This is one of my favourite things you've written, which is going up against some *stiff* competition.
Firstly, please start a podcast called The Cupboard Under The Stairs. Thx.
Secondly, my lingering thought here was that I would like to step into the multiverses and emerge where you've written a magical realism book about a coffee-maker in Russia who makes magically good coffee by day (coffee which turns Bad people into Good people) and gathers that magic at night from the Moon. A kind of Eastern 'CHOCOLAT' (Maybe "КОФЕ"?) with the same sensual focus on how delicious the subject matter is, the same battle against mindless bureaucratic Evil, and the same kind of dreamy yet bittersweet vibe and message behind it.
I'm not saying it needs to happen in THIS universe, I know you've got a lot on, but I felt that across all the multiverses, someone needed to say it, so I nominated myself. And what a good thing it would be too. (Sorry. No pressure.)
>>"We’re at the beginning of a thousand-year cleanup..."
SURELY there is already a podcast called The Cupboard Under the Stairs??!! I would be amazed if not.
You're always so kind, Mike. And that sounds like a magical realism book YOU could write! Though as an aside, one of the few short stories I ever finished was based on some of my father's experiences in this business. It was fun to write. I sent it to the New Yorker on a whim and got a personalized rejection back with some comments including that it should probably be a novel. So that's something I've hung onto for whenever I actually have the time to write fiction again.
Yeah, it hits me in the feels every time I think about it, too. Especially in the "could we get started then, instead of continuing to muck everything up?"
Re. mucking everything up: ah, modern politics - the art of continually kicking the can marked "THOUSAND YEAR CLEANUP" a little further down the road.
>>"that's something I've hung onto for whenever I actually have the time to write fiction again"
I knew it! This is the right universe! Okay then. Now I have another request to annoy you regularly with. I would absolutely love to see you get novel-writing. And I would also like to see you twist those novels in genre-bending sorts of ways, knowing your reading preferences.
I am going to find a big barrel and paint “Thousand-Year Cleaup” on the side.
Someday! I set intentions to get back into fiction, at least a little, for a few years and finally accepted that it’s going to have to wait. It’s taken me long enough to get good at nonfiction!
Nia, I just heard the recording and yes I forgot to mention that we also sometimes use goat milk in the turmeric chai, and goat milk and goat ghee is absolutely fantastic for throat congestion.
Moonfall - YES! That’s how it feels when the city lights aren’t flooding out all our cosmic relatives out of sight. As if the radiance can flow down like streams of bright light through the landscapes. One of the fairest deals of being human is to stand still and admire the moon 🌕
“It’s stayed small, and still employs many of the people who started there, a small raft of security and honest work in a country where both are scarce.” I honour this work so much. It is so hard to hold onto our values and maintain integrity in face of a institution as corrupt as the one you talked about here. And these corruptions are only growing more rabid in general corporations too with each passing day.
We can change things only looking backwards and learning from history- our own and of others too specifically if they bring in diversity of perspectives and experiences through their history. Nothing changes if we keep looking forward into the blank canvas of our future while ignoring the bloody canvas of the past.
Thank you Nia for being a starlight of integrity in this dim world. ✨
I should try goat milk! It's not easy to find around here (I've been using oat milk), though we used to be able to get it fresh where we lived before. It's bizarrely uncommon in the U.S. Marketing and the power of the cow dairy industry, I suppose, which is huge. I often forget that goat milk is much more common in most of the world.
At the Reclaiming the Commons conference I went to this summer, I wrote down a line from one of the panels that will be a beacon for me: "How we got here is how we get out of here." Meaning that we need to understand how we got to this place in order to see how to get out of it.
Thank you Antonia. Reading this I felt like I was taken on a trip.. so visually engaging, so emotionally enriching.. Hope you had a great Christmas with the family..
It was less stressful than usual, so that was nice. 😊 But there is barely any snow here and it's too warm, which is weird if good for taking long walks.
I've always been fascinated by how 'stressed' people are about Christmas. I wonder if this is an American thing, or a global thing too. Saying this as I've been around countless 'Eid' celebrations and people generally were not as stressed about it as are people generally are around Christmas now that I'm witnessing it being in the US..
It’s pretty weird, isn’t it? I think the consumerism is a major part of the stress. I have some other personal stressors around it—bad associations with Christmas and the time around it; I also have a hard time with anything that requires me to make magic for people, birthdays included—but when people talk about it being stressful, my general associations are the gift-giving pressure (consumerism) and that many people have difficult families and there are a lot of stressful dynamics that can play into holidays like this. That probably wouldn’t matter so much if it were more communal/community-oriented and less each individual household holed up doing their thing.
Maybe that's the difference. I was talking to an American muslim friend who grew up in the states and wanted to compare if "Eid" was as stressful as Christmas is, to measure if it's got any other cultural elements to it, but my suspicion was in its place: Christmas is way more stressful for people than Eid is for the muslims in America. That said, there's a mindset difference there. The sense of 'obligation/duty' to be around larger community and whatnot, vs. 'I have to go see them and bring them gifts' that Christmas carries. My friend pointed to something really interesting. He went to a thanksgiving of one of his friends and said: "They dig deep on everyone's business, and we don't do it when we get together".. That was a really interesting angle!
