No.281

May 09, 2026

Without any particular warning May has materialised and is now sitting in sharp, mainly green focus. Here it has brought with it a lot of good and decent things: dandelions, so-small-as-to-be-unidentifiable bumblebees, more light, more warmth, the first swifts, intense Orion work, a mended roof, a friend pacing up and down in their garden while we speak on the phone (this happens for two consecutive weeks), increased book responsibilities, the neighbour’s cherry blossom after a hailstorm.

It has also brought with it migraines, a disagreeable cold virus, and the feeling that I’m soon going to run out of things to say. Disbelief can be a silencing force both for good, for bad, or for no real reason at all.

One of the most reassuring things of late has just been noticing people keep going. It’s possible to observe many of them moving here and there while I sit in a certain corner of the sofa, as the window faces out and down onto the street. People keep going to get groceries, to take their grandchildren to the park, to make each other dinner. People keep doing things because that is what, more or less, we are all designed to do. They keep planting seeds and then waiting. They keep staring at the sun when they shouldn’t. They keep purchasing each other dying flowers cloaked in plastic to try and say I love you. They keep walking their dogs, and they keep folding their kids clothes, and they keep running out of breakfast cereal.

I can’t pinpoint exactly why these mundane, often unchanging practices and/or facts of life are reassuring right now, but I suspect it has to do with scale. While our planet tries to cope with terrors and brutalities and concerns so huge as to be incomprehensible and searingly traumatic in the same inhale, anchoring oneself down into the things which at the end of all the days matter most—caregiving, nourishment, our physical and real surroundings—feels about the only sane thing to do. That and fighting against the brutalities and the societal rot like a small hot hell, of course.

The night you noticed the first swifts had returned from Africa I was already out in the garden, and you came crashing down the wooden stairs so fast I thought something was seriously wrong. Not so, and instead of wrong you were luminous and pointing a finger towards to sky, and our eyes adjusted to the highest heights of their dark scythe wings and we looked and looked. Then when our necks hurt enough from the uncomfortable yet important angle we went back inside and I thought to myself we have noticed them, and perhaps they know we have noticed them.

**The Sometimes Newsletter** is an entirely reader-supported affair. If you love reading, and are able to, please consider becoming a paid supporter to help ensure its continuation—as a thank you paid supporters usually receive one or two special pieces each month *but of late I’ve been terrible at that*.

Support The Sometimes Newsletter

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

The UK edition of Words to Love a Planet was, merrily, published on Earth Day, which is now a little over two weeks ago. It joined its non-identical American twin. I feel pleased, and tired, and relieved that the moment of the book’s release into the open is done, that I can now settle in to the work of talking about it—certainly not my favourite part of the work, but a part nonetheless, and these days I’m trying to view it more as kind of a mad honour to be able to share my ideas with people, to say what I think in the hopes that it might result in someone caring a bit more, going about the place more gently.

In the last few weeks I also painted windows for three bookstores within a very long arm’s length of me, Topping & Company in St. Andrews, The Book Nook in Stirling, and Night Owl Books in East Lothian.

We also had a delightful event the night before the book’s release at The Book Nook, where people asked beautiful and perceptive questions about the planet and about languages and translation, where someone told me afterwards they nearly cried sitting there, where someone said they wanted to be first in line to get their book signed because they didn’t want to drive home in the dark, where a Danish woman said I pronounced støvfnug very nicely and how good it was to look at a word in your own mother tongue from the outside in. The owners Leanne and Jasmine have created an incredibly welcoming and special thing, and I’m thankful for their time and space.

Then, and on the other hand, while I keep the book tenderly afloat, I busy myself with finalising the summer issue layouts for Orion, and although I’m yet to receive my copies of the spring issue (“Working the Land: Lessons in Labor and Collective Action”) I can say with confidence that the features in its pages are spectacular and important, and I can say that my own Root Catalog column is a much expanded extract from Words to Love a Planet, specifically the word vernation, and finally I can say that it also contains in full the essay which accompanies the chapter in the book titled ‘Seasons’—if you subscribe to Orion you can also login to read it here.