At first blush, the request from my son’s preschool seemed reasonable. “As spring time approaches we want to encourage families to consider packing ‘waste free’ snacks and lunches, which should help boost your child’s nutritional intake, reduce waste going into landfills, and save money over time.” Sure, we’re drowning in plastic. Let’s produce less waste. It’s a sensible ask.
Yet this seemingly benign request filled me with blinding rage. (These days, I’m often on the verge of blinding rage, so it doesn’t take much). How. Dare. They.
Let me explain. And in doing so, give you a snapshot of what it means to carry the mental load as a mom in 2025.
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This post first ran in March 2022.
A few days ago, a friend texted me that a red-flanked bluetail had been spotted a couple of miles from where I live. I had to look up what a red-flanked bluetail was. Turns out that the red-flanked bluetail—also known as the orange-flanked bush-robin—is a small songbird with red flanks (or orange flanks, I guess, depending on who’s looking?) and a blue tail (which isn’t always a big deal?). More to the point, the species normally ranges throughout Asia and Europe, so in the Seattle area it is quite the rarity.
News of the bluetail left me largely unmoved. I like birds a lot, as people who know me know, but I don’t chase rarities. I don’t have any profound philosophical reasons for this. I’m just lazy, and the thought of skulking around the suburbs for hours only to stand among the peering hordes just this side of some befuddled schlub’s property line so I can stare at some distant smudge in the bushes is not why I got into birding.
On second thought, there might just be a tiny bit of philosophy undergirding my studied disinterest.
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My preschooler is awed by many things, some of them more generally relatable than others. A spider in the sliding-door track. Mist coming through the woods. Irish butter. And rocks. For a long while now, her favorite miracles have been rocks.
She doesn’t anthropomorphize them, turn them into pets, or expect unreasonable things from them. She respects them as they are.
To her, all rocks are “peshal” (special) and deserving of her regard. They don’t exist as proof of some epic backpacking trip, or as mementoes of places we have traveled. Her rocks come from someone else’s lawn, from the parking lot at Noodles and Company, always from playgrounds, always from hikes.
Because of her, I find rocks on the bathroom floor, in the laundry basket, nestled inside cups in the kitchen cupboard. She got a new coat recently and it has a little chest pocket, which for adults might hold your ID or your sunglasses. She unzipped the pocket and announced, “this coat has a rock pocket!” It always has a rock in it, always a different rock, which she takes out and holds and gently puts back.
She genuinely loves rocks, and maybe she will be a geologist, or a rock climber. I try not to overthink it. For now, I think of the rocks as a testament to her character. She loves and honors the smallest, most lowly things, the things most people don’t think about at all, except in the context of kicking them, or removing them from one’s path, or maybe making them the path upon which to tread.
Right now, she does not need all the information I have about rocks. Some of this information I am saving for later, when she is older, and she can understand what rocks represent, rather than what they simply are.
Rocks are hard, but they soften under pressure. They do not give in easily, but when they are forced to do so, the Earth itself shakes. Rocks harbor life. They make up the surface of this world, and they give us purchase in an otherwise uncaring universe. They are strong. It takes a lot of power, by which I mean violence, to break them. When they do break, they are never really destroyed; they just become something new. Even when they are pulverized into dust, drowned in water, tumbled in mayhem, they do not fail but become other, stronger rock — metamorphic rock, or concrete.
Rocks and the minerals in them are the mountains and the seafloor. They are food for trees and crops; they are our roads and sidewalks and trails. We can move them, but it is hard work.
We can learn a lot from rocks. We can learn how to be crushed, tossed, drowned and then remade into something new, and even stronger. We can learn how to let time shape us, and to let experience soften us. We can hold life, and provide it safe harbor.
What would happen if we all looked for wonder in such forgotten things? What if we found purpose in the objects and the lives that the rulers prefer to ignore, or do their best to destroy? What if every rock on this rocky world really was “peshal,” and all of us were too?
Images: Some favorite rocks in Colorado Springs, by the author
What follows is a poem about the Voyager spacecraft I wrote a long time ago, when the world and I were very different than we are today. For a multisensory experience, you can read along while listening to a splendid set-to-space-noise version here.
“Whether we like it or not, there are things out there, not alive, that think about us,” wrote a contributor on the internet anthropologist Katherine Dee’s substack. He was talking about the networks of technologies designed to stalk our movements and use the information to influence our decisions and command our attention.
In the age of these infinitely networked technological megafauna, how do you know if anything you are dealing with on the internet is under human control or driven by its own opaque desires? What is watching you? How will it act on the information it harvests?
I have begun to mentally categorise these nonhuman entities along the same lines theologians once taxonomised them in the old grimoires:
Continue readingI’m in my office. It is snowing lightly outside, and suddenly I hear them — a flock of sandhill cranes flying overhead. So I step outside for a moment to observe their formation and remember that the world is still a beautiful and wondrous place.
This realization is what is keeping me grounded amidst the alarming and increasingly dystopian news that keeps coming. Yes, I will stand up and fight as much as possible.
But I am also taking time to stop, breathe and listen. I filmed the video here (turn the sound up!) while skiing earlier this week. I noticed a sound, so I paused to look up and listen. The noise is so distinctive, a gentle trilling sound.
There is now a population of cranes that winter near here, but this time of year — spring — also marks the mass migration of larger populations who stop at Fruit Grower’s Reservoir on the South slope of the Grand Mesa on their migratory route. It’s a sign of spring, just as much as the apricots that are now blooming down the road from me. (I hope mine can wait a little longer, so as to avoid a freeze.)
Happy spring!
Spring seems to come every year. The apple tree in front yard has leaves. The season of direct sun in the living room: over.) Everyone else has started taking their dogs for longer walks. (The season of walking my dog in relative peace: over.) The trees shed their pollen and my nose runneth over. (The season of clear breathing: over.)
The famous cherry blossoms of Washington will reach peak bloom in the next few days, but in the meantime the non-famous trees of Washington are putting on a show. That apple tree will put out its pretty little flowers soon – I can see the buds from my desk. A neighbor’s dwarf peach (that’s the picture above) is putting on a show already.
I had more trouble than usual figuring out what to write about this month. So much is happening on so many fronts here in Washington these days that it’s hard to get your head around and exhausting, too. Too big to tackle in writing while I’m living through it. So I try to be grateful for moments of good news as I wait for peak bloom.
Photo: Helen Fields, obviously