Maybe the bigger difference is we go and see many families during Eid days so it's shorter times, a little bit less intense, and somewhat more shallow vs. being around the same people for days in Christmas.
"The sense of 'obligation/duty' to be around larger community and whatnot, vs. 'I have to go see them and bring them gifts' that Christmas carries." This is a thought-provoking clarification. And I think your friend is right! That doesn't happen at my Thanksgiving because that is the one holiday I like and my only rule is that anyone who wants to come over, to eat or just hang out, do whatever makes them feel most relaxed. But before I decided to make Thanksgiving "my" holiday, it could definitely be like that, a lot of expectations around family and socializing and who you had to spend time with even if you didn't like it.
And yeah. Christmas just has so many pressures for so many people. Too many expectations that are frankly unreasonable. Like flying in midwinter to visit family just because you're supposed to. No thanks!
I think it'll be too much to ask people not to bring gifts, but to donate that amount instead.. My wife's family would be up in arms if I say: you don't need to give me an amazon gift card cause this is so lazy.. Just donate that money instead..
this is so beautiful. i love how you pull together all these threads--the bison herd, your father’s coffee business, the stars, the Luminaria tradition and even permitting. it’s like a mosaic. happy holidays to you and yours, thank you for being a light on my thinking and reading this year!!
Thank you for being a light in return, accidental or otherwise!
(Also, that's really funny -- when I first started publishing essays, "mosaic" was the description I thought of for the style, though a friend describe it as fish scales."
Your line, "what it means to take land that all rely on for sustenance and survival, and turn it into private property, into capital" caught my eye. Just this morning a grandson asked me why I thought there were so many homeless people.
Pull up a chair. I'll brew some tea. We have a long conversation ahead of us.
I might have been paraphrasing Tyson Yunkaporta in that, too. I think he said something about it once, land and capital. But many Indigenous people have said it in different ways, like Nick Estes.
I hope you got to have tea with your grandson. It's so hard to explain why things are like this to kids with just resorting to "evil, greedy people control too much." There's a line in Willa Cather's book "Shadows on the Rock" that's something like "because the law protects only property, and property thinks too much on itself."
So beautiful. I love thinking of your kids knowing that no one can truly own anything. It makes me hopeful, as does your commitment to finding community and connections across geography, time, and space.
I've also been thinking about integrity lately. I don't think that I know, exactly, what it means anymore, or, rather, I don't think that it is so much a concrete trait as it is a guiding light that coincides with your personal sense of ethics (such as the Utilitarianism required when navigating a coffee shop in the Motherland). What is integrity, though, to the stars or the eroding cut bank? As the guy said, all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
I was wondering if you’d have a LOTR reference to share. :)
That’s an interesting comparison, to the stars or river erosion. We speak of integrity, often, as almost an implied static state, an unchanging thing. But at the same time of the integrity of ecosystems, meaning whole in their complexity. We can speak of the concrete’s integrity in a dam (meaning it holds together), or of the integrity of a river’s life, and the two can’t easily co-exist. Two different ideas of integrity from the same word.
If you'll please allow me to be the first person ever to strain the absolute shit out of a metaphor involving a river...
But maybe integrity is like a river. It's both a destination and a conveyance. Somehow they are both static and wholly renewed every time we see them, in the same way that we are, from day to day, static in our nature and yet every time we make an important decision, it is a new set of circumstances with a new set of outcomes, even if the question of integrity is the same. Further, even though we may be static in our short-term lives, we do change and mold as we float to the sea (which is, of course, death - the animating feature and muse in all of Tolkein's creativity (you think I'm gonna comment here without mentioning my favorite Oxford man?)). Just as the Arkansas River's journey is observed by so many oxbow lakes, so is our journey towards our best self with internal scars. I can keep torturing this metaphor, but I fear that as some point the Hague may get involved.
Did you ever read Arthur Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers"? I ask not because I'm recommending it (though I do for anyone interested in Galileo and Kepler and astronomy) but because he was evidently a founding or at least active member of the Society for the Protection of Dead Horses. Inspired by the overuse of the phrase or the action of "not to beat a dead horse, but ..."
But this doesn't feel like a tortured metaphor at all. It makes sense, and feels like what I was trying to get at with the integrity of ecosystems. True integrity, then, would be an ability to shift, change, respond, evolve. Or, to bring in another book, play the infinite game (from "Finite and Infinite Games"), which is not, as the tech bro dudes would like, to cheat death, but to take actions and make choices that allow the infinite game--life itself rather than our individual lives--to continue playing out. (I do love Tolkien's keen awareness of death and change, his refusal to leave Middle Earth a static place where our fantasies could live forever.
I think The Hague might be a bit too busy in the coming years to worry about metaphors. 😕
I need to keep a spreadsheet of all of your book recommendations.
Think of the river that you know the very best. You know where it comes from and where it goes. You know what it looks like in all seasons. If you walked down to that river and sat down on the cut bank, you could study it and see how it was behaving that day. And yet, if you dropped a leaf into that river, you couldn't bring exactly how it would swirl the leaf around as it took the leaf to its endpoint. Maybe, to flog this horse further, our nature is the river, and our integrity is the way that we integrate life's occurrences through the immediate context and into our nature?
