This title is a nod to the local-to-Western North Carolina, late poet Carl Sandburg’s quote “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” Or rather, a translation of it, as those serve as lovely metaphors, which is just our native poet-language.

Once, on a trip to Carl Sandburg’s home in Flat Rock, my youngest son and I held baby goats, delighted in their erratic joy, and spent nearly an hour on our bellies staring into a cement pond teeming with algae and wiggly tadpoles.

As my children arch towards adulthood, these are the kinds of memories I’m holding close.

There’s this weird thing I’m experiencing lately.

When I read about, watch a video about, or otherwise learn about physics, my eyes spill over, saltwater streaming down ruddy cheeks, my person overwhelmed with the elegance and beauty and complexity and simplicity. Tears like tide, pulled forth by the gravity of the moon, the arc of a wave, the elegance of equation.

But there’s something more to it that I hadn’t yet been able to articulate until this morning, when I started reading Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (which I, later in the day, put down for good).

I believe in magic. I always have. It’s a felt sense of the woven undercurrent of the world’s ecosystem, including us as humans, and how it behaves, how it thrums. It’s how I feel when I’m immersed in forest, the trail I return to weekly where each time I absorb different aspects of the environment: the fecundity, the humming interdependence, the sensory magic and the orchestration.

It’s how I feel when synchronicities stack like puzzle pieces and I know I’m exactly where I’m meant to be, that very same undercurrent. How I sometimes can sense things before they happen, or subtle shifts in the energy of a fellow human.

The Sagan of The Demon Haunted World in which he rails against pseudoscience would likely take issue with this.

I’ve also always adored science, though much of my experience has been anemic. As an eight-year-old I pored over the glossy human body section in our Encyclopedia Britannica, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my closet. I wanted so much more from it, for it to spill out of its bounds into an operating room right in front of me, for a mentor to explain the answers to my myriad questions about digestion and ATP and respiration and circulation and kidneys and elimination: to reveal the connective tissue of it all. The interplay, the symphony.

I had a year and a half of nursing school under my belt before my first son arrived in my belly (to much joy), and the OR was my very favorite rotation. And I felt a similar sense of grief and overwhelm and elation when I finally sat in classrooms accessing the kind of learning I so hungered for as a child.

We are meant to be just so curious, aren’t we?

One of the problems I have with science in the way it was taught in K-12 and beyond is the same problem I have with modernity right now, both human and systemic, the same problem I had when I worked for an assistive technology company, the same problem I have with how we approach so many problems: the siloing of it all.

We specialize, often at the expense of our interdependence and mutual flourishing within those ecosystems. We become terribly good in one specialty or field, in opposition what John Muir said: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

(He also said: “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” which I have found true to be true over and over again.)

What I mean by that is:

• Capitalism, the best of our shitty modern systems, in its current iteration is singularly focused on profit and growth, at the expense of our environment and working class, situated on a foundation of both historical atrocity and beautiful work too, commodifies fundamental aspects of human experience (think: childcare, eldercare, etc.), and erodes our souls.

• Math without interdisciplinary learning is like learning how to speak a bone-dry language without understanding the juicy, stunning meaning behind the words. (Ironically, I wrote most of this piece before reading the preface to Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, which speaks to the same thing.)

• We, all of us, are a specific iteration of brilliance, but when sorted by capitalism rather than moving and flowing and organizing intuitively, we lose the interplay and infrastructure and meaning that allows that brilliance to shine.

• We evolved to live in interdependent ecosystems and the machine has slowly taken us away from each other as it dissolved the communal aspects of labor.

• Scientific research, an incredible and important endeavor, in its current iteration often focuses on a single or cluster of aspects to the exclusion of many other important factors, and there’s the problem of funding being tied to a need for profit.

  (I attempted to write about this in this article about elderberry in the New York Times, which floor edits shaped into an advert for the flu shot. To be clear: I’m vehemently pro-vax, but I am also witchy and opposed to editing an informational piece aimed at a complexity of information that silenced nuanced voices - but more on that later.)

This is not to devalue individualism, which I have come to understand in it’s most valuable iteration as individuation, because in this way it fuels the collective as opposed to homogenizing it.

This, I think, is how John Galt and Karl Marx both can contribute to a flourishing society.

In a similar way, let’s sit Carl Jung and Carl Sagan down together at the dinner party, and maybe throw in Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler. After all, diversity of perspective only strengthens our ideas.

