This is the newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore a little bit of everything that’s on my mind as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. You can listen to me read you the newsletter by hitting play above - or you can click the little link above and to the right to play in your favorite podcast player. If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it!
In this podcast episode, John Densmore, the guest, said that he thinks of Mother Earth as being under humanity’s boot for the last few centuries since the Industrial Revolution, and that She used the pandemic as a way of biting off humanity’s toe in hopes of waking us up to the reality that, if we don’t get our act together, Mother Earth will do away with us entirely. That sounds daunting, but I like the analogy as a way to get us moving.
The part that is so frustrating is that it doesn’t seem to have gotten us moving in any kind of positive direction. The pandemic seemed to accelerate forces that were already in place: increased income disparity, increased polarization and partisanship, hyper individualism, obsession with personal rights, ignoring our responsibility to one another and the more-than-human-world.
In this excellent conversation, Stephen Jenkinson was talking about reopening after the pandemic, especially how it’s largely been marketed as “let’s get back to normal.” He said, “I would never have guessed that the consequence of twenty months of relative isolation has been to lionize and to mythologize the ‘personal freedoms’ that were available to us in 2019 as if that year is the high water mark of cultural achievements and as soon as we get back to that, man, all will be well.”
I wrote about the initiation without the return last fall, and it seems, so far, like we have collectively missed the boat on the initiatory experience the pandemic offered by yelling about getting back to 2019. Most of our institutions keep plugging along without having seriously considered how we could take this opportunity to imagine new, more sustainable ways of organizing our communal lives together. For most of the last two years, I’ve just been really frustrated about that (as evidenced by the slew of writing I’ve done on the subject).
But I have been reminded all over the place lately that the top-down solutions haven’t been working. I wrote this last fall:
But one thing I’ve been learning from this threshold space is that the top-down way of growth and change doesn’t seem to be working. We’ve tried it for at least a few centuries at this point. The new way forward, I think, will have to be from the ground up instead.
This is the best invitation of all: that my own individual return from this initiation and the reimagining work that little old Sara is doing is part of a larger quilt that, while many are probably missing the opportunity, there are many of us who are waking up to the invitation, crafting our squares in a beautiful tapestry, among our particular people and in our particular places.
Even if The Culture hasn’t taken the initiation that Covid has offered doesn’t mean I can’t. In fact, if I believe my own words on the subject, I shouldn’t be waiting around for so-called leaders or institutions to re-imagine how we’re doing things; I should be doing that work for myself and supporting my little family to do so too.
We have an old group of friends that we grew apart from that wants to keep trying to resurrect our old friendships as if we could just skip over the years apart and the factors that caused us to grow apart in the first place. I’m not mad that we grew apart. That is life. I also don’t want to go back to who I was when I was friends with them, nor do I expect them to do so. I don’t get this nostalgia for what was and can’t be again because we’re all different people now. It would be different if we had retained some level of connection in the intervening years, but we haven’t. We no longer have anything that connects us other than talking about old stories.
I decided that my frustration with this group of friends is the same frustration I have more broadly, which is the idea that we should want to return to the way things were instead of growing and evolving into something new. It’s a gift, of course, when relationships grow with you, but I also think some relationships are meant for a season and that doesn’t make them failures.
History, of course, is essential to see where and who we have been, where we have come from, and what we got wrong, but I’m not sure it’s a place to live. If Dunsmore is right that Mother Nature (or God or source or whatever-word-you-want-to-use-to-describe-that-which-is-bigger-than-us) used the pandemic to wake us up, then let us invite the lessons in big and small ways. Since we can’t do much to control the big ways as individuals (unless we’re leaders in large organizations), let us embrace the small ways we can take this initiation and the return for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that they are.
In April of 2020, Martin Shaw said the following about those early pandemic days:
The way I see it is we've had this general pandemic, but all of us at the moment are not celebrating or investigating it in the way that a village does. We are like little hermits. We're like…millions of houses which are like these little alchemical cells. Where all sorts of things connected to this are getting played out in our family dynamics. It's all present, if we just have the eyes to see the thing. Some of those alchemical experiments are going to boil over. Some of them are going to make gold. Some of them, the fire will go out beneath them.
We’re still potentially in the returning phase of the initiation where we now have the opportunity to see which lessons and experiences will make gold and which ones will die out. Let us not waste this opportunity, even if some certainly will.
Rants and raves
👍 Starting to see the very beginning signs of fall.
👍 The Bear exceeded my high expectations.
👍 Our kids’ schedules right now are a little bananas (I’m not complaining; they asked, and we signed them up for it), and it’s a little embarrassing how much utility we’re all getting out of this calendar that I put on the fridge color-coded with everyone’s various evening activities. File it under “boring things that are saving my life right now.”
👎 I’m in a bit of a fiction slump. Send me your recs!
Stuff worth sharing
Grant and I watched Trainwreck, the Woodstock 1999 documentary, and the title was very apt. But it actually led to some good conversations about toxic masculinity and weirdly overlapped with this Reel and this Men Yell At Me newsletter that I sent to several single friends this week.
However you feel about the loan forgiveness this week, AHP’s newsletter and this comment thread should be required reading before commenting.
Farm Share is one of my favorite emails of the week - she writes up what she made that week based on her CSA share, so it’s seasonal (she lives in upstate New York, which is very close to my garden schedule, but even if you live somewhere where it doesn’t line up, you can just save the recipes for your season). Best of all, she’s my kind of cook: not fussy, actually seasonal, and practical. Also her blog bio says: “Bread enthusiast. Vegetable lover. Omnivore.” so I’m pretty sure we’d be friends IRL.
Cheers to daydreaming about how we can embrace the return in the week ahead!
Sara
cut off the toe