This has me deep in thought about a lot of things. About belonging, what happens when we strip that from someone and agitate their own sense of self-belonging and how this neighborly belonging has felt elusive most of my life.
The scenes you described, of knowing the sounds of other people’s voices, of gathering and togetherness — I know I have dreamed of something like this but found it massively difficult to step into. Even in our beautiful Colorado mountain life, the instinct to isolate was hard to overcome. And now that I’m plopped into suburbia again, strangely enough, I am finding small glimpses of belonging even amidst some of the saddest trees I’ve ever seen. (They are not sick or withering. They just feel forgotten in a sea of cookie cutter homes, and dare I say, lives.) I do wonder though about the evening we shared hot cider from our front yard with weary parents on Halloween. Or the night that the fire department drove a fire truck with Santa on top for the children to see and wave to. It does feel like there’s some seedling of hope even in this concrete jungle, even as I long to live again in the luminaria of our next home.
Thank you for this. Also I owe you an email or two. 🧡
When I moved back here -- this is the town I graduated high school in; I call it my secondary hometown -- it was for a number of reasons, but one thing I hadn't thought about was community as described, much less close friends. I knew it was a resilient and strong community, but didn't know what that meant. I'm not sure how I got to be a part of it all, but I feel extremely lucky.
Everywhere I lived before, since college, I felt isolated. No sense of belonging. And I didn't miss it. I enjoyed living in other countries, and have always been extremely introverted and private. My truly close friends are few. But I wonder a lot now how I would feel if I had to move again. I have something here I've never experienced before, not even when I lived here as a teenager, and don't know how I would respond if it were no longer there.
And then I think of people and communities in war zones, or uprooted through environmental or ecological disaster. Or all those communities torn apart by the U.S. highway system. There is something very real lost, all those connections, through imposed choices or others' desire for greed or control. It makes me wonder what it takes to rebuild that when it's taken, both individually and collectively.
That's a beautiful line, "the luminaria of our next home"! 🧡
It's wonderful. I've read it twice and probably will many more times. It's one of those books that's different every time you enter it. I can imagine it was a good fit for a workshop on good ancestors!
One thing I appreciate about Yunkaporta is the way he pushes back in interviews against (mostly white) peoples' urge to turn him into a guru. That seems like a rare thing, to know the worth of your work and knowledge and when and how to share it, but to refuse a characterization that you have all the answers, especially for everyone.
I want to read-read it this winter. I listened to it this past summer, or perhaps the summer before. He reads it himself and that so often helps me find intended meaning versus interpreted meaning in someone's shared thoughts.
I don't do many audiobooks (my attention drifts too much and I also mark my books up a lot), but have wanted to listen to the audio of this purely for that reason!
I had to train myself for a good while to be able to focus on an audiobook for more than 2-3 minutes before realizing 10-30 minutes later I'd tuned it out. It was in my days of looooong commutes and work travel and small babes with no other time to read, so I was motivated.
It still takes a particular author and particular voice or I'm a lost cause on the focus even after all my practice.
I think I would try that if I didn’t listen to so many podcasts. 😂 Though now that you mention it, I did listen to more audiobooks when my kids were very little. No time to read, as you say. Though the attention was still an issue so I mostly listened to, like Jane Austen. Books I’d already read a bunch of times.
The reader makes such a difference! For several years our long car rides were accompanied by Upside-Down Magic because the reader of those books is REALLY good and the stories are fun.
Antonia, this is sublime. I hope your throat is feeling better! I am mentally sending you a light-filled room of your own, filled with plants to breathe oxygen out to you, within a soft quiet that is palpable in its gift of contemplation and common union. (Communion is too loaded a word to use without lots of disclaimers and reclaimers.)
I so enjoyed your reading, your sharing of your Solstice tradition, and especially referring to Moon and Sun as she and he respectively, without the article "the" to objectify them.
I love the image of starlight as clean and white and of memory; so beautiful! The stars speaking to us from however long ago they actually lived, with the notion of our being fireflies, is so hopeful! It instills the infinite perspective of our microscopic individual roles in our brief flickers of life, which—though not at all insignificant—brings a relief from the pressure to fix and be responsible for everything, while confirming that when we are awake in spirit and we do whatever we can in our little spheres, it adds up, and is enough.
Thank you, Kate! I am going to carry that light-filled room with me today, especially as it's completely socked in with fog and chilly here this morning. And I like that "common union" as an alternative to communion. Wonderful phrase.
I made that language shift last winter sometime, dropping the "the." (Interestingly, Russian has no articles. My father didn't learn English until he was nearly 30 and always forgets to use "a," "an," and "the.") It still feels a bit awkward, not because of the sentiment but because of caution around appropriation. But when we know these are living entities, why not speak of them as such?
