#I just personally find joy in imagining mundane healing stories :'))

[chatdae]

The Great Gatsby (1974) au where Gatsby doesn't die and instead Nick takes on the no-paying job of trying to get Jay to move on from Daisy.

Bad ending is Gatsby never does & he and the Buchanans become a never-ending shitshow. Good ending is Jay moves on. Super special bonus ending is Jay and Nick fall in love (toxicity optional)

[be-ready-when-i-say-go]

Hi! Can you do let's fall in love for the night by FINNEAS with calum? Specifically the lyric "you won't stay with me I know but you can have your way with me until you go" and can the reader be that one saying or feeling that lyric? Thanks and sorry to bother, love your work!

Thanks for your suggestion and much gratitude for you patience. 

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If you feel so inclined, here’s my Ko-fi. But please know that I am making this content because I want to help you all through these times. 

Enjoy my masterlist!

Feel free to send me a song + a boy or small blurb request. 

_____________________________

Let’s Fall

Everyone told you not to fall for Calum. Everyone told you that he was sweet and he was thoughtful but that was something he extended to everyone. You had witnessed it with your own two eyes, helping someone get a box off the high shelf in the grocery store, stopping for the gaggle of kids crossing a good foot from the crosswalk. He bought lemonade for a kid’s stand at the end of the block once. The man oozed a softness that could melt anyone’s heart. 

But he couldn’t melt his own. And not for a lack of trying. Not for a lack of wanting love. But situations just never worked out. It seemed like with touring and his own lack of communicating sometimes, things kind of fell apart. 

it’s a dangerous game. To play with your own heart. But you are playing it, at bat with all bases loaded. Whenever Calum calls, even if it’s just to have someone else’s voice and life and even problem fill his own head instead of the bullshit he usually spiraled down, you pour your heart out. If Calum mentions doing even the most mundane things, grocery shopping, taking Duke to the vet, you ask to tag along. 

Tonight’s no different of a game. Calum’s sick of the four walls of his house, so he asks if he can crash at yours. “My apartment is tiny and you have a whole ass house.”

“I just wanna hang out for a little while. Maybe take a stroll around your block.”

You want not to flutter and squeeze at the thought of watching the setting sun in front of you guys as you wander down the block, watching birds fly overhead. Praying to the heavens none of them take your hair as a place to shit. But still enjoying the cooling breeze and possibly stopping at the convenient store not too far out of the way to stock up on cheap fruity wine and all the snacks that are no good for either of you.

But you swallow down the dream. “I don’t want you have to jostle around bringing Duke along and everything. I can just come by your place.”

“Nah, it’s not that much of a hassle. Please? I’m so bored,” he whines. And you can almost imagine him reclining into his couch with Duke in his lap. His head resting into the cushions and he’s grinning just a little knowing that soon you are going to crack. 

“Really, Calum. I can just come to you.”

“What part of me asking if I can come over to your place do you not understand?”

“Alright, smart ass,” you huff. 

“I’ll be there in 25,” he returns. 

The call ends and you’re left blinking at your phone, staring at your call list where you’re call with Calum now rests. “That wasn’t a yes,” you sigh but clean off your sofa, vacuum quickly and straighten out the kitchen table.  

When Calum turns up at your place, with a backpack, Duke on his leash and a few extra bags hiked up onto his shoulder you know immediately that it’s not just a few hour thing. But you say nothing. You let him inside and turn your attention to Duke. “Your pops is a very stubborn man, you know?”

“Oh but you love me,” he hollers as he treks down the hallway to the bedroom. 

You roll your eyes though your throat quivers. You had hoped it wasn’t obvious. You tried to tell yourself you weren’t falling. You were holding onto the edges of hope, hoping it wouldn’t push you over the edge. But it seemed it would. He returns, a baseball cap on his head. 

“Let’s go for a walk, yeah?”

“Wine and snacks?”

“Of course.” You take Duke’s leash and your keys. The sun’s hasn’t quite started to set. The hint of spring and summer allowing you more light for longer. A few neighborhood kids are laughing into the skies, a group. And for a moment it reminds you of your younger years. When after school, you hung out in groups and even if you had no money or knew you had to be studying for a test, it was a lot more fun to linger outside and laugh over some video, or story that was being shared. 

It reminds of when feelings and crushes were the biggest thing in the world and when Duke pauses to sniff out the base of a bush, you glance up to Calum. The cut of his jaw can’t be hidden by any hat, and you nearly gave. You nearly give in and stroke the scruff that’s not quite a beard. 

Now love feels like a gamble. This person could break your heart. This person could crush you. And it won’t ever be permanent. You won’t be permanently hurt. But the time frame for healing doesn’t make anyone want to jump head first into heartache. The other side of that gamble is that they could be the perfect person, they could be the person to restore your heart. 

But do you take that gamble with Calum?

And it’s not until after toting Duke around the convenient store and pointing out the bottle of wine you’re going to split and the snacks that will be shared begrudgingly and you’re laying on the floor in your living room with the TV playing whatever programming is set by the station that you’re giggling at the feeling of Duke’s snout sniffing at your face, that you think to yourself this is something you could get used too.

You haven’t had much of the wine and neither has Calum. A less than a third of it still rests inside the glass bottle and your glasses sit empty next to it on the coffee table. Your head is resting right next to Calum’s, but you’re feet point towards the fan and his feet are pointed down almost towards the hallway. You can feel the heat radiating off his cheeks, hearing the exhales.

“I want a garden.” The thought cross his lips so quietly that you don’t think you catch it. “Mum always wanted one and like, I don’t have a green thumb for shit, but I want her to smile when I hand her a bouquet of the flowers in my own garden.”

“Forget-me-nots are pretty,” you say, helping Duke up onto your stomach and he settles his head right under your sternum.

“I’ll plant you some. A whole corner.”

“That’s too much for me.”

He scoffs. “No, it’s not. You deserve more than a corner if I’m honest.”

While your fingers stop their work in Duke’s fur, you turn your head to look at him. He’s staring up at the ceiling. “That’s the wine talking,” you laugh. But when he turns to look at you, the tip of his nose almost brushing yours and you see the pulled down brow, you know it might be more serious than you estimated.

“Why do you do that?”

“Do what?” The smell of the strawberry whine fills the space between the two of you. 

“Why do you always reject me?”

“I’m not rejecting you, Calum.”

“You didn’t want me to come over.”

“I didn’t want you having to uproot everything especially with Duke. I was offering to come over to you,” you correct. 

“You don’t want me to plant you flowers,” he continues on like you haven’t just spoken. 

“I only said I didn’t need a whole corner in a garden.”

“I like you but you keep acting like you’re not good enough or something. Like you’re waiting for me to go find someone else.”

Your ears are not hearing this. You’re sure that you’re hallucinating. All you can do is blink, mouth slightly agape. Calum could never like you like that. You weren’t even supposed to be in this game at all. You were supposed to just be friends. “Are you going to like me in the morning? Are you going to like when there’s no wine in your system? Are you going to like me when you wake up to my morning breathe?”

“Yes.”

It’s such a simple answer. Three letters. One syllable. One fucking word but you’re not sure if you can fall. “You’ll leave before morning,” you start, turning and looking back up at your ceiling. And with a thick swallow, your throat starting to close up on you because you want to believe, you want to give into the words but you know it’s Calum. The man who’s sweet to everyone. You’re no one special. 

“I won’t.” Calum reaches across, just to trace the side of your face. 

You should be cursing yourself for turning into it, rooting into his palm. “Want to know the crazy thing?”

Calum pushes up. It’s with a small grunt and he spins on his bottom to face you, one leg tucked up the other resting extended behind your head. “I’m down for crazy.”

“You could have whatever you wanted. And I know if it were just for a night, that would be fine by me. Like literally whatever you wanted from me, I think I could give it up in a heartbeat. No questions asked. And it just hurts, it could only be for a night.”

Calum’s careful as he collects Duke and settles the old man onto his lap. HIs fingers wrap around your wrist and pull you up. Now you’re sitting cross legged in front of him and he’s staring at you. His big brown eyes look so earnest across your face. “I don’t want just a night with you.”

“Then what? What do you want?”

His smile is soft and his palms are warm against your cheeks. “All of it. All of you. For as long as you’ll have me. I wanna call you mine.”

Hope, you think, wasn’t pushing you to your demise. The first tear stings and then slips down your cheek. “Okay, like I know wine makes me emotional but I swear not this bad.”

He laughs, a soft exhalation. His palms press down a little and you know your cheeks give to the pressure. “Can I kiss you?”

“Hmm-mhm,” you hum unable to nod in his grasps. The first one is soft, barely a kiss and you’re still registering the way his lips fit against yours before he’s kissing you again. And then a third time.

-H

[emeraldtawny]

My Ikemen Vampire OCs

Been a while since I’ve done anything with OCs and I’m not sure if I’ll be using these boyos in fics or the like. I just wanted to add my own suitors based on some historical figures that caught my attention and thought would be cool to bring back as sexy vampires uwu~

Picrew used can be found here.

Marco Polo

Thomas Jefferson

Sigmund Freud

~Details under the cut~

Marco Polo

The Wide-Eyed Explorer

Adventurous x Oblivious

“Life's all about finding something out there in this great wide world that hasn't been discovered yet. How about it, Signorina? Want to take the risk with me?”

An explorer renowned for his treks from Europe to Asia, his documentation of his travels are known the world over. Yearning for knowledge yet grounded in his ideals, he enjoys exploring this “distant future” of 19th century France and pauses to marvel at every detail and moment he can. He accepted the taste of immortality so he could further explore the world. However, the dynamic, rocky expanse of love is one journey even the great Marco Polo wasn’t prepared for.

