Stories from the Earth and Sky
Where redwoods rise, bears fall, and the 9/9 portal opens. Plus, some books I’ve recently read and what’s going on with book club.
Good morning! I missed you. How is everyone doing? I am drinking peppermint green tea and hiding from the heatwave that is baking Los Angeles, and am feeling grateful that I can do this. As the sun was rising this morning, I was thinking about the 9/9 portal happening tomorrow and read that “with the energy of 9 enhanced, the 9/9 portal is a good time to say goodbye or transition out of matters that have outlived their purpose for you,” that it is a time for endings and rebirths, and to “begin to plan baby steps into liberation.” Mercury also moves into Virgo on Monday, which is one of those things that organizes itself around a sort of logic for me — of course we feel called to refresh our lives, seek clarity, and step into our dignity with Virgo by our sides.
Should we have a moment, this is a little something I’d pass along...
𓆨 “‘People will be able to live off the salmon again,’ said Kenneth Brink, vice-chairman of the Karuk Tribe, as he watched the Klamath begin flowing over the site of the former 173-foot Iron Gate Dam. ‘We’ll be healing physically. We’ll be healing mentally. We’ll be healing spiritually.’”
𓆨 “Rare examples of 17th-century decorative paper-cutting found amid debris at a historic house in east London that was part of what was known as “the ladies’ university” are to go on display. Eight examples of the art form have been identified, including a hen embellished with coloured silk and a tiny folded star. They were discovered on a lintel where they are assumed to have settled after falling between floorboards about 350 years ago.”
𓆨 The unpublished genocide diaries of Refaat Alareer
𓆨 For the God of Love, for the Love of Florida
𓆨 “There are more than 50 Chinese herbal apothecaries in the Los Angeles area, according to Willie So, sales director of Chinatown-based Solstice Medicine, a leading distributor of traditional Chinese medicine products since 1979. (He said Solstice Medicine has been providing inventory to Tian Xiang since the store opened.) And while Tian Xiang is a well-stocked and conveniently located one, its social media success is a mystery — even to the people who work there.”
𓆨 Keeping the Spirit of Maine’s Wild Blueberry Harvest Alive
𓆨 In a devastating and exasperating blow, “The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the long-running, closely watched copyright case over the scanning and lending of print library books.”
𓆨 Young patients want beautifully imperfect veneers. They’re getting pain, debt, and regret.
𓆨 “And [clinical psychologist Eli Somer] counsels them to do stuff that they can’t do while fantasizing, like talking to real people in their lives, or mindfulness training—increasing their awareness of real-life sounds, smells, and physical sensations. He also uses psychotherapy to address the underlying pain, fear, and anxiety that lead people to retreat into their fantasy lives so heavily in the first place. The cure for unhealthy daydreaming, says Somer, is reconnecting with the real world.”
𓆨 “There are over 12,000 women incarcerated in the United States for homicide, a broad category that includes everything from manslaughter to first-degree murder. We do not know and have never known how many of these women killed someone who was abusing them. In the spring of 2020, I partnered with researchers at the Stanford Law School’s Criminal Justice Center for an ambitious study — the largest we know of to date — to find out. That number, we thought, would get to important questions at the heart of the legal principles of self-defense: Who is allowed to kill in the name of self-defense or protecting others and under what circumstances?”
And were we catching up, here is what I’d share with you...
Jamie Hood’s writing is deft and breathtaking, a portal to a world of beauty and singularity.
Did you know that back in the 1970s, a local bank in Southern California gifted redwood seedlings to anyone opening a new account with them, then donated the remaining seedlings to Orange County? This is how a park full of coastal redwoods came to exist just an hour and some change from downtown Los Angeles. I was familiar with Carbon Canyon Regional Park, but I didn’t know the history behind how the redwoods came to call that little patch of land home. Fascinating.
Victor, a well-known and beloved black bear who frequented Pine City Campground near Mammoth Lakes, California, was first tranquilized and then euthanized, with his body dumped at a local landfill after campers failed to follow proper safety protocols. Intrigued by the scent of the steak they were grilling, Victor plodded over to their campsite. One camper climbed onto a tree stump to avoid him, and startled by her presence, Victor swiped a paw at her, which ultimately sealed his fate. I won’t lie — reading about Victor’s death made me teary-eyed, and then reading about how the Bishop Paiute Tribe recovered his body and held a ceremony in his honor made me even more emotional.
