Your Seven Closest Neighbours
— I had this memory of taking photos of a murmuration in Rome. I know we witnessed a couple of them, but I also thought I had a photo or two of the birds in a twilight sky. Can’t find any. Spent an embarrassing amount of time looking. And then, as well, I wanted to look up an Auden poem, and couldn’t find the book on my shelves for hours. I had imagined it as larger, the spine a different colour. I gave up, and naturally, found it not long after. Birds are escaping me, books. Thoughts, too. I need to write more down.
— It’s been another one of those weeks, where someone very dear to us has died. But then, our daughter got a promotion. Small nice things have happened. My niece has graduated from High School. And I watched a bird in our birdbath for a surprising amount of time one afternoon. I read some good poems, and we started a new TV series that we like. We go on, we continue, but we’re changed. Of course we are.
— You know you can sit there and add up the losses of the last five years (and more) and you have to tally in the joys, too. One good friend has recently been mourning her husband, making it to the three month mark of his death. Another good friend is launching her first book. The CEO of my library is retiring soon and I’m not mentally prepared for that. I’m not. All these changes. And I still haven’t finished mourning friends I lost in the pandemic and beforehand. Michael McCarthy, for example. I’ve written about him here before. Our daughter will be getting married this fall. He would have loved that. When she was little she met Michael, and he pushed her on the swing in our backyard and played Junior Monopoly with her. When he left she thought he was Paul McCartney, because we’d been playing a lot of the Beatles back then and that would have been on her 5 year old mind. He absolutely loved it when we told him that.
— I’ve needed to take a moment. But I also need more moments. Don’t we all. I’m not the sort of person who gets over things easily or ever. But who is?
— I’m probably also a pretty big grudge holder, but that’s for another post. I came across this quotation by Fran Lebowitz lately that made me laugh: “Holding a grudge is the modern equivalent of having standards. Because if people don’t hold grudges, it means they just don’t care what people do.”
— I’ve been thinking about loss and consolation for some time. None of us escape loss.
— It’s very often everything all at once. That’s just the way life is. Do we even have time to think properly about death and what comes after? All I know is I don’t know.
— Li-Young Lee says, “I don’t want to seem morbid, but it feels to me that the process of dying is actually dying into a greater presence. It isn’t lessening, it’s actually more. And we die into greater awe, greater splendour, greater terror, and greater presence.”
— Well, I could live without the terror, but that’s where the sublime is right?
— Li-Young Lee also says this: “Praise is the state of excess, ecstasy. We counted up all the deaths; we counted up all the dying; we counted up all the terrible things in life, and guess what? There’s still Van Gogh painting sunflowers, there’s still morning glories. There’s an excess in the universe, a much-ness, a too-much-ness.”
— I read a conversation lately with the writer Nicholson Baker, and he says, “When things are really bad, I just say, “Try to enjoy it.”” Which is also comical but, probably as good a response as any to the rough stuff. We should try to enjoy our sorrows and our celebrations of those who we knew for however long in our life. We should try to enjoy the fact that we got to know them at all. What a wild and sunflower-y gift!
— When someone dies you read their obituary and you think, hopefully, wow! They really contributed to this life here on earth. All these small accomplishments, listed, seem like a lot. You think about how they improved and changed your life, and then you wonder for how many people they did the same. You won’t even know for how many, but you have to imagine how many lives they touched.
— I’ve been thinking a lot about murmurations this past week.
— From Wikipedia: “By 2013, physicists in Italy along with mechanical and aerospace engineers working with Princeton University, determined that no single bird could control a flock, and certainly not the movements of more than a thousand birds. Researchers used a computer simulation to determine that each bird synchronized with its seven closest neighbors, creating overlapping groups that communicated their movements — focusing on three simple parameters: attraction, repulsion and angular alignment.”
— You’ve heard me rattle on about our 3 meters of influence here often enough. And maybe now we could start also thinking about our seven closest neighbours. Love murmurations. The murmurations of love. How that might change things, and maybe already is.
— And so thinking about this led me back, as I’m often drawn, to adrienne marie brown’s book emergent strategy.
— Emergence: “notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems.” It is how we change, says a.m.b.
— also: “Many of us have been socialized to understand that constant growth, violent competition, and critical mass are ways to create change. But emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend more upon critical, deep, and authentic connections, a thread that can be tugged for support and resilience.” And then she says, also: “Dare I say love.” I repeat: DARE I SAY LOVE.
— And maybe you need to hear this as often as I do but: “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” (This is adrienne marie brown quoting Toni Cade Bambara, p. 36).
— I’ll vote for love over greed any day. The world is beautiful friends, and our work is to remind others of that. Those who are working in offices without windows, in cubicles, at the supermarket checkout, anywhere. Everywhere.
— Lovely to be mentioned by 320 Sycamore Studios this past week. Thank you!
— I’m always grateful, but this week, it’s all just hitting me, how glad I am for all the small good things I know you are doing out in the world. Please keep doing them. You never know how your small things add up. They mean something. Maybe everything. They, you, are irresistible.