What a beautiful last paragraph. Thank you for sharing those thoughts! I frequently have to remind myself that the world I wish to see probably won't come in my lifetime, and that does not detract from the work of making it more possible for future generations. But you put it far more beautifully. 🧡
"There was something other-worldly about it, by which I mean this-worldly. The this-world that too much of most of our daily lives washes out and hides from us. The this-world I soak in when I go to forest service cabins or my stepdad’s cabin, far from any electricity, especially electric lighting, where the stars can show their brilliant, miraculous selves." This line! And of course, all of the rest— shining light on profound matters like our connection to each other and to the land that sustains us. This post is beautiful, Antonia. Thank you.
P.S. I, too, have been enjoying that chai recipe since you shared it. I use oat milk. So I'm glad you've found that option. It's heavenly. So, also, thank you for that.
Thank you so much, Holly. 💗 All the lights of this world, trying their best to sustain their flickering ...
And yay! Thanks to Swarnali for that, so much. And for your seconding of oat milk. I mostly just avoid anything dairy-related except for goat cheese (and yogurt; somehow plain yogurt is fine), but the oat milk in this recipe is divine, isn't it? I tweaked it with a bit more ginger and less honey and had it when I couldn't sleep last night. So good!
Thank you, Nia, this is beautiful. Great pictures, all of them.
I understand your struggle "to explain, for people who don’t already get it, that wrongness—of ownership itself". I can say that while I saw many of the pieces, the concept of ownership is so built-in to everything around us, even, as you point out, the language we use to tell history, that I couldn't see the whole until you pointed it out. Please keep on illuminating!
I am inspired by your and Swarna's exchanges of light, too, John. (Though NOT banana candles. I am sorry, they have no place in a sane world!)
It is really hard. I was thinking recently that until enough people see "Land for Sale" signs and feel how utterly wrong that concept is, we haven't even begun.
All candles... no, maybe not! Also, is it a sane world?
It's so deeply engrained in the culture. While it seems that our current concept of land ownership may only be a few hundred years old, we're seeing historical land stories reinterpreted under that new concept as if it had always been that way; about who is excluded.
Yes, the history keeps being rewritten to support the status quo and those who benefit from it. Even I didn't know the history of trespass in the U.S., which wasn't illegal until after the Civil War. People talk of it as such an absolute now.
It will never be a sane world as long as banana candles exist in it. Did you look at that photo? The stuff dripping from the top is *mayonnaise*!
The person who wrote that book review made one a year later. The description is worth reading: "First, I set up all the ingredients in my office, so that if I started making a banana candle and accidentally summoned Satan instead, my coworkers could call for help."
Hey Nia, thanks for another lovely column - and really enjoyed all of your photos (esp the one along the frozen river - quite magical) and your kiddo took a super image, good eye! I'm so impressed at what your dad has done - WOW! I'd love to learn from his wisdom on acting with integrity in a corrupt system and being successful. What a difficult balancing act, and I am sure you are facing a lot of balancing acts in your role on the Board of Parks.
I love Waxwings!! We used to get them yearly for a few days and I loved watching them, taking photos of them - beautiful birds - and wondering how they got her and where they were going. Bird migrations and navigation are just so phenomenal.
Good stories and good cognition, I will have to remember that. Best, Paul
Those days near the frozen river were something else. I got full Moonrise from behind the peaks of Glacier just before I went to bed and it really was other-worldly. And so true, I do learn a lot from my dad! Both his upbringing in the Soviet Union (especially when Stalin was still alive), and trying to function under corruption and Putin's regime. There's no simplicity to it.
I love waxwings, too! I haven't seen any around Whitefish, so it was fun to have the company of that flock for a while. Though it was depressingly warm in Great Falls, 56 degrees at the end of December ... I could have walked around in a T-shirt. Last year it was -30/-40 wind chill this time of year!
This: "These traditions create what’s called culture. They bring people into relationship with one another, and into relationship with this-world. The land and water, animals and moonlight." I've been thinking so much about how well we've been conditioned to separate from the land, from relationship, to not pay attention to ritual, to not believe that these traditions have value that we have lost and no longer experience. The stars as memory, each one a light from other times, that have been shining in other time, literally. I just love thinking of each one as a point of memory, to be treasured--and how the electric light we use blinds that memory from us. ✨
I love thinking of that, too, and how you phrase it here. Each one a point of memory to be treasured, and reminded that their light does in fact come from another time.
It felt like Moonfall, like I could just bathe in it for hours and hours, like breathing fresh air after being stifled, or getting into the silence of the woods ...
Too many of us have been conditioned, and it defines and restricts so much of our lives. I love for a world where we're allowed to engage in the relation-ing I think nearly everyone craves. 💞
This is one of my favourite things you've written, which is going up against some *stiff* competition.
Firstly, please start a podcast called The Cupboard Under The Stairs. Thx.
Secondly, my lingering thought here was that I would like to step into the multiverses and emerge where you've written a magical realism book about a coffee-maker in Russia who makes magically good coffee by day (coffee which turns Bad people into Good people) and gathers that magic at night from the Moon. A kind of Eastern 'CHOCOLAT' (Maybe "КОФЕ"?) with the same sensual focus on how delicious the subject matter is, the same battle against mindless bureaucratic Evil, and the same kind of dreamy yet bittersweet vibe and message behind it.
