Fort Mason, San Francisco

In fall and winter, the skies in San Francisco are the clearest and bluest, the light the most blessed gold. Last December, my wife/then-fiancée and I stopped here as part of our wedding planning. There is a theater on the end of a long hallway at the end of a pier. I remember rehearsal on that stage when I was a teenaged ballet student - how when the music stopped, we could hear sea gulls crying. 

Black-and-white December

"It's a new year/or about to be..."

(My current earworm.)

I'm looking at some film pics I got back from the lab recently (will share some soon), headphones on, introverting whilst my girlfriend putters around the apartment talking to her mom on the phone. My muscles are pleasingly sore from a class yesterday. We have a bit of joint time off right now. We went to a beautiful public garden today and strolled between botanical continents as the sun passed in and out of cloud cover, the air becoming somuchcolder every time it disappeared.

January is not traditionally a power month for me. I'm feeling a bit of seasonal blues currently and I struggle in general with feeling out of sync with the cultural vibe at this time of year. In November and December, it feels like we're getting it right for the colder darker time of year - focusing on rest, food, loved ones, warmth, coziness, adding beauty and light to our homes. The holidays are overblown and overly stressful for sure, but at their most basic, the priorities feel correct.

Then in January our culture switches abruptly into "GET OFF YOUR ASS and IMPROVE yourself!" mode. I love self-improvement, but it's a bit harsh and it's not what I'm personally feeling at this time of year - I consider winter a success if I keep up most of my existing positive habits and do some things that are interesting to me.

How about you? How are you doing?

Happy New Year to you.

xo

Empty mystery lot

A curiosity on a busy street, shielded by hedges. Oakland, December 2020.

A circle song for winter nights

I had a notably upsetting experience yesterday. Today I'm feeling a lot better, though still a bit shaken and troubled. I took a hot shower just now and spent most of it singing circle songs to myself, which made me feel a bit like a cat purring to help her own broken bone heal.

The genre - women's circle songs - is one I just became aware of a few years ago when I was able to participate in a singing circle for the first time. They are simple songs or chants, designed for women to teach one another and sing at length together at gatherings, usually with feminist or nature or spiritual themes. Or all of the above. One piece of the precious heritage of the women's movement.

So here's one for you to enjoy too, "Winter Solstice Round" sung by the choir Libana. On this past winter solstice I buried myself in a veritable snowdrift of blankets when bedtime came, and hummed myself to sleep with this one.

Deep down in the belly of the night
Dream deep winter dreams
And lie safe in your grandmother's arms
Still as a seed, still as a seed 

Winterfall

Happy winter, friends.

I celebrated solstice by: getting a gorgeous-smelling fir wreath and a bunch of winter berries on the branch delivered, and by washing our bedding. (My logic goes: sleep is a spiritual practice, in winter especially; bed is the altar; therefore make it extra nice for holidays. The coziest bed for the longest night.)

I always thought it a crying shame in Illinois that the wonderful "Christmas" lights got taken down in December. How about a mental health innovation: leave them up! Help get your neighbors through the grim wastes of February!

I decided myself last year, after reading The Little Book of Hygge, that I would carry on freely through the rest of winter with any previously December-bound practices of light, warmth, and ritual that I cared to.

Speaking of indoorsy pursuits: yesterday I started learning Esperanto. I never understood the appeal of a constructed language before. But I see why people like this one. It's delightfully simple, organized, and exception-free. So friendly. Lots of immediate reward.

And I've enrolled in a community college linguistics course for the spring semester...for the third time! Spring 2009, Spring 2017, Spring 2021. Long story short, there were obstacles the first two times (respectively: being nineteen, living with a felon). The third time will be a charm.

What about you - winter rituals? Winter plans?

Gratitudes & things that are making me happy

• The wonderful sweetness of roasted leeks

• Discovering sliced Tokyo turnips as a vehicle for hummus 

• The combination of wintry light, clear skies, and fresh winds we get at this time of year in the Bay Area

• Going outside around dusk (paler colors, colder air) to get some last fresh air for the night and reminisce about other early-winter days in years past and places distant. 

• Putting my girlfriend’s extra duvet on the bed and feeling nicely buried at bedtime 

• Sleep socks 

• Vacation from work. A staycation, of course, the longest chunk of time I’ve had off work since August 2019, and specifically, a reading staycation. I spent the week leading up to it ordering books and arranging library holds so as to be entirely ensconced in books, and sleep, for the duration of the week. 

• Relatedly, going back to the LIBRARY (even if only for curbside pickup) 

• Continuing to bake bread every week or so 

• Tea forgotten, but remembered when it is exactly the right temperature

• Finding, and racing through, a single novel containing three of my favorite book ingredients: San Francisco, ballet, and Antarctica (Up to This Pointe, by Jennifer Longo)

• Reading a Rapunzel retelling and realizing what a fitting fairy tale it is for the shelter-in-place era (Bitter Greens, by Kate Forsyth)

February: predictable

February: predictable.
Eating pomelo
and tangerines, eating
my baseless sadness.
These words scratchy-dry
with rust, like certain muscles in
my feet, thighs, and hips.
I go to make them sore today.
I know what to do. No shame
in being detected as what you are.

Thoughts of winter

First thoughts of winter, and first preparations for winter. I like this herbal remedy to aid against colds and flus. It's a tincture - a very simple way to extract certain properties in alcohol.