Other than the Paiute Tribe’s tribute to Victor, everything else about this reads to me mostly like a very sad, unfortunate, and avoidable failure, from the government down to the campers. For his own safety, a bear should not have to grow so accustomed to the presence of humans that he remains mostly unfazed by them. For their own safety, people should perhaps reconsider bringing their laissez-faire attitudes camping with them, where there’s always potential for a wild animal to roam into the space where their lives are in the hands of that animal's home. I say this not admonishingly, but as someone who grew up camping and had parents who stressed the importance of always remaining vigilant as a visitor in the home of wildlife so unflinchingly that I myself also hold this belief true. Neither should campground hosts be made to feel like they’re treading water because the U.S. Forest Service fails to allocate anything more than a handful of days to train them. I don’t have the answers to how animals of all kinds (I am including humans in this language) can live — or at least interact — more harmoniously alongside one another, but I do believe that Victor should not have lost his life this way.
i-D relaunched their website, and for its christening, I read this Jocelyn Silver interview with Rayne Fisher-Quann, writer of Internet Princess, about hosting her first literary reading, Secrets, which took place at a Lutheran church earlier this year. Very fun.
On the walk to my friends’ house, I will pass chaotic bushes of hibiscus, and I always stop to snap a picture—or two or four—even if I’d already taken one just days before. I like how spiders weave webs around the flowers’ delicate stamen, pollen loosening from the pistil and staining their petals. I say chaotic because the bushes almost look held together by the spiderwebs, whole neighborhoods of them really, and caught in their silk homes are other flowers that have fallen, leaves that have cascaded from trees towering above, and debris from Los Angeles litterbugs. The face of the hibiscus is always open and, in this way, is especially beautiful to me, the loitering of life that surrounds them only compounding the richness of their appearance. Hours later, when my husband and I walk back to our car, we inevitably pass the same bushes, but the magic never dispels, because as the sun lowers its head, and the moon settles in for the evening, the hibiscus blossoms furl themselves into tight little buds for the night, partaking in an evolutionary process called nyctinasty.
Reading this excerpt from Leigh Ann Henion’s forthcoming novel about spending the night outside with her friend, waiting for flowers to bloom under the moon, recalled to mind these walks of mine, and the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine that wraps itself around the city of angels, and a home I lived in many years ago that was surrounded by so much cape jasmine that stepping outside past a certain hour became almost nauseating, its fragrance thick and cloying in the air. Cultivating a garden of era-specific plants to complement an Appalachian homestead, being moved by the first appearance of a hawk moth after planting Nicotiana, an insect that evolved alongside the night-blooming tobacco plant, “and other night bloomers like primrose,” vultures looming overhead as they await the afterbirth that follows cattle being born so they may then nourish themselves and their own offspring, stems from flowers smelling like cigarettes despite their sweet petals, pulling the shades in a living room so the artificial light from inside doesn’t disturb the photosensitive cycle of flowers outdoors, for a pod of seeds to break open in the palm of a hand — all of the little wonders brought to life by Henion’s writing moved her book to the top of my TBR.
Rather than sharing new titles I'd be drawn to at the bookstore, here’s some of what I’ve recently read
𓇼 Falling Awake: Poems, Alice Oswald. I haven’t stopped thinking about Oswald’s book of poems since I read it several afternoons ago, and yet I don’t quite have the words to distill my experience of moseying through it for you. I will say, though, that I loved this poem and this one too. Read this if you haven’t swum in the ocean all year, feel a little bad for spotted lanternflies, have apple cider vinegar concoctions down to a science, or have fallen asleep under a tree.
𓇼 Liars, Sarah Manguso. I somehow missed that Hogarth Press had sent me an ARC of Liars, and upon realizing they had, I read it in one sitting. I found it engrossing but mostly dissatisfying, which is not necessarily a criticism of the book, but rather a recognition that I am not the audience for its discontents. I really enjoyed the interactions between Jane, the protagonist, and her son, though. Read this if you like watching Showtime’s Couples Therapy, listening to Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel, or if you generally pause any reality television show every few minutes to go on a sociological dig into the relationships unraveling before your curious eyes; if you ask someone to do something but then just do it yourself because you want it done the right way, have daydreamed about living in Big Sur after the Highway 1 closure, or love asking for advice but never apply it to the circumstances of your own life.
𓇼 Heroes of the Fourth Turning: A Play, Will Arbery. Arbery’s play is the story of five conservative Catholics gathering late at night somewhere in Wyoming, their commiserations about life, eschatology, and both the physical and emotional faculties of pain coming together to masquerade as tension in the very dark and neurotic air. In an interview with American Theatre from the same year Arbery’s play was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, he said he “wanted to create an experience that was engaging people in a very citizen-based way, but where they left not even knowing the question, let alone the answer,” which I believe he accomplished. Read this if you enjoy the sound of crickets at night, the way land can disappear before your eyes, listening more than talking, were aware of but did not partake in the “Hegelian e-girl” drama on Twitter this summer, or have wondered who you would be if you prayed more often, or even just at all.
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And here’s some of what I’ve been grazing on
𑁍 Rachel Day, of Day Acupuncture, is an acupuncturist and herbalist whom I greatly enjoy following and learning from, and I hope to one day experience the healing of her hands. While reading the latest installment of her newsletter (which I love and highly recommend following), I learned about Dijon’s live performances and subsequently had what can only be described as a religious experience, alternating between Many Times and Big Mike's over and over again while sitting on my living room floor earlier this week.