I'm not saying it needs to happen in THIS universe, I know you've got a lot on, but I felt that across all the multiverses, someone needed to say it, so I nominated myself. And what a good thing it would be too. (Sorry. No pressure.)
>>"We’re at the beginning of a thousand-year cleanup..."
Well, that hit me in the feels. Damn.
SURELY there is already a podcast called The Cupboard Under the Stairs??!! I would be amazed if not.
You're always so kind, Mike. And that sounds like a magical realism book YOU could write! Though as an aside, one of the few short stories I ever finished was based on some of my father's experiences in this business. It was fun to write. I sent it to the New Yorker on a whim and got a personalized rejection back with some comments including that it should probably be a novel. So that's something I've hung onto for whenever I actually have the time to write fiction again.
Yeah, it hits me in the feels every time I think about it, too. Especially in the "could we get started then, instead of continuing to muck everything up?"
DAMMIT you're right: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-cupboard-under-the-stairs/id1255313754
Re. mucking everything up: ah, modern politics - the art of continually kicking the can marked "THOUSAND YEAR CLEANUP" a little further down the road.
>>"that's something I've hung onto for whenever I actually have the time to write fiction again"
I knew it! This is the right universe! Okay then. Now I have another request to annoy you regularly with. I would absolutely love to see you get novel-writing. And I would also like to see you twist those novels in genre-bending sorts of ways, knowing your reading preferences.
I am going to find a big barrel and paint “Thousand-Year Cleaup” on the side.
Someday! I set intentions to get back into fiction, at least a little, for a few years and finally accepted that it’s going to have to wait. It’s taken me long enough to get good at nonfiction!
Moonfall✨this-world✨sunrise on that river! So much to love. Loved hearing you read it from your Harry Potter cupboard as well. ❤️
You know what my husband calls me when I'm working in there? Dobby. Funny-not-funny!
Nia, I just heard the recording and yes I forgot to mention that we also sometimes use goat milk in the turmeric chai, and goat milk and goat ghee is absolutely fantastic for throat congestion.
Moonfall - YES! That’s how it feels when the city lights aren’t flooding out all our cosmic relatives out of sight. As if the radiance can flow down like streams of bright light through the landscapes. One of the fairest deals of being human is to stand still and admire the moon 🌕
“It’s stayed small, and still employs many of the people who started there, a small raft of security and honest work in a country where both are scarce.” I honour this work so much. It is so hard to hold onto our values and maintain integrity in face of a institution as corrupt as the one you talked about here. And these corruptions are only growing more rabid in general corporations too with each passing day.
We can change things only looking backwards and learning from history- our own and of others too specifically if they bring in diversity of perspectives and experiences through their history. Nothing changes if we keep looking forward into the blank canvas of our future while ignoring the bloody canvas of the past.
Thank you Nia for being a starlight of integrity in this dim world. ✨
I should try goat milk! It's not easy to find around here (I've been using oat milk), though we used to be able to get it fresh where we lived before. It's bizarrely uncommon in the U.S. Marketing and the power of the cow dairy industry, I suppose, which is huge. I often forget that goat milk is much more common in most of the world.
At the Reclaiming the Commons conference I went to this summer, I wrote down a line from one of the panels that will be a beacon for me: "How we got here is how we get out of here." Meaning that we need to understand how we got to this place in order to see how to get out of it.
You are a true light on that path, Swarna.
Thank you Antonia. Reading this I felt like I was taken on a trip.. so visually engaging, so emotionally enriching.. Hope you had a great Christmas with the family..
Thank you for reading, as always! 🧡
It was less stressful than usual, so that was nice. 😊 But there is barely any snow here and it's too warm, which is weird if good for taking long walks.
I've always been fascinated by how 'stressed' people are about Christmas. I wonder if this is an American thing, or a global thing too. Saying this as I've been around countless 'Eid' celebrations and people generally were not as stressed about it as are people generally are around Christmas now that I'm witnessing it being in the US..
It’s pretty weird, isn’t it? I think the consumerism is a major part of the stress. I have some other personal stressors around it—bad associations with Christmas and the time around it; I also have a hard time with anything that requires me to make magic for people, birthdays included—but when people talk about it being stressful, my general associations are the gift-giving pressure (consumerism) and that many people have difficult families and there are a lot of stressful dynamics that can play into holidays like this. That probably wouldn’t matter so much if it were more communal/community-oriented and less each individual household holed up doing their thing.
Maybe that's the difference. I was talking to an American muslim friend who grew up in the states and wanted to compare if "Eid" was as stressful as Christmas is, to measure if it's got any other cultural elements to it, but my suspicion was in its place: Christmas is way more stressful for people than Eid is for the muslims in America. That said, there's a mindset difference there. The sense of 'obligation/duty' to be around larger community and whatnot, vs. 'I have to go see them and bring them gifts' that Christmas carries. My friend pointed to something really interesting. He went to a thanksgiving of one of his friends and said: "They dig deep on everyone's business, and we don't do it when we get together".. That was a really interesting angle!