Birthday: September 15th

Height: 177cm (5’9”)

Occupation: Merchant

Vampire Type: Lesser Vampire

Hobbies: Exploring, Collecting trinkets (hoarding), Taking notes

Dislikes: Staying indoors

Specialty: Storytelling, Charisma

Weaknesses: Lying

Favourite Food: Pasta

Hated Food: Ginger

Pet: Monkey named Viaggio

Random Tidbits

Wears two dangling coin earrings, as a symbol of the currency he knew before learning of and introducing paper money to Europe.

Responsible for bringing noodles - and consequently, pasta - back to Italy. One of his proudest accomplishments, he says.

Gets incredibly pouty when people doubt his memoirs or if he even made it to China at all.

Is endlessly fascinated by the different culture of this “new world” and will ask endless questions to gain knowledge.

Gets flustered and oddly prideful over how many other important figures of history looked to his experiences to guide them (Of course, he is most proud of the children’s game named after him).

Most of his memoirs were written in prison and by his cellmate. *A/N: hmmm, I wonder who comes back to smite him :3*

Is uncharacteristically frugal and likes to hoard any “unique” treasures he finds (most of them are commonplace items, but rare to Marco).

Favourite Place To Bite: Shoulder. He just gets incredible pleasure sinking his teeth into the flesh of the shoulder, and it works in tandem to muffle the groans that threaten to slip through his lips as he feeds. And if they bite him back on his shoulder, he is gone. His arms will always be snaked around their waist and whether he’s pressed against their back or front, he’s absorbed in his feeding so fully that sometimes he doesn’t know when to pull back until it’s too much.

Associates With:

Leonardo - The pureblood quite enjoys the boundless vibrant energy of his fellow Italian, and is more than happy to show him around the city and listen to the younger man’s detailed recounts of what he’s seen. They fuel each other’s insatiable need for new things to learn.

Dazai - Enjoys teasing him for his cluelessness about the world. The mansion’s residents don’t know whether to intervene, as both seem oblivious to the other’s intentions in their odd conversations.

Sebastian - Usually on the butler’s bad side for the constant clutter of “souvenirs” he always returns with. However, is rewarded with the whimsical story recounting of THE Marco Polo, so it isn’t all bad.

How He Met MC

After MC had attended dinner and was making her way to Comte’s room, she almost gets knocked off her feet as she collides with someone whilst lost in thought. Things fall to the floor and she quickly apologises and kneels down to help pick up the fallen items. As she lifts her head, she’s met with a head of white wispy locks and kind ice-blue eyes staring back at her behind his round spectacles. He takes the things back from her and they both return to their feet. “Grazie Mille, Signorina.” He says through a grin. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you there. You must be new around here.”

“Oh, um--”

(Is he a famous figure of history too? He looks nice enough.)

Her thoughts are cut off as Sebas comes into the hallway and seems ready to scold the young man for bringing in another assortment of useless trinkets. He pouts a little and says that these are unique and a brand new discovery that he must look into for their use. Sebas sighs, notices MC and asks if he has introduced himself to her yet. He blinks and exclaims in realisation before turning back to MC with a sheepish, boyish grin.

“It seems I forgot to introduce myself to you, Signorina. My name is Marco Polo. I’m a merchant and an explorer.”

(M-Marco Polo?!)

After MC learns the truth about the mansion and its residents, she’s on her guard as she walks aimlessly around the mansion, avoiding everyone she can for fear of them biting her. She stops as she passes the archive at the sound of a happy tune being hummed. She peeks in to see Marco cross-legged on the floor with a pile of junk in front of him. Yet the way he’s observing each piece makes her believe every single one is an irreplaceable treasure. He adjusts his glasses and inspects the map in his hands with an inquisitive gaze, his excitement of a new discovery at his fingertips vibrant and infectious. 

She’s so lost watching him that she hardly realises that she’s entered the archive, her feet naturally bringing her towards him. He stops humming and turns to meet her curious eyes with a wink.

“Oh! Perfecto! Just the woman I was hoping to see!”

He says it so heartfeltly that she feels her heart leap.

“Would you happen to know what these are? Since you’re from the future, you’d likely have a better idea than me.”

She hesitantly sits down across from him, still unsure yet compelled to help him, the kind, yearning aura surrounding him too strong to resist. [First CG of them looking over the pile of junk. Marco gesturing wide as he imagines the uses of a simple silver spoon and MC staring at him like “...it’s a spoon, not a lightning rod.”]

As she listens to him, she asks him why he finds joy in collecting these everyday items. He blinks at her...before bursting out laughing.

“Don’t laugh, I’m serious!”

“Ah, I’m sorry. Really I am. It’s just I never get tired of hearing that question. To me, that question means that there are people out there who have grown accustomed to what’s around them. So much so that something they see every day has lost its beauty to their eyes. I truly believe that everything out there - discovered or not - has a story, a meaning. No matter how mundane it may be, everything has a unique beauty in this world.”

(That’s...such a wonderful outlook on life.)

...

Thomas Jefferson

The Repentant Sinner

Awkward x Earnest

“I cannot see the merits of wanting to get to know me. So, why can’t I stop you from doing so?”

A diplomat and a scholar, the one thing Thomas Jefferson cannot say he is versed in is the art of conversation. Despite this, he isn’t shy. He simply prefers to observe and document what is around him. Intelligent and soft-spoken, he seems to be more driven in his immortal life despite his tremendous accomplishments in his human life. What so greatly motivated him to be reborn as a vampire?

Birthday: April 13th

Height: 190cm (6'2")

Occupation: Diplomat don't mention the P-word

Vampire Type: Lesser Vampire

Hobbies: Writing, Violin

Dislikes: Public speaking

Specialty: Writing documents (in silence)

Weaknesses: Conversation, His reputation

Favourite Food: Vegetables (selective vegetarian)

Hated Food: Liver

Pet: Mockingbird named Quill

Random Tidbits

Can speak 4 languages (English, Latin, French and Italian) and can communicate through writing in a further two languages (Greek and Spanish).

Wears multiple rings and a wrist cuff on his right hand, as he had dislocated his wrist in his human life yet the bones failed to set right when healing. The discomfort continues as a vampire, though less painful.

His voice is quiet, mellow and of a tenor pitch. He can barely string more than three sentences together unless speaking in private and about a topic he is knowledgeable in.

Developed mild insomnia since becoming a vampire. Coupled with his periodic headaches, some days he will be completely inconsolable.

Enjoys writing and listening to his mockingbird sing in the comfort of his room.

Completely freezes and nearly breaks down when reminded of the dark underbelly of his legacy.

Has no less than four feather quills on his person wherever he goes.

Favourite Place To Bite: Fingers. Feeding on a body part with a smaller surface area helps him pace himself and prevent more harm than necessary. But he truly enjoys piercing his fangs into the tip of the index and middle fingers, giving a cursory suck before withdrawing and taking the fingers into his mouth to suck them that way; he doesn’t wish to harm anyone with his bites if he can help it. Of course, sometimes he can’t help it when he’s lost in bloodlust.

Associates With:

Isaac - Enjoys his quiet companionship. They usually sit in the archive together, working on their different projects in complete silence.

Napoleon - Occasionally goes to the Frenchman requesting a feather from his eagle to make into a new quill. Napoleon agrees under the condition he helps him teach the schoolchildren, something he begrudgingly agrees to.

How He Met MC

The first time she meets Thomas is at her welcoming dinner. She baulks slightly at the height of him and the broad set of his shoulders being accentuated by his perfectly fitted dress shirt. He meets her gaze and nods politely towards her before taking his seat and idly staring down at and fiddling with his rings. She whispers to Napo if she somehow offended him, but he assures her that that’s just how Thomas is; not the best at striking up a conversation. 

When introductions come up, he’s one of the last to speak and definitely the least enthusiastic. He clears his throat softly and makes eye contact with MC, his gaze oddly intense as if forcing himself to meet her eye.

“Thomas Jefferson. Diplomat. A pleasure.”

(Thomas Jefferson. He was important in American history if I remember correctly. Can’t say I know much more than that.)

When Sebas (and Arthur) get it through MC’s head that she’s now in a mansion of vampires, she immediately runs out of the kitchen and just panic runs. She ends up in the foyer and almost collapses with relief because she can finally escape this place. Before she can reach the door, however, she realises there’s someone else right in front of the door, pacing back and forth as if in a trance.

(Oh great. They have someone on guard as well? Even more reason to get out of here!)

She tries to slip by, but the man notices her and stops his pacing to stare at her, saying nothing. MC feels overwhelmed by his gaze and starts to shake. His eyes widen and he goes to reach for her.

“Are you--?”

“Get away from me! Vampire! Monster! Don’t touch me!!”

She swats his hand away and makes a break for the door, but Thomas grabs her around the waist, pinning her arms down. She thrashes and begins to feel tears pricking her eyes when Sebas emerges. Thomas turns to him and asks him to take the young lady to her room. He immediately releases her from his hold and whispers a soft “I apologise for scaring you.” before walking back to his room with long strides.

Back in her room, she reflects on what happened and realises that his grip on her wasn’t tight enough to harm her and instead, he was likely as panicked as she was.

(Even if he is a vampire, it was clear he was trying to protect me. And I called him a monster…)

The next day, she asks Sebas to show her where Thomas’ room is so she can apologise to him. Sebas says to try the archive instead and shows her the way. She knocks on the door and peeks inside. 