꩜ There’s just something about Kay Gardner’s A Rainbow Path…
𑁍 These pictures of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov catching and cataloguing butterflies in Ithaca, New York in 1958 are such a delight.
꩜ Starting the morning off listening to music, prepping a pasta dish for movie night with friends, opening the frigid door of consciousness by submerging our bodies in a cold plunge, then sweating the bottoms of our feet back to life in a misty jacuzzi. Every time we flit from one part of the spa to the next, other women leave, and we wonder if this is a gift or a curse; then, here and there, a solitary woman joins us, each offering some sort of passing clairvoyance so sagacious in its dispensing that we believe it is the former and thank our lucky stars. Somewhere during the afternoon, we lie together in a meditation room and read our respective books. Later, a hair mask is applied, bodies of water revisited, stories shared and predictions foretold, then hunger distracts the conversations we are in, and we gather our belongings, lather our bodies in oils. Before heading to my home for dinner, though, we run around Los Angeles, this silly song our companion as the setting sun disappears in the direction we’re heading. To quiet our rumbling stomachs, we eat surprisingly well at the Brandy Melville café (you’re meant to laugh here btw); one of us buys pizza for everyone, the other cookies the size of our heads, and I use my chance on a trio of complementary coin pouches. For Barnes & Noble to validate our parking, my friends each buy a copy of what is maybe one of the books closest to a favorite for me. This was love being passed around like a baton, which was fitting because my selection for movie night was Sugar & Spice, which is essentially a film about budding philosophers parading around as cheerleaders. Whenever I watch it, I love it more than the last time, and seeing the movie through the eyes of two of my best friends was maybe a religious experience (apparently I had a lot of those this past week). We eat our actual dinner on the floor, lights low, salad shared. As the movie winds down we move to the couch, and I prepare everyone a bowl of the plum ricotta olive oil cake I made with a dollop of earl grey ice cream, and I think that I love it here, in this moment. Hearing my friends chitchatting on the couch while I warmed the ice cream scoop under the water, Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ voice low on the television, a section from one of her audiobooks my post-movie preference, embedded itself in my memories. I have been and will forever be me anywhere, but I love being a woman in LA.
Sour Reflections
Initially, I had a different book in mind for this month’s book club, but something recently reminded me of my traipsing around Turkey with Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book a couple of summers ago and how much I relished what I read. I never dove too deep into the book because I wanted to really sink my teeth into its pages, but at the time, I felt too drenched in the glitter and daze of my wedded summer for that. I promised myself I would read it soon, but some time passed and now here we are, nearing the end of another summer, and all I want to do is return to this book. So, that’s how we’ll spend September together.
And speaking of Barn Sour’s book club, I apologize for dropping the ball in August. Around the same time my excitement for reading alongside more people bubbled up, an inflection point in my life also rose to the surface, where suddenly everything was shifting both within and around me, and my focus could not be dedicated to our selection for that month. I drifted from page to page, submerged in the world before me whenever I cracked Hangman open, but my focus and my time were out of alignment.
Something I've learned from my IRL book club is that I prefer looser strictures — kind of just reading at my own pace and then coming together with a group to share what we all thought, felt, and discovered at the end of it all, motivated to share my thoughts at random. So that’s what we’ll do with Barn Sour’s book club. Use the chat at your leisure — I may join here or there! — but I’ll bring you my actual thoughts on our book the last Sunday of each month, and you’re free (actually, I would love it if you did) to share your own thoughts in the comments (or the aforementioned chat). I’m not sure why I thought I would want it any other way.
I only finally finished Hangman yesterday, and I loved it. I was sort of adrift throughout my time with the book, unsure of how I felt about it, wondering if the distractions of life were blurring my understanding of what was happening — am I missing something? did I skip a page? should I read this sentence for a fifth time? — but now I believe it was because of how Maya Binyam drew the world of the book together. I was lost within a constellation of surreality alongside our protagonist, and when I finally came to understand what was happening, I felt atomized by the knowledge I was suddenly befriended by. I thought the book was brilliant, and I would love to know what you thought too.
I’ll leave you with the first few pages of The Unwritten Book, and I hope you’ll join me in reading it this month.
Apparently I didn't even need the first few pages, because I just read the first few sentences of The Unwritten Book and I am really excited to get a copy! I feel like I have to say thank you each time I read Barn Sour... I felt so in tune with this week's letter. I am so excited to read more by Leigh Ann Henion and similarly, I am so curious to check out Lauren Groff’s book about Florida!
Mars, I absolutely loved this week's Barn Sour! I reread it in a stressful moment to soothe my nerves and it helped tremendously. :’) I loved reading about the 9/9 portal and the Chinese apothecaries! We need to make a girls' trip to Tian Xiang🤍🎐. Reminiscing about the spa and Sugar & Spice was truly so sweet to read. I'm also very glad to hear that you loved Hangman!! I'm hoping to get through it soon because I'd love to join you in reading The Unwritten Book 🫂💌💍