For many years, during the month we are on the precipice of ending, I would think about, and often post on my one and only social media, this line from the Anne Sexton poem The Truth the Dead Know:
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
In more recent times, it hasn’t felt good to linger on this—the tiredness of being brave—because the more you think about it, the more it seems obvious that any kind of truthful or pithy living in the world of today requires a great deal of brave, and for some people a larger quota of brave than should ever reasonable. And if you think about the obviousness of bravery too much, you quickly feel far too tired.
To some degree bravery and privilege seem an inverse relationship—the harsher or more challenge-filled a life might be the more bravery is needed to continue on despite. For those untouched or unflinching in the face of everything, or simply cushioned completely from daily struggles by wealth or situation or whatever it may be, it seems not bravery but rather a brutishness is being cultivated, one which means the acute damage to ecosystems or the genocides of people do not appear to have much of a landing in their bodies. Where, I wonder sometimes, do they put such knowledge?
In this thinking I am seeing bravery along the lines of courage, as the word ‘brave’ seems borrowed from the Italian ‘bravo’ as meaning courageous, or wild. There is much to be said about courage, and about wild, and I won’t say it all now, but I will leave it as acknowledging we need to be a great deal more wild, and a great deal more courageous, if we are to live forwards toward a future that is not simply a world on fire.
June ending, a list:
The garden became a meadow and I suppose we could have sat and counted species of grass for hours
A most excellent acquaintance playing the “Rolls-Royce of guitars” in a four-piece jazz band at a pub within walking distance of the town (over the golf-course-which-should-just-be-a-public-park and across the river and along a road a small way in order to become quite cold because there is an insistence to sit outside)
Inverness for 36-hours, preceded by the visiting of a family member and the excavation of a large section of ground directly in front of the entrance to the house in which to plant vegetables
I signed some book-related paperwork the details of which shall be expanded upon an unspecified distance into the future
Artworks finally coming home from the framers after two months; a pair of inherited Japanese pieces, a Victo Ngai print you had purchased sometime before we met which eventually travelled transatlantically across to what we now refer to as home
A small bird died in your hand
We looked after the young potted fig tree of some friends while they were away, after it had been slightly sun-scorched and outside-shocked
I am still two layers of knitwear in almost-July
Instead of deciding what colour to paint walls I keep adding more and more cards of options-colour around the place to further prolong and confuse matters—besides, my arms are too tired from braveries to consider any large-scale painting at the present moment
A friend dreamt so vividly that I had travelled to the Texan desert they were convinced it had in fact happened
I watch the sunlight move around the house
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
The fine art photographs of Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison. Their photographs “offer visual poems of loss, human struggle, and personal exploration within landscapes scarred by technology and over-use”.
BOOKS & ARTWORK:
A small-sized reminder that my website stocks foreign language editions of my books, available as signed or unsigned copies, with varying quantities of French, Korean, Vietnamese, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese language copies, along with the UK and US versions too.
(Available original artworks are to be found there also.)
I like my body when I’m in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,
that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
I like when I evergreen, current and berry.
I like when I mushroom, avalanche, cliff.
And everything is yes then, and everything
new: wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew.
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ‘Yes, That’s When’ from Hush, Middle Creek Press, 2020
And, always: Links and actions for a Free Palestine
Paid supporters of The Sometimes Newsletter receive several additional posts each month, including things like short stories, illustrated essays, and more detailed looks into creative processes. The most recent of these is a illustrated essay, Flying Closer to The Sun:
