Singing Our Hearts Out

This was originally posted August 5, 2013. I just spent all weekend singing with many of the same people I was singing with then, so I thought this – my first post as a person of LWON – was worth sharing again. 

That's me in the red jacket.
That’s me in the red jacket.

Recently I was rehearsing a glorious 16th-century motet with a group of 20 or so people. Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, the song begins. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it. It’s an Easter text and a lovely thought, whether or not you think the Lord actually made this day or whether the day made itself, thank you very much, from the rotation of the Earth. This is a day; let’s enjoy it.

The piece is by William Byrd, an English composer of Shakespeare’s time—yes, he’s wearing a ruff in his portrait—who wrote a lot of sacred music like this. The idea that different people could sing different things at the same time was fairly new in the Renaissance, and composers like Byrd went to town with it. Continue reading

Elves in the Balance: An interview with naturalist David Mizejewski

I first saw the elves on the floor of my best friend’s station wagon when I was seven. Grinning up from the back of a big book, these elves looked different from any other elves I’d seen. I’d always thought elves were a little wimpy, but instead of being fragile fey, these elves seemed fun. Even better–they had wolves!

This was my first experience with Elfquest, a fantasy comic series that is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The series, created by Wendy and Richard Pini, chronicles the adventures of an elfin tribe that has a deep connection to their landscape and to wolves. Years ago, I read and re-read the first four graphic novel compilations so often that the pages grew soft. Recently, I came back to Elfquest after a long absence to find that not only had new installments had appeared, but that an extensive community of Elfquest lovers was frolicking (and also, delving into extensive analysis and speculation) online.

One of these Elfquest superfans is David Mizejewski, who has been the co-host of a podcast dedicated to the most recent part of the series, Elfquest: The Final Quest. He’s also a naturalist who works for the National Wildlife Federation and he appears regularly on television and radio shows to talk about wildlife.

As I listened to the podcast, I found that Mizejweski was sprinkling in details about altruism in nature and wolf social structure as he discussed the latest cliffhanger with co-host Ryan Browne. Last month I talked with him about the connection between his work as a naturalist and his interest in the series. The following is a condensed and edited version of our conversation. Continue reading

My Daughter and the Not-Perfect Bunny

You woke up screaming in the middle of the night, frantic. You held up your bunny, a floppy square of pink blanket attached to a long-eared rabbit head. “This bunny is not perfect,” you wailed.

I knew what you meant. This bunny, one of three identical bunnies, is the oldest, the most worn. His fur is a little less pink than it used to be, a little less soft. He’s clean, but the whites of his ears have grown dingy.

So, yeah, this bunny is not perfect. This bunny was loved — drug across the playground, stuffed into the trunk of your trike, abandoned briefly on the floor of the bar where your favorite musician sings the song about a peanut getting hit by a train. This bunny was loved, and with love he got used. That should make him more appealing, not less.

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Redux: Goodbye to the Friend I Never Met

I wrote this piece a year ago at the end of an exhausting story about the end of a species. I was angry and despondent. I wish I could say that a year has changed my perspective. Scientists have spotted a surprising six individuals more during their expedition to the Upper Gulf this year. But nothing substantive has changed in the politics of the region and my hopes are dim. 
Saturday was the day I finally gave up. The last hope for the vaquita marina, the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean, is gone. On Saturday, biologists working in the Upper Gulf of California announced that the latest animal they had captured in an effort to save the species had died in captivity.

For the first half of 2017, I was knee deep in a story I’ve been following since I got to Mexico six years ago. In summary, an animal that had found itself on the wrong side of rampant poaching practices is all but wiped out and the last option is a Hail Mary plan to round them up into captive pens and hold them until such time as humans stop sucking at ocean stewardship. (For a full review of the vaquita’s tragic tale, I really encourage you to read the story.)

But there was always a problem with this strategy – no one had ever tried to catch one before. It was possible they wouldn’t go quietly into pens.

“If captivity fails, then, well, we tried,” NOAA biologist Barbara Taylor told me in the spring. “It’s game over.”

After Saturday, I think it’s game over. The vaquita doesn’t do captivity. The first animal caught by biologists got so stressed out that it had to be released. The second died within hours. We have now officially done more harm than good in our attempts to save the vaquita. In fact, this whole effort has been one long lesson in throwing the porpoise out with the bathwater. From the beginning, it feels like we’ve tried to help the vaquita with the best of intentions and have only made things worse.

