The other week we watched a television programme in which someone scaled a coastal redwood tree and at this point you whispered, more or less inaudibly, Sequoia sempervirens. They are the tallest trees in the whole world and the presenter of the programme said while passing branch after branch they are so tall they can drink water from the clouds.
And the other thing, which is about birds. Specifically the Manx shearwater, Puffinus puffinus, because an individual ringed when already at least five years old in the 1950s was picked up again in 2003—at least 55 years old, the oldest known wild bird. This means one small, sooty bird weighing between 350 and 575g would have flown over eight million kilometres (five million miles) in its lifetime. I live on the wrong side of Scotland to see any of them on the west coast island they prefer, nocturnal there in that they only visit their breeding colonies under the cover of darkness, raising young before migrating to the seas off Brazil and Argentina. Near-silent while out at sea during the day, they call loudly at night when visiting their nesting burrows, “although moonlight depresses the amount of calling.”1 Moonlight depresses the amount of calling. At night their vocalisations are so eerie and odd that to someone unaware of the birds or unfamiliar with their sounds they can seem awful—in various languages and places their nightly shrieks have apparently given them a nickname of ‘Devil bird’.
“Manx shearwaters are able to fly directly back to their burrows when released hundreds of kilometres away, even inland.”2
Imagine being able to walk yourself home from hundreds of unrecognisable kilometres away? So sure of where you need to go, the direction and the pulling feeling of yes, this is home, this is home, this is home.
I spent the first three days of the week horizontal with a migraine of horrors which in turn means that the rest of it has felt uncomfortably viscous and opaque and not unlike a can of condensed milk. There is a new type of migraine medication recently approved for use in Scotland, and because I’ve tried with great un-success at least two types of migraine-specific drug already I would likely to able to try it. Feelings about this are mixed, not because of the drugs’ newness but because it’s bizarrely possible to absorb chronic pain into your sense of self, into a reasonable reason for not moving forwards with certain aspects of work and life, and to feel vaguely frightened by all of the days that would be made available to you were the pain no longer there.
It is July, the middle of, but you wouldn’t know that because I’m wearing knitwear and it’s raining incredibly and the rivers are looking hurried. The current and catastrophic flooding in various countries seems acutely and blindingly like shouts of desperation, of isn’t this obvious now, but people are so quick to damage and smash and so slow to heal anything, including themselves. The rain this morning, although soft, could be felt at such an angle that even a large umbrella was more or less ineffective, and it was easy to conclude within the ten minutes it took me to walk between my desk and a cup of coffee that surviving in this climate was like asking an equatorial lizard to be content and productive inside of a refrigerator.
Most of the houseplants grow happily enough, but after over a year several of them are becoming unsurprisingly dissatisfied with the quantity of light at this northern latitude, and we look at them forlornly, and worry, and say things like we need to give this one more light but it’s just that there never is more, no matter which window or which direction or how much we want it.
I find the best conversations I have are ones I’m then unable to recount much of at all to anyone else. Each week—Mondays usually, midday often—I speak on the phone to a dearest person and it is one of the fastest-moving hours of all. This says something I think of the ease and authenticity, of always thinking that half a day could slip by in the same manner without so much as a blink. If I’m asked later what we spoke about I often have no idea, but I know that it has been a million tiny things and that each of them felt like ladybirds.
Last week I was down in the south visiting family, where the sun was out and the dark came much earlier, bringing with it bats and a coolness and walking around the village at night in the hopes of seeing one particular white cat who will climb on your shoulders and drool on your body and cover you in pale hairs and give you reason to believe everything will be OK.
On the first night we separately felt something with too many legs crawling over us, you on your shoulder and me on my head, in my case abruptly woken from a dream about escaping one apocalypse or another, though we didn’t corroborate our accounts until the next morning. I then saw the spider on the carpet a couple of days later while rearranging belongings and felt unkindly towards it. Upon our return home, unpacking things after a tired sleep, I saw the very same spider on the bed—brazen, unconcerned that it had been transported by car by plane by another car over four hundred miles.
I put a glass over it and messaged you at work, explaining the situation and asking whether I should keep it so that you could say hello to it later. You do not like spiders, so you said no, you would not like this, and I put it outside for the birds to have a small snack.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Pieces by Brooklyn-based illustrator Karlotta Freier.
“That’s not my reason for being. When I am done with this, I will do other things. I do not have a purpose any more than a mouse or a slug or a thornbush does. Why do you have to have one in order to feel content?
You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
— Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built
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The regular, numbered newsletter is currently free for everyone to read, with paid supporters now receiving several additional posts each month, including short stories, previously archived writings, and more detailed looks into creative processes. Arrangements in June was the first of these paid posts, an excerpt of which is readable below:
Birkhead (2012) pp. 168–172.
I read these Sometimes Newsletter installments and love every one and the images. If only i could subscribe and receive more. I read the news of floods and heat...and yet .....receive messages about luncheons, and travel plans.....and look from my bed to a blue sky with small lenticular clouds and the cats romping over the shorn yard...cheerful email and messages and why not? What can be done but what is left but to enjoy and focus on what is near very near, say what to have for dinner and what color to paint the door and maybe go back to bed for a bit.
Another wonderful piece. The thought and care you put into this work is evident.