The herbs looked so beautiful, with the mixture of flowers and berries and leaves looking like sand art, that I needed to take  a picture before I filled the jar the rest of the way with vodka.

Here's the recipe. I added lemon balm and thyme, increased the quantities of ginger and orange peel, and left out the honey.

The only way I can fall asleep is clutching a heating pad to my chest

In the thirties at night. That wouldn't be notable for, say, Chicago, but this is coastal California; consider the limitations of our wardrobes, how our houses are (not) insulated, for example...

The hardwood floor in our place feels cold enough to burn the soles of bare feet. Tonight before bed though I microwave the last inch of coconut oil until it is transparent and liquid, strip and stand in the lamplight, bend to dip the cup of my fingers into the jar. The best moisturizer. Considering myself through the lens of a nonexistent camera, considering myself through the eyes of an absent lover (think: that part in The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and I hurry. Open-water swimmers smearing their bodies with goose fat. Bending down, the cup of fingers, straightening, how quickly a drip of oil solidifies on the cold floor. Of course I regard myself during this exercise, and I am somewhat exasperated. Body strange, what are you doing — keeping secrets from me with such indifference. I admit I am angry about the excuses I feel compelled to make for you, even if only in my head. Control must be released again and again.

It's been raining all morning.

Goodness knows California could use it, though.

And I am in bed, taking care of my sick self instead of earning money, which makes me a little nervous, but given that I'm not in dire need, in this regard I am not one of those people who's good at ignoring their own body.
Lately I have been luxuriating in this album from U.S. Girls, and rediscovering Writer's Block.

"Winter," by Bella Akhmadulina

This same poet wrote one of my favorite autumn poems, which I have posted here twice before. I discovered this poem just a few weeks ago, and it continues to hold me in thrall.

Winter became my season during my years in the Chicago area — the sensory sparseness and the deep cold lent themselves perfectly somehow to the different moods and struggles of each year, and my memories of what was so striking to see, feel, and hear hold the emotional memories tightly. I mostly look forward to it now as a time to turn inward, read closely, turn big ideas over and let my thoughts steep without hurry. This coming winter will also bring the time to celebrate a year spent with my love.

The feeling of these memories has accumulated, though; I feel them lying layered and translucent against each other. And I read and love this poem because of how well it evokes (and invokes) some of my winter selves.


Winter

Winter's gesture to me is
chilly and persistent.
Winter has something
mildly medicinal.

Why else does
my unsuspecting sickness
stretch its hands toward it suddenly
out of darkness and pain?

My love,
practice witchcraft.
Let your icy ringlet's tonic kiss
brush my forehead.

The temptation continually grows
to meet deception with belief,
to look dogs in the eye,
to press myself against trees,

to forgive — playfully —
to run and turn,
and when done,
forgive again.

To equal the winter afternoon's
empty oval,
its nuances,
and always be aware of it.

To reduce my self to nothing,
so from behind the wall I can shout
not to my shadow, but to the light
not blocked by me.

– Bella Akhmadulina
trans. Mary Maddock

Going stale

Facing east, December

A postcard from last winter

The last light of 2011

I put a lid on my mug of green tea and climbed the hill behind my house to share the sunset with some strangers. "In our beds, we're the lucky ones, filled with the sun..."

Walking

Come talk a walk with me, amiga. It is a December afternoon in San Francisco, heading towards evening. The air is cool and soft, and when we reach the top of a hill, you'll see it's clear on the horizon, no haze as on warmer days. The trees and gardens are greener than ever, soaking up the wet of our mild winters. People are wearing their coats and scarves because they like to, but they're unlined, and it's really only fifty or fifty-five degrees. A gentle season. We'll stop by the post office to drop off these packages (belated Christmas gifts) and maybe see how the pomegranates are at the produce store across the street...

With love and vigor

Not long till solstice and still no snow.

This year when I'm deciding what to do with my hours, I have been thinking about what will be worth remembering and what the vigorous thing to do would be. (I love that word. I love vigorous people. I hope I am one.) It often runs contrary to what would feel most comfortable, but it doesn't feel like fighting with myself; it feels more like clearing away the junk from around my intuition.

I've thrown so much time away simply because I thought it wasn't mine — time when I was "supposed" to be doing other things. Why is it a rule that when you're procrastinating, you have to be numbing your brain, bouncing around from website to website or similar? That's not how it has to be. It's stupid. It results in nothing worth remembering, and it's not even enjoyable. More about that later.

Tonight I walked home at a leisurely pace, in the middle of the street and singing. Twenty-five degrees. Orion has swung to the south, and my voice was echoing off of...something. I went past my house to the end of the block before turning back, because it was a good song.

I might remember that someday. I might remember this fall as the one I spent singing, because I was finding out that my voice is not as bad as I'd always thought. I wouldn't mind that.

Happiness and gratitudes

• hospitality

• winter

• that a shower and stepping outside for a few moments makes everything better

• a care package of tangerines

• sleeping on campus during the day sometimes instead of in my room at night

• my new pets, which are two star-shaped foil balloons

• how many options I already have for next year

• "Near Town," by The Amazing Broken Man

• bike rides when I get cabin fever late at night, and the combination of emptiness and dark in the streets

• soccer-field stargazing for too long and my toes going numb

• a feeling of soon-will-have-smashed-something-edness

• emailing with Sui

• long Skypes with my Bostonian contesserate

• pesto/tomato grilled cheese

• soon I'll have my degree

Backwards at winter