As Sagan rails against pseudoscience: crystals and aliens and astrology and flavors of religion as well, he voices in favor of the more robust cultural embrace of the wonder and elegance the actual science, both minute and sweeping, offers us.

His premise: these humany endeavors, to delight in otherworldly magic not based in realism, detract from the promise of a society deeply literate in the everyday scientific magic that life here on earth, in our bodies, and the stars are teeming with.

But our humany delight in otherworldly magic is soul sustenance, is art, is imagination, is music and we all have different pathways to experience it, if we’re lucky. If we’re afforded the privilege, which not all of us are.

We are individuals improbably alive, skin-packaged miracles of myriad tiny circumstances, pulses, processes, electricity and saltwater.

As somebody who wanders trails holding the somatic devastating impact of modernity on the pulse of the forest, particularly in a forest reminiscent of recent disaster, I must also remind myself that I am 42 years old: I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be alive at this age if it weren’t for science, for capitalism.

It’s so easy to rail against what we take for granted. Scientific advancement, Sagan reminds me, feeds far more of us more efficiently, has tripled our lifespans, saved our babies from retrospectively outrageous mortality rates.

But nothing, as the capitalists argue, is without cost.

Our humanness persists in paradoxes that insist that as we increasingly automated our lives with machines and our women entered the workplace, women’s labor and cognitive load actually proliferated. That when we increase efficiency and make something more available and cheap, the demand increases. That when we increase our output of soy and corn, our calories become emptier, our soils bereft.

That when we stop using our hands to craft and our bodies to come together and labor and our spirits to delight in the improbable, the result is loneliness and disconnection.

I’d like to remind Sagan: as civilization emerged, one of the primary elements in each and every one was religion, belief, ritual, spirituality.

I just don’t see the depth and wonder and precision of science at being at odds with the magic of the human spirit.

He would maybe argue that this is due to a lack of knowledge of what’s actually driving the fantastical: we grasp for an explanation for what it is we don’t understand, and the actual explanation is in itself precise magic, laying the laws for our, and our environment’s, existence.

The luminous orb in our sky, a night punctured with stars that may not even exist by the time their light reaches us, the capriciousness of the weather.

We evolved to both seek answers and iterate, as well as believe deeply in something beyond the everyday miracles of our physicality. It’s fundamental and evolutionary, that human drive.

It’s wisdom, which is contained in multitudes.

Knowing about how far away the stars are and what they’re made of, and lying on your back on a summer night buzzing with the wonder of the crickets, the bats overhead, the warmed cement holding your body, is, all of it, sustenance.

And modernity often steals our wonder, both of science and of magic and of our love for each other.

God can also be known by the name of Why. God can be known by the name of Neighbor. God can be a momentary pause to simply notice.

And especially at this moment in time, where the machine is mimicking what it is to be a thinking human that iterates and seeks answers, and displaces us from the cognitive load of distilling our thoughts into commodities and physical products, and our world is increasingly prone to flood and burn and drought and disaster, I, for one, just keep hoping this will spit us out into a physical world where we re-learn how to be with one another and sit, present, inside our earthly home.

We will need meaning and spirit and belief more than ever, to steward us across that bridge.

We are already seeing people here in the US return to church in unprecedented numbers, and I say: good. These belief systems give us frameworks to hold the untenable: death, loss, disaster, to foster hope and faith and community in hard times.

And yes, religion has also been used to justify atrocity and bigotry, and continues to do so.

But I’m no longer as alarmed as I was at our society further splintering into individuated factions, in part because I have a felt sense that we will make art of this chaos, for some reason.

I’m learning so very much from people who don’t think like I do. Particularly about the ways I’ve long been wrong about life, about other people’s politics.

Sagan would likely be particularly alarmed at how, since The Demon Haunted World was published in 1996, we have only further polarized into, how education has decidedly has declined, how Covid-era misinformation has split us further.

But what I hold in my head as convergence is decidedly not utopian, but is informed by what I’m learning about entropy, listening to old lectures by Prigogine who assures me that chaos is a ripe opportunity for new structures to be born, and art too, and on the philosophy of math, and reading Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Steven Hawking.

Though each perspective on its own isn’t the whole picture.

What I learned when I fell apart this time, earlier this year, was how very much I have ached for this deeper understanding of the world and the universe, from such a young age, and how deeply reverent and grateful I am that I am taking the time to dwell even more deeply in curiosity and wonder at this chaotic moment in time.

