before the sun and catch some of the pink and orange glow across the sky each morning. This week, though, the actual sunrise timing has allowed me to get to the beach in enough time to watch it ascend the horizon - the slow creep of a crescent over the water, a sphere forming as the earth turns beneath it, then the daylight. On a choppy morning, I can’t help but imagine that the ocean is churning up the sun through some sort of pulley system like a hydromill providing power to push the sun up and out, or a theater tech drawing the curtains.

You know the sunrise is going to be good when there are a few clouds in the sky. A cloudless sunrise is lovely but lacks the dimension of a cumulus partially diffusing the light. I hear myself - this is about to be corny - but isn’t that life! Need a little friction to make the scene more impressive.

There are usually a few other folks at my spot for sunrise, a tender bunch of stragglers who have arrived for their own purposes - usually fishing or photographing or walking along the shore. On Monday, two men approached me to ask that I take a photo of them. Obviously, I obliged - what a gift to capture any stranger’s sunrise. One then said, “thanks, I came all the way from China for this. This is my first Atlantic sunrise. I am so happy to see it.” They went on to share that they were friends from childhood and one lived in Atlanta now but they had always heard that the sunrises on the US’s east coast were a bucket list item. I’m so glad that this morning proved to be worth their wait. What an honor to have spent the morning under the same sky.

There were many other “wows” of this week’s mornings. Among them, a black skimmer living up to her name and two roseate spoonbills panning for gold. So often I think, I could be anywhere and I am here.

A black skimmer coasting along the meniscus of a tide pool.

Two roseate spoonbills panning the pluff mud for tiny crustaceans to give them their pink complexion. They’re fishing alongside a few snowy egrets this morning, but usually I see them alongside white ibises. We love an inter-species camaraderie.

We could be anywhere, but we are here. This rock floating in space, with all her craggles and split ends, her sunrises and earthworms. We might as well enjoy it.

Unsolicited rec x One small thing

These are in the same section because they are the same today. And that is this: go volunteer. Rates of volunteering are decreasing worldwide and while I don’t think this is some sign that we are all less engaged or less attuned to the needs of our communities, I do think that we are missing out. As protest through public demonstration2 has become increasingly mainstream, I almost think it’s reset the norm around how we take care of each other. I don’t; think this is a bad thing, per se, but I do think it matters that we show up in the small, un-social-media-able3 ways between the streets.

The truth is, the coming years will exacerbate our communities’ needs in new and ancient ways, and in ones that the government has historically addressed and now refuses. Our neighbors will need food and hygienic supplies. We will need help learning to read in our native language or another. We will need childcare. We will need someone to pick up groceries or provide legal support or spend time with us on our death beds. We will need help filling out applications or learning to use the internet. Local museums and libraries will need help archiving artifacts and teaching programs and caring for their facilities, generally doing the work that allows them to teach us. Local animal shelters will need support caring for our pets. Oyster reefs will need building, parks will need cleaned up, homes will need repaired. We will need each other. We will need to be seen as human beings.

Find a group or organization in your neighborhood and get involved in a big or small way. It’s not going to change the world, but it will change you (if, for no other reason, that you cannot be doomscrolling and building a ramp at the same time).

A few rapid fire other recs include this week’s Sporecast about different cultures’ words for various natural phenomena, Radiolab for Kids’ latest episode about horseshoe crabs, my friend' Garrett’s Discover Weekly4 last week (don’t worry, Taylor memorialized it in this playlist), and wearing grippy socks when you work from home. Whelmed has a new edition out today (a treasure), I’m reading Karen Russell’s latest release, and Taskmaster continues to be the most fun I have ever had watching tv.

This weekend, look into some groups in your area handing out lunches in parks or teaching adults digital literacy or coaching your kid’s little league team. And try to catch a sunrise. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

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The next morning, mushrooms that spent the night pressure cooked in the underground detritus are eager to spring up alongside the morning dew. Their mycelium network is always there - interlocking threads of fungi waiting to hatch when conditions are just right to become visible to the above-ground world. The soil is sufficiently damp. The temperature is sufficiently warm. Necessary nutrients abound. They’re ready to reproduce.

Earlier in the month, I spent a morningmaxxed half hour lying on my belly closely inspecting the tiny parasols that seemingly dropped into our yard one night. I later learned these were the ephemeral fruiting bodies of conocybes that sprung up from the morning moisture. The pleats of their tiny caps were actually gills, wafting spores into the surrounding air. I loved their ridges, the practicality of their shape: umbrellaed to create surface area, lamella (or gills) primed to expand their kingdom. I spent my workday typing memos with my left hand, doodling mushrooms with my right. And when I went back to check on them in the afternoon, they were shriveled. By nightfall, they were nearly disintegrated.

There’s a house I run by a few times each week that has a wonky crop circle, or perhaps deconstructed peace sign, of Chlorophyllum molybdites (vomiters) in the yard. I have convinced myself to go on at least three runs this month solely to check on these and others of their ilk along the route. I love to see them fruit - a stalk into an egg-shaped bulb, the emergence of a nipple (mycologically, I learned, called an umbo, though you cannot look at one and not immediately think “100% nipple” at a certain stage), the slow flattening of the umbo into the broader umbrella of the fruit, the steady decomposition of the mushroom as it makes the invaluable effort to break down the earth around it, too.

On Monday during my early morning chicken duty, I was greeted by another stunning species, that, in Spanish, is called “mantequilla de bruja naranja,” meaning “orange witch butter.” Congratulations to me, I have a new favorite fungus. For better or for worse, neither Dacrymyces spathularia, or it’s English name “fan-shaped jelly fungus” have the same ring to them.

