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I’m at a workshop in a meadow under a wolf pine.1 The topic is “Grieving with Pine.” An hour or so in, after greeting the pines, and learning about their medicine, lore, and specifications, we are invited to try “pining.”2 Everyone stands up one by one and shares something of their current experience with grief. They hold a pine bough above their heads, swishing it back and forth. The sound is hypnotic. The form is sacred. Dust, pollen, and bits of pine rain down, caught for a moment in the horizontal light of the afternoon sun.

Suzanne tells us that the health benefits of walking in a pine forest for 20 minutes last for 30 days and not only is this something our bodies know but scientists have now proven it is “true.” She suggests this creates opportunities for planting pine forests next to hospitals, nursing homes, and schools.

I think about the small garden in the middle of the maze-like memory unit where my grandmother-in-law passed away. Its unmarked exits the design of nightmares. The swing she used to rock back and forth on with Gloria, my oldest child, at her side. How angry she was at having had to move there. How she re-packed her things every day, saying that her (deceased) husband would be picking her up soon. Our guilt. Holding her hand the day before she passed away. How they removed her things from her room without telling us there was a limit on how long we had before they’d get rid of them. How the old photograph of her grandmother as a child that my mother-in-law had framed for her disappeared along with her rings. A month and many phone calls later,3 the rings showed up, as did the framed photograph, almost half a year later. It had been hanging on the back of the door of the room but no staff members were ever in her room with the door closed so it had never been discovered. We got it back.

Another Day.
Gloria is speaking into my phone, asking, “How do you say, ‘The Far Side is my favorite book and there is a picture in it of ants on top of a mountain looking at a person with a magnifying glass’ in Arabic?” “What is the life cycle of an apple tree?” “How do you say, ‘Some days are good, some days are bad,’ in Russian?”

Gloria is giving me a Band-Aid after having scratched me in a moment of rage. I’m bleeding. She’s six. We dip her fingernails in warm water anointed with rose oil, then cut them back. She asks how rose oil is made. I remind her of the jars full of calendula blossoms and olive oil in front of the window downstairs. She sees possibility in our rose bush, the one my mother delivered to us during the height of the pandemic, the one that is called, “Hope for Humanity,” the one the squirrels keep eating the buds off of, the one we’re trying our best to keep alive, aware of the tongue-in-cheek story of what’s at stake.

We planted the rosebush underneath our electric box, the one that shorted out one day three years ago nearly causing our entire house to explode. I pulled the napping children from their beds and gathered them with me under the apple trees by our laundry line. We watched as the firefighters came. I shuddered with fear that we’d lose everything. We lost nothing. We went back inside.

Last Week.
I’m standing in my driveway with my dad telling him about the pamphlet I found in Gloria’s backpack for the evangelical club that meets in the art class of her public school on Thursday afternoons. I’m irate about the use of my kid’s backpack to attempt to evangelize her, going on about church and state, church and state, the dangers of the club’s teachings.4

My father tells me, “These conversations have been happening for years,” and “You realize what you sound like, right? You sound just like the other side.”

From some cursory canvassing, I learned that friends in liberal areas say they have never seen such a flyer be distributed by a school, and that they can’t imagine their school administrators allowing it to be distributed. Friends in more conservative areas say, “Yep, this is a thing. It's an after-school club, that's legal. But that also means that THIS after-school club is legal.”

A fellow parent recommends waiting to attend a school board meeting until my anger has turned into something that can serve me. I heed her advice.

En Route.
On my way to the Grieving With Pine workshop, I happened upon an episode of Hidden Brain on the radio: Taking Control of Your Time. Psychologist Cassie Molginer Holmes shared the results of a study that was done to measure the impact of perceived time scarcity on empathy. The results were predictable: people who were told that they were going to be late to a meeting were much less likely to stop and help someone who was having a medical emergency/clearly in distress than those who perceived of themselves as having a more leisurely amount of time to get to where they were going.

(See Exhibit A/You are Here: the world falling apart under late-stage capitalism.)

Back in the Meadow.
When it’s my turn to share—to pine—I cannot. I’ve heard my workshop companions share grief around climate change, loved ones succumbing to illness, mourning a mother a year after her death, the loss of a dear friend, ways of being, loss of connection to self. My grief, though activated/palpable doesn’t feel specific enough to be articulated. I’m living/falling through it.