Sitting at a desk and brandishing a feather quill, Thomas writes like his life depends on it, his eyes - while still heavy and tired with dark circles - seem focused with an intensity that leaves MC dumbfounded. [First CG of him deep in his scribing, unaware of the pretty lady who watches him with her attention rapt.]

(He writes as if he’s possessed. I feel like if I interrupted him now, I’d be ruining the very nature of his being.)

She waits until he lets out a soft sigh and sets down his quill. When he finally notices her presence, he blinks, a deer in the headlights. His mouth opens and closes, but no words come out.

“Um...can I help you?”

...

Sigmund Freud

The Cold Elitist

Analytical x Insatiable

“Such honest eyes. Yet such boring simplicity in your actions and thoughts.”

An Austrian neurologist whose work helped to shape modern psychology. His work with brains and how they shape our conscious and unconscious mind - his book The Interpretation of Dreams using his own brain as the study - made him observant and insightful; in a holier-than-thou way in most cases. He is private and distancing, yet fiercely loyal to those he deems worthy enough to be close to him. His own findings concluded that personality and unconscious thoughts cannot be so easily swayed. Until he meets you...

Birthday: May 6th

Height: 180cm (5’10”)

Occupation: Neurologist (despises the term psychologist being attributed to him)

Vampire Type: Lesser Vampire

Hobbies: Smoking cigars, People watching, Reading

Dislikes: Being referred to by his first name (Call him Freud or you’ll get one hell of a death stare)

Specialty: Psychoanalysis, Picking apart people’s thoughts

Weaknesses: Accepting defeat or wrongdoing, Smiling through his eyes

Favourite Food: Artichoke

Hated Food: Anything American

Pet: Frog named Ego

Random Tidbits

He has a pet frog because of his early work as a medical student, where he studied frog brains to determine the difference between vertebrate and invertebrate brains. And named his pet after one of the terms he coined of the human psyche, representing the balance of our desires and morality.

Used to smoke cigars heavily, so much so that he developed mouth cancer which led to his eventual human death. Picked the habit back up again after being revived as a vampire.

Had a therapy dog when he was human. Sneaks pets to Vic and King whenever he can.

Was quoted saying “The goal of all life is death.”, yet accepted the offer to be granted eternal life (he chuckles bitterly at himself over this fact).

Was a firm Shakespeare sceptic and remains so into his vampire life. Any conversation he has with Shakespeare usually ends with him bad-mouthing him in German and proclaiming that the Earl of Oxford was the true writer of his plays.

Continues to write books about his discoveries, yet keeps them unpublished.

Is joked as being sex-obsessed (by Arthur of all people), but stands by his claims that sexual wishes and desires play into how a person’s mentality is shaped.

Favourite Place To Bite: Stomach. The way the muscles flex and spasm around his fangs is exquisite in every meaning of the word. He enjoys slowly sliding the blouse up, letting his hands trail slowly to feel the goosebumps that prickle on the skin, before biting right on the curve of the waist.

Associates With:

Comte - The one man who may call him by his first name. Feels indebted to him for another chance at life.

Mozart - Short yet calm conversations between the two Austrians happen every so often; about what, who can say?

Arthur - Pesters Freud for psychoanalytical techniques he can incorporate into his Holmes novels. Gives him the bare minimum to leave him alone. Absolutely loathes the nickname the Brit gives him (“Siggy”).

How He Met MC

When MC first encounters him, Freud is at the dining table with Mozart, Theo, Vincent and Isaac. As soon as he hears the commotion and she enters for dinner, he abruptly stands and leaves without a word, only sparing a cold stare that she feels in the pit of her stomach.

Her first true encounter with him is after Sebas tries to tell her that her housemates are vampires and she runs into him in the hallway. She notes that his eyes of metal run just as cold as the first time she met his gaze, but she still tries to greet him (Comte told her about him briefly at dinner, saying his name is Sigmund). When she addresses him as such, his lips twitch in distaste and harshly tells her not to call him that.

Being MC, she bites back a little, causing him to raise an eyebrow.

”For a meek little thing, you certainly try to bark, don’t you?”

“Hey, I don’t need another person in this mansion referring to me as a dog!”

“Hm. Very well then, Rotznase.”

(Did....did he just call me a brat?!) *A/N: no, MC. He called you a snot-nosed brat*

She goes to bite back again, but something in his eyes stops her dead. Like they can see into her soul, see the exact way her brain ticks. He exudes a harsh aura that makes her want to run, but the power of his eyes on her has her paralysed, like a predator staring down its defenceless prey. He scoffs at her before asking if she knows what he is. When she doesn’t respond, he sighs in annoyance before grabbing her by the throat and pushing her against the wall, hard. [First CG of this kabedon-strangling hybrid. 2/10, not sexy and probably hurts too much.]

”You’re a foolish little girl. And unfortunate in your luck. If you had crossed paths with any of the other beasts in these halls, you may have gotten away with nothing more than nightmares.”

His hand on her throat tightens, constricting her windpipe and cutting off her air supply, the petrified horror in her eyes only increasing as he bares his fangs to her.

”I am not a lenient man, I never have been. And this is no dream. You’re just an unlucky human. No offence intended.”

Just as his hand tightens further and he leans over her, Arthur of all people is the one to save her. He grabs Freud’s collar and yanks him back, barking at him not to scare the bird. Freud only gives an annoyed huff before strolling away as if he never had any part in it. MC loses strength in her knees and passes out from fear, and Arthur brings her to her room before heading to Comte to tell him what occurred.

The following day, Comte invites MC out to the garden for a chat. He confirms that the residents are all men of history brought back from death as vampires, and he apologises for Freud’s less than savoury approach at drilling the message in.

”Listen well, ma Cherie. The men in this mansion may be vampires, but they all show restraint. Sigmund, however, is an unusual case. He is prone to frenzies, where he’s so consumed with bloodlust that he cannot control himself. For your own safety, I would suggest having as little contact with him as possible.”

[wonder-fx]

Favorite Books Read in 2019

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952)

I need to read more books about ordinary, good, flawed women because this book brought me so much joy. Never have I identified with a character as much as Mildred. (Not sure how that makes me look, but that’s fine!) She’s a little nosy, has good intentions, wants to mainly observe life, but wishes that life could be more sometimes. I love her a lot. And I appreciate how tea itself was a character in this book. I definitely need to check out more Barbara Pym because this is my type of humor and mundane, every day life I like to read about. 

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016)

Although I'm not really supposed to, I enjoy reading at the circulation desk when I'm on shift. And when I started reading this book, every other patron was telling me their thoughts and feelings of it. My favorite one was, "it's just... not very life giving you know? I thought it would be more uplifting" ... did you even read the premise? I don't think this is going to be an uplifting, empowering tale! With their opinions in mind, I delved into "Convenience Store Woman" and I absolutely loved it. I didn't find it as hilarious as other folks because I found it more bittersweet, but there are some funny moments.

Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier (1999)

I was honestly a tad bored for the first 100 pages, but once the fairy tale aspect kicked in, I was hooked! Sorcha's journey was unrelenting and intense. I didn't expect that at all since the task given to Sorcha was to weave 6 shirts. There's a lot more to it than that, but Marillier really captured Sorcha's inner turmoil, her sacrifice, and the high stakes of it all. I also didn't expect how well Marillier could write a mute character. Sorcha was a vibrant, strong, vulnerable character. All conveyed without her speaking. I appreciated the physicality of her character. In the way she expressed herself, in her weaving and healing. Lastly, as nice as the romance was (still  creeped out that she's 16 and he's like 22), the relationships I cried many times over were the relationships between Sorcha and her brothers. In hindsight, the kind of boring first 100 pages were set up for the emotional devastation of the curse. Not only did you feel for Sorcha and her harrowing task, but I also felt the loss of each brother.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1817)

I have now read half of Jane Austen's novels, and I forget how much I love her each time. Her heroines are excellent, and her writing is so entertaining and readable. And I enjoyed Northanger Abbey immensely! Catherine's imagination and good heart, the Gothic flare, Henry's flirtatiousness, the scheming and hilarious Thorpes, and the love of stories. There is a lot to like. However, the last 40 pages or so greatly disappointed me. The book lost its character and charm due to the lack of dialogue and Catherine's insights. It shifted to the narrator and therefore, the reader didn't get a passionate or endearing confession scene. No true confrontation between Catherine and Henry. Where is the dialogue? Catherine's removal from Northanger Abbey was intense and distraught, but there was no emotional follow up for it. Just explanation. This authorial decision kind of bummed me out so I am giving this 4 stars.

Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)

So past me only wrote “So flipping good” for my Goodreads review and I’m so mad! That doesn’t help me with this year end wrap up does it? This is what I can remember. It’s a stylistically difficult book with a meandering narrative, but once you get into it, it’s fascinating. I’ve never read something like this before. The lilt and strangeness of it all still lingers in my mind. I listened to this on audio book while following along with the text and that helped a lot. This book made me interested in learning more about the Troubles and Northern Ireland. 