These neon clusters are saprotrophic, meaning, they feed on decaying wood. Their little warped spatula bodies spray their spores to the surrounding decay, sharing their colonial DNA with the world around them. Per the internet, these are in fact edible but “bland and insubstantial.” I didn’t taste them, because I am not trying to rack up another ER bill this summer, but know that I am curious, if you know any foragers willing to give me a lesson.

I’ve loved mushrooms since I was little and learned that they’re basically the vultures of their respective kingdom (but much more efficient - don’t tell the vultures I said that). Mushrooms are essential decomposers doing the thankless and vital work of breaking down decaying matter. From roadkill to old wood to microplastics, fungi are the waste management of the nature. By releasing chemicals to break down detritus, fungi effectively digest the discarded parts of our world, absorbing the nutrients to further power themselves and the soil and root systems around them.

Quick distinction before I get too into the weeds: there are four types of fungi: saprotrophic (rot-eaters that break down debris), mycorrhizal (that commune with tree roots to form symbiotic networks), parasitic (that feed on their plant or animal host, replacing the host’s tissue with that of their own), and endophytic (that also take over their host’s tissue but without manifestation of their presence in the host for a long time. Their relationships with hosts can sometimes be symbiotic). Many of the mushrooms I see are saprotrophic, breaking down decaying plant matter or other refuse along the Bluffton Parkway. But sometimes, they’re mycorrhizal, which is the real meat and potatoes of today’s blabbering in your inbox.

What I’m here to share with you, really, is that moisture this August has made visible1 a small section of the Wood Wide Web.

Common fungi, like the mushrooms that decorate my yard, have symbiotic relationships with plants in the area. The fungi send out delicate cobweb strands of fungal tubes, called hyphae. The hyphae dig into the soil and weave into the very cells of plant roots, braiding together to form a mycorrhiza: itself a synergy of the Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza). These filamentous fungi, the majority of the 5,000,000 species fungal kingdom, are present virtually everywhere plants are. In fact, every meter of plant root in soil is associated with roughly one kilometer of symbiotic fungal hyphae. The mycorrhizal networks of these plant-fungus fusions link up to create a global hyphal network, colloquially known as the Wood Wide Web.2

The relationship between the plants and fungi is truly one of mutualism: mycorrhizal fungi slurp some of the carbon-rich sugar that plants produce during photosynthesis while entangled in their roots. The fungi reciprocate by sharing nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that they have collected from the soil through enzymatic processes that the plant can’t perform on their own. Fungi can’t get carbon without plants. Plants can’t get phosphorus without fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi also contain chitin, the core ingredient in insect exoskeletons, which acts as a protective layer on the outside of roots and sometimes even release antibiotics to protect against root diseases.

But these networks aren’t about the basic exchange of goods and services between plants and fungi, so much as they are about the broader connection that the Wood Wide Web gives between plants sometimes miles away from one another. The fungal network acts as a conduit for plants to share resources, and more impressively, to communicate about the distribution of such resources. A dying tree will divest its nutrients to the broader tree community through the myco-net; a sapling is supported with extra nutrients by stronger neighboring plants.

These networks don’t stop at resource allocation. The fungal-vegetation connections allow plants to send each other warnings: a plant under attack from an aphid infestation can warn its nearby compatriots to orchestrate a defensive response before the aphids arrive. Plants are known for airborne hormone exchange, too, but the mycorrhizal networks are faster and more precise. Think Google Fiber’s processing speed, as opposed to Starlink.3

No one really knows the extent of these networks - there are millions in the world, occupying virtually all of the soil inhabited by plants. The largest known single organism on earth is an Armillaria ostoyae: a fungus that covers 2,384 acres of soil in Oregon's Blue Mountains. It encompasses nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of surface area - for a maybe easier-to-conceptualize visual, that’s 1,665 football fields. Of “indefinite shape and size,” the humungous fungus took scientists several years to define the hard edge between one network and its sibling next door and is widely believed to be at least 1500 years old.

Mycorrhizal fungi evade the scientific mind, in part because they’re so fundamentally different from what our anthropomorphic understandings of the world can comprehend. What is a single organism? What constitutes communication? What is intelligence, if not interpreted through the lens of a human brain? The mysteries are unending, but so is the opportunity to experience wonder. Even when we can’t see them, the fungi are there.4

Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants “intelligent” depends on one’s point of view. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us—or have brains—they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate,” “make decisions,” “learn,” and “remember.” As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change. The second field of research that has guided me in this inquiry concerns the way we think about the microscopic organisms—or microbes—that cover every inch of the planet. In the last four decades, new technologies have granted unprecedented access to microbial lives. The outcome? For your community of microbes—your “microbiome”—your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut (which if unfolded would occupy an area of thirty-two square meters), ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin, and every surface, passage, and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy.

- An excerpt from Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Unsolicited recs

On a long run last weekend, I listened to Lucy Jones’s Losing Eden. I found it so comforting (yes, it IS a problem that we’re so disconnected from this ancient rock in space that has provided every single thing we could possible ever need for our survival but all is not lost!) and so distressing (yes, we are losing entire ecosystems by prioritizing overconsumption and yes, it is so damning to our health and wellbeing and literal chances of survival). There were so many insights as to the impacts of the loss of wild spaces on our mental health, not only because of the actual loss of space but also because our indoor-by-default lives don’t expose us to the same kinds of microbes that thousands of years of human evolution have adapted to. IF ever I have kids, I am raising them in the yard.

