Just a little heads up:

Talking today about death, grief, loss, the hard stuff, no painful details included…

And a small housekeeping note! I have been offline for the past two weeks, so if you sent me an email, I haven’t seen it yet but hope to catch up this week.

Announcement & ebook reminder

If you’ve already given to Barrington’s Discretionary last year or this year, you should have received my ebook (by email) on how I approach and plan my year, how I think about time and am in relationship with time.

You’ll get a copy as a thank you when you give any sum to Barrington’s Discretionary Fund, hope you enjoy!

More housekeeping: You can subscribe to posts by email again!

If you aren’t seeing these updates in your in your email and want to, you can can solve that here.

This will pop up a new page on Follow.It that lets you subscribe via email, newsletter, or RSS reader. They say “expect 50 stories a week”, and yikes to that imaginary number, once a week is the dream.

Strawberry tip water and other apotropaic delights

The card draw

I don’t know why this card hit me so hard but it did.

The card says protection from cynicism, and features a line of prayer flags…

It’s from a deck called Portable Fortitude by Corinna Dross that my friend Goshman gave me a few years ago when they visited me at the dome (was that 2018?), and each card is a different form of protection.

Something felt important about this card. Protection from cynicism.

And the idea that prayer flags maybe aren’t so much about the prayers as they are a way to divest from cynicism. Maybe that’s the prayer. Maybe.

A new-to-me word

I love that there is a use list included for the cards, and that list includes: valentines, cheap health insurance, prayer flags, apotropic charms, writing prompts…

You know how much I love a new-to-me word, so I wanted to look up what apotropic means, but I turned off wifi for the summer, so I had to ask friends to look it up for me, and here is what I learned.

apotropic = to ward off evil

apotropic charms = something you wear or use for protection spells

Someone else sent me a dictionary definition for a version of this word, spelled apotropaic: “having the power to avert evil influence or bad luck”, from Greek apotrepo “to ward off”…

The gate

I was painting the gate across from my little home. It was the exact right day for gate-painting: not raining, not too hot, plenty of cloud cover on a beautiful New Mexico summer day.

This gate painting project has been wanting to happen for years, but there was always a reason why it wasn’t the time, and I thought it wouldn’t happen before my trip, but then Sunday it was the time.

I took a break from gate-painting and went inside to drink water. There was a text for me from a number I didn’t know, letting me know that my friend Michael had died.

Michael

Michael was many things to me, all of them wonderful, but above all else he was my co-conspirator in cooking experiments.

The person I would text first about an idea, an intriguing recipe, a flavor combination I’m playing with, or what I made for Luscious Breakfast.

The person whose warm perspective I am always attuned to inside of the creative process of being someone who cooks. Someone whose take I always want, whose opinion I always cherish.

You might remember him from a story I told here last year I think, a story about the quality of refinement.

Refinement

We were talking and I’d said something about how I thought maybe I was stuck in a bit of a rut in the kitchen, making the same things, just with tiny, tiny changes. And he said, no, no, this is good, this is the process of refinement.

He was always so encouraging and reassuring in his framing of whatever I was working on, always enthusiastic, always happy for me and excited with me.

I miss him tremendously. Grief is also a process of refinement, I think. You do a lot of the same things, maybe eventually slightly differently.

Movement

When I received the news, I immediately needed to move, to be in motion, a state of doing, not where I was.

It felt as though, if I didn’t do something in that moment, something active, that I would simply explode? Like my body would go through some sort of shattering event.

I painted the rest of the gate. Then I painted a table that did not need to be painted but it was there, and I had paint leftover in the tray, and I had to be in motion.

Then I moved some rocks around. The paint was all dry when the rains came, and then I opened all the windows and jogged in slow figure eights in my kitchen until it was dark outside.

Strawberry tops

It would be impossible to list the many gifts and marvelous delights I have received from knowing Michael, in addition to memories of our conversations and beloved themes, but here is one:

Michael taught me that whenever you have strawberries, you can save the tops and make strawberry top water. Strawberry tip water? Like a refreshing spa water.

I wonder how many pictures we have sent each other of strawberry top water.

Many, I’m sure. Hahaha. Probably a downright silly number. I could look but I don’t want to.

Refreshing

Michael was a talented baker and a creative chef, and could plate anything beautifully, but something about remembering those pictures of a jar of strawberry tops in water is a calming and grounding image in my mind right now.

It is good to have something that is both refreshing and surprising (in a good way).

And sometimes that something is a drink, and sometimes it is a friendship.

It’s good to be taken by surprise like that. I am grateful to have been surprised.

Breakfast delights / the PRIMACY of delights

We both were enormous fans of breakfast, both as a concept and as a criminally underrated event in the world of cooking.

We talked a lot about breakfast.

Sometimes you need to wax poetic about the simple things, and all that is possible inside of simplicity, inside the simple things.

Also

Also: there is a time and place for everything.

Also, a great Michael-ism: “I know we’ve already discussed the primacy of the chocolate-cake-and-coffee breakfast…”

Primacy! I love this so much. The primacy of decadence, the primacy of cake for breakfast. This feels so important.

Also: fuel for what is to come.

Also: homemade salsa macha on everything.

Yummy culprits

Once I asked him his thoughts about this flavor combination versus that one and he said, “Oh yeah, that’s tough to narrow down, lots of yummy culprits to investigate.”

That’s also a great Michael-ism.

The world is full of yummy culprits, and they need to be investigated!

Apple trees

Our last conversation was about apple trees.

He was telling me about an orchard he liked to visit, and asked if I was going to plant starts, or if I had another plan for apple trees here.

I told him about my plans, four trees to start, and how someone I know from the farmers market is married to a fruit tree expert, so I will ask them.

He said: Go ahead and do it! In spring, or whenever the appropriate time is.

Whenever the appropriate time is

Obviously it is never a good time to be surprised by loss, and it is also never a good time for an expected, anticipated loss.

Loss fucking sucks. That is a known entity among the. many unknowns, and remains true.

But the timing of how I found out was right timing for me, even though the person sharing the news felt bad that it had taken the amount of time it had taken to get in touch with me.

The timing happened how it happened, and I am not upset about it nor do I regret anything. Go ahead and do it, in the time that feels right for it, whenever the appropriate time is.

A SMOPL

I am thinking about my personal practice of SMOPL, a ritual of Something Meaningful On A Personal Level, and what these will be for me, these small Rituals Of Michael.

This morning I ate a plum for plum season, enjoying the fruits of the season is a very good way to honor Michael, and if you also would like to really enjoy the hell out of some fruit for him, I would love that.

Something delicious is there to be treasured and enjoyed

Make something delicious.

Or eat something delicious that someone else made!

Or eat something terrible! Michael was always trying bagels, even though Arizona is generally speaking not a place that excels at bagels, and then being annoyed that they were not good enough.

I love that. Yes! Be justifiably annoyed at something not good enough! Now or whenever the appropriate time is.

More Michael things, more rituals of Michael

He liked to forage and be outside. Maybe I will taste something of the earth…

He loved to make shortbread. And gelato. And ferment things!

We were both cranky childhood victims of early 1980s obsessive health food culture, so we would laugh about the tragic carob desserts we had to eat then, and try to make up for it now. Have some real chocolate for Michael if you like chocolate.

Or something else. Something deeply pleasurable, now or whenever the appropriate time is, whenever that turns out to be.

What do I know about grief

Here is what I know about grief.

Grief is messy and disruptive and huge. Grief is a doozy.

And: our culture simply does not make enough (or any) room for this, even though reality is that we are walking through this world in pain.

Tattered, etc

Endings and transitions are so challenging, and sometimes I have to whisper to myself that grief is messy, it’s okay that it feels messy. Why wouldn’t it. Messy is the nature of the experiences.

Like tattered prayer flags, the tattering is how the prayers are set free, supposedly.

That’s kind of all I want to say about that.

Getting to know Michael has brought me a great deal of joy, contentment, laughter, and appreciation for the pleasures in life, and I hope that reading about him will make you want to really enjoy the hell out of a plum, for example.

For example

Or maybe you will go for a walk outside, for example.

Or simply decide you will do something for joy, when the time is right.

Or have cake for breakfast, when the time is right.

Or something else.

I am going to learn more about planting apple trees and also I am not going to stress about apple trees. It will happen or it won’t, I am going to trust in right timing.

I am going to trust in right timing

Yes, I am going to trust in right timing, I am going to drink strawberry top water, and take a breath and another breath and feel earth under my feet. To life.

The important thing isn’t the apple trees, the important thing is that I am holding on to aliveness. To a desire to participate in this experiment of aliveness.

His memory is a blessing, and also I’m mad about that? He should still be here. I am mad about grief and loss, and that is also the human experience.

To joy

Michael was someone who really, truly took joy in the pleasures of life.

So I have been adding the word JOY to my morning sun salutation poetry. And ready. Ready to re-dedicate myself to joy. Ready for a devotion of joy.

I am ready to be grounded in joy. Ready to be strikingly joyful. Ready to be powerfully joyful. Ready to be fearless in my pursuit of joy. I am ready for the fierce joys, to be fierce in joy.

May it be so, or something even better.

The shrine

I wanted to go somewhere, for Michael, if that makes sense, and I didn’t know where that was, and so there was a long winding drive, and also I ended up at a roadside shrine. Like, a Catholic shrine. A very New Mexico tiny shrine.

Michael and I are both Jewish, so this might seem odd, but I figured he’d get it, and there it was, and there I was, and I needed to talk to him and to place a stone somewhere, other than by my gate.

And being there felt preventative somehow, like chicken soup.

Or strawberry top water. A holy dose of protection and sanctuary in the moment.

Apotropic / Apotropaic

I don’t know if strawberry top water wards off evil spirits, or if anything does for that matter, but I do believe that it is a fundamental human experience to wish hopefully towards hopeful things, and at other times to fervently try to hope ourselves away from the hard and scary things.

So here’s to the fundamental human experience, and to my own ability to make believe.

I am going to imagine that strawberry top water wards off whatever needs warding off. Maybe it can encourage more delight in the world.

And god knows this world could use some delighting, some intentional fierce pursuit of joy.

Some intentional fierce pursuit of joy

Yes. The world could use some of this. I could use some of this.

Protection from cynicism, in the tattering times. Fierce pursuit of joy, in the tattering times.

When we can, to the extent that we can.

Strawberry top water for good luck. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake. To life!

Come play in the comments, I appreciate the company

You are welcome to leave a stone for Michael or light a candle, real or imaginary.

And you are welcome to share anything that sparked for you while reading, anything that helped or anything on your mind, make some wishes! I am lighting a candle for all of it.

Or anything you’d like to toss into the wishing pot, the healing power of the collective is no small thing, companionship helps.

Whatever comes to mind (come to heart?), let’s support each other’s hope-sparks and wishes…

Thank you to everyone who reads, porch breaths, the winding path, the many clues that land when they land, receptivity, keeping on keeping on.

New ebook alert!!!

Aka fun bonus material on how I relate to time and map out my quarters for the year.

Anyone who gives to Barrington’s Discretionary this week (see below) will get this by email as a pdf!

A request

If you received clues or perspective or want to send appreciation for the writing and work/play we do here, I appreciate it tremendously. Between Long Covid and traumatic brain injury recovery, things are slow going.

I am accepting support (with joy & gratitude) in the form of Appreciation Money to Barrington’s Discretionary Fund. Asking is not where my strength resides but Brave & Stalwart is the theme these days, and pattern-rewriting is the work, it all helps with fixing the many broken things.

And if those aren’t options, I get it, you can light a candle for support (or light one in your mind!), share this with someone who loves words, tell people about these techniques, approaches and themes, send them here, it all helps, it’s all welcome, and I appreciate it and you so much. ❤️