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (2019)

Another book without a review on Goodreads. Ugh! After reading a little bit of Milkman, I stopped and thought, “Maybe this would be easier to get if I had greater contextual understanding?” So, my friend recommended this book to me and I read it over my Nantucket trip. This was my beach read. And it was excellent! I was hesitant since I do not like true crime, but Keefe uses Jean McConville’s murder as a narrative thread to delve into the Troubles and an example of collective memory. He also writes about the lives of well known people during the Troubles, and this gives the reader a more humanistic portrayal of a long and complicated history.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (1995-2000)

Oh gosh, my reviews for all three novels are so long, it’s difficult to condense. Basically, I thought the first two books were very good. I found the world of the Golden Compass to be the most compelling and the bold opening in the Subtle Knife to be successful. I love Will and Lyra, but going into the third book, I felt Will overshadowed Lyra a little bit. In a way I personally didn’t like. The third book was definitely the weakest since there were some character developments and decisions that didn’t feel organic. I could sense Pullman’s authorial hand multiple times all for the sake of the greater themes which hurt the plot and emotional weight of some moments. Overall though, I clearly love this series since it’s on this list. Lyra, Pantalaimon, Will, Iorek, and many others are so dear to me. I wish I read this series as a kid, but I’m glad I read them now too.

A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde (1893)

I went on a hard core Oscar Wilde binge late last year and I read 5 of his plays: The Importance of Being Earnest, Salome, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband. They were all excellent, but my favorite was A Woman of No Importance. I usually hate the plot devices of miscommunication and birth secrets, but Wilde handles them so well. This is a feminist play that tackles gender double standards, concepts of innocence, and single motherhood. I highly recommend listening to this on audio book or watching a production because I enjoyed his plays more like that than just reading them. 

Naondel by Maria Turtschaninoff (2016)

This might be the darkest YA fantasy series I've ever read. Trigger warnings for sexual assault, pedophilia, torture, violence. It's difficult to read, but these women's stories are powerful. This story is mostly a web of these women's lives and how they all come together as the wives and concubines of this awful Vizier's harem. The introduction of this large cast of characters increasingly became a little repetitive, but at the end, I love the ensemble that was built. Each character's back story and the world she comes from was explored which was interesting! Turtschaninoff creates a fascinating world with diverse cultures, belief systems and customs. I noticed this in her last novel, Maresi, too. She loves her world building and what she creates is so unique. However, apart from the beginning chapters, hundreds and hundreds of pages go by without much plot. It feels like the reader is waiting for all the characters to come into place and into their roles before the big escape happens which takes 85% of the book. If you're into character driven novels and lush world building, this series is for you. And I love both of those things. Just needed more of a driving force throughout the novel than in the last 75 pages so 4 stars.

[lovehaswonangelnumbers]

New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/karmic-tools-weekly-forecast-february-23-29-2020/

Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast: February 23 – 29, 2020

Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast: February 23 – 29, 2020

By Kelly M. Beard

The video version of this forecast, as read by Kelly, is available here.

The Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast covers the current planetary transits which affect people in different ways and to various degrees of intensity. Take notice when it is a Personal planet (Sun / Moon / Mercury / Venus / Mars) interacting with a Social (Jupiter/Saturn) or Collective planet (Uranus / Neptune/Pluto). And pay extremely close attention when it is a Social planet interacting with a Collective planet because that means something *big* is brewing that will move large groups of people along their evolutionary paths. Tuning in to the energy and rhythm of the planets can serve as a useful *guide* as you move along your Individual Path. It also helps to understand your place within the context of the larger Social & Collective Story. Below, you will find out how these energies tend to manifest, as well as guidance and direction. 

*NOTE*  There are some days when there are NO CONTACTS (besides the Moon), please note that there are no missing entries, we just list the actual Activations of each week + the day they happen.

Note from Kelly: For those of you who like to READ my Weekly Forecast, I wanted to just make sure you knew that on the VIDEO version of the forecast, I do add more insights that are more/less channeled in that moment and can be quite useful. If, after you’ve read the general energies, you want more, the audio is really good for that too. IN-Joy!

Weekly Forecast: February 22 – 29, 2020

2/23 ~ PISCES New Moon:

This is an annual crossroads we come to every year around this time. It is the completion of 12-new moons since the last Pisces New Moon 3.6.2019. How’s it going a year later? No one is exempt. We all have a House in our charts ruled by Pisces. It is here that you should seed your intentions and precious vision for the next year (minimum), with consideration of where you’d like to be at the 6-month MidPoint, the Pisces Full Moon 9.2.2020, when these very seeds will show their true promise. Consider that this crossroads is simultaneously an ending and the womb holding what will be birthed next. Virgo/Pisces realms teach us about being a Spirit in Human form. How’s that going for you at this time? Can you see any patterns in your health or consciousness, your physicality or spirituality and how all these dynamics are part of who & what you are? This month you get to dream – to dream the New Vision you’d like to experience in the 6-12 months. We are also blessed with Mercury Retro in Pisces helping us go even deeper to discover a new dream. We are not going to find solutions in the old or linear way. Sometimes you have to put the Monkey Mind in Time Out and let your Imagination lead the way. Give your Self ample time & space to do this over the next month because you are clarifying what you would like to initiate come the Aries New Moon 3.24.2020, a month from now.

2/23 ~ Venus (love, finances & relationships) ~square~ Jupiter (expansion & consciousness):

This energy is a happy-go-lucky kind of energy that doesn’t really want to be bothered with the mundane, however, you must not allow that passing energy to get you so off track that it costs you more than it is worth. If you don’t have any pressing obligations, then this can be a fun, relaxing time, possibly with friends doing something together. However, if you have work to do, make sure it gets done first so you can truly enjoy yourself without the worry of the pile being bigger when you return. Watch the excesses as well, food, drink and/or spending. On a deeper level, you may have to make some adjustments in your relationships or finances. Jupiter always reveals how we make things bigger’ (consciously or not) and this activation usually helps us be more realistic, so we can align our true priorities with our grand vision of the future.

2/24 ~ Sun (confidence) ~sextile~ Mars (action):

This is an excellent time for action! You may have some good, positive energy brewing that, if it does not find an outlet, could turn negative or destructive. So, DO something – get moving – take action! Work on accomplishing some long sought-after goals, physical, spiritual, emotional, mental or material. The Universe supports action at this time. Call in help from other like-minded souls – reach out – share this energy and see where it leads. During this kind of energy, you could secure a stronger position and if you have to fight for something, you will do so more effectively with this energetic support.

2/25 ~ Mercury Rx (communication & self-expression) ~conjunct~ Sun (core essential Self):

This energy will compel you to express yourself on many levels. Communication will be a focus, just make sure that it is reciprocated. You will have access to some powerful energy that can (and probably will) make quite an impression on others (if you need to). This is a good time to travel too, if possible. However, if not physically, then mentally and certainly within your own area, you will take in more information per square inch than usual. Pay attention! You may even gain the much-deserved recognition from others that you have worked so hard for.

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[rueitae]

Welcome to the Neighborhood

Allura is not dead and the story isn’t over. Fight me.

I needed to time heal after season 8. Please take this post canon fic and do with it what you will. 2200 words. Thanks you @sp4c3-0ddity for the usual. <3

