Dear friends,
It's been good to unplug briefly during this season. I hope you've been able to do so as well, to separate from essential work, muting the static that gets in the way of being right here, now.
There was a moment for me—as long as two hours—where the beauty of the Earth stilled my heart. It was on Christmas day, which was mild and sunny in the Northeast. I was walking with my son, his wife, their dog. A field near their home, roots underfoot, brambles, naked silver trees, an old crusty beehive way up high. There was a river, too, with two storybook swans feeding in the dappled water.
I can still feel it.
Having a dog, I've learned, helps to quiet you. You must take the pup outside to stretch its legs, to run, pee socially, to poop. Our sons have adopted dogs within the last three years. I can see the calm it has brought into their lives.
I want to hold on to this feeling, to being present, wide open. I want to feel and receive the world. This is my wish for 2024.
Earth from Space
Just now I am reading Orbital by the English writer Samantha Harvey. I am three quarters of the way through this small book in length that is hugely original. The New Yorker says, "Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it's barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare."
Samantha Harvey has imagined six astronauts and cosmonauts, from the U.S., Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan, men and women. They're orbiting the earth in one of the last space stations before it’s disassembled, traveling at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour, living together in cramped spaces for six months and more.
There is that idea of a floating family, but in some ways they're not really a family at all - they're both much more and much less than that. They're everything to each other for this short stretch of time because they're all there is…. They are each to the other a representative of the human race - they each have to suffice for billions of people. They have to make do in lieu of every earthly thing - families, animals, weather, sex, water, trees.
Orbital is a love-letter to Earth. It provides astonishing information on what it might feel like to be an astronaut in space. (But it's not for readers who insist on plot.)
The book reminds me in some ways of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic that gathers the voices of Japanese mail-order brides brought to San Francisco at the turn of the century. The voices of the women meld into a kind of song. (Buddha in the Attic is one of my favorite books of all time.)
What is most important to you? What is your wish for 2024?
Can't wait to read that book and go on another walk with you and Sheldon in February!
An that would be a life well lived, because we are also giving to others when we truly see others around us. People need to be seen and heard.