Conversations with the river (and maybe also muskrats)
This week, I started and abandoned two newsletters before arriving at this one (which will hopefully stick).
The first newsletter was about our faith in human history as a story of steady progress, usually shepherded along by the ideals of science and rationality. This argument feels especially annoying to me at the moment, which isn’t surprising.
Nothing about this historical moment feels like “progress.” It might also be that I finished the semester teaching Foucault, whose whole schtick is systematically tearing apart any ideas that modern life is somehow better than the distant, “barbaric” past.
The second newsletter was going to be a response to a post I read taking apart the post-election turn to local community-building. It wasn’t that the post didn’t make a good argument—that we probably need to think about exactly what we mean by community. Does our community only include people like us? Who are we leaving out?
These are good questions to ask. It’s just that reading it felt so…dispiriting. Like, really? Community is the tiny life raft I’m holding on to in the face of this unrelenting stream of despair and now you want to punch a big hole in it? I’m sinking here. Let me have my life raft.
I didn’t write either of those newsletters because I just didn’t have it in me. But also because they were responses to things I had read online. They weren’t responses to tweets or notes or threads or…what do you call a Bluesky post? They were well-reasoned, longform essays. They were responses to quality internet content, if you want to call it that. It’s just that at the moment, I don’t want to be responding to things I read on the internet. That’s not the conversation I want to be having.
This weekend for the first time in entirely too long, I took a walk along the river. As I’ve written about before, I’m reading two Mary Oliver poems every morning. Not surprisingly, this has created a strong desire in me to move to the country. I mean, how does Mary Oliver see so many animals? Muskrats? I’ve never seen a muskrat. I’m never going to see a muskrat on the mean streets of Madison, Indiana.
My own version of nature, which consists mostly of the river and my backyard, sometimes seems very inadequate compared to Mary Oliver’s version of nature. I know this isn’t her intention. After all, she can clearly spend hours watching a bug. Or a tree. Muskrats are not a requirement for enjoying nature.
Still, sometimes I feel my little neighborhood isn’t natural enough and I forget that, though there may be no muskrats, the river is still pretty amazing. The river is never the same from one day to the next. It’s been so long since I walked along it that I had to remember again how the sides of the river valley look with the trees bare. I stopped on a bench and listened to a cacophony of starlings gathered in a tree. I couldn’t see them. I could just hear them.
Over and over again in my life I forget the river. I forget its comfort and its beauty. I forget its stillness and its chaos. I forget the loneliness and joy of a great blue heron taking flight and disappearing to the far shore. How can a single human be this stupid? I don’t know, but I am.
I want to be in conversation with the river. I want to be responding to the great blue heron. I want to bounce some ideas off the clouds. Yes, it’d be nice to loop in the muskrat, but it’s not necessary.
I want to spend my time thinking about Mary Oliver poems. Are owls reminders of death? Did she really fall asleep in the woods once only to be awakened by a deer? Are our bodies not much more than two feet and a tongue? What does that even mean? Am I just breathing a little and calling it a life?
“Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”
I want to be in conversation with books, like the one I just read that wasn’t really great, but had a lot of weird ideas I’d really like to talk about. I want to talk to movies and about movies.
I want to be in conversation with people, like the woman I met at a party this weekend who was sad about not being able to read the news anymore because of how horrible it was. I want to be in conversation with my sister and my brother. With my friends and my students.
Like so many people, I took a big news break after the election. It’s not as if I was a person who was reading a lot of news before that. But I’ll admit that the energy around Kamala Harris’s candidacy drew me back in. I liked reading the funny posts about Tim Walz. I willingly stepped into that bubble. I felt excited and hopeful and I don’t regret that.
Then this week or so, I got pulled back in by the drama of Luigi Mangione. Again, it was mostly about the jokes. And the collective rage. United is my healthcare provider. They are truly horrible, as all the stories on social media so clearly demonstrated.
But the joy of social media isn’t quite like the joy of walking along the river, is it? I’m not even sure if we can accurately call it joy. And in looking at my phone for funny posts about whatever the story of the day is, the ugliness creeps in. What the specific ugliness is doesn’t matter. The ugliness is always there. Is a chuckle really worth that?
The question it feels like so many of us are facing is, how do we live now? In the very early days after the election, I came up with a list. I still think it’s a good one. I’m standing by it, even if, not surprisingly, it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.
I also listened to a podcast interview with Joan Baez last week. In talking about how to live with the ever-looming specter of global climate change she said, “I mean, I think it’s really important to live in denial. [laughter] Live in denial 95% of the time so you can breathe and have a life, and then 5% of the time go make some good trouble, go do stuff.”
Denial might not be the perfect word here. She certainly doesn’t mean denying that climate change is real. But the underlying sentiment makes sense to me. We have to go on living our lives in the best way we can, no matter what impending disaster might be looming. We can’t spend every moment protesting or calling our senators or posting about our collective outrage or in conversation with the latest bit of internet wisdom. There is a place for that, but it can’t be our entire lives. Not even if you’re Joan Baez.
We have to make room for other conversations. We have to make room for conversations with Mary Oliver and the river and that person you run into on the street. And, yes, maybe if you’re very lucky, we have to make room for conversations with a muskrat.
Thank you to all my new subscribers, including
, who became a paid subscriber. I still can’t believe that some people are generous enough to actually pay me for this, but eternally grateful all the same.Your holiday reminder that I write books, which someone in your life might like to read. Check them out here.
I met Joan Baez and think she may have a good idea. Would love to have a conversation with you neighbor. Let’s take a walk along the river together 😊
You’re right about muskrats. And everything.