Read on Ao3

~~~~~

She sees them all, every possibility in every reality, every moment that makes one branch from the other. Billions of new realities are born every tick as decisions are made in everyday life.

A yalmore turns right instead of left. Her nana chooses a different dress for her to wear on her tenth birthday. A man picks up a piece of trash instead of leaving it on the beach. Each one creates their own strand of reality.

It doesn’t hurt, all this information, at least not her head.

She aches as Earth is destroyed before Voltron is reformed, the Paladins only children. Her heart is sick watching as Lotor grows up in cold loneliness time and time again.

She reaches out to change it, to prevent her loved ones from pain. She finds herself unable to touch or affect anything.

So she observes; all at once she experiences joy for her friends and mourns for what could have been and what has been lost. She sees millions of realities where she has a family of her own, sometimes with Lance but not always. The number of children vary and if her oldest is a girl or a boy. In others she remains single but alive.

Only in the one she left behind does she become what she is.

Which is… what, exactly?

Allura isn’t sure, but it becomes harder to see the different realities through watery eyes. She sees her happy ending unfairly play over and over in different ways. It does nothing to soothe the longing in her heart.

Over time she learns each reality like the back of her hand and begins to foresee the divergent realities. Soon, she cannot tell what is the past and what is the future.

What’s the point of having all this power - of having to leave her loved ones - if she cannot do good?

Physical contact, the first since she sacrificed herself, surprises her and interrupts her concentration.

“Careful, sweetheart. Too much work this quickly will make you go mad.”

Allura turns around in the white void to greet her guest.

Of all the people she expects to visit her in the afterlife, Bob is not one of them.

Allura believes herself a reasonable person, and the last time she saw Bob he’d held her and the other Paladins captive on his game show.

She summons her bayard with a growl and wraps her whip around the surprised host, jerking him and his floating platform towards her.

“What do you want?” she seethes in his face. “Is this your doing?”

“Hey! I’m not the one who decided to go out in a blaze of glory!” he protests, raising his bound hands as high as he can. “That was all you.”

“‘Great judge of heroes’, my quiznak!” Fury fills her heart remembering Coran’s explanation - oh Coran she misses him so much already - of the supposed judge of those who would do great things. “Did you know all of this would happen? Did you know Honerva would try to destroy everything?”

Allura hasn’t seen Honerva since parting with the Paladins. To think all of this, her fate included, culminated from a desire for family.

But blood does not a family make. Allura takes that to heart above all else. Her Paladins are alive and thriving, so she can endure whatever this is for their sakes.

“Hey, I keep tabs on potential heroes! That’s my job! It’s your job to watch different realities, Ms. Lion Goddess.”

Allura lets his words sink in, a pit falling in her stomach. “What… did you call me?”

“Lion Goddess,” Bob says dryly. “Welcome to the neighborhood, by the way. Norlax and I got you a fruit basket. Which I’d love to give to you, if you’d be so kind as to let me go.”

“Can’t you just...poof out, or something?”

“In my realm? Sure. Not in your place though.”

Allura lets the blue bayard revert to its base form. The flash of anger is nearly gone, replaced with a weight in her heart she isn’t sure she wants.

Lion Goddess is what the Arusians first called her, a title she rejected. Even now she does not wish for it.

She now knows this isn’t death.

Bob hovers closer, wrapping a friendly arm around her shoulders and dropping a basket of Altean fruit in her unprepared hands.

“Thank you… Bob. It’s lovely.” Though the words fit the situation, they taste strange as they leave her mouth. The mundane exchange feels like it should take place anywhere other than in this void.

“You’ll get used to it,” Bob assures her as if reading her stunned thoughts. “Take some time to spruce up the place. You’re only limited by your imagination, your realm, your powers, your fashion. And you, kid, have plenty of it, what with bringing back Altea and managing infinite realities and all.” He rolls his eyes. “Just wait until you start getting heroes petitioning your help for their cause. There’s only one you for all realities after all.”

Everything still feels so fresh, the battle and her actions that followed. The looks on the faces of her Paladins - her family by choice - as they said goodbye brought fresh pain to her heart. So perhaps that is why she asks, “Is that why you have guests, Bob? Do you miss your loved ones too?”

Allura doesn’t know why she expects anything different when he shrugs off the personal question with a smirk. “The circumstances are a bit different, but our goals of keeping order in the universe are the same.”

“So you are lonely,” she presses. She wishes to be anywhere else - with either her father and all her loved ones who waited for her, or with those she left behind.

Bob shrugs. “It comes with the job, but there’s no rule against visitors as you can see from yours truly,” he says with a proper bow. ”Is that why you gave him a part of yourself? Do you want them to find you?”

Allura looks at her hands, pink energy glowing around them in anticipation of her will. Lance doesn’t seem to mind the marks, a constant reminder of her sacrifice even more than the statue they built. Does it make him lonely every time he saw his reflection? “I wanted to give him something, anything, after he gave me so much. Can I - is there a way for me to go home?”

“Not without tearing the fabric of space and time,” Bob says, and Allura’s hope sinks. “But hey, what else is new for the Paladins of Voltron?”

Allura doesn’t want that, nor does she want more painful goodbyes.

Only bounded by her imagination, Bob says. Perhaps she can tell them she is alright, that she is going to watch over them; ask if they are truly happy…

She finds them asleep at night in her mind’s eye, in the reality she had left. The small act of Lance, Hunk, and Pidge wearing their Altean pajamas warms her heart. Surely of all realities, here she should be able to do something. She reaches out to the life force she left, eager to leave a message with Lance.

Instead her will finds a stronger and older link. Platt dreams of sampling Hunk’s cooking, Chuchule of sunbathing, and Chulatt of exploring Kosmo’s thick fur.

Allura clasps her hands together, hopeful. “Friends, please, can you hear me?”

Plachu’s whiskers tremble and he wakes, head turning as if searching for her voice.

The others rouse slowly while they chatter, wondering if they all dreamt of their tall friend.

Success! But now...what can she say? Can she just...bring them here?

Black lightning strikes in the distance and demands her attention. Allura severs her connection with the mice in time to see Bob jump in response to the flash.

“What… why is that here?” he shrieks in an understanding that chills Allura’s spine, because she too recognizes it.

The rift entity, the thing that started Zarkon and Honerva towards their path of destruction. The thing she used to bolster her own powers…

And never removed from herself.

“It came with me,” she says in growing dread. Here where she had access to every reality...

The frequency of the flashes increases, getting closer by the tick. The edges of the white void darken as it approaches.

She turns to an awestruck Bob. “How do I stop it? I cannot let it get to the other realities!”

“I’m neutrality personified,” Bob explains as they back away from the black void. “It’s a creature born of the rift between realities; you need the same energy to oppose it.”

Power trembles at her fingertips, begging to be released. Allura grits her teeth. If this is her role now, to protect all realities and keep her family from having to fight any further, then she will do it.

Bob yelps and hovers behind her as the black lightning surges towards them, the last remaining bastion of light. Allura meets it head on, dropping Bob’s gift as the darkness halts at her outstretched arms. It twists around her body, searching for an entry point.

You used us once, let us in again, it taunts.

“Never again,” she spits, and her quintessence overwhelms it.

Not even a yalmore is capable of such otherworldly screeches. The entity from the rift between realities shrinks to its smallest form, resting in the palm of her hand and emanating a soft pink glow.

Because Allura wills it to be contained.

But Honerva proved that containing it is not a permanent solution.

Allura parts the white void as if it were a curtain. It opens to the quintessence field, the place from which it originated, where she allows the entity to drift under her magical supervision. She closes the rift with a wave of her hand.

It will never corrupt again.

Bob breathes a deep sigh of relief and slumps in his chair. “That was a close one. The realities without Voltron are a lot less traumatic.”

Allura tries to imagine what life would be like if the comet had never landed on Daibazzal. She only has to look in on the right reality and the peace she could have had pains her. But… then she never meets her Paladins. In its future, Keith is never born, and Shiro passes away far earlier than is right.

She closes her mind to that reality. She doesn’t want a world where neither of them is there.

To think that small thing was responsible for the corruption of Honerva and entrapped the other Alteans.

She gasps in horror. “I never removed it from the others.” She frantically searches for the malignant entities and visions of the affected Alteans appear in the void above her. Allura tenses. There are five of them still out there. “I need to get them back into the quintessence field as soon as possible!”

“You won’t be able to trap them if they’re outside your realm,” Bob says. “I couldn’t do a thing to you Paladins until you entered my nebula. You may be able to see realities, but you can’t change them - that would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”

“Then Voltron’s work is not yet complete,” she says sadly. Her friends can’t rest, not when Voltron is the only other force that can oppose these creatures.

“That thing getting into any of our realms is a bad idea,” Bob tells her, “but I don’t have to tell you what could happen if it does.”

“The corruption of all realities,” she agrees. Guilt fills her gut. She sacrificed herself to restore all realities, yet she delivered a malignant entity right where it could do the most harm. But… “If I could contain this one, I should be able to contain the other five before they find a way here on their own. It isn’t safe to leave them unaccounted for in the universe. The Paladins will need to form Voltron to bring them to me.”

Bob grins knowingly, snapping his fingers. “See, you knew the whole time.” He laces both sets of hands together and crosses a leg over his knee. “So, how are you going to bring the Paladins here?”

“Not while you are visiting,” she says sternly. “I will not have you taking them in for your quiznaking game show again.”

Bob sighs dramatically. “Too bad. I was looking forward to seeing a rematch of Shiro versus the Snick.”

She needs to contact Lance and the mice, but first, she needs to get the Paladin’s attention. They also need a way to find her. Lance is good with directions, but his methods would fail in deep space.

Her mouth tugs up slightly, but she’s unable to smile fully with longing overtaking her. There is no greater bond in the universe than between Lion and Paladin, the same bond that allowed Zarkon to chase them across galaxies.

And she was bonded to all of the Lions.

Twin pedestals rise on either side of her. She places a palm on each one, her power flowing through this realm and into the greater universe.

She reaches the Blue Lion first, and her message is instantly understood. The Lions roar in acknowledgement. After the Paladins witness the send off, Allura bids the Lions to join her.

Now she waits for the Paladins to follow, looking forward to a very happy reunion.

[leisurelypanda]

Mundane Miracles (aka, my sermon from this morning)

When I was a child, I believed in miracles. I believed the stories about Jesus healing the sick, feeding thousands of people, bringing the dead back to life, turning water into wine, walking on water, calming stormy seas, and casting out demons from people possessed. I believed that these were what miracles were, things that only God could accomplish, things that could only be achieved by having some kind of divine blessing.

