This house is where I spent the first few years of my childhood in western Maryland – one room, three floors (if you count the dirt basement), and no hot water. It’s strange to miss a time of life that you don’t remember except through pictures, but there it is. I miss it.
This week’s links are below. As always, hold on to the ones you love, and let the rest go.
Goddamn, Glennon Doyle. Untamed is about as fierce a book as I could ever hope to encounter in pandemic-induced fits of insecurity. On what she was taught as a child versus what she has come to know as an adult: “Good girls aren’t hungry, furious or wild…I understand myself differently now. I was just a caged girl made for wide-open skies. I wasn’t crazy. I was a goddamn cheetah.” And the heart-wrenching question that comes in just the first chapter: “Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?”
Khristian seemed a little judge-y about this, but I loved The New York Times’s guide to meditating outdoors. It is ironic that I am looking at it in bed on my computer screen, and I got a little annoyed that the actually natural rain sounds outside drowned out the NYT’s recorded nature sounds on the video. Sigh.
Speaking of New York, I was reading The New Yorker interview with Tori Amos and clicked on the link for her performance on David Letterman a week after 9/11. Even 19 years later, I can conjure up the horror and grief of that sunny day, and this performance of Tom Waits’s song “Time” is a heartwrenching document of that moment in U.S. history. Not ashamed to admit that I was teary by the end, feeling the fullness of sorrow and gratitude mingling in the memory of my own personal losses, wrapped up with the loss of so many people. It’s in moments like this that I think how far away from each other we have become, and I wonder if we are that far away in reality.
Finally, for all those of you who fancy yourselves writers and want to give poetry a go (or if you’re just interested in the weird ways that words can be strung together), here’s a list of 100 poetic forms and links to what they are. Clogyrnach, anyone?
You’re all goddamn cheetahs; go out and meditate in nature this weekend.
Be well. Wash your hands. Love each other.