Maybe the bigger difference is we go and see many families during Eid days so it's shorter times, a little bit less intense, and somewhat more shallow vs. being around the same people for days in Christmas.
"The sense of 'obligation/duty' to be around larger community and whatnot, vs. 'I have to go see them and bring them gifts' that Christmas carries." This is a thought-provoking clarification. And I think your friend is right! That doesn't happen at my Thanksgiving because that is the one holiday I like and my only rule is that anyone who wants to come over, to eat or just hang out, do whatever makes them feel most relaxed. But before I decided to make Thanksgiving "my" holiday, it could definitely be like that, a lot of expectations around family and socializing and who you had to spend time with even if you didn't like it.
And yeah. Christmas just has so many pressures for so many people. Too many expectations that are frankly unreasonable. Like flying in midwinter to visit family just because you're supposed to. No thanks!
I think it'll be too much to ask people not to bring gifts, but to donate that amount instead.. My wife's family would be up in arms if I say: you don't need to give me an amazon gift card cause this is so lazy.. Just donate that money instead..
this is so beautiful. i love how you pull together all these threads--the bison herd, your father’s coffee business, the stars, the Luminaria tradition and even permitting. it’s like a mosaic. happy holidays to you and yours, thank you for being a light on my thinking and reading this year!!
Thank you for being a light in return, accidental or otherwise!
(Also, that's really funny -- when I first started publishing essays, "mosaic" was the description I thought of for the style, though a friend describe it as fish scales."
thats apt & lovely too--and it reminds me of an old favorite book from my childhood, “rainbow fish”!🐠 ✨
Rainbow fish! I love that!
A lovely read. Thank you.
Your line, "what it means to take land that all rely on for sustenance and survival, and turn it into private property, into capital" caught my eye. Just this morning a grandson asked me why I thought there were so many homeless people.
Pull up a chair. I'll brew some tea. We have a long conversation ahead of us.
I might have been paraphrasing Tyson Yunkaporta in that, too. I think he said something about it once, land and capital. But many Indigenous people have said it in different ways, like Nick Estes.
I hope you got to have tea with your grandson. It's so hard to explain why things are like this to kids with just resorting to "evil, greedy people control too much." There's a line in Willa Cather's book "Shadows on the Rock" that's something like "because the law protects only property, and property thinks too much on itself."
So beautiful. I love thinking of your kids knowing that no one can truly own anything. It makes me hopeful, as does your commitment to finding community and connections across geography, time, and space.
Your commitments, and writings, give me that, too. <3
Integrity is costly, but self-respect is priceless. You do what you can in a corrupt system.
Very true. Well said.
I've also been thinking about integrity lately. I don't think that I know, exactly, what it means anymore, or, rather, I don't think that it is so much a concrete trait as it is a guiding light that coincides with your personal sense of ethics (such as the Utilitarianism required when navigating a coffee shop in the Motherland). What is integrity, though, to the stars or the eroding cut bank? As the guy said, all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
I was wondering if you’d have a LOTR reference to share. :)
That’s an interesting comparison, to the stars or river erosion. We speak of integrity, often, as almost an implied static state, an unchanging thing. But at the same time of the integrity of ecosystems, meaning whole in their complexity. We can speak of the concrete’s integrity in a dam (meaning it holds together), or of the integrity of a river’s life, and the two can’t easily co-exist. Two different ideas of integrity from the same word.
If you'll please allow me to be the first person ever to strain the absolute shit out of a metaphor involving a river...
But maybe integrity is like a river. It's both a destination and a conveyance. Somehow they are both static and wholly renewed every time we see them, in the same way that we are, from day to day, static in our nature and yet every time we make an important decision, it is a new set of circumstances with a new set of outcomes, even if the question of integrity is the same. Further, even though we may be static in our short-term lives, we do change and mold as we float to the sea (which is, of course, death - the animating feature and muse in all of Tolkein's creativity (you think I'm gonna comment here without mentioning my favorite Oxford man?)). Just as the Arkansas River's journey is observed by so many oxbow lakes, so is our journey towards our best self with internal scars. I can keep torturing this metaphor, but I fear that as some point the Hague may get involved.
Did you ever read Arthur Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers"? I ask not because I'm recommending it (though I do for anyone interested in Galileo and Kepler and astronomy) but because he was evidently a founding or at least active member of the Society for the Protection of Dead Horses. Inspired by the overuse of the phrase or the action of "not to beat a dead horse, but ..."
But this doesn't feel like a tortured metaphor at all. It makes sense, and feels like what I was trying to get at with the integrity of ecosystems. True integrity, then, would be an ability to shift, change, respond, evolve. Or, to bring in another book, play the infinite game (from "Finite and Infinite Games"), which is not, as the tech bro dudes would like, to cheat death, but to take actions and make choices that allow the infinite game--life itself rather than our individual lives--to continue playing out. (I do love Tolkien's keen awareness of death and change, his refusal to leave Middle Earth a static place where our fantasies could live forever.
I think The Hague might be a bit too busy in the coming years to worry about metaphors. 😕
I need to keep a spreadsheet of all of your book recommendations.