As a child, I also believed that people followed God because Jesus did cool stuff. Jesus was extraordinary and did things no one else could and promised that if people followed him, that they could do cool, extraordinary things, too. Of course there was that bit about God loving all people, but to a kid with an active imagination and who believed that his dogs could be taught how to talk, who tried to talk to the weeping willow in the backyard like Pocahontas did in the Disney movie, and who believed in magic and genies and fairy godmothers, the miracles seemed to be the thing that must be why people followed Jesus.

I tried to perform miracles. I remember trying to walk on water at the local pool because how cool would that be? I remember trying to move a mountain or a small hill, anyway, because that sounded awesome! I remember when my grandfather died and I wondered why the people at the funeral didn’t try to bring him back like Jesus did because surely that would be better than being sad.

But when I tried to walk on water, I fell through the surface and swam back up. When I tried to move that small hill, it stood resolutely and I wonder if it bothered to notice that I was there at all. My grandfather was driven from the funeral home to the cemetery and laid to rest. And as a child, I wondered why no one ever seemed to have enough faith to do any of the things Jesus did.

When I was a teenager and started asking questions, I remember asking the people at my church why miracles “didn’t happen anymore.” Why didn’t praying for someone to be healed of sickness or injury heal them like it had when Jesus did it? Why didn’t blessing food make it multiply endlessly? (Which for anyone who has ever been to a Southern Baptist potluck where that one person brought devilled eggs, you know that that specific platter of devilled eggs needs a blessing). Why didn’t mountains move and why couldn’t people walk on water?

I received a variety of answers for these questions. Some people said that I needed more faith, that God only worked with people who had achieved some hidden prerequisite faith quota. Others said that God moves in mysterious ways and that it’s not our place to question. That never made sense to me. Still others had the most frightening answer of all, that God didn’t perform miracles anymore. That answer in particular came up more in the South, the idea that God was no longer actively involved with humans. That God did not speak to people anymore, that God did not work wonders in the world anymore. And it was always confusing, as well, because these people would always insist that God was active in the world, that God was doing something. God just wasn’t doing anything miraculous or being transparent about what was going on.

I wondered what the point of believing in God was if these miracles people spent so much time focusing on didn’t exist anymore. Why did Jesus feed people if they were going to be hungry again? Why did he heal people if they were going to get sick again? Why did he bring people back to life if they were just going to die again? And I clung to faith because I was waiting for someone to bring me an answer.

I didn’t find a satisfactory answer until I was in college after I came out. One of my sociology professors talked about her work as a nurse while her husband worked as a community organizer and pastored a church in South Africa. There were stories of trials and difficulty and I wondered sometimes why anyone would stay in a place with such hardships when they had the option of leaving. There were stories of joy and blessing, too. Children learning languages, change happening, people receiving medical care. And these stories gave me part of the answer. All life contains both blessing and hardship.

The second part came when I was completing my spring semester of my senior year, the only time I have ever been part of a theatrical production and I did it as a favor to my friend because it was their senior show. The show was called Corpus Christi, and it was a retelling of the story of Jesus from the perspective of Joshua, a gay man. All the disciples are there, and they’re all gay. Simon was a singer, Phillip was a stripper, and Judas was Joshua’s high school sweetheart.

The story was the same as it is in the Bible. Joshua goes out, leaves home, teaches, performs miracles. And when the last supper happens, Joshua and Judas go off alone because Joshua knows that he’s about to die and he’s afraid. He falls asleep in Judas’s lap and Judas makes a deal to betray him with the high priest. And when they’re done, the high priest warns Judas that Joshua is a troublemaker. To which Judas asks, “Because he says he’s the son of God?” The high priest says, “No, because he says that you are also the son of God.” Judas counters with, “We are all the children of God.”

And this is the central message of Corpus Christi, the truth as the playwright saw it, that we are all manifestations of the Christ Spirit. The school shut it down, of course and it was a dark, sad time for those of us in the cast. But life went on. We healed, bit by bit, step by step, through little things and time spent with friends. Through talking and laughing and crying and raging. Through eating and drinking and stressing and playing. Some of us wrote. Some acted. Some protested. Others threw themselves into schoolwork. And three years later, we’re all still here. And that’s when I learned the second part of the answer. Life goes on.

Miracles happen every day. To say that God does not work miracles in the world discounts the wonders we see around us. We live longer than we did a century ago because someone discovered medicines and ways to keep us healthy longer.  We grow food in such quantity that it feeds billions of people around the world every day. We heal, day by day, from old hurts and traumas others may never fully understand. And to say that God is not here in the midst, orchestrating these little miracles, even ones so small as the next breath we take, is wrong.

And just because Jesus’ miracles were temporary does not mean that they were not extraordinary. His teachings, to love with our whole beings, to be kind even to our enemies, to do good, even if all we can do is give someone some water, are what matter. And resurrection, the continuance of life even in the face of death is the greatest of all. When Jesus came back, he comforted those who mourned for him. He forgave Peter for denying him. At the end of Corpus Christi, the actors come out of character and the Actor Playing Judas says, “Sometimes, I mourn for Judas, too. I think Joshua would have.”

Easter is a time of miracles. Jesus rose from the dead and this was so shocking, so absurdly wonderful, that the people who spent every day with him for years, listening to him teach, hearing his words, questioning him, learning from him, eating, resting, dancing, singing, laughing, and crying with him were so flabbergasted that they could not believe that it happened. And the only people who believe the women who come to tell them that Jesus is not in the tomb are Peter and John, the Beloved Disciple. And when Mary Magdalene comes running to the rest of the disciples crying “I have seen the Lord!” they don’t believe her until Jesus himself pops in to tell them.

And yet Easter is often so calm. So mundane. It comes like spring. Slowly, at first, then all of a sudden the world is alive again. Everything is reborn and every year at springtime there’s one day when I go out and I pause and wonder when the trees had grown their leaves back, if I had been asleep for the whole thing or if it happened just a few moments ago. And suddenly the world is alive again after the winter snows. Flowers are blooming, the grass is green, the birds are singing, and the trees rustle in the wind, whispering their secrets to each other as they come awake.

Resurrection is coming and it is a gift, whether we experience rebirth and renewal in this life or are reborn into the next. Resurrection is the chance to do more. To love more. To be more compassionate. To be more gracious. The mistakes we made are not the last word. The cycle continues until we have reached the highest and best good. And that is a miracle, too.

As for me, I believe in only one miracle. Life, and the endless wonder it brings. The feeling of wind at your back, the sun on your face, of rain falling on dry skin and thirsty earth, of dreaming and waking, of living moments of joy and sorrow, of loving and being loved. The greatest miracle of life is that it endures. As life does not, cannot pause in the moments of blissful peace and profound joy, so too does life not stop during moments of incomprehensible sorrow and deep despair. As every sun sets and the long night begins, so the sun rises and new days come to bring their blessings. Every winter ends and life returns to a sleeping world. Life goes on and resurrection is coming. Praise God. Amen.

[revlyncox]

Re-Energizing

This Platform Address was written for the Washington Ethical Society and presented on September 27, 2020. 

Growing is very hard work. Whether we are talking about growing flowers, or growing in our understanding of living an ethical life, or growing a movement for justice, or nurturing young people as they grow, it’s very hard work. Whatever growing we happen to be in the midst of, a lot of what we’re doing is transforming one form of energy into another. In the garden, the nutrients of soil and water and the energy of the sun transform the impossibility of a seed into food and flowers and abundant life.

Ed Ericson, one of my predecessors here at the Washington Ethical Society, wrote that Ethical Humanism is “a single integrative process of creative spiritual growth having religious, educational, and social consequences.” Something we know about growth is that the energy has to come from somewhere. As we are looking at adapting our personal growth and our community’s growth for the year ahead, what energy are we drawing from? How do we renew and re-energize our ability to act as a community headed toward moral growth, beauty, joy, and ethical action?

Part of what Ericson meant by that process of creative spiritual growth is the human capacity to make meaning and to find purpose, using as our raw materials the experience of living in relationship with each other. Whether we find joy or sorrow, and usually a mix of both, we are energized for moral and intellectual growth with our direct experience. He wrote, “as human beings we are capable of transforming our pain and grief into sentiments that provide solace and healing and that bring deeper insights into the meaning of life.”

Here’s what I think this means for what we are facing today: We have a number of challenges before us, some of them unique to our time and some of them perhaps not as unique as we might hope. Adapting to the pandemic brings us challenges in our daily lives and in WES’s community life. Our challenges in dismantling oppression and keeping the ideals of democracy alive are many. Some of us have challenges getting through the day, finding transportation, caring for our loved ones, filling our prescriptions. Yet the difficulties we face, our way of making meaning from them, and the relationships that keep us committed to facing them, are some of the sources of energy that will carry us through this chapter of our lives.

On the other hand, despite the difficulties around us and among us and within us, beauty and love persist. These, too, are sources of energy for the transformative work that is ours to do. We must keep these things alive in our minds and hearts, because they help us to stay committed, and because we cannot have a complete picture of the world as it is without beauty and love. When we can perceive what’s right, what’s growing, what’s giving life -- as well as perceiving obstacles and threats to liberation and abundant life -- then we can come together with a whole strategy for change. That’s true whether the change is in our own minds and hearts, in our community, or in the world beyond. When we can see what is growing, we can make a plan for supporting that growth. Through all of this, we find energy by keeping care at the center; care at the center of our goals, and care at the center of how we behave in community on the way to our goals.

In other words, here are three ways we can re-energize for the months ahead: 1. Observe and treasure the impossible as it happens. When beauty and love and joy make themselves known, celebrate. 2. Plan and improvise support for what is growing and giving life. Plan for structures that can keep growth healthy, and also be ready to respond in the moment with support when delightful surprises sprout up. 3. Put care at the center. The way we treat one another and ourselves matters. Let’s live as if we believe that people are ends in themselves and are worthy of care.

Observe and Treasure the Impossible As It Happens

Observe and treasure the impossible as it happens. In this morning’s story, “The Garden” by Arnold Lobel (description here), Toad plants some seeds. It seems impossible that a tiny seed can grow into a flower, or a vegetable, or a tree. Yet that’s exactly what happens every time a plant grows. If it doesn’t seem impossible, that’s only because the evidence is overwhelming, but even so, the dramatic difference between the seed and the plant is worth a moment of awe and wonder. Thank goodness for Frog, who helps Toad to wake up and bears witness to that first inkling of success. We can be Frog for other people, and we can ask people to be Frog for us, lifting up occasions for joy rather than letting them slip into mundanity. When those sprouts do poke up, when the needle moves, when the data comes in, when the the city council considers your group’s proposal, when the student grasps a new concept, celebrate that.