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Redux: An interview with David Grinspoon, author of Earth in Human Hands

David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own book, Earth In Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. The book was recently featured in an ongoing series on “Resistance Reading” selected by authors and published by Mother Jones. Author Jesmyn Ward picked it as part of her list. In her words, “this book provides a sobering exploration of how human beings have affected the climate of our planet, but also gives us reason to hope in the end. We need that now.”

I agree. Here’s an interview with Grinspoon that originally ran in March of 2017.

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There are Two Kinds of People: Those Who Make Their Beds and Those Who Don’t

I was at the pharmacy the other day, waiting for my flu shot, when I spotted a book called Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World. It was written by a retired U.S. Navy Admiral. In his tongue in cheek synopsis of the book at the Guardian, John Crace explains that the admiral learned about the importance of bed-making during Naval SEAL training camp:

Every morning, we would have to make our beds. If the task wasn’t done properly, we would be sent on a 10-mile run. Making my bed taught me the importance of getting my day off to a good start. Years later, when we finally captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq, I was intrigued to notice that he had never made his bed. It’s that kind of laziness that can lead to the downfall of any dictator.

Which is exactly the kind of thing that a bed-maker would say. As if folding sheets and positioning pillows could impose order and predictability on a chaotic, uncertain world.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who get up every morning and make their beds, and the people who don’t bother. In case it’s not obvious yet, I’m one of the latter.

It didn’t occur to me that bed-making was such a telling detail about a person until I noticed that my friend Rosemerry’s bed is always perfectly made. Continue reading

On Food Pills And Legacy

What if instead of eating three meals each day (plus snacks, if you’re me) we just popped pills and moved along with our lives. Food pills were once a staple of science fiction, from Dr. Who to Star Trek to the Jetsons, and I recently did an episode of my podcast Flash Forward about the dream of replacing food with capsules. Turns out, food pills are basically impossible to achieve, but the continued obsession with them says a lot about cultural neuroses.

You can listen to the episode for more about that (please do, this is a bald faced plug for my podcast) but one thing that struck me in researching the episode is the way that the history of food pills as a concept is told online. The woman who is almost always credited with the idea certainly didn’t come up with it, nor did she care about it all that much at all. Her story is far more interesting, in fact, and the fact that her name is now synonymous with food pills rather than her actual work is a fascinating (if depressing) case study in how history is repeated and warped online.

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Here I Am

I’m standing in my underwear and socks, gripping a rolled-up magazine that is shredded at the end from my violent battle with the flies. I’ve killed a dozen or more of them this Wednesday morning, but they just keep alighting as if there is some source—a pile of dog shit, a rotting corpse—hidden just there, under the newspapers slouched in the corner, or here, behind the overstuffed laundry basket on the sofa. It occurs to me in passing that if such a source is that close by, I have a bigger problem than flies. Still, I continue wielding the torn New Yorker—three weeks old, 1/3 read (mostly the cartoons)—beating it, mostly fruitlessly, against the sunny countertops as the flies lift off with an irritating buzz. (Fuck you, too, flies.)

I’m in my underwear because of the hot flashes. There are certain ramifications to reaching the middle ages, one of them being the handing off of one’s hormones to a cruel sorcerer who gleefully pinches off the estrogen drip at his whim.

I’m in my socks because hot flashes are usually quick things, and after one ends I’m suddenly freezing. Whatever was sweating will be, next, chilled. I have little control over the internal thermostat, but keeping the feet wrapped gives me an ounce of control over this phase of misery. Small victories.

Yes, this is who I am right now.

Ping! An email has arrived. I abandon my murderous work and click. The note is from a high school student out West somewhere. She informs me that over the last few weeks she’s been reading all my pieces—part of an assignment to follow a favorite journalist. To her I am a hero, a skilled woman writer tapping into adventure and living her passion, a shiny thing in darkness. She wants to know more about me, how I got to do what I do, how I’ve managed to become this person she so admires and how she might follow in my successful footsteps.

And I have to laugh at her timing, the scene before her if, horror of horrors, she could see me: The me in the underwear with the flies and the hot flashes, the me who can’t get organized or inspired, the me with the puffy eyes after another night of stress-waking. The me she’s envisioning is the confident one from the back of a book—a woman I haven’t seen in months–the brushed and smiling Author with a long list of ideas and a clear road of success starting way back when and rushing into the future. That’s what most people expect who don’t know me in person, and even some who do.