My mother, the Christmas before she intentionally took leave of this world when I was seventeen, gave me fabric-bound copy of The Good Spell Book: Love charms, magical cures, and other practical sorcery.

Inside she wrote:

Mary,

I hope your life is filled with love and magic.

Love,
Mom
Christmas, 2001

It has been. My life. Filled with love and magic but also strife, much of it imparted by her decision to depart, and by my own lack of access to knowledge, support, and development of my own discipline and resilience.

I don’t want to live there anymore, in that story. In a story of being a victim capitulating to circumstance.

I want to rebuild life around what’s important to me, around the things I missed out on precisely because of the bifurcation of possibilities and circumstances.

Part of that is the juiciest of learning.

I think the reason I cry every time I take teeny tiny baby steps towards understanding physics and philosophy and math is because it scripts out bits of my physically felt sense of orchestration, of cause and effect, interdependent connective tissue of causality that I’ve long carried inside of me, and occasionally bleed out into my poetry or my writing.

It gives me reason to try to cultivate discipline to support my deeply felt sense of empathy with infrastructure.

It lays bare the bones, the gorgeous rules that dictate and orchestrate existence. The set of conditions under which we, and our world, evolved to fill. The tapestry, the vibrant code that underpins existence and allows us to iterate to play and push at its bounds.

When we better understand the elegance and limitations and interconnectedness of the rules, that’s when we can make art of them, and more profoundly understand all it is that’s brought us to this moment.

Sunlight spilling through the canopy is a heart-rending sensory and spiritual moment, oft emoted by our poets.

And, that very same sunlight tells us the story about what elements comprise our sun.

I cry because, when I was younger, physics and math were wholly unappealing.

But when you locate an entry point into it through that which you already love and sense: a forest, a poem, a feeling, and it only serves to make that love more rich and that thing more beautiful and complex, for me it only enhances our wonder, our gods, our lives. And if you love the spirit of a forest and get to know all the little interconnected rules that dictate how it grows too, imagine where that could take us.

I believe my mother shows up for me as I move through this life in moment, like an essay acceptance, a spilling of sunlight, in a bird lighting my path.

Sagan would say no, not really, and here is why this is ouija board level thinking.

But that’s the wonder of being a complex human, isn’t it? It’s not in being a skeleton or a circulatory system, or being precise or right.

But the magic is in the sum total, the whole it all, as well as a minute slice of time, a flower, a feeling, the precision of a single joint or equation. The thrum, the beat, of heart.

And even if it, every last bit of it, is explainable by science, if you can show me the chemical composition of consciousness, the math of existence, the science of emotion?

I can still feel it.

Author’s note: to anybody who is still here with me in this space: thank you. I fell apart spectacularly and my subconscious flooded the page here this winter. There was much darkness and fear that overwhelmed my normally buoyant way of being in the world. I learned a lot, and my work now is figuring out how to apply it.

I have an enduring faith in the felt sense of magic humming all around and inside of us, both wounded and resonant.

It’s both me and not-me too, in the sense that it’s both you and not-you: that we are all a part of this immense everything that is consciousness, magic, physics, trees, fungi, bacteria, life here on this planet.

Individuation and interdependence don’t have to cancel each other out, and I hope this is how we can synthesize, how the warmth of collectivism can coexist with the rugged spirit of individualism. How the empaths and the discerners together can help form connective tissue.

How somehow pushing the outer bounds into dissolution will circle us back to what’s fundamentally, irrevocably human, which is to say: connected to all of life here on earth while being extraordinarily aware of it too.

Perhaps this looks different than all of our individual ideas of it, but for some reason I trust it, in the same sense that I trust each and every one of us are holy and sacred. I trust that the good work so many people are putting in will eventually crest and spread beautifully on our shores, that amid disaster we will touch our tongue-tip to the pulse of it all before it’s too late.

And maybe that’s a stupid, naive hope. The data is certainly damning.

But: I’m human, after all.

It was the summer of 2020. The walls were sweating.

We had no air conditioner, the pools were closed, our contact with other humans was freakishly limited (why yes we were those people), and the social tension in our country was at a lurid crescendo.

Remember that?

It was then that a somehow both tiny and enormous German Shepard puppy climbed out of Nate’s pickup and wove tight, immediate circles around each of us, myself, my husband, and our two sons, claiming us as his own.

It was decided. We were his.

He had come to us from the innards of a hot garage, trapped for days without water, his owner having abandoned him in the throes of a mental health crisis. His paws and ears were monsters, and he couldn’t bear to snuggle without freaking out, crying, and biting us, hard.

Boone Bear was a hot mess of neurosis, a boom-bass bark that vibrated your entire body all the live long day, and the most aggressive love I have ever experienced from any living creature.

Oh, what’s that, you want me to get down off the bed? I think I’ll heave my entire 105-lb body onto yours, and squish my enormous face into your face with all my might, instead.

He would hold a gaze and pour every ounce of love that giant body could muster through his gorgeous liquid brown eyes into yours, care-bear style.

He was hella good at protecting us from the minutest of threats, from teeny porch lizards to bounding squirrels to roly-poly black bears with sharp teeth that lumber past our windows.

His thundering bark from the car when we drove him anywhere in public once startled somebody nearly clean off their bike.

More than once, a delivery person, after experiencing Boone full-force murder-bark flexing the actual sliding glass door, sprinted Phoebe-style to the safety of his van and backed out of our driveway with the side door still hanging wide open.

Little did he know: Boone would have just attacked him with love.

In fact, all he ever wanted in life was to love and protect.

When our mountain turned liquid-river-of-mud and trees and boulders during Hurricane Helene in 2024, he and our then ten year old son took turns leading our family through the flow and up the steep banks through the woods to the safety of our neighbor’s house.

What a devastating trickster, this death thing that happens upon all of us.

He was a spry six years old, handsome as all get out, relishing his prime and loving his people, loudly. He was also the loudest sigher I’ve ever met; I’d hoped my days would long be backdropped by those sighs.

On Boone’s last day of life, he got into the trash (possible culprit?). He galavanted with some family friends outside. He howled one last soulful Pembleton family howl with his sister-dog, his human brother, and his Mama.

He had an upset stomach that we didn’t think too much of: kid was prone to stomach upset.

And then, sometime during the night, he quietly, mysteriously departed.

Of all of the delightful qualities he brought into our life (along with several really challenging ones), I think my favorite was his unabashedness.

He was an enormous goofy galoot, but he didn’t seem to ever experience shame, because his primary drive of love and protection overshadowed any doubt of it or himself. He was gravitationally self-assured.

He did stuff that made me embarrassed for him all the time. But he himself was never embarrassed.

His love-drive was just too overpowering for self-doubt.

We are going to sorely miss his enormous, embodied love-aggression. There’s nothing quite like it.

After the hurricane, my offspring
named our new vehicle Gertrude,
meaning strong spear in German
words I hold like a pearl on my oyster-tongue
as together, landlocked, we traverse broken mountain landscape
venturing into sleepy-clean suburban wilderness
to forage dinner as she burns oil, and the cost —
metaphorical, physical, bodily, existential, environmental, human, grocery —
rises to a raucous crescendo.

I press a yellow pad of paper to her wheel,
heart-blooming in language-shapes
amid the robustness of spring’s life-thrust
in an attempt to craft meaning from devastating noise.

I like the spring light best in the morning
when I emerge from my enormous blanket
when the sun is still tender over the mountain
my eyes framed in fresh-celled renewal.
In the mirror my image somehow
both newborn and elder, and the broken-but-growing landscape,
bathed in early light, weightless.

Let us carry into this season of light the cold shape of winter:
the knowledge that emergence is not promised, but orchestrated
by the tiny actions of billions: organisms, ecosystems,
inside the body, outside our windows
teeming, crawling, dwindling too, in our soils-waters-skies.

In the morning, it’s easy to take for granted tender leaves, tender skin,
that tomorrow will emerge unscathed despite the weight
of evidence to the contrary accumulating like the
forest’s fire-tinder out of my home’s windows,
the land’s thirst for rain.

Yesterday I read about a Black ninth grader’s work
regenerating a Mississippi oyster reef
by tending her oyster garden, a school project,
a task that the government,
and fifty five million dollars of investment,
failed to accomplish.

Her pearled-promise a reminder:
trust what grows inside your
intimate, oceanic depths.
No matter how ludicrous,
tend it.

Write poems in vehicles with squandered-time
that won’t afford you groceries.
Stoke a ridiculous hope that
refuses to surrender to its consequence.

Be human. Be fallible, unreasonable with your insistence
that instead of boxed classrooms, boxed food
lonely journeys to the grocery with Gertrude
we might work together like ants, joyfully
carrying more than our weight,
communicating with scent,
in underground networks
like saprobes, decomposing what’s dying,
orchestrating renewal, resurrection
like the sun, coaxing life from earth
with the simple fact of our light.

1. Freedom from propaganda. We deserve truth and understanding.

2. Safety from violence.

3. Meaningful work.

4. Deep relationships.

5. Joy.

6. To feel supported in hard times.

7. To be challenged.

8. To have one’s strengths honored and exercised.

9. Accessible pathways to housing.

10. Food that nurtures.

11. Accessible pathways to health.

12. Fair and just tech algorithms.

13. Transparent governments that work for people’s best interests.

14. Economies that fairly honor the true value of labor.

15. Time to be with loved ones.

16. Time to connect with nature.

17. Time and freedom to worship, in whatever capacity you so choose.

18. Community connection, agency within one’s community and its governance, and responsibility to one’s community.

19. Agency over one’s own body, life, and love.

20. Protections for the earth and her resources.

21. To be supported and honored in old age, and in sickness, and at the end of life.

Hi!

I’ve done things a bit backwards, as I tend to do. I launched this Substack breathlessly, full of words, without explaining what I want to do here, or who I am.

Some of you may have been confused when I arrived in your inbox, because you may or may not have remembered signing up for my mailing list after my Modern Love Essay for the New York Times ran in March of 2022.

I haven’t written much at all since then, until now.

Some of you subscribed a week or so ago when my essay Ten Imperfect Cicada Metaphors for the Apocalypse ran in Jane Ratcliffe’s Beyond.

Some of you are my amazing supportive friends in real life :)

Either way, please know I don’t take it lightly that you’ve somehow found value in my words and have spent precious time actually reading them. It’s such an honor.

Also: Hi I’m Mary. (And that’s my middle schooler, who has grown out of selfies with his mom.)

I snapped this of us in the Solstice evening glow at the Climate Summit at Warren Wilson College, around the corner from where we live in Swannanoa.

Whenever I publish work, typically I just write a one sentence bio: I’m a mother and writer in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Because despite excavating some of my most vulnerable moments for very public writing, I don’t love being seen.

But today I want to share with you:

• What it feels like to me to share intimate writing with a divisive, insane world, not knowing how it will respond

• Why I started doing it, stopped doing it, and why I’m doing it again now while division’s at a fever pitch

• My hopes and dreams

On the night of January 23, 2002, I drove from the apartment I shared with my mother to my father’s house, my foot smashing the accelerator to the floor, Pearl Jam’s haunting, beautiful Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town playing with the volume turned up all the way. At seventeen years old, I’d just lost my mother to suicide.

I’ve carried that song around deep in a memory-pocket ever since, one that houses a lot of different emotions but always brings me back to that night.

The lyrics:

I seem to recognize your face
Haunting, familiar, yet I can't seem to place it
Cannot find the candle of thought to light your name
Lifetimes are catching up with me

All these changes taking place
I wish I'd seen the place
But no one's ever taken me

Hearts and thoughts, they fade, fade away
Hearts and thoughts, they fade, fade away

I swear, I recognize your breath
Memories like fingerprints are slowly raising
Me, you wouldn't recall for I'm not my former
It's hard when you're stuck upon the shelf

I changed by not changing at all
Small town predicts my fate
Perhaps that's what no one wants to see

I just want to scream, hello
My God, it's been so long
Never dreamed you'd return
But now here you are and here I am
Hearts and thoughts, they fade away

Hearts and thoughts, they fade, fade away
Hearts and thoughts, they fade, fade away
Hearts and thoughts, they fade away
Hearts and thoughts, they fade, fade away

Hearts and thoughts, they fade, fade away
Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away
Hearts and thoughts they fade.

Early this May, my sister and nephew and I went to see Pearl Jam play in Raleigh, North Carolina on an impulse. I wanted to hear Eddie Vedder sing the song that marked this time in my life, with two of the people who’d been a part of it.

I was hoping for a resurrection I think, a glimmer of her, because my memory is indeed fading. I’m aging into a life with a husband and children and friends and pets she’s never met, in a house she’s never been to, during the strangest time in American politics. My now-life would feel pretty foreign to somebody who’d just crested the millennia when she departed this world.

I hoped to meet her there, an elderly woman in a small town that my mother might have become.

For twenty years after her death, all I really wanted to write about was losing her. I think because her death was mired in a maze of hard and winding circumstances, disassociating me from my body, which was steeped in shame, I kept trying to write my way back to myself.

To work backwards and decipher what had happened into a map of what not to do. To feel my grief which always felt too enormous to swallow and therefore just out of reach, and to craft meaning and beauty from it too, with word-shaped art.

I wrote and I wrote but it wasn’t until twenty years, some therapized, later that I’d covered so much ground that I felt like I could tell the whole story. One that held the nuance, the full scope of all its parts… the beauty and the love and the pain. Because grief in itself is a paradox of loss and immense love.

And then I emailed it to a man named Dan Jones, who is the editor of a New York Times Column called Modern Love. It’s kind of the holy grail for memoir.

He emailed me back eight months later with an acceptance. I literally fell off the toilet when I saw the email come through on my phone. And then I kept falling over, over and over again, and screaming “What!?”

I ended up laying in my driveway, limp-limbed in awe and just thinking that my mom was with me, that she was happy our story might help others.

I’ve been published in the New York Time four times. And every time I don’t sleep the night before. Every time I’m incapacitated all day on pub day, obsessively checking comments and sweating and heart racing.

The world isn’t kind to people who brave the public eye, especially if they say or do something wrong. Which we all do. It’s part of being human.

“Making mistakes is how we grow, how we learn,” I tell my children. “Shame isn’t helpful. Take that shame and spit it out the window. We are all human, we are all imperfect, and we all make mistakes.”

I’ve been slaughtered on Twitter before, for asking the wrong question to the wrong person, somebody with influence and following.

Ironically, she had posted the harm of writing about suicide, and I wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t hurt anybody else.

I sobbed all damn night long and deleted my account for awhile.

She’s not on Twitter anymore, and Twitter is now X which is a weird and wild and mean soup of right wing bots and techno bros with AI hard ons and spiritual hard ons and an occasional gem. I like to watch Grok, Musk’s “maximally truth-seeking AI,” call out all the misinformation in the comments.

But I digress.

The thing about putting your art into the world, even art woven from your own life like memoir, is that if you risk being misunderstood, you risk being piled on in your DMs, if you risk just being YOURSELF in a hateful world, sure, you’ll probably receive hate.

Even when you don’t do anything wrong. Maybe especially then.

Queer, Black, and/or disabled influencers and writers and speakers do this every day. Famous actors and musicians do this every day. To a chorus of judgement, of exposure, of opinions and mean-to-the-corenesses that nobody asked for.

And yet they keep standing up and speaking. Filming. Writing. Making. Creating.

I think of all these cultural icons who have shaped the very tapestries of all our lives in this harsh public landscape.

In my room as a lonely weird depressed kid lying on a pile of stuffed animals, Pearl Jam backdropping my life from the speakers of a clunky boom box. Eddie Vedder sacrificing normal experiences and privacy for fame and parties and loss, for criticism, for the vulnerability of an exploitative system.

He talked about how once early in his career, he’d played Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill. He borrowed somebody’s Schwinn, and pedaled through the residential streets of delicious normalcy.

“This is a memory that I hold close to my heart and remember very distinctly. I thought, we could live here. Streets with overhanging trees. Nice, small, easy to maintain houses.”

And yet, as he shined from the stage in Raleigh, North Carolina, in front of thousands and thousands of fans, he thanked us for giving him an extraordinary life.

And god, his rich voice like gravely chocolate, the band’s enthusiastic energy, their ageless transcendent talent reverberated around that stadium.

But here’s what happened when they played Elderly Lady, in the middle of the set without fanfare, like a sneeze that I had mistakenly thought would be the whole experience:

The crew shined stage lights around the whole stadium, lighting up the faces of the people in the crowd. The whole stadium was singing along and it nearly eclipsed his voice.

Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away.

I looked around at all the people singing and realized that each one of us probably had a story or a memory or a heartbreak associated with this heart-rending song. I watched a woman dance and raise her arms up in the air. I watched grown southern good ol’ boys emote, loudly.

What an extraordinary thing, to be alive in this shared moment.

I wasn’t sad. I didn’t feel my mother. But what was important is how I wasn’t alone. In our chorus, we ordinary people were sharing what that song had meant to us as individuals. The sadness and hope and grief and joy of these familiar, well worn, lyrics and notes, strung across a decades-long career that touched so so many people.

What a gift. What a gift it is when somebody chooses visibility.

We must do better by them, yes? The Beibers and the Britneys and the Lin Manuel Mirandas (okay this doesn’t work he’s actually thriving I think but I just really wanted to give him a random shout out because what brilliance!!). (This is also why I unpublished my last newsletter like an hour or so after sending it… the content was simply hypocritical.)

All that to say.

When my Modern Love Essay about my mother came out, it was right around the twenty year anniversary of my mom’s death.

Y’all. I really can’t with the response. I was by FAR the MOST healing single experience of my life. My inbox filled up with messages from suicide loss survivors like myself. Because, community. Because that risk I took of putting my art out into the world, my vulnerable art, was met with reciprocity and connection and strangers trusting me with my vulnerability.

I got lucky- I was unscathed. But that certainly wasn’t a guarantee. Memoirists are regularly charged with being too much… fill in your favorite criticism here. Navel gazing narcissists is probably the most common but also probably the most mild.

This is, in part, why despite publishing in places with wide readership, I didn’t want to build a platform for myself. I’m mortified when I see somebody I know at the grocery store unexpectedly, out of context. I’ve only just learned to stay embodied with grace and say a true thank you to a compliment and not melt.

Also my self concept has grown pretty unshakable and robust. Not to say that insults wouldn’t hurt, that threats wouldn’t scare me. But I’m 41, and they tell me this decade is magical in the many fewer fucks involved. I really couldn’t agree more. I love being myself for the most part. I love being quirky and scattered and loud and seeing the best in most everyone I meet, unabashedly. I love when I’m grinning at what I’m thinking walking through the grocery store and I catch somebody noticing my whimsey and smiling at me. Or even when they look annoyed, I love that too. Because who they are perceiving is actually me, embodied.

Just don’t like, say hi if you know me k?

But. Even more than whatever tangent I’ve just been chirping on about.

Now more than ever is the time to speak out. Now more than ever is the time to love bigger and more quirkier. Now more than ever is the time to show your community big unabashed love.

Because we’ve got to be louder than the hate. We’ve got to be safer than the scapegoating of marginalized humans. HUMANS.

We are all humans, deserving of love and dignity and respect and rest and food and shelter and the right to live.

Oh gosh it’s now late and I’ve been rambling and didn’t really get to the bullet points I promised in the beginning. But I wanted to land on reciprocity… even now in this Substack it feels weird AF to send this newsletter out into the ether when I hit publish.

And I was talking to a friend about this, and they suggested it might just have to do with the lack of reciprocity that we’re meant to have as humans. Not in that I want to be paid for my work here, though I’m hoping at some point it will help lead me to paid work. But like, if you and I were sitting in a coffee shop and this was a vulnerable conversation and I just word vomited all of the above all over you, a. please remind me to let you talk next time and b. there would be a human response in return. Body language. Murmurs of agreement or dissent. Etc.

That’s why I admire the artists that send their work-babies out into the world unattended, vulnerable to interpretation by the receiver. Because frankly, that disconnect between human and human interaction, the same one that allows us to be dicks to each other on the internet, allows us to be dicks about somebody’s work.

And it’s fine because that’s the gamble, right? That’s part of it?

But as we close out, I do wonder if you have any questions for me, about the disaster or the world or my tumble of ideas here. Or anything else you might like to share. Like, in the comments.

It’s not that I want a platform for any traditional metric of success. I think I just want this to feel more relational. And, someday I plan to share interviews of incredible locals here, and their enduring disaster recovery work (we’re 9 months out and people STILL don’t have secure housing… and not a small amount of people) and such, and for that reason, I’d love to cultivate a community.

It’s okay if not. This is all an experiment. I’m not afraid to make mistakes anymore. (That said, I have to go put my kids to bed and I’m not editing so pls forgive typos)

But, if you feel so inclined, maybe say hi here :) in the spirit of reciprocity.

To end, some more lovely extra-wise lyrics from Eddie Vedder himself (is this in violation of copyright law do you think?)

Such is the way of the world
You can never know
Just where to put all your faith
And how will it grow

Gonna rise up
Burning black holes in dark memories
Gonna rise up
Turning mistakes into gold

Such is the passage of time
Too fast to fold
And suddenly swallowed by signs
Low and behold

Gonna rise up
Find my direction magnetically
Gonna rise up
Throw down my ace in the hole