💡 “In a few words, please tell me why you’re calling.”
Navigating a fallen bridge, magnolia blossoms, a nor'easter, a chatty octopus and a broken EV, all with the help of Substack
“I offer myself to divine creation, use my sound, my voice, my heart in a way that will benefit the world most.” ~
It’s been a week, hasn’t it? More and more, I find myself relying on Substack to companion me through turbulent weeks like this. I encounter a luminous bit of writing just when my fear-addled heart needs it most. A swing toward frustrated cynicism is checked instantly with an expansive metaphor—like this one, born from an interaction with
.1Writing is how I (dare I say, “we”?) process the outer and inner weather of daily life. I had that experience last Tuesday when I crashed out some words about the Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Thursday
In anticipation of a series I’m planning with Substack writers, I asked in this post what sort of interview you would most enjoy—either as a reader or as a subject. Readers not only chose from five different themes, several offered additional brilliant questions and strategies. In a last-minute surge, Wendell Berry pulled ahead of Proust!
If all goes according to plan, juicy interviews with some of my favorite Substack writers will be coming soon.
Friday
I finished
's debut (best-selling!) novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, which fascinates me as someone who also experiments with non-human POV in my stories. She has a presence here on Substack, so I hope she’ll see how much I enjoyed this book. Not only does the story open with a Giant Pacific Octopus narrator, the co-protagonist is a 70-year-old widow who is just a delight.Non-human POVs in fiction are a creative way to challenge human centricity. I’m working on a collection of short stories that bring nature to the foreground and nudge people out of the center. I’ll be sharing the first in April, a story narrated by a maple tree about a forest threatened by a fracking pipeline.
We have an abundance of writers, both fiction and non-fiction, who offer daily doses of wonder and awe from the natural world. To help us find each other,
has been promoting the idea of a ‘Nature’ category on Substack (how is that not already a thing?). She gathered a marvelous index of over 90 nature writers on a recent post that has prompted more discussion on Notes.2Saturday
We slogged through a nor-easter’s cold baptismal deluge to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, for the Es Devlin show that I heard about from
months ago. To begin, we were ushered in to a small rectangular room for an immersive multimedia experience around a white-painted work table set with open white books and drawings, white scissors and rulers and pencils, the four walls lined with white shelves on which were placed white books, models, sculptures and nature fragments: a tiny skull, a feather, a shell.3As I sat there watching videos of pages turning and Es Devlin’s beringed hand drawing, listening to her talk about her interests, approach, curiosities, and love of drawing, I was overwhelmed with a strong emotion I could only name as longing. She gives herself full permission to explore, underline books, make notes, seek out meaning, draw, cut, collage, assemble, dream, and make. Her imagination has utterly free rein. I felt this, this is the life I could’ve lived, had I been more courageous, less careful and dutiful, less trapped in conformity, bent on pleasing others, craving praise for being good. To be surrounded by what might have been was almost too much.
Writing this now, I see that I jumped too quickly to the habitual place of unworthiness, of comparing and finding lack. Because on another, deeper and truer level, it felt very much like falling in love.
“Wear your heart on your sleeve and never grow out of that shirt.” ~
4
Sunday
Returning to the dangerous unquestioned assumption of human centrality, I started the day ranting my response in this Note to an otherwise promising post about the aesthetics of ‘progress’ that began as an art history discussion of Leo Marx’s book, The Machine in the Garden (which I read and loved in grad school) but quickly veered into techno-optimism.
The highlight of the day was having brunch with Adam and his wife, about whom I’ve been reading in his marvelous series on how they met.5
We talked about writing and travel and our kids. I would say “like old friends,” but the meeting had a different, more delicate quality. Traveling light with no backlog of history, we embarked on a treasure-hunt for shared loves—which we discovered in abundance: sailing, southern France, dogs and gardens, art and creativity, great novels. We did talk about writing, but I hope not too much, for our spouses’ sakes. We each had our own reactions of longing to the intro room of the Es Devlin exhibit, which delighted me.
Monday
From
, I learned that magnolia blossoms are edible.6 Our exchange led to an amusing metaphor. I shared this photo of our tree in bloom, shortlived due to a shredding by the savage wind. She wrote in agreement, “The petals are like fragile sails,” but a little blur in my eye read, “The petals are like fragile saints.”Tuesday
Baltimore’s “cathedral of infrastructure,”7 the Key Bridge, was destroyed in 20 seconds after being rammed by a 95,000-ton container ship that had lost power. I wrote this Note in a fever of need to appreciate not only the first responders, but the whole back bench of people who keep our complex systems running. I should do a whole post on systems thinking, which we just don’t learn and we really should because the whole world is a marvelous web of interconnecting, interdependent systems of people, technology and nature.
It turns out that the shock of a broken bridge resonates, both for the metaphor of disconnection and the harsh reality of aftermath. Metaphor-making is one way we try to soften the heartbreaking grief of sudden loss, and it’s the people who matter most—the heroes and heroines flocking to the scene in the cold dark of night. The construction workers from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, working the night shift to fix potholes to minimize inconvenience to the 31,500 drivers who depended on that bridge.8 Six hard-working men sacrificed much, and now their lives, seeking a better life for their families.
Wednesday
A beautiful piece on what work is, by
led to my rediscovery of the poet Philip Levine (from whom Joshua borrowed his essay’s title).9 I appreciate writing like this that gives me fresh insights.“I’m struck by how often adults project work stories onto children at play. I fall into this trap myself, seeing a future as an accountant in my son’s sorting of colored pencils, or in the perfect lines he likes to make with his toy cars. His fascination with building must mean that he’ll someday be an engineer. It never seems enough to see pleasure or mastery as the end in itself.”
As part of that series,
’s piece on work and fatherhood is both touching and wise.10 It helped me realize that I don’t believe in academia so much as I believe in the intense passion of the young people I teach. Their all-in intention to make a difference feels different from my anxiety-fueled need to be good when I was their age.I’m so glad those pieces pulled me out of writing a what would have been a ranty post about my Chevy Bolt EV being useless to me for over seven weeks now, due to a charging problem that the dealer hasn’t yet successfully diagnosed or repaired. Coincidentally,
posted this excellent piece on the gratuitous smear campaign now underway against EVs in the presidential election.11I am genuinely worried about the grand electrification project in this country upon which so much depends, due to flawed humans and our complex systems being so necessary to the project. I’ll spare you the boring details, except to say the title of this post is an actual auto-reply on Chevrolet’s help line, and it broke me.12
I hung up and wrote this post. So grateful to have found this community of thoughtful writers and generous readers.
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Another way to show love is to share this post with others by restacking it on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!
Why I Hate Wind is about so much more than wind.
The post is Nature on Substack and continues in this Note.
Not too late to go! It closes August 11, 2024.
The Tears That Got Me Here is a balm for those of us who cry too easily. Solidarity.
You must start at the beginning, with this brilliant piece. It’s a paid series. Please invest. I do not have an affiliate account with Adam but he did pay the tip on Sunday, which was very generous of him.
Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, has quite a way with words.
This article (gift link) in the Washington Post has more details on the workers.
What Work Is and, as often the case, the comments section is full of wisdom.
Your reward for making it this far. 😊
“In a few words, please tell me why you’re calling.”
“I am happy to tell another human why I am calling, but I do not share my life with things that cannot love me in return. Sorry, HAL.”
Julie I simply adore this post of yours! Thank you so much for sharing your learning and wisdom. I've written down the beautiful quote you opened with from Sarah Blondin; I LOVED learning about "Remarkably Bright Creatures" which I had not heard of, and after looking it up on Amazon, this is priceless:
"Marcellus the octopus sees us with such sensitivity and compassion. “Why can humans not use their millions of words to simply tell one another what they desire?”
“Secrets are everywhere. Some humans are crammed full of them. How do they not explode? It seems to be a hallmark of the human species: abysmal communication skills.”
“Humans… For the most part you are dull and blundering. But occasionally you can be remarkably bright creatures.”
This novel now on my To Read list and I LOVE this that you write, "Non-human POVs in fiction are a creative way to challenge human centricity." YES! May more of us wake up to the fact that we are not the only sentient beings living on this planet!
I also love this idea of a ‘Nature’ category on Substack and agree, how is it that it's not already a thing???? Especially a category that recognizes the spiritual aspect of our ecological crisis - doesn't the grassroots nature of how BRAIDING SWEETGRASS became a best seller on the NYT list TEN YEARS AFTER IT WAS FIRST PUBLISHED, tell people anything??? That and the fact that it continues to resonate with more and more readers. I'll stand down from my soap box now😉
And I could go on listing everything that speaks to me in your post, but I will stop there for now. Thanks again Julie! 🥰✨🌟💖🙏🕊️
p.s. one more thing: I love this idea especially and will love to read it when you write it: "I should do a whole post on systems thinking, which we just don’t learn and we really should because the whole world is a marvelous web of interconnecting, interdependent systems of people, technology and nature."