Were you rural, industrial, or suburban?
We thought we were home
— Robin Coste Lewis
It took until this week for me to rule up the pages of my 2023 bullet journal — two whole months into the new year, but whatever. The start of 2023 has felt more like 2022+, with the old year running into extra time. Emergencies have bent the usual temporal containers. The earth has shaken, the skies have emptied; the hills have slipped away and filled the rivers. For all last month’s talk of sticking with the trouble it was hard to accept that Cyclone Gabrielle was coming so soon after the floods. I remembered a similar delirious affect when we learned about the emergence of the omicron variant right after the delta slog. The announcements felt like they were delivered at a helium-high pitch. Perversely, all I wanted to do was laugh. Everyone was frazzled.
Living on an island feels like an exposed spot, but it was the west coast and eastern seaboard and cape that were most terribly hit by the cyclone. I saw a family member the other day who had just come up from Hawkes Bay. They were radiating disaster and haunted by silt. They still have their house and their dog, but some of their neighbours have lost everything. They felt guilty about leaving their community for the week but, as this how-to-help piece points out, the recovery is a marathon not a sprint. Sticking with the trouble requires stamina. At Te Matatini festival Wairoa-based kapa Mātangirau wore the mud of their suffering whenua when they performed on stage. They wore the trouble, wore the love for the troubled place, and insisted on a line of belonging thrumming backwards and forwards through time.
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There’s been a white noise disorganised frenzy feeling this February — maybe less a depression and more an executive function struggle — and I’ve been internally slow and unable to complete some basic functions like text-based messaging. The maintenance of meaningful relationships is important to me, but my behaviour hasn’t made it real. I stopped using social media in January and, at first, it was a welcome break, but now I don’t seem to know how to gear back up to communicating frequently across long and short distances; to seeing others and being seen. I have lost, for now, a certain written fluency and organising principle.
I just want to bump into people. I want things to happen between us and for that be that and then the next thing to be the next thing. I want to walk to the park and see everyone I’ve ever known, and meet all the people I haven’t yet known, and for it to happen to be the clearest morning that any of us has experienced in a long time. I want them to say look at that and me to say isn’t that something and I don’t want to talk about our current employment situations, unless, because it is a very good morning after all, the gap between our survival and our care and efforts has shrunk away and we are now employed in a way that has nothing to do with exploitation, nothing to do with weaponising access to food and shelter, nothing to do with hostage or debt, and everything to do with making - letting! - life be liveable, loveable, edible, look-at-that-able on planet earth.
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This month I met a new nemesis: the moth plant. Ropey vines, prolific pods, milky sap; a super-spreader, but weak-rooted. So satisfying to tease out and extract, I would go to bed each night after weeding still feeling the sensation of pulling the root from the soil and unwinding the vines from the strangled hibiscus and lemon trees. Not really a nemesis — the moth plant was just living its arbitrarily contraband life, fulfilling its contraband potential — but now the pair of doves have come back to sun themselves beneath the yellow flowers and it is their turn for that spot in the garden. I haven’t even got to the productive part yet. No planting, it’s just been days of weeding out the dross that I’ve let build up in this borrowed garden these past months.
I’d end each day with a shower-time inspection of bruises and scratches that I never felt forming, too occupied by my task to notice the angry flicks of the foliage. A good occupation, the sort where something gets done and the mind gets free. I hope to have some form of vegetable patch underway by this time next month. If I don’t get to stay then someone else can eat from it. I am finished with the ambient disappointment that comes with trying to guard against disappointment. I am here and there is a garden and I am doing things with it, uncertainty be damned. We cannot earn the security to live a human life on an earthly rock anyway. Basic security is our birthright, not for some but for all.
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Just returned to the library:
Inland, Gerald Murnane (“Some places are many more than one place.”)
Bodies of Light, Jennifer Down (“Gold-flecked eyes. A flatbed truck. A lone horse in a field.”)
Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, Alice Wong (“Role models create unrealistic expectations and an asymmetrical power dynamic; role models or icons can do more harm than good because they obscure the flaws and contradictions we all have.”)
Picking up from the holds shelf:
Nox, Anne Carson
Your Face Tomorrow Volume 1: Fever and Spear, Javier Marías trans. Margaret Jull Costa
Buying at the bookshop:
Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton (1002 holds at the library!)
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Today’s sunset is at 8.01pm. Shadows are beginning to fall across the wall of the last day of February. Some of our named months are monuments to tyrants. But this one is meant to be an ode to purification. May you feel clean once in a good while — not innocent, just alive while you’re alive, young before the world.
Until next month,
H x
Just remembering the green envy I felt in the claustrophobic flat in London when other people wrote these florid types of odes to their mindful weeding and planting during lockdowns! I walked past a beautiful allotment with my pal Hazel and she told me about the huge waiting list, but it would be so worth it. Shout out to another pal, Anna the budding market gardener, for encouraging the outdoor labours this month. Good to know people who know a trick or two for errant brains xx
It struck me tonight what a gift your writing is, the pattern of it- I know a month has gone when you pop up in my inbox; but also that you don’t commercialise it - your writing is worthy of paywalls and funds, don’t get me wrong; it’s just also really enjoyable to read the meandering of it, the beauty of it; detached from the strive/pay/strive cycle.