Sometimes, we get to observe the impossible as it happens in social change. I never thought there would be widespread acceptance of the need for treatment and community care for people with AIDS. I never thought marriage equality would be the law of the land. Maybe some of you were born into a world that doubted the possibility of women leaders, or of voting rights for African Americans, or of the decline of the coal industry. Our current agenda for justice, equity, and compassion is long. We want safe communities, free from police violence and the cancerous growth of the prison industrial complex. We want racial justice, and an end to white supremacy. We want just immigration policies, and compassion for all who migrate. We want gender equity. We want to see swift and science-based climate action. The list goes on. We will not complete that list in a single lifetime. But, one step at a time, the impossible has happened before.

Plan and Improvise Support

A second source of energy is when we plan and improvise support. When we anticipate growth in all senses of the word, when we observe what is alive and what is going well, we can build structures to support future success. Sometimes we are delightfully surprised by what is working beyond expectations, and we respond in the moment with improvised support. That process of creativity and responsiveness and adaptability can, itself, bring joy that fuels future activity.

Some of you have heard me talk about my hobby as a clueless gardener. I try things, and sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don’t. The process of failure and discovery interests me, and so my cluelessness leads to curiosity, and this gives me the energy to keep going.

This year, I thought I would try pole beans companioned with corn. As you may recall, we had a cold and wet spring, such that it was June before it was warm enough to put beans and corn in the ground. Thinking I had to rush, I went against the conventional advice and I planted the corn and beans at the same time rather than planting the corn first and waiting two weeks. Since the corn wasn’t going to be tall enough to support the beans, I put a 6-foot bamboo stake by each pair of plants. I had some doubts that anything would grow, but it was worth a try.

Well, some things did grow. VInes spread out, beyond what I imagined. I became concerned that I wasn’t seeing any blossoms, just a lot of vine growth. I worried that I had made a mistake and wouldn’t see any beans at all.  Then, in late July, there was a bean! And then a few more. Then about a dozen. I added more support. The vines kept going. One week, we put away about nine pounds of beans. Now that it’s fall and the first frost is coming soon, the beans are slowing down. Looking back, I’m glad I put up supports, in case something might grow. That support mattered, though it wasn’t perfect and I needed to adapt later. It has all been very surprising.

When we are doing something complicated together, we want to plan support as if success might happen, and we want to be ready to respond when something grows unexpectedly well. That means we need to be aware of what’s working, not just what’s broken. And it means there are times for sweeping the floors, making the copies, writing the letters, making the phone calls, and sticking with it through very long meetings. There are times for journaling, daily practice, and data collection. Whether we’re seeking new insights for our own ethical development, starting a new social group at WES, or building power for affordable housing in Washington, DC, there are plenty of everyday actions that strengthen and re-energize our efforts. They may seem boring or routine. The habits of support create a strong foundation so that, when things do grow, when the impossible does happen, there is space to thrive.

Put Care At the Center

Before we close, I want to say something about putting care at the center of what we do, both in the way we formulate our goals and in the way we treat ourselves and one another on the way toward those goals. There is a lot we want to learn, a lot we want to work toward for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our planet. Another world is possible. It may seem sometimes that urgency to the point of exhaustion is the only way to operate when one crisis follows another. I’d like to suggest that we prioritize kindness, not only in our individual interactions, but also in the way we make space for difference and vulnerability in our community expectations.

Again, this morning’s story provides us with an allegorical role model. Toad realizes that his shouting is not conducive to growth, and he attempts to make restitution through a practice of care. He provides light in the darkness, companionship in the rain, beauty of all kinds, the gift of his musical talent, and genuine concern. This might seem whimsical, but researchers have found that talking to and playing music for plants makes a difference. How much more do those of us who know we are self-aware, who use words to communicate, need that kind of care in order to grow and mature?

I was reminded profoundly of the ethic of care this week upon learning of the death of Elandria Williams. Elandria was an activist and a powerful community organizer, having spent many years on the staff of the Highlander Center before moving on to The People’s Hub in 2018. Elandria was a Unitarian Universalist from childhood, was a national volunteer leader since youth, and just completed a term as Co-Moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association; that is, the UUA’s highest governance officer. E was also my friend, someone who encouraged me when I felt like giving up, saw something worthwhile in me when I couldn’t, and wouldn’t let me off the hook when I needed to hear the truth. Elandria died this week at the age of 41.

In one of Elandria’s recent video dispatches, E spoke about caring for ourselves and each other as part of the practices of liberation. Caring for our loved ones and our communities is part of liberation. Learning to care for people we don’t know so that everyone can get free is part of liberation. Being mindful of our actions and taking care, because our actions affect others, is part of liberation. And, E reminded us that honoring our own worth as people, apart from whatever we think productivity or effectiveness looks like, is part of liberation.

Elandria dropped wisdom at every turn, generously and spontaneously. And people received that wisdom because Elandria had a gift of relationship. E’s friends and loved ones and colleagues had unshakeable confidence that E saw them and honored them for their - our - whole selves. There are memes turning up on social media already with some of Elandria’s wisdom. Here’s an excerpt:

We are worthy

Not because of what we produce

But because of who we are

We are divine bodies of light and darkness

You are not worthy because of what you offer, not because of what is in your mind, not for the support you give others, not for what you give at all

We are worthy and are whole just because

I could go on, but I want to make sure we have time to hear from you during the Community Sharing. That Elandria was a Unitarian Universalist may not be relevant to you, but as members of a society that affirms the worth of every person, I hope that E’s words resonate.

What I’m trying to say is that practicing care is one of the things that will re-energize us. When we regard each other with love, and our reminders to each other of our community agreements are rooted in love, and our demonstrations of care and concern and support for each other are rooted in love, and our appreciation of each other is rooted in love, we are practicing the world we hope to manifest. This is how we remember what we are on the way toward, this is how we sustain ourselves and each other on the way there.

Be the person who offers seeds. Be the person who wakes up your companion to celebrate when the impossible is in progress. Be the person who reads a story in the dark, or recites poetry, or plays music to encourage someone to grow. Be the person who chops wood and carries water, everyday practices to support abundant life. And be the person who offers that same love for your own wellbeing. Put care at the center.

Coming to a Close

We strive through our relationships to elicit the best in the human spirit. We work for a world in which love and justice cross all borders. These are not easy goals, and these are not easy times in which to live. We can do this, together. As we consider where we might draw energy and direct energy for the mission we have accepted, let’s remember the garden.

1. Observe and treasure the impossible as it happens. Causes for awe and wonder are all around us. 2. Plan and improvise support for what is growing and giving life. That may mean routine practices and unglamorous architecture. It may mean being fully present, rain or shine. It definitely means taking note of when something is going well. 3. Put care at the center. You are worthy. Your neighbor is worthy. The people we don’t know are worthy. Let us learn to lead with love. May it be so.

[bibliopolisblog]

Glendy Vanderah (‘Where the Forest Meets the Stars’) and Luka Pejić, translator for the Croatian edition — Q&A

Glendy Vanderah is the author of the bestselling novel Where the Forest Meets the Stars—the story of Ursa, a peculiar girl who claims to have come to Earth from the stars to witness five miracles amongst humans so she can “graduate” on her own planet. Where the Forest Meets the Stars is a brilliant, heart-warming, poignant novel in which tragedy collides with triumph, intolerance with love, the mundane with the magical, factual with fantastic. It is a stardust-woven story that lures the reader in, grabs them, and drives them to the last page, where they realise how much they’ve fallen in love with the story and its characters.

Glendy’s debut novel is also my translational debut: Stilus, the publishing house, kindly offered me the job of translating from English to Croatian. It’s been a year since—and even if I never translate anything again, I will remember this magical adventure with starry eyes and nostalgia, with love. Of all possible books, I will not regret being given the honour of translating this masterpiece.

“I’m touched,” I wrote to her when I received the answers. “I didn’t expect this to be so… heart-to-heart, because rarely does an author open up like this. The readers will have to feel the connection with you and your characters once they’ve read the novel and all this, like I do—now even more.”

“Yes, I’m honest about my background in interviews”, she replied. “Where the Forest Meets the Stars was closely tied to the emotions and memories of my childhood. If I hid that I’ve struggled with adversity as a child and depression as an adult, how would that help my readers see a better future?

Croatian edition of ‘Where the Forest Meets the Stars’  by Glendy Vanderah (Stilus, Zagreb, 2019)

Ms Vanderah: firstly, I must say that I’m thrilled to be speaking with you, and I’m immensely grateful to you for agreeing to answer a few questions for your Croatian readers.

Thank you for that great introduction, Luka, and for providing this opportunity to talk to my Croatian readers.

I’ll start with the simplest—probably the first from everyone: What inspired you to write Where the Forest Meets the Stars? How did the idea come to you? Was it cunning, so to speak, approaching you little by little, or was it a surprise, overwhelming you all at once?

The story came to me in parts. I had been writing fantasy for a few years (first for ‘fun,’ then trying to get published) when I decided to try contemporary fiction. I’d have to say the setting came first. I’d always wanted to write a book set in an isolated research house I lived in for a few years while I was working on avian research projects. The real house was similar to its description in the book. It was in the woods, next to a creek, and at the end of a rural road. There was even an old graveyard next to the house. The main idea for the book came to me after I saw director Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth. I felt affinity with the idea of a child using fantasy to escape the violence and evils of war. As a child growing up in an unstable home, I used the nature of my wild-grown backyard to escape the traumatic events that were happening in my family—it was almost like a fantasy world for me. When I felt those deep connections, the book started to burst out of me!

Did you know what the novel would be like when the idea was still in the embryonic stage, or did it change as you wrote? What did it look like at its conception? What was at its centre? What came first—themes, and the shadow of the story that would soon be written, or the characters that would inhabit it?