This week, I’ve been telling absolutely everyone I’ve spoken to about Karen Hao’s Empire of AI. It is damning and fascinating, particularly in regard to the creation of Gen AI (or AGI as I guess it is called in the biz) being spurred by the very fear that it would be created by someone else and destroy humanity. The hubris of white men eager to play God!!!!!!

Also re: playing God - I have thought about this article about the hermit crab trade on a near hourly basis since I read it Monday. What fascinating and complex creatures that we have painted (often literally!) as disposable. Made me so grateful to see wild hermit crabs so often, and also curious about all the local shell shops’ crab policies during the offseason. Taylor, stay tuned, we might be building our own crabitat with the rescues this fall :).

Felt a single tear roll down my cheek while reading Joseph Earp’s piece about pigeons in the Guardian yesterday. Did you know that these humble birds can differentiate between Monet and Picasso? Gorgeous reporting of a once-loved creature.

Oh no she’s suggesting I read an instagram carousel post!!! Yes, I am!!! Shouts to Madison for sharing this the other day (and for being the best and baddest always). As it so aptly states, “this is holy work, learning to tolerate each other’s bullshit.” Brand it on the back of my eyelids.

One small thing

I recently learned that each Thursday, the Humanti Project and other activists for Palestinian safety, security, nourishment, joy, are calling for a Global Economic Strike. This means: if you must buy shit, do not buy it on Thursdays. For those of us living in the relative safety of the global north, this is the utter least we can do. Make no purchases on Thursdays and if you must go out for lunch or something, do so at a locally-owned business and try to pay with cash or check. I understand that not all of us can afford to donate to relief efforts - good thing we can all afford to forego spending!

Okay cuties, I am scheduling this and heading off to ESL. We’re learning the names of relevant information on ID cards tonight and I made sample cards with fake info but many of your names. Hopefully it will be a good time! I hope your weekends are teeming with life - your coneflowers are in bloom, your kids are fixated on a new song and hellbent on singing to the entire restaurant, there’s a patch of newly-emerged mushrooms on your usual walking path. Doing a little metta meditation as I send this - may you be happy, may you be fed, may you be curious, may you be kind. Love you.

See ya later,

emilgator

When I have the choice, I always opt for the window seat. I’m on a lot of tiny planes going to tiny airports and usually it’s all window or aisle. Most people seem to prioritize legroom over assessing their proximity to outer space and for that I am always grateful. My time on planes is always an instance I remind myself that when I get home this time I must look up the names of the cloud shapes, dammit, and this time commit them to memory. This does not stop me from taking a minimum of twelve mostly-blurry photos of clouds out the scratched plane window, though.

If I’m lucky and the sky is bright, I sit mouth agape staring at the mountain range before me: the rolling hills of cumulus clouds, the 60,000 foot sierra of a cumulonimbus in the distance. I think about the mist I would feel on my face, question the temperature of my surroundings if I wasn’t bound in this metal tube catapulting alongside the jet stream at 700 miles per hour. Practically, I know I would fall through these suspended cotton balls if I busted out the exit doors. But sometimes, they seem so structurally sound, so taut and compact and so obviously bouncy, that I can’t help but hope that if this plane goes down, my budget airlines compatriots and I will be the first people ever to trampoline between clouds, slowly boinging our way groundward until we land on a skyscraper or redwood tree. A girl can dream, can’t she?

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Last Friday (where, for the record, I was contemporaneously savoring it but not writing about it), in addition to the usual cloud fantasy hour, I was greeted by the full Moon.3 Reader, I will not mince words: this was a spiritual experience. The sun was setting, orange light peeling through the window and across my sleeping neighbor’s eyemask, onto the aisle floor. And through the plexiglass separating me from the great beyond, I saw that we had eked past the cloud range, moving over the curve of the earth, and suddenly I was sitting directly in line with our most iconic celestial body. 40,000 feet closer than usual, I felt like I could really see the Moon for the first time. The ridges of each crater, the bright penumbra spotlighting her. It was 8/8, which all the astrology girlies online had told me *meant something* cosmologically. Even if it hadn’t been, there was a cosmic match lit. I couldn’t help but think about thin places4, a Celtic concept for the spaces where the veil between the earthly and spiritual realm is thinner. Heaven and earth, the belief goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places, that space becomes centimeters. I don’t know that the Celts would agree a 30 year old United airlines plane emitting ~53.3 pounds of Co2 per air mile is sacred ground, but for four short minutes, I thought it could be.

In other cosmic news, each morning this week I’ve gotten up a few minutes earlier to crane my neck to the sky and stare at Jupiter (and, upon googling Jupiter’s visibility this time of year, learned that the other bright body I’m seeing below it is actually Venus). Driving over the bridges at 5:30 am on Tuesday, eyes darting between the road ahead and the planets above, I was rewarded even further by catching a shooting star! I purport to know nothing about what else is out there, could be out there, exists on the other side of the veil - but, what a thrill it is to know that there are atoms and molecules and light and heat colliding outside the circumference of our planet and into infinity. We are all made of star stuff, indeed.

Update: I wrote this Thursday evening to send out Friday AM but thankfully did not schedule it. Last night, we came home from dinner at my parents’ to a wide open, cloudless sky. I opened the car door, mouth agape, neck craned as close to 90º as my physiology will allow and immediately caught the flash of another meteor5 cutting through the blanket. I flopped down in the grass and spent the next 45 minutes counting the constellations and the streaks of light from what I learned was the Perseids meteor shower!!! Taylor eventually joined me in the yard and we watched the cosmos, yes, but also many planes over head. I thought about looking down from those planes on the tiny spec of me, about looking up from my yard at the tiny lights of them. I’m just a dot on the patchwork, just a crumb on a quilt. And they’re just one more light in the sky.

Supposedly the Perseids peaked earlier this week, but on clear nights you can still catch some falling stars (and put them in your pocket) until August 23. The name Perseids denotes where in the sky you’re most likely to see them - near the Perseus constellation. Mark your calendars because Orionids are next, starting in early October.

Snailwatching update

Many of you (yes, actually, more than 5 of you!!!) have asked for updates on the snail situation so I will try to keep this brief for the rest of you that have not. They seem to love the coffee grounds I haphazardly throw in the rosebushes each morning and are multiplying with each new glance into the bed. I have been playing a game I like to call “snail matchmaker” each evening, wherein I pick up two snails and let them sit on my hand or our front porch table and see if they will fall in love (read: hit each other with a love dart and subsequently feel each other up and do a little penis handshake). Needs to be stated that I return them to their natural home after this but yes, I am becoming the worst kind of eco-voyeur. My attempts have been unsuccessful thus far, HOWEVER, last night, I happened upon two snails already mid-coital in the bed itself. The following video may be NSFW (but hey, I don’t know your office’s policy on snail porn):

I also saw my first more mature snail of this particular family tree the other night (taking this moment to remind you that the snails in the video above are smaller than a standard adult fingernail) and took my chance to visit him up close too (please don’t come for me, PETA, I promise I am not abusing these snails, I’m just abnormally invested in their strange little lives).

Today’s may be a newsletter about these micro-interactions with outer space, but thankfully, we have aliens at home. Just look at them.

Unsolicited recs

I have been stupefied (in a good way) by two recent episodes of Radiolab. The first is extremely pertinent to today’s meanderings: Galaxy Quenching created an impossible-to-swallow lump in my throat before I walked into Aldi the other day. The other, the Menopause Mystery has me banging down everyone’s doors begging to talk about grandmother orcas.

I’m still reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and hanging on every word. Most of you know this already because I’ve overshared it to the nth degree but I ordered my own copy (I’ve been reading a library copy on my kindle) from thrift books and a 1974 edition with a sticker listing it for resale in 1991 landed at my doorstep. When I opened its weathered pages, school photographs of two elementary aged girls dated 1994 fell out, with notes addressed to a woman named Shelley. Morgan somehow found the girls and Shelley, a former Montessori teacher and outspoken anti-racist public school advocate, on Facebook. I reached out to share that I seem to share her values and now I share her book (and these photos of her students if she wants them back). I’ll keep you updated on what, if anything, comes next.

Also re: Annie Dillard, Mary Reid mentioned that she read Living Like Weasels in high school and still treasures it. I will do anything recommended to me by Mary Reid, directly or indirectly, and boy am I glad I heeded this particular nudge. What an essay. Moving forward, I will be biting the neck of necessity. I hope I already am.

When I was in Brooklyn a few weekends ago, I got to attend the premiere of Stacey Torkelson’s short film, In Lieu of Flowers and have thought of it every day since. An altar to girlhood, in all its silliness and grief and sincerity and confusion and vibrance. If you get the chance to see it (rumor has it, it may be coming to a film festival near you in 2026), you MUST!

Liana Finck interviewed Roz Chast in her substack earlier this week and I transformed into my nephew when he beat the rest of us in Yahtzee! for the first time (giddy) upon receipt of such an email. Naturally, now I’m caught in the crossfire of my desire to not accumulate more stuff that will one day become more kindling on garbage island with a deep, abiding yearning for one of Roz’s puzzles.

And finally, the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is August 29 and I have a syllabus for those of us who, by the grace of God, remember little more than the droll of newscasters yammering on about “looters” through a 27” Sony Triniton television and K*nye (aptly) staying that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” about the time. Clint Smith has a gorgeous piece in the Atlantic this week. Ologies has a two-part Tempestology episode answering so many hurricane questions in light of the activity amping up in the Atlantic this time of year, funding cuts to NOAA, Katrina’s harrowing anniversary, and so much more. Ryan Coogler and NatGeo just released Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time as a five-part Hulu series. And I must share with you one of my favorite podcasts of 2020: Floodlines, which released a new episode in honor of the upcoming anniversary as well. The choiceful incompetence of government officials at all levels feels like such a harbinger of the times were in now - so many lessons still to be learned: about infrastructure and disaster response, but also about how stories are told, how communities come together after tragedy, about dignity and autonomy and care.

One small thing

See your neighbors.6 Especially the ones in tattered clothes or resting on park benches or sleeping in their cars. Say hi. Shake their hands. Ask their names. Take nothing personally. Carry cash. Carry cash, carry cash, carry cash.7 Be willing to give it away freely.

I have been thinking about cash so much in regard to being more analog and Madison so aptly summed it up the other day - the most vulnerable among us will be even more vulnerable as we move toward being a cashless society. The unbanked and uncredited among us, often discriminated against in so many other ways too, quite literally will lack the mechanisms to shop at cashless institutions. Resist the urge to look away from them. Give people money if you can afford it. People. Human beings. Share what you can. Pay for hotels or buses or meals if you’re more comfortable meeting a need that way. Or maybe have cold water bottle or socks or packs of hygiene products and snacks and maybe a visa gift card. But look people in the eye and see them, and when you can, have cash on hand and ready to share.

Times are hard and likely going to get harder. Especially for our neighbors with few options to begin with. Carry cash.

Okay! Enough screen time. I’m off to listen for the “woohoo!” of the kites in my yard before I schedule this to go out and jump into the workday. I’m basking in every decibel of the chirps and caws and woos of summer residents before the seasons change. I hope you get a night of clear skies this weekend and you stare into it long enough to watch space debris burn up as it crosses into earth’s atmosphere. I hope you make a wish. Love you.

See ya later,

emilgator

In addition to Taylor’s newfound limited mobility, I have had some iteration of a flu the past week. I know, really stealing his thunder. Because of both of these factors, my usual jaunts have been cut back significantly. This has made room for a few different kinds of observation when I’m needing the reminder that the real world still exists: the trees in my yard are older than anyone in the Trump administration (and, obviously, wiser); mycelium networks still communicate with more accuracy and efficiency than AI; the Mississippi kites on their summer residency remain a constant reminder that migration is natural, sacred, beautiful.

Snail watching

For lack of a more eloquent way to say this, I’m extremely into lying on my belly watching the snails that live within the mulch in our front flower beds this time of year. I’ve spent the better part of each after-work, pre-dinner period this month with my nose inches from these tiny mollusks, absorbing far more questions than answers as they ooze their way across the shards of bark and pine straw in the unkempt plot.

I know they are technically “pests”. I don’t care. I love them. I love the strands of slime-silk they leave between branches. I love the way their eyestalks jut out in front of their heads, the way they reabsorb their tentacles when bumped. I love seeing their foot extend behind them. I love the subtle movement of their mantle visible inside their translucent shells. I love leaning my ear in close to try to hear their tens of thousands of teeth chewing.4

More than anything else though, I love that they are ever building something with their bodies. I can turn my day around almost instantly by thinking about biomineralization, the process by which snails (and other invertebrates) somehow convert the goo of their flesh into something impenetrable. Really think about that. They are basically toothpaste in a ziplock bag but then? Poof, they create an iron exterior. What. Let’s talk about it, shall we, because what the actual fuck and also how and also why.

Snails emerge from eggs with shells on already on them. Within four days of embryonic development, snails are making shells and becoming asymmetrical.5 From hatching onward, snails use their mantle to secrete calcium carbonate along the shell’s opening which then hardens and grows the shell along with the snail. Scientifically, this makes sense (I guess) but my human brain can never compute how a snail less than half a centimeter in diameter can grow to be inches long, shell and all. Moreover, when I watch the tiny guys in my yard, I can usually see their visceral sac (the organ-filled, always-shelled, part of their body) wriggling within their quasi-transparent shells. The magic of their asymmetry is also astounding - despite the shell’s substantial contribution to the snail’s body weight (up to 40%!!! That’s like me carrying around a 60 pound backpack at all times?!), the shell’s helical shape and compact structure (that, keep in mind, the snails can fit their entire body into when necessary) keeps the overall center of gravity low and close to the snail's body. As these snails chug along, the fact that their shells are off center and one-sided actually makes the snail more stable.

Another small miracle of snails is that they are hermaphroditic. Land snails, in fact, are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning they have functional male and female reproductive organs at the same time. They find a lover, stab one another with mucus covered love-darts (this is an actual scientific term) to make the other willing to accept sperm, erect their - ahem - everted atria6, and then lay eggs. Hallelujah for the mystery of nature, the extraterrestrial qualities of the very terrestrial.

Looking up, lying down

Wednesday afternoon, I spent two hours lying on a beach towel under a tree in the yard. This should not be groundbreaking - people have been lying on their backs in the shade for millennia. But boy, do I recommend it. In my line of sight, I watched as the moon continue her ascent, a waxing crescent. I watched two black bellied whistling ducks race across the open sky over the lagoon. Four blue jays cawed from the trees above. The symphony of cicadas swelled. A red shouldered hawk swooped into a tree in the yard next door, screaming all the while. But mostly, the trees above me slowly swayed, dropping pine needles intermittently (and reader, this is not meant to embellish but have you ever watched a pine needle twirl its descent? It’s so common but *littttrally gorgeous*. The realization that I can probably just come sit under a tree and watch its filament plummet with such elegance any time I wanted has wholly reframed my thoughts about pinestraw).

The sun changed her direction and so did the trees’ shadows and it became just a little too hot to continue this otherwise perfect afternoon activity. A few ants had spent the hour marching across my kneecap; I did my best to blow them off, rather than wipe them haphazardly, so I wouldn’t smush their small bodies. I failed and killed one. Between the ants and accidentally crushing one of my beloved snails while dumping coffee grounds in the rose bushes the other day, I’ve been thinking a lot about how inconsequential it often feels to end the lives of small things. How so often being human, and moreso being a human in a country that has so glorified overconsumption, has made greed the leading lifestyle, often leads to such ends. How rarely I investigate those ends. How I feel programmed to prioritize comfort (in the literal sense, but also the emotional one) of people from my background over survival - of small creatures, of the planet, of humanity, of myself. How this apathy translates to so many other concessions. I’m constantly trying to retrain myself around this. Trying to hold onto a belief I had as a kid7 that each being is significant, that each life ended is a whole life ended.

Unsolicited recs

I have been waiting WEEKS to tell you about Taskmaster. Taylor and I started season, ahem, series 19 when he had the flu (we have been a mess this month) and have now finished 18 and started 17. It is a British tv show wherein five comedians complete silly tasks. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It is the most fun I have ever had watching tv (which is saying something because you all know how much I love Jeopardy!). I laugh laugh laugh laugh gasp laugh gasp laugh the entire show. I recommend starting with season, I MEAN SERIES, 19 because Jason Mantzoukas, the show’s first ever American is in it and he is an agent of absolute chaos. But I also recommend 18 because Rosie Jones is a gem and so funny and cool, as is everyone else on this show. Greg Davies & Alex Horne, please accept me as your second American!!!!

I just started Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and ummmmm yeah there’s a reason this won a Pulitzer. This is the book I wish I could write. I texted my dear friend Madison 9 pages in “babe red alert have you read anything by annie dillard” and immediately knew I would have to share it here, too.8 I am relishing it. I also just finished Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall and am frothing at the mouth for one of you to read it too so we can discuss. Short, potent, and full of unanswered questions.

I’m no chef but I AM a tomatillo stan. So just a reminder that it’s tomatillo season! I remove them from their peels, roast them in the oven with an onion, a head of garlic, and a few poblanos, maybe a jalapeño if I have it, and throw them in a blender with the juice of a lime and a bunch of cilantro for a bright & easy soup or enchilada sauce, etc. Raw tomatillos contain solanine, which can be toxic, so be sure to roast them if you take advantage of their newfound prevalence at your grocery store, etc.

I’m feeling really weird (and Bad!!!!) about using Spotify9 after their CEO invested $700 million into a military AI startup. As if it wasn’t bad enough that all my tax money is going to surveillance and war without my consent, now I am directly funding it through what was once my favorite app. I don’t have a strong alternative. I DO have lots of physical records. So I guess I recommend that? Physical media? And welcome your thoughts on this because yuck what a champagne problem and also what an actual PROBLEM that even MORE of our money is going to fund war. Bffr.

Finally, shout out to Nick Barrs for sending me my favorite content on the internet this week. This video. I have watched it 1000 times. The hissing. The jowls. We are so hashtag blessed to share a planet with gators.

Lots of pain in this world. And also lots of thrills. Hope you get to hug someone you love really tight this weekend and spend a few minutes really letting the sun hit your face. Love you, mean it.

See ya later,

emilgator

There are moments on my screens I find to be invaluable - FaceTiming with my grandparents, my morning Marco Polo check ins with friends (and their babies) across the country, group texts that have me literally laughing out loud, scrolling my photos on any and every plane after a trip. Hell, the fact that I am able to get a gate change update the moment it happens during a tight layover has me saying “thank you Steve Jobs”1 aloud in nearly every airport I’ve stepped foot in this year. Plus, I’m in this whole screentime-as-a-lifestyle situation in large part because I’m a remote worker (or really, a knowledge worker generally, because when I am in the office it’s not like I’m suddenly flying screenless) and that has its own perks.

But I worry about who I’m going to turn into if I spend one third of my remaining time in this flesh staring at light-emitting rectangle, contemplating the opinions of others. I worry about my sense of wonder, my ability to problem solve. I worry about my attention span, my spatial awareness, my patience. I worry about my relationships with others and with myself.

My real-world FOMO has me trying every hack to try to Robin Hood my brain back from big tech. I figured it might be worthwhile for me to share my best findings here in case anyone else is also trying to tame this particular dragon.

Being on my phone all the time is embarrassing. I make it even more embarrassing by narrating what I’m doing.

Look, I am generally anti-shame as a tactic for behavior change but THE most effective deterrent I have used to stop my scrolling nearly instantly is to humiliate myself. I learned this god-awful and extremely effective trick a few months ago by reading someone else’s substack2 (the scroll never stops, I fear). The goal is this: each time I unlock my phone screen, I start narrating (OUT LOUD) what I’m doing. This is effective (I think) for two reasons:

1. It is nauseating to say the words “I am watching a video of a personal attention brain rot ASMR” out loud to oneself in line for the post office. It is also nauseating to say in my kitchen making dinner, during the work day at my desk, in front of my partner as he’s telling me about his day. There is something about the sting of admitting aloud all the utterly useless places I direct my attention that jolts me out of the scroll-hypnosis.

2. It helps stay on task when using the phone for an actual purpose. “I am looking up how to make crispy tofu” or “today is Ella’s birthday and I have to text her and make sure it’s in my calendar for years to come” makes the task easier to remember and somehow feel more valuable.

I’m less addicted in black and white.

My friend Katie reminded me of a trick I used to play on myself a few years ago that I’m about to bring back into the rotation. Grayscale-ing my phone makes it less tempting (in part because there are just enough steps to deter me from taking it off grayscale mode when I want an experience in color); instagram and TikTok immediately lose their luster in black and white.

The TLDR is this - our brains love the stimulation that bright colors on our various OLED screens provide. I am on my phone significantly less when the red notification badges and my greenish phone background are in the same gray gradient.3 I won’t belabor it further, here’s a link to help you turn your phone into more of an epaper experience.

I’m a little iPad baby and I need parental controls.

I almost said I don’t pay for many subscriptions and then I thought of three separate times I have gotten a credit card charge alert this week (SCETV, Radiolab, the New Yorker in print). BUT none have changed my life like the Freedom app. I agree, it is pitiful that I paid actual dollars to a tech company to limit my use of technology. But alas, we live in pitiful times. The app has a free version but I wanted to pre-set my days and times of lockouts (because I cannot be trusted to do it manually every day multiple times each day) so it was worth my hard earned cash, to me, personally. I know there are lots of other options too4 (I see ads for Opal at least 4x each day and did no real research after Carson said “I downloaded this app called Freedom and you should too”) and I have no preference toward any of them. But if you’re serious about your screen time and also don’t feel like you quite have the ability to part with your iPhone/can’t discern if The Light Phone is a scam, I regret to inform you that these apps are probably a good answer.

I know lots of phones now have varying versions of Do Not Disturb which allow for parsing your time and app use more strategically. I have 4 different versions of these for different times of the day and they’re great for limiting notifications. But alas, this particular treatment isn’t strong enough for me. Much to my5 chagrin, downloading another app was in fact the answer.

I’m displacing all of the fun uses of my phone with analog options.