Think of the river that you know the very best. You know where it comes from and where it goes. You know what it looks like in all seasons. If you walked down to that river and sat down on the cut bank, you could study it and see how it was behaving that day. And yet, if you dropped a leaf into that river, you couldn't bring exactly how it would swirl the leaf around as it took the leaf to its endpoint. Maybe, to flog this horse further, our nature is the river, and our integrity is the way that we integrate life's occurrences through the immediate context and into our nature?
This has me deep in thought about a lot of things. About belonging, what happens when we strip that from someone and agitate their own sense of self-belonging and how this neighborly belonging has felt elusive most of my life.
The scenes you described, of knowing the sounds of other people’s voices, of gathering and togetherness — I know I have dreamed of something like this but found it massively difficult to step into. Even in our beautiful Colorado mountain life, the instinct to isolate was hard to overcome. And now that I’m plopped into suburbia again, strangely enough, I am finding small glimpses of belonging even amidst some of the saddest trees I’ve ever seen. (They are not sick or withering. They just feel forgotten in a sea of cookie cutter homes, and dare I say, lives.) I do wonder though about the evening we shared hot cider from our front yard with weary parents on Halloween. Or the night that the fire department drove a fire truck with Santa on top for the children to see and wave to. It does feel like there’s some seedling of hope even in this concrete jungle, even as I long to live again in the luminaria of our next home.
Thank you for this. Also I owe you an email or two. 🧡
When I moved back here -- this is the town I graduated high school in; I call it my secondary hometown -- it was for a number of reasons, but one thing I hadn't thought about was community as described, much less close friends. I knew it was a resilient and strong community, but didn't know what that meant. I'm not sure how I got to be a part of it all, but I feel extremely lucky.
Everywhere I lived before, since college, I felt isolated. No sense of belonging. And I didn't miss it. I enjoyed living in other countries, and have always been extremely introverted and private. My truly close friends are few. But I wonder a lot now how I would feel if I had to move again. I have something here I've never experienced before, not even when I lived here as a teenager, and don't know how I would respond if it were no longer there.
And then I think of people and communities in war zones, or uprooted through environmental or ecological disaster. Or all those communities torn apart by the U.S. highway system. There is something very real lost, all those connections, through imposed choices or others' desire for greed or control. It makes me wonder what it takes to rebuild that when it's taken, both individually and collectively.
That's a beautiful line, "the luminaria of our next home"! 🧡
I just read Sand Talk myself in preparation for that Yellowstone workshop. So good.
It's wonderful. I've read it twice and probably will many more times. It's one of those books that's different every time you enter it. I can imagine it was a good fit for a workshop on good ancestors!
One thing I appreciate about Yunkaporta is the way he pushes back in interviews against (mostly white) peoples' urge to turn him into a guru. That seems like a rare thing, to know the worth of your work and knowledge and when and how to share it, but to refuse a characterization that you have all the answers, especially for everyone.
I want to read-read it this winter. I listened to it this past summer, or perhaps the summer before. He reads it himself and that so often helps me find intended meaning versus interpreted meaning in someone's shared thoughts.
I don't do many audiobooks (my attention drifts too much and I also mark my books up a lot), but have wanted to listen to the audio of this purely for that reason!
I had to train myself for a good while to be able to focus on an audiobook for more than 2-3 minutes before realizing 10-30 minutes later I'd tuned it out. It was in my days of looooong commutes and work travel and small babes with no other time to read, so I was motivated.
It still takes a particular author and particular voice or I'm a lost cause on the focus even after all my practice.
I think I would try that if I didn’t listen to so many podcasts. 😂 Though now that you mention it, I did listen to more audiobooks when my kids were very little. No time to read, as you say. Though the attention was still an issue so I mostly listened to, like Jane Austen. Books I’d already read a bunch of times.
The reader makes such a difference! For several years our long car rides were accompanied by Upside-Down Magic because the reader of those books is REALLY good and the stories are fun.
Antonia, this is sublime. I hope your throat is feeling better! I am mentally sending you a light-filled room of your own, filled with plants to breathe oxygen out to you, within a soft quiet that is palpable in its gift of contemplation and common union. (Communion is too loaded a word to use without lots of disclaimers and reclaimers.)
I so enjoyed your reading, your sharing of your Solstice tradition, and especially referring to Moon and Sun as she and he respectively, without the article "the" to objectify them.
I love the image of starlight as clean and white and of memory; so beautiful! The stars speaking to us from however long ago they actually lived, with the notion of our being fireflies, is so hopeful! It instills the infinite perspective of our microscopic individual roles in our brief flickers of life, which—though not at all insignificant—brings a relief from the pressure to fix and be responsible for everything, while confirming that when we are awake in spirit and we do whatever we can in our little spheres, it adds up, and is enough.
Thank you, Kate! I am going to carry that light-filled room with me today, especially as it's completely socked in with fog and chilly here this morning. And I like that "common union" as an alternative to communion. Wonderful phrase.
I made that language shift last winter sometime, dropping the "the." (Interestingly, Russian has no articles. My father didn't learn English until he was nearly 30 and always forgets to use "a," "an," and "the.") It still feels a bit awkward, not because of the sentiment but because of caution around appropriation. But when we know these are living entities, why not speak of them as such?