I never know precisely what my story will be like at the end. I don’t use detailed outlines. When I get a story idea, I first create characters and their motivations, then I imagine what event would stimulate my plot. At first, I only rough out the storyline, though I generally know the ending. As I write, the plot usually changes—sometimes dramatically. And as the characters become real in my mind, they develop personality traits and backstories that are often a surprise even to me! For example, some of Gabe’s background surprised me as I wrote. For me, this story started out very much about how children deal with adversity, but it became so much more as the story progressed. The duality in Ursa’s alien/human self-perception mirrors Jo’s before/after cancer identities, as well as Gabe’s pre/post discoveries about his father. Those themes evolved as the story progressed.

What can you tell your Croatian readers about Ursa's genesis? Is our genius little alien girl based on or inspired by a real person? Someone you know? Or did she just pop in your head the way she is written?

Ursa is certainly an outgrowth of how I remember my own difficult childhood. I decided her self-perception as an alien in a human body was an interesting way to show how children often feel when they experience trauma or abuse: the isolation, the sensation that they are standing apart from a ‘normal’ human world they can’t join. Some of my readers see Ursa as an actual alien, some see her alienation as a metaphor.

Many ideas for Ursa’s traits came from my three children. For example, one of my sons read words backward from a young age as a way of dealing with an excess of mental energy. Children are a lot more aware of what’s going on than many adults realize. I know this will sound biased, but I never ceased to be amazed by the brilliance I saw in my kids at young ages! Ursa is an amalgamation of all children I’ve ever known, including myself.

Which authors have influenced you as a writer? Which works have impacted Where the Forest Meets the Stars? Also, I can’t help but ask… William Shakespeare is Ursa’s favourite writer. Is there any special reason it's him? Which Shakespearean play is your favourite and why?

Since a child, I’ve read eclectically—fantasy and sci-fi, contemporary fiction, scientific nonfiction—and I can’t really say one or a few authors strongly influence my writing. In fact, I don’t want them to!

As for Shakespeare, I think his writing is brilliant, especially for his time. I like to put references to his plays in my stories because his plots often hinge on strange or unlikely quirks of fate, and I’m intrigued by that: how one decision, or a few seconds of good or bad luck (an accident, a crime, a meeting) can change a person’s whole life. Putting Shakespeare’s plays in the story resonated with me because Forest pivots on this theme of fate, on how much control we have over it, and whether we have the strength to overcome tough fates once they’ve been dealt to us.

Shakespeare’s verse is gorgeous, but I think reading the plays doesn’t bring out the magic like seeing them performed. Two favourite performances: a magical production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream I saw many years ago, and a recent showing of Twelfth Night at a tiny playhouse where the audience essentially became part of the play.

In your novel, mental illness plays as important a role as physical. Do you have advice for people—especially youths—who are struggling with depression and anxiety, or mental illness in general? Furthermore, regarding Jo—who beat breast cancer—do you have advice for women, young and old?

Depression occurs on a spectrum from mild to severe. I certainly know what severe depression looks like—my alcoholic mother had it. Mine was less severe, probably more ‘situational’ than ‘clinical.’ Though I wrote Gabe’s depression to be like my own experiences, I received criticism from some readers who felt his illness wasn’t written ‘realistically.’ I think it’s sad some people think all depression is severe and unbeatable. I wanted the story to show another side. Depression, especially milder forms, can improve. Finding joy in biology, nature, and writing, and stability in a loving relationship with my husband, helped me overcome more than I ever dreamed possible when I was child. Perhaps there is no ‘perfect’ happy ending, but there is plenty of hope and potential for healing. That’s the message I want to give readers.

Like most of us, I’ve seen too many family members, friends, and acquaintances succumb to breast cancer. I’ve seen many beat it, too. I don’t have specific advice, other than preventive measures, because every case is different, as are the very personal decisions women make after diagnosis.

Your novel also addresses other serious issues, such as domestic- and child abuse. Do you have a message for the people struggling with such difficulties?

Every circumstance will be different. I believe the troubles of my childhood made me a stronger person, but I know that can’t be the case for everyone. One loving, stable person—a relative, a friend, a teacher, a neighbour—can make a huge difference in a troubled child’s life. Find those good people and trust them. Feeling less isolated is important. If you don’t have anyone you can trust, you must trust yourself. Love yourself. Don’t take on guilt that isn’t yours. Don’t turn to destructive behaviours that will only make your life more miserable (I did that for a few years). You can get through the bad days, and recover, and have a fulfilling life. Don’t ever give up hope. Ursa embodied this idea, that even an eight-year-old, through sheer force of will, can change her future for the better.

(spoiler alert) Now, for those who have read the novel only! Can you tell us what happens with Ursa, Jo and Gabe after the ending? We are desperate for more!

I don’t see the continuation as immediate happiness and sunshine. I think Ursa, Gabe, and Jo still have challenges ahead. But the strength they’ve found in their love for each other will be important for conquering those problems. I’ve been asked if I imagine Jo and Gabe’s wedding in the future. My answer is, yes—and who doesn’t?  

How long did it take to write this seemingly simple yet rather complex novel?

I’m not sure how long because the writing was often interrupted. I have written books in less than 7 weeks, but this one took much longer because I had many issues going on. My dad was dying of advanced Parkinson’s disease and needed lots of care. His partner had dementia. Also, I shattered my arm in an accident and couldn’t write for a long while.

Which, say, five books would you recommend to fans of your work? Some compare Where the Forest Meets the Stars with The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey—would that be among your recommendations? As a guess, did it perhaps influence your writing?

As I’ve said, del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth—a screenplay, not a book—had a big influence. I read The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey after I wrote Forest—because of the blurb by author Christopher Meades on the front cover of my book. I see the connections between the two stories, but I think they are quite different, too. I read The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh shortly after my book was published, and I feel that book has more similarities than Ivey’s. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is possibly a book people would enjoy if they liked this story. Many readers compare my book to Delia Owen’s Where the Crawdads Sing, so that would be another story I can recommend. I’ll also mention All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, a story about two youths who battle adversity during World War II.

You are a bird biologist, like Jo. When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

I loved writing poems and stories as a child. My fifth grade teacher once told the class, “Someday you will all read a novel written by Glendy.” That was an inspiring moment for me. Yet my love for nature and animals had a stronger pull, and I chose to study ecology instead of English in college. After I received an undergraduate degree, while I worked as a biologist, I took some writing and literature classes. But I went on to get my Master’s degree in biology. Then I met my husband, also an ornithologist, and we had three kids. I was too busy to do much science during that time. Once the kids were in school, rather than go back to science (I felt I’d been away from research for too long), I began writing. I was honestly surprised that I could write fiction when I first started!

Another big question: Can we expect a film adaptation in the near future? Please say “yes”! Ursa’s fans, including me, would be overjoyed!

The book has had some attention from a Hollywood representative, but so far no word of a movie. We’ll all have to send out some good quarks to make it happen!

What can you tell us about your next novel? Is it in a similar vein to your debut, or should we expect something entirely different? Are you still writing it, or have you finished?

It’s finished, and it has similar themes. It’s coming out in the spring of 2021.

I believe most readers of Where the Forest Meets the Stars thought it to be science fiction throughout; is that something we can expect in the next book? Does it have a title? If so, can you share it with us? (We promise not to tell. 😉)

Where the Forest Meets the Stars has been variously described by readers as contemporary fiction, literary fiction, domestic fiction, science fiction, and magical realism. I think it’s fascinating that the story ‘shape-shifts’ to different genres! My publisher lists the book’s genre as contemporary fiction, and my next book, The Light Through the Leaves is the same genre.

Phew, so many questions… but that's on you for writing such a beautiful novel!

Finally, would you like to say something to your Croatian fans?

A message for my Croatian readers: I hope you enjoy Where the Forest Meets the Stars. I’m certain it must have been expertly translated from the original English, because the translator, Luka Pejić, has written these thought-provoking questions and a beautiful, perceptive review of the book. Thank you, Luka, for all the hard work you have put into bringing this story to Croatian readers.

It’s been a dream come true to see my first published novel translated into twenty-one languages. I’m thrilled that the people of Croatia will have the opportunity to read Where the Forest Meets the Stars. What more could an author want than to know her stories might touch the hearts of many people around the world? I hope to bring a translation of my next novel to you soon! Happy reading!

Source: www.bibliopolis.home.blog/2020/09/14/glendy-vanderah-interview/

[likechild]

35 questions

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

Bjork 

2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

I’d like to be cult famous as a mixed-media artist and get to collaborate with my favorite artists on their projects as well as my own. 

3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

Maybe for an interview, but not usually. 

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

Waking up to kisses and cuddles. Going for a long drive somewhere pretty stopping all along the way. Playing in sunshine and water. Falling asleep with someone who loves me. 

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

To myself, daily. To someone else, so long ago.

6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

Body. I don’t think the mind significantly declines after 30? If anything you get wiser after 30.

7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

I think I will die at 88 years old and I always imagined it would happen pretty peacefully and that I would accept it beforehand.

8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

I’m recently single. And it hard for me to realize this question is not about them anymore.

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

My best friends. My bedroom. Sunshine. The ocean. Animals. Trees. Queer community. The arts. Hope.

10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

My family would have been kinder, more sensitive, and more supportive.

11.  Tell your life story.

Um this is a lot so I’ll go with the very basics. I was born in San Jose, CA on June 11, 1993. I lived in a house with my four half-siblings and two parents. My parents were in an abusive relationship and divorced when I was five. Since my half-siblings were not related by blood two went to live with each parent and I travelled back and forth between the two. I was afraid of my father my entire life and my mother was emotionally distant. I don’t feel I know either of them now or that they know me. I had a lot of support from friends, other families, teachers, etc. I was quite spiritual and optimistic, but I do remember the feeling of losing hope when it came to family. I moved to San Francisco in 2011 to go to college. