Annual Winter Post
time is a circle and here's what I'm reading this time
it’s nice to find that what substack really is to me is a place to write in the winter when I’ve been alone for too long. if someone else was here, I’d be talking. maybe I never liked writing, maybe it’s just a substitute for the much more enjoyable hobby of conversation.
this winter I have a new craft: altering a plain black pullover. I got the sweatshirt a couple years ago on clearance intending to do something with it, and it sat in my craft room for two years until I finally found a design for it based on a painting in one of my astrology books. I’ve been experimenting with several techniques, which so far have been painting with bleach, reverse appliqué, embroidery, and something my mother informed me is called couching (when you sew down yarn with thread). I’m getting so much sewing practice and I love the way it looks. I’m hoping to have it done in time for a tarot event I’m doing at a gym in february so I can be a sporty witch.
I just finished reading Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp, a heavily researched book about the history of societal collapse. last year at this time I was reading The Grapes of Wrath. I guess january is the month when I like to read about everything going wrong. the Goliath book has a little forecasting and a few recommendations about avoiding catastrophe in the future, mostly involving energy resources and economic policies over which I have no influence, but there is one thing Kemp recommends that I can do: not be a dick.
a lot of problems stem from the impulse to dominate over others, and we can all decide not to do that to each other. it reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s commencement address where she tells the graduates:
I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is.
I return to this speech often. it keeps me oriented toward a life that feels real. I just got my hands on her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, which has the same grounding effect. when I read her work I can feel sanity settling into my whole self, my feet on the ground, my body a part of reality that is seen and shared by her. the essay is in the back of a volume I got from the library called Always Coming Home, in which Le Guin translated the imagined writings of a people that inhabit the Napa Valley in the distant future. it starts with a story of an eight-year-old’s first journey outside her home village, and then her first solo trek up the sacred mountain. it ends with this wonderful sentence: “I knew something had come to me that I did not understand, and maybe did not want, from that strange place, the pool and the waterskater; but the hinge of my walk had been the golden hill; the coyote had sung to me; and so long as my hand and the rock touched each other I knew that I had not gone wrong, even if I had come to nothing.”
!!!!!!!!
I knew that I had not gone wrong, even if I had come to nothing!!!!!!!!!!!
I needed that sentence for my life — for my caminos that have come to nothing, for every experience I did not understand — so that I may release the choking grip I have have strangled around my life to extract meaning and achievement for myself. every day I am so grateful that a library meme account (which no longer exists) on instagram convinced me to read The Dispossessed and I will never stop recommending that everyone read Ursula K. Le Guin.
that’s it this time, see you next winter!