But, you see, I’ve been away from LWON for some months and not because I was hunched over a book manuscript or jetting around the world chasing elephants or iguanas. The truth is less glamorous: This writer, as happens to most in this field, has hit a wall.

There are plenty of possible reasons, but one is simply that the field is packed tighter with freelancers than ever; staying ahead of the rest takes a certain grit and an even flow, not a slow drip, of original ideas. Meanwhile, some of us tire of having to sell ourselves over and over. Some of us are weary of slim paychecks and forgotten invoices. Some of us are tired of editors who forget to tell you what you did right before launching into all the wrongs. (Many do remember to compliment. But some don’t.) We scrabble for scraps. Our souls are sucked dry.

I wouldn’t call this writers’ block. A block is something that can be shattered with the swing of a sledgehammer, or slid out of the way in three heaves by a handful of friends on a Saturday afternoon (with the promise of pizza and beer).

Remember Han Solo frozen, grimacing, in the wall of carbonite?

Actually, let’s go bigger. Game of Thrones. That ice monument looming over the end of civilization—that’s the wall in this scenario. It’s massive and bone-chilling, shored up with horrendous news headlines like rebar in concrete. And the fact is, when one is defined by what one does as many of us writers tend to be, a hard stop to creativity is especially devastating.

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity as a result of this hit to mine, why some of us can’t see ourselves outside of our careers. It may be especially hard if we have a public face, some kind of success that has defined us for others. The successful writer is what when not being successful and not writing?

We are encouraged to find an identity. And that should be a good thing. Yet think of how identity has divided us. One People, yes, but so, so many ways to pull away from fellow humans these days. Isn’t it from labels that prejudice is born? While many of us speak of unity and acceptance, we continue to splinter into ever smaller groups and to stand up and scream that we, of that group, deserve special attention. Ultimately walls go up between our camps. So many walls. So much anger on either side of those walls. Disgust, even.

Evolutionarily, feeling disgust toward “other” may have once served us, keeping foreign pathogens from reaching new hosts. But morally, disgust at “other” serves no one. And yet.

And yet we wave our own flags facing off with those waving different flags. Faith, color, sex, blue versus red, meat or no meat (“cruelty or cruelty free?”), sexual preference, nationality, financial status…which Star Wars character are you, what decade are you, which European castle or dog breed are you. Even in entertainment we look for a club to join. We’ve become so “identified with,” so black and white even as we profess the desire for gray, for equality and blindness toward our differences.

Perhaps it’s a stretch, but in a way, I’ve decided, this writer who sees herself as defined by her writing—the successes and, mostly, the failures—has separated herself from all the other things she is as a human, and is, in a sense, fighting against herself. If I’m not writing, I’m scared that I’ve lost all that is important about me. What am I if not a writer? Something “not good enough.” Something to be ashamed of. Something to sneer at–a woman lost and unhinged who dreams of slinging hay for farm animals. I denounce my other selves for being less than. I forget to see the whole.

I’ve been waving my writer flag so high that I’ve lost sight of the beauty of the other flags I carry. Especially that of the simple human being just trying to make her way in the world, focused on family and health and doing right by others, and on searching for whatever beauty can still be coaxed from this world. That’s a flag we can all carry together.

I’ll admit to being comforted by this truth about writers: We tend to circle back to writing over and over. It won’t let us go, and we wouldn’t know what else to do if it did. I fantasize about different kind of job, maybe watering plants or making donuts or tending goats (really, I want to tend goats), but mostly because I know a different kind of job would give me new experiences and, as a result, something new to write about. So that part of me will, ultimately, rise to the top on its own. That has to be good enough.

So, here I am, still in my socks (one has a hole, I’ve noticed), making some slow headway toward the top of the wall, wielding my fly swatter in defense. I’m searching for a cool breeze. I’m wandering in the woods (not pitching stories, not writing a book proposal), looking for meaning in a world that’s become stunningly divided and divisive. I’m trying hard to embrace the parts of me that aren’t the writer and let them breathe un-panicked breaths until the writer returns.

My promise to the young woman who wrote to me is that the confident, competent writer in me isn’t gone forever. It’s a promise to myself as well. But I’m seeking ways to broaden my identity rather than celebrating one part and chastising all others. And I’m looking out from in here at the splintered world and applying the same lesson. No one of us is just one thing. The mosaic is especially beautiful when woven together. The mosaic, woven together, is what matters.

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