What a beautiful last paragraph. Thank you for sharing those thoughts! I frequently have to remind myself that the world I wish to see probably won't come in my lifetime, and that does not detract from the work of making it more possible for future generations. But you put it far more beautifully. 🧡
"There was something other-worldly about it, by which I mean this-worldly. The this-world that too much of most of our daily lives washes out and hides from us. The this-world I soak in when I go to forest service cabins or my stepdad’s cabin, far from any electricity, especially electric lighting, where the stars can show their brilliant, miraculous selves." This line! And of course, all of the rest— shining light on profound matters like our connection to each other and to the land that sustains us. This post is beautiful, Antonia. Thank you.
P.S. I, too, have been enjoying that chai recipe since you shared it. I use oat milk. So I'm glad you've found that option. It's heavenly. So, also, thank you for that.
Thank you so much, Holly. 💗 All the lights of this world, trying their best to sustain their flickering ...
And yay! Thanks to Swarnali for that, so much. And for your seconding of oat milk. I mostly just avoid anything dairy-related except for goat cheese (and yogurt; somehow plain yogurt is fine), but the oat milk in this recipe is divine, isn't it? I tweaked it with a bit more ginger and less honey and had it when I couldn't sleep last night. So good!
Thank you, Nia, this is beautiful. Great pictures, all of them.
I understand your struggle "to explain, for people who don’t already get it, that wrongness—of ownership itself". I can say that while I saw many of the pieces, the concept of ownership is so built-in to everything around us, even, as you point out, the language we use to tell history, that I couldn't see the whole until you pointed it out. Please keep on illuminating!
🌃🕯️
I am inspired by your and Swarna's exchanges of light, too, John. (Though NOT banana candles. I am sorry, they have no place in a sane world!)
It is really hard. I was thinking recently that until enough people see "Land for Sale" signs and feel how utterly wrong that concept is, we haven't even begun.
All candles... no, maybe not! Also, is it a sane world?
It's so deeply engrained in the culture. While it seems that our current concept of land ownership may only be a few hundred years old, we're seeing historical land stories reinterpreted under that new concept as if it had always been that way; about who is excluded.
Yes, the history keeps being rewritten to support the status quo and those who benefit from it. Even I didn't know the history of trespass in the U.S., which wasn't illegal until after the Civil War. People talk of it as such an absolute now.
It will never be a sane world as long as banana candles exist in it. Did you look at that photo? The stuff dripping from the top is *mayonnaise*!
The person who wrote that book review made one a year later. The description is worth reading: "First, I set up all the ingredients in my office, so that if I started making a banana candle and accidentally summoned Satan instead, my coworkers could call for help."
https://bookriot.com/when-used-books-attack-operation-banana-candle/
Mayonnaise, yes. Couldn't find an emoji for that, fortunately.
I just want you to know that I just snorted laughing at the airport gate. I hope no one calls security.
😂
Hey Nia, thanks for another lovely column - and really enjoyed all of your photos (esp the one along the frozen river - quite magical) and your kiddo took a super image, good eye! I'm so impressed at what your dad has done - WOW! I'd love to learn from his wisdom on acting with integrity in a corrupt system and being successful. What a difficult balancing act, and I am sure you are facing a lot of balancing acts in your role on the Board of Parks.
I love Waxwings!! We used to get them yearly for a few days and I loved watching them, taking photos of them - beautiful birds - and wondering how they got her and where they were going. Bird migrations and navigation are just so phenomenal.
Good stories and good cognition, I will have to remember that. Best, Paul
Thank you, Paul! I owe you an email 😊
Those days near the frozen river were something else. I got full Moonrise from behind the peaks of Glacier just before I went to bed and it really was other-worldly. And so true, I do learn a lot from my dad! Both his upbringing in the Soviet Union (especially when Stalin was still alive), and trying to function under corruption and Putin's regime. There's no simplicity to it.
I love waxwings, too! I haven't seen any around Whitefish, so it was fun to have the company of that flock for a while. Though it was depressingly warm in Great Falls, 56 degrees at the end of December ... I could have walked around in a T-shirt. Last year it was -30/-40 wind chill this time of year!
Just so beautiful Nia. Moonfall. 🌖💜
This: "These traditions create what’s called culture. They bring people into relationship with one another, and into relationship with this-world. The land and water, animals and moonlight." I've been thinking so much about how well we've been conditioned to separate from the land, from relationship, to not pay attention to ritual, to not believe that these traditions have value that we have lost and no longer experience. The stars as memory, each one a light from other times, that have been shining in other time, literally. I just love thinking of each one as a point of memory, to be treasured--and how the electric light we use blinds that memory from us. ✨
I love thinking of that, too, and how you phrase it here. Each one a point of memory to be treasured, and reminded that their light does in fact come from another time.
It felt like Moonfall, like I could just bathe in it for hours and hours, like breathing fresh air after being stifled, or getting into the silence of the woods ...
Too many of us have been conditioned, and it defines and restricts so much of our lives. I love for a world where we're allowed to engage in the relation-ing I think nearly everyone craves. 💞