Beaverland

Hello friends!

Outside of my window the dogwoods are exultant, almost fluorescent, and what was days ago (hours ago?) a green haze is now a ravine full of sunlit leaves. It’s about 90 degrees out there and just looking outside makes me feel thirsty. Some birds and squirrels are doing their thing, Otis the dog is asleep on his bed, and I am sitting here trying to find the first thread to follow to weave something useful for us out of all of the words, pictures, impressions, connections playing with each other in my mind.

I am very interested in beaver(s)

The plural for beaver is both beavers and beaver. This could be something like fish where fishes is the plural if you are talking about multiple types of fish, say salmon and tuna, whereas if you are talking about a lot of the same kind of fish or a bunch of unknown mixed fish then you would just call them ‘fish’. Maybe beaver is like that but there are only two extant species of beaver so maybe not. I’m not going to look into that any more today.

I just ordered a new book called Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America written by Leila Philip. While I was tempted to have it delivered overnight by the Amazon Fairy, I decided I could wait the time it would take for the book to arrive at my local bookshop. Imagine my surprise to find that they have this book in stock already, and now waiting for me at the front counter. I’m encouraged by this — I guess I’m not the only one fascinated by beaver(s).

I am back to writing my own book, the one that used to be called Stuffed. I’m still calling it that, as a working title, but it’s a different book now. Well, it’s a lot of the same book, but what I thought I was going to do isn’t the same as what I’m doing now or what I can’t foresee yet but will be doing soon.

The book won’t be called Stuffed, but I’d like to note, to myself as much as anyone, that the beaver(s) I recently saw at the American Museum of Natural History were stuffed. And it was looking at these beaver/s where I learned that beaver/s are rodents, to my astonishment and delight, and it was learning this that helped to unlock, to open up, to uncover, to suggest what I feel, believe, intuit, hope, determine, choose to be the path I will follow now. A new channel to explore.

But back to the book, the book I am writing (the book that is writing me), I collected all of the words that I’ve written so far that are related to the path down which this book is leading me. I put these words together in one file and arranged them in an order (and saved it and backed that up) and then I printed it out. The stack of printed pages is sitting next to me right now. The top righthand corner of the top page of the stack has a word count that says: 56,100 words. That’s almost a whole book!

Seeing the pages printed out, the quantity of work and thought already undertaken, creates a feeling of momentum and, dare I say, inevitability. This has led to a certain exuberance that has prompted me to mention this printed copy to several folks who have then asked me what’s the book about and I’ve responded, each time, with something like this:

Well, I buried a ratskin bracelet last year under my fig tree and then a squirrel buried my prayer flags in a hole in the maple (and later discarded them) and then we buried Sir Galahad, the hamster, under a stone and now I’ve learned that beaver/s are rodents! It’s a book about reimagining our relationship to the material world, or it was, and also I have a tree decaying in my backyard. Also fungus. It’s about accumulation and restoring flow, about the stories we live within and finding new stories or discovering the stories we are a part of living. It’s about anything can happen and lots of things are happening and we can open our hearts and let go a little and be part of contributing to transformation. Maybe it’s about dreaming a new dream, together?

And then people say back to me:

Well, here’s the thing: I MUST be explaining it in a way that touches something, because the very first person I talked with, just after printing out the 56,100 words last week, said: I think you might enjoy a book I recently read and she shared her copy with me:

May I humbly suggest this book might change how you see your life? This is not a book about money. This is a book about how you look at resource. How you think about what flows through your life and the power you have to notice, appreciate, and direct that flow.

Do you have a wheelbarrow your neighbor could use to transport her giant mulch pile? Do you have a minute to patiently answer the question of a child? Do you have a smile to share with anyone whose path you cross? Do you have a silent prayer of lovingkindness for the man who cut you off in traffic? Do you have birdseed in your basement on a cold day and an empty bird feeder nearby? (These aren’t the kinds of questions she asks in the book, but they are the kinds of questions I asked myself after reading it.)

Looking at what you have, what you can share, what can move through you is transformational. As I was reading her book it occurred to me, being me, that beaver/s are also agents of restoring flow. How do they do it, I wondered? What is their secret?

Other pronouncements

Oops, I’ve done it again. I have a(nother) plan that is related to the book. It is about this newsletter which I love with all my heart(hling). I’m torn: don’t tell you and then just surprise you? Or do tell and then ask you somehow to help me deliver, or provide input or cheerleading or ideas or comments or ???

I don’t want to tell you, I just want to show you. I want to show you something and then ask you something, but in that order. I kinda want to make a club (also), like a dogooders club. What would the club do? Learn about and support regeneration. What do I mean by regeneration? Contribute to flow and healing.

One more thing

Do you remember when the kids and I went walking at a wetland and someone along the path started drawing pictures in the gravel and it reinforced my belief in human goodness and our capacity for spontaneous, unmeasured care and delight?

I was recently in the Trader Joe’s parking lot (yes, illumination visited me again in that same dimly lit garage where I found the lucky quarter that turned my life around). Pushing my cart, bags full of frozen fruit and butter, I noticed someone walking, she had a buoyancy about her, and I thought: she could be the person who left messages for my kids on the path. She could be that beautiful soul who, just for the light of it, drew a funny little frog for a couple of sweet kids on a Monday in one park in one city.

I looked around me at various people getting in and out of their cars, loading and unloading their bags. Buoyant, rushing. Anyone here could be that person, I thought. That beautiful person.

I turned on the ignition. Reversed out very carefully because I’ve hit one of those columns before. Began to drive toward the exit. And then, probably with a tingling at the back of my neck (me did not think this) an awareness moved into me: Everyone here is that person. Everyone here has that beautiful person inside themself.

And now I remind myself of this frequently, or as frequently as I remember to, and I think about sharing it with you. It’s become a personal refrain, or practice, to imagine that the people I see walking down the sidewalk could be/are the person who drew pictures on the path, the person who engaged in playful delight with a couple of strangers, just because we’re alive.

And now, writing this, I wonder, is the most important thing to try to be more of a beautiful person, to know that that capacity is in each of us and to find ways to live it? Or is it at least equally important that we work to see that beautiful person in everyone around us?

This is officially too long

I have thoughts to share with you about Everyday Robots and the small problems they are being created to help us solve (small problems like “making sure the people we care about get a helping hand whenever they need one” so that we are free to “spend our time on the things that really matter”).

My concern, in this instance, is not so much with the robots as with choice of language and the world and stories that language builds and that we live inside of. I have a lot of respect for robots, which is one reason that I am always very polite to them, and I hope they will remember that someday.

But more than robots, I so want to share with you the stories I am reading that fill me with hope. Sand Talk and mitochondria and beautiful books and artists and my barred owl. Otters too, though they are not rodents. Oceans, and Llonio who has been there all this time, setting out his nets.

I hope you will have a beautiful weekend, whether it is spring or fall in the land where you live. I hope you will feel the sun and the wind. I hope that you will feel a part of the life of the world.

With love,

Jennifer