Suzanne says it’s okay to pass and that she also encourages everyone who feels able, to share. That practicing growing more comfortable with sharing our grief collectively can help to normalize grieving, making each of us feel less alone, or that the weight is not solely ours to bear.

Hugs are offered to people who would like them. My lower lip trembles. I try to wipe the tears that warm my cheeks out of existence without making a commotion. I ask for and receive a solid hug from Suzanne, a hug clad in mutual wool and grief under the wolf pine.

At the end of the workshop, after shedding tears and co-creating pine medicine, we circle the 130-year-old pine, holding them as they held us.

Epigraph: One Week Later
During a break from mowing the lawn I find myself a pine bough, creep into the forest, and whip it back and forth above my head. It is a relief to understand the experience of this sort of pining, its choreography, the force of wind through the pines.

I’m reminded of this poster by Anna Fusco I came across the other day, a poster inspired by an essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer.5 It reads,

“There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share. There is enough if we share.”

I believe it.

New Work in the World

Six months or so, I decided to use all the time I was spending searching for new jobs to pitch stories instead. Then there were stories to write, deadlines. It was good, it is good, I’m excited about it—grateful. Hopeful, even. But there was no time in between to you know, empathize with people in distress, process the harvest from our garden, or gaze upon pines, so I paused.

Now, without urgency but with much enthusiasm I’m reaching out to “preeminent” biologists who work with certain insects and flowers with color-changing capabilities. With some fervor, I visited a certain museum. Lighting struck on my drive home. Stay tuned.

Currents

The big news I mentioned not being able to announce last month is now fair game: my partner, Derek Yorks, and his good friend, Ben Stookey, won the first ever US Fish & Wildlife Theodore Roosevelt Genius Prize for Innovation in the invasive species category. (Shout out to Murray Carpenter for the story!)

In a nutshell, they’ve created a smart trapping system that uses artificial intelligence to trap invasive species with the potential for deployment in all kinds of ecosystems where such species are throwing off the balance in harmful ways (brown tree snakes in Guam, Burmese pythons in Florida, etc.). You can read more about them (Wild Vision Systems) on their website and the prize they won here.

Listening to

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs new album, Cool it Down on repeat. (I love this interview with Karen O by Jia Tolentino and the way O talks about writing/receiving songs.)

Persona: The French Deception, an investigative podcast hosted by Evan Ratliff (who is also one of the hosts of the Longform podcast). My favorite parts of podcasts like this are in the last episode, where Evan and his co-producer knock on the door of one of their sources, have a confrontation, and process the experience directly afterward, on tape (a la Connie Walker in Stolen, and Hamza Syed and Brian Reed in the Trojan Horse Affair).

Reading

This devastating article by Casey Cep about Johnson & Johnson. I got so incensed while reading it that I felt like I was 14 again and discovering PETA for the first time. 

adrienne maree brown’s magnificent Emergent Strategy. 

Works-in-progress by my uncle, Heather Christle, and my friend, Holli Cederholm.

Watching

Dick Johnson is Dead by Kirsten Johnson.

Housekeeping

There is no housekeeping. (Except, I would like to know how one becomes a “successful”6 freelance writer when one has a time deficit and is not able to set aside savings. If you know, could you tell me?)

The freelance writing business seminar I’m taking tells me that I should be reaching out to several contacts a week to tell them that I’m available for work, to network, etc., but I’m afraid that taking on additional work right now will make everything feel impossible/fall apart.7 (In Girlhood, Melissa Febos jokingly calls the things she tries to do every day to take care of herself, “modules.” I’m failing to complete my daily modules.8)

Last night I told my partner that I wanted to finish writing this, exercise, read and give feedback on the pieces of writing I’m currently working with. In response, he said, “Probably you can just go to sleep, Michele.”

I’m reminded of words by writer, documentary filmmaker, activist, and teacher Toni Cade Bambara, spotted on Jenna Wortham’s Instagram:

“I have no shrewd advice to offer developing writers about this business of snatching time and space to work. I do not have anything profound to offer … except to say that it will cost you something.”

Good night/good morning.

And thank you for reading/sharing/commenting/subscribing/etc.

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