Daffodil Medley (Fifteen Dollars)
On happiness, Joy Harjo, jealousy, decision-making, and potentially perfect first chapters
Hello lovebugs. How is everyone doing? Is $15 too much to pay for a medley, do you think? What if it’s a breezy spring day and the street performer / entertainer is just nailing it?
I had some very weird dreams last night, too weird to mention. I also may have injured a person in one dream by sliding off an old recliner(?). So now I feel just bad. It left a weird taste in my mouth, the twang of a tennis ball off an old fender in a junkyard.
I have been thinking about what to write you all (is there anything more boring than thinking about writing? Or is it the most riveting thing? I love when when writers nail the agony and ecstasy that is the writing life). I’m not writing to you about agony and ecstasy per se, but I have been thinking this week: What really makes a human happy?
Because this is a science experiment of self (not a heavily researched library of philosophers, social scientists, and psychologists) I was going to track my highs and lows for you each day and see if anything interesting turned up - any patterns or anecdotes. But then Kara, who eschews many routines, forgot to write down her answers. So we’ll work off memory and photographs here.
Photographs are the original memory device at Under a Spell anyway. I frequently snap things that move me throughout the day and then later while corresponding with you reach for an image to pepper my post. My memory is then jogged by the photos I’ve taken and I recall: “Oh yes, I need to tell everyone about that desktop bear sculpture slash broken fountain I saw this week!” Because priorities.
Also: what else is writing, besides show and tell?
Here is a tiny list of things that have made me happy this week:
No one tells you this but true happiness is actually a bar of soap. I bought new hand soap for one of our bathrooms, a windowless tunnel with weird energy and a weirder color scheme (tan on gray on beige). The lack of natural light in there bums me out which doesn’t relate to anything, I just feel like complaining about it. I bought the soap because it was the only “flavor” (lol) they had in a brand I like. It said something about cucumbers on the packaging, but it smells like spring lilies in our bathroom that, trust me, isn’t that cool. Yesterday I was straightening up a bit and cracked a bedroom window to let in some birdsong. I kept thinking, “Wow, the earth is really blooming, stirring its spring atoms.” Then I realized, no, it’s the new drugstore soap. So simple but real. It made all of the upstairs feel awake and light.
This is not what the upstairs looks like. I stopped on a busy street to take this photo and wait for a jogger - who was taking a walking break - to finally pass. The devotion I have for you! Jk, I was impressed by the yellow, the thick, raucous lawn in bloom. I would have risked getting mowed down for less.
Birdsong. I read somewhere recently that listening to the birds soothes your nervous system because subconsciously your body can understand how safe it is. This sounds kind of pseudoscience-y but if I’m remembering correctly, birds won’t sing with predators around so birdsong = deep peace and safety to the animal parts of you. I’ve been noticing this week as cardinals visit the feeder (when the squirrels aren’t ransacking it) and the bunnies shake their white bums at us in glory, how true this is for me. With a few minutes before afternoon pick-up one day this week, while waiting in my car I mused how I’d like to spend the minutes. Journaling? Meditating? Listening to a voice message? I realized I just wanted to lean back my head, close my eyes, and listen to the birds. (If you are living your life like an old dog, I believe you are doing it right.)
Food. What do you want to eat today? I’ve been noticing that sometimes I want a smoothie, sometimes it’s a cinnamon roll. Other times, it’s cereal for dinner. One morning I drove to the store almost immediately and got ingredients for spaghetti sauce. After noting how cheerful everyone is at the store in the morning (retirees in their windbreakers pouring over strawberries and coupons, Instacart employees picking through the stashes of on-the-vine tomatoes without yet looking dead-eyed and robot-y) I went home and chopped and sizzled, then went about my day. This fit around other responsibilities and made me so much more present to my roles and duties. What is your body craving right now? Listen and glittering secrets will be revealed. At the very least, your belly will stop all its embarrassing groans.
I had to look up ingredients for a food allergy on a fudge website and a link that reads Buy Fudge Now made me laugh really hard. It was something about the urgency in the message, like someone might need water IMMEDIATELY, but instead of water it’s fudge. Hey, everyone has their needs, yes? Sometimes it’s a Buy Fudge Now day.