I have begun schlepping a tote bag of activities around the house with me and bringing something from it nearly everywhere I go. I know, God forbid a girl sit alone with her thoughts for a few minutes! But it’s been huge for choosing something else to do with the meager time between work calls or downtime while cooking a meal. Here’s what I like to keep in my bag of tricks:

• A notebook where I jot down things I want to do on my phone when I have a better reason to pick it up. Need to remember to text Kelsey back. Google when there’s another full moon. Check the weather for next week in Chicago. Whatever! Just useful to have a landing place for non-urgent phone tasks (that, more importantly, becomes a place to deposit other non-phone thoughts, too).

• Physical reading material. Usually this is a literal book, but sometimes I feel like a magazine or cookbook can be more fun if I’m just perusing between other tasks. More bite sized, less committal. Same articles I’d be scrolling on my phone, just on paper if I have access to them that way.

• A puzzle option of some kind. I have a crossword puzzle book I got at a thrift store for 50 cents and a book of various puzzles I got when I broke my foot that I cycle between if I have already finished the week’s New Yorker crossword, which has become an invaluable ritual each week.

• What my sister calls “crafty crap” - The only way I actually make things with my hands these days seems to be by tricking myself into it. I stuff my tote bag with gel pens or watercolors or linoleum carving supplies and erasers to carve and when I crave the dopamine rush of posting on my instagram story, I try to channel that energy into doodling in the aforementioned notebook or doing a tiny bit of needlepoint on a canvas I’ve had sitting around for four years now or carving yet another alligator stamp. The point is not to make Good Art™️, the point is to avoid the pitfall of getting online for 5 minutes and realizing it’s been close to an hour and my soup is burnt when I come-to 45 minutes later.

• Something tactile. For me, this tends to be a shell covered in barnacles or a pine cone or really any funky tchotchke I’ve acquitted over the years. This object has many functions - something to observe closely over and over again (new colors, new lines, new patterns each time I actually pay attention to it), something to run my fingers over when I’m feeling overwhelmed, a possible subject for a doodle or watercolor or whatever else I’m feeling that day. What matters is that this object is an anchor in the physical world. I can learn all about these objects online, but never the same way as I can from using my five senses to take them in in real life.

I don’t really care what my screen time notifications say (if they’re the result of using my phone for stuff that actually matters).

I refuse to self-flagellate about X hours of screen time each day if I know it’s the result of being on phone calls with family or watching a YouTube video about fixing a piece of furniture (and actually fixing it) or Marco Polo-ing friends or identifying birds on Merlin or even playing Wordle. The actual number of hours spent on my phone feel kind of irrelevant - what matters is how I use those hours. I want to be on my phone less, sure, but I still want to hear about the mundanities of my loved one’s days. I still want to see how Andrew and Erin fared in today’s Connections. I still want to see pictures of my friend’s kids’ first slices of pizza. So long as we live hours apart, the phone will usually be the best medium for spending time together and I’m more okay with that than I am with letting relationships fizzle (or bird calls go unidentified).

Analog Sundays

Each birthday I set a resolution for myself because I never have my life together enough at the turn of the Gregorian calendar’s new year. This year’s was to be off tech on Sundays, in hopes of it making me less inclined to be online the rest of the week too. I regret to inform you that it does in fact work, even if it is an imperfect practice. There are a few key factors at play to make sure this can actually happen: I have to have all work that would require a laptop or phone DONE before Sunday (a huge privilege in and of itself), and I have to set my (aforementioned) parental control app to lock me out of all social media and email for the entire 24 hour period. I still bring my phone around with me because - oh my god what if my mom falls off a ladder or something - but I try not to use it.

It’s really not that deep. I usually still listen to an audiobook or playlist if I go for a run, and I usually still log it on Strava. I still whip out Merlin if I hear a bird I can’t identify. But I try to leave my phone in another room or in a bag tucked away otherwise. Sundays are for sitting on the beach and walking in the woods and making a big pot of whatever we’re eating that week and doing laundry and maybe playing a board game. They’re for inviting people over and consulting my stack of too-often-forgotten cookbooks. Sometimes they’re for watching a movie. But they’re not to be wasted staring into the abyss.

I don’t worry about the years of my life inevitably spent scrolling so much as I worry about the moments of genuine connection, joy, and healthy boredom avoided when I instinctively turn my attention toward my virtual pacifier. How many times has my cat sought my affection while I have descended the virtual rabbit hole looking for clues about an acquaintance’s love life? How many lunches have I disregarded my tastebuds’ delight while I was too busy tap-tap-tapping through instagram stories of other people’s Euro summer meals? How many funny quips has my partner made that I only half-heard because I was reading the comments of a nonsensical video of “new mom hacks” (I’m not a mother)? How many times has the buzz of an email received after hours stopped me from making something with my hands? How many times have I robbed myself of actual enjoyment in pursuit of digital placation?

Anyways, I clearly possess no expertise in this (or any!) area of life but I keep blabbering to my friends about my complex relationship with screens and have a feeling you might be too. Would love to hear your strategies for being less umbilically tethered to these devices. Gotta live with them, gotta learn to make space in our lives without them, too.

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Savor it friday will be back this week! I was in West Virginia for the first annual Family of Family Reunion (just as cute as it sounds, I promise) and eating my weight in wedding soup and pepperoni rolls took priority over converting my garbled notes into a substack. Sorry to send you two emails this week! Feel free to retaliate by emailing me twice, too. Idk! Seems fair!

See ya later,

emilgator

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For the past week, when I close my eyes and try to forget that we are barreling towards hell, I think about the hour I spent fighting the current last weekend, and all the hours spent fighting the current throughout the many summers in my hometown. This is not a metaphor. There is something extremely cathartic about digging my heels against the sand, shuffling my feet across the ocean floor against a swell that begs to become a riptide. I feel the heat in my nostrils, the burn in my eyes. I lock my knees as the water pulls backward, lurches forward, tries to dislodge me from my post. I dip below one wave and exhale, come up for air and get trampled by another. Nothing makes me feel alive like the sting of salt water soaking through every layer of my being, the knowledge that this body (of flesh) is at the mercy of that body (of water). It is rare that the ocean is this rough where I live; it’s a gift to be so small and so temporarily in its grip. When I finally decide it’s time to stop flirting with my own mortality, I still can’t believe my luck as I watch from the shore: the salt spray on each wave! The light catching the spindrift! The somersault of the water - something so mighty becoming tame as it crashes!

Last Friday, which, may I remind you, was the Fourth of July3, I spent at least sixty minutes in pure unadulterated bliss as I was pummeled and rocked and thumped and thrashed by the ocean. Laura and Spencer and Taylor also joined in the childlike ebullience of rough waters - hurkieing and bellyflopping and dunking over and under the waves. For legal reasons, I don’t recommend this. There’s definitely some risk. But my god, talk about a baptism. I am anointed. I am brand new.

this salt spray is the best part of being alive, except for all of the other heartbreakingly gorgeous parts of being alive.

I also want to tell you about the sharks

Relatedly, on Sunday, Laura and I saw a shark jump out of the water. We saw its entire body exit the ocean and flop back in. This was after watching at least seven different fins thrash their way back and forth along a 200 yard stretch of shoreline, probably a football field from the beach, for about an hour. I don’t have much else to say about it except that last summer I declared it was hot shark summer, and this summer it actually is. This is also your reminder that Radiolab’s Week of Sharks miniseries ruled and if you want to come over to our house for Shark Week July 20-25, we have plenty of of room on our big ass couch.4

Unsolicited recs

I can’t remember if I’ve already shared with you this video of John Turturro live at The Moth, but I have watched it nearly once a week since I first saw it. The Moth has been one of my very favorite forms of media since I listened to this story on a roommate’s jump drive that she’d downloaded from an RSS feed while lying on my bed in Jinja, Uganda in 2012. I have been hooked ever since. I also feel compelled to share this story, by one of my biggest influences in organizing and collective action, Chenjerai Kumanyika. Go forth and prosper with all these Moth recs!

Because I am on a work trip, I am in what I like to call “bad thriller mode” wherein I cram in as many bad thrillers on audiobook as I can muster in my 2-3 days away from home. It feels unfair to call them “bad” because they are extremely bingeable and I *cherish* the treat of listening to them, but also I don’t know that I recommend any of them specifically? I DO recommend this work trip ritual. What a treat to think about kitschy made up horrors and not real, far scarier ones for a few hours on flights.

Last night was the buck moon, meaning the full moon when the deers’ antlers are fully developed. That being said, tonight around sundown, go look for the moon! She won’t be full (instead, an early waning gibbous), but she WILL be stunning! All week, I have been so lucky as to catch a glimpse as she’s grown her contours and fought off the shadow of the earth and all week I have said “wow, I cannot believe there are people who rob themselves of believing that this quite-literally-otherwordly body is in the sky, dancing around us and controlling our tides.” LOOK AT THE MOON. BE ASTONISHED. I IMPLORE YOU.

This isn’t really a rec, per se, but on my run today WILLOW’s symptom of life came on shuffle and may I just point us all towards the lines “feast my eyes on lower things while beauty is a symptom of life, gotta decide if i’m gonna see it, why?” This made me extremely emotional while looking at a bunny outside a building marked RADIATION RESEARCH.

Sorry, you will not hear WILLOW in this video and instead will be subjected to the sound of me actively panting. Alas, turn your volume off so you don’t hear me huff and puff and blow the house down here.

One small step

Kayla mentioned that it might be helpful to include one tiny action each week to steel ourselves against apathy, etc. and I think that’s a great idea. This week, we’re talking public libraries. The TLDR is this: in the spring, an executive order took aim at the the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences and totally gutted it but somehow it came out unaffected from last week’s Bad Budget Bill. The House Appropriations Committee will begin to markup the Fiscal Year 2026 budget over the next several weeks. The Subcommittee overseeing funding for the Institute for Museum and Library Services is on deck for Monday, July 21, at 5 pm EST, with the full Committee markup scheduled for Thursday, July 25, at 10 am. There are 17 members of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee. Blow up those mfers phones.

Look, I too, am weary. You think I WANT to dial up smarmy-ass L*ndsey Gr*ham’s office every day? Not really!!!! But, I want my friends’ kids to grow up in a world where they can check out Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry or Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret and be fundamentally changed. I want them to be introduced to books, sure, but also the PLACES that are public libraries and museums. I want them to have summer reading goals and to visit Smithsonian affiliates and to learn to sew or garden or build a stool because libraries are hobby holy lands!!!! I want people who have nowhere else to go to find the comfort of air conditioning and a place to sit on a hot day!! I want elderly folks to be able to use computers!!5 I want VITA volunteers to help people with their taxes!!! I want people in need of services to have one more door to access SNAP and TANF applications!!! I want to breathe in the air of a library, to smile at a few strangers between the shelves, to continue checking out my bad thrillers for work trips on Libby for heaven’s sakes!!! So we have to make some calls. Sorry.

Anyways, yesterday, Kaveh Akbar6 shared a Fanny Howe poem that ended with the line, Human was God’s secret name. And I will be rolling that over and over again in the back alley of my brain for the next few days. Love you.

See ya later,

emilgator