“Allowing” myself to clean. This one is a tricky one. Cleaning can sometimes make me feel like the family maid. BUT I really like a tidy environment. I’m not crazy about decluttering. I don’t like matching bins. But if things get dusty for too long or I get riff-raff on my knees or calves while rolling on the floor in yoga “practice” (read: stretching because I’m old) it really bums me out. I also like to stay on top of life’s detritus. I never skip brushing my teeth. I’m a tooth brushing fool. Similarly, life with four people in one house creates a lot of movement and scraps and disorder. Setting things straight takes a bit of time, but not that much time. I’ve been “letting” myself clean in moments when I might otherwise tell myself: “You need to work, or exercise, or write right now,” and it’s helping my overall mood. One thing I’ve noticed about myself over the past couple of years is that if I fill my cup first with the things that bring me joy and are fun for my soul, the restless parts of myself have a lot more patience and “discipline” for the tasks they find challenging. Win win / selfing hack.
And yes, I just said that cleaning is fun for my soul. The truth will set you free.
Buying the six-year-old alcohol markers (read: markers that do not wash off the (white!!) couch). My inner six-year-old is not the one who received new markers, and we’ve had some art mishaps over the years (was it just last year this same child scrawled Help Me! in sharpie on the basement wall?) so I don’t understand all the alchemy in this one, but I do know that these markers have so far bought hours of quiet concentration. And after deferring this purchase for months if not years, when I finally decided it was time, I earned myself the moniker of Best Mom in the World!! I am not checking my rank with the creeping-toward-the-tweens oldest. I’m taking the six-year-old’s verdict as the final one, I’m no fool. I know this crown will disappear one day so I’m wearing it with pride and a few errant marker slashes on top of my desk while I can. I still have a child who hangs on my legs and bars my way on the stairs while asking for a hug. I’m going to take all the crowns while they’re still being proffered.
Birthday fever. I am not a birthday person. I don’t do that well celebrating my own, when it should be easy enough to read my mind and find out what I want. But I’ve recently been able to tap into the festive spirit the gods didn’t bestow on me and procure some decorations and special balloons for someone’s birthday. Believe me when I say: this girl (me) loathes little more than the ruckus and rubbery static caused by balloons. The delight children feel about tossing balloons in the air while squealing quadruples as ire in my bones. And yet! I’ve gotten excited about the prospect of giving these small gifts to someone I love. This is growth, people. I heard Rainn Wilson say on Kate Bowler’s podcast that love is sacrifice. I don’t know that I agree. I recalled he has a son and calmed down a little, because as a woman and a mother, I don’t want to hear a white cisgender man tell me about sacrifice. I read in one of my Anne Lamott books last night that love is action. (I think I’m getting this right. Don’t make me fact check my blog, people! This is a cute convo over coffee, not a seminar paper.) Anyway, that makes more sense to me. Let me show you my love by action, by my choice to honor your happiness. Hence: ballons.
This list could go on forever. Luckily, there are other weeks, other months for me to embarrass myself with you by peeling back the layers of my heart, whence we shall find baby sloths and/or old dogs on raggedy rugs in the sun.
And now, re: people who nail thinking about writing, I’ve chosen a quote from a book my friend gave me. The book is I’m Still Writing: Women Writers on Creativity, Courage, and Putting Words on the Page, by Virginia Ann Boyd. I don’t care for the phrase women writers, as if ‘woman’ needs clarification like a strain of long-toothedness in the cat family, an ancestor of Male Writers, the long-standing woolly mammoths in everyone’s DNA. If I identify as anything in my life, it is usually as a mammal, or a human being. But I do like this book and the following quote made me tear up, which is how I know I’m onto truth that resonates for me.
Here is Joy Harjo on an object that informs her writing habits:
When my mother passed, I inherited an iron cooking pot brought over on the Trail that belonged to her mother’s mother.
Some of the most important stories are not in words, or in poems or other forms of speaking, but in objects of use and beauty. This cooking pot is one of the most potent stories I carry, made at the end of the century before last, one of many such pots used by Native people east of the Mississippi. The one that was passed through generations of women came to me from my mother. It tells of survival, of the labors of women who cooked, cleaned, and uplifted everyone with their stories and songs. The pot is sitting at my feet when I am writing.
-Joy Harjo from Poet Warrior
Very good, right? I deeply agree that many important stories are not in words but in the fabric of life itself, our bones and what they carry.
By the way, I am kind of coming to really like Rainn Wilson lately. I just want to be clear about that. Among many good-hearted people, he is wrestling publicly with what it means to be present with suffering (sometimes his own) and how to be of service to the greater good. He’s also doing it with a sense of humor about himself which always gets my vote. While the word sacrifice can rub me the wrong way because too often it is dictated by others to determine societal virtue, when you choose your own sacrifices, they can be deeply meaningful. Does everything in life come down to choice? God, I hope so. Does this mean we get to make our own choices every single day? More often than not.
Finally, because I mentioned a tennis ball in a junkyard above, I want to tell you that on a whim I plucked my friend Nic’s first novel Doubles from my bookshelf last weekend. It was next to Dalva, one of my favorite Jim Harrison novels, which I also picked up. The beginning of Doubles stopped me in my tracks the first time I read it, and basically has every time I’ve picked it up since. Nic has said he barely remembers what is in that novel, he wrote it so long ago. I find this amazing - whole sentences of past works of mine waft through my head periodically throughout the day. I am helpless to stop this - it feels like my subconscious is writing me. Anyway, the first chapter of Doubles contains a turtle, a vulture, a dog, a pompadour, a small child’s tennis racket, North Carolina and New York City simultaneously, and several storylines that hook me immediately with their melancholy and absurdity. The first time I read that chapter, I didn’t know whether to scream in jealousy or start up a marching band in celebration.
I don’t know why I feel like sharing this with you. Maybe to counter the silliness of my bar of soap? Sometimes I think life’s challenges define our joys. We need them both - the stressors and the triumphs. I think I just always want to make sure people are in charge of their relationships to both. And where we aren’t in control, where life is walloping us good (or your friend is writing circles around you with their many many books), I want everyone to know that crying is always a beautiful option (in the case of my literary jealousies, I prefer a stunned, somewhat burning silence, lol).
How are you tending to your heart today? Do you need to make a spaghetti sauce, or watch a movie, or walk to the 7-Eleven whilst listening to the birds? What music are you listening to while you work? What sentences are wafting up from the past? Whose cookware are you keeping at your feet? Does it warm you to know it’s there, or is it time to take that heavy pot to the garage / curb?
Make sure that your guidance is coming from inside. If it feels brave and tingly and hopeful and true, whatever it’s telling you to do I say, as much as possible, go for it.
Xoxo
Kara
P.S. I did go back and look for that Anne Lamott specific quote and couldn’t find it. Hope I’m not making that up.
P.P.S. The alcohol markers have been . . . a gamble.
“What really makes a human happy?”
Hosiery.
Lol!!
Oh man I’ve been having the worst dreams lately too, eclipse season?! I dreamed last night that a hydrogen bomb went off in my childhood town and I had to flee a giant fire monster that was burning everyone and everything in sight by hopping on a cargo ship to Singapore. (Do I have a hunch as to what this means? Yup.)
The other night, I dreamed Oprah Winfrey took off all her makeup and wig?! And we got to see her just as she is, with short curly died-pink gray hair?! And another dream with this flying spider/cat/fairy creature that was begging for me to take her everywhere but I locked her in a room whenever I went out to keep her safe. (Spoiler, she’s my inner child/artist, and she’d like to travel with me at all times, from the safety of my body thank you very much.)
Anyway, dreams!
Lots and lots of goodness in your post, if I commented on every part that tickled me, this comment would be way too long!
Oh! I’m also reading an Anne Lamott book (the diary about her newborn son) and I think I remember her describing love as “to be with?” Not to prove you wrong, but rather, to note that Anne, like all of us, may just constantly be in the process of trying to figure out how to describe love 🤷♀️
That birdsong fact doesn’t sound like pseudo science to me it sounds like science science. Truth! It makes me think, what else is like that in life? Subconsciously soothing for the nervous system? I want to know all the things that are behind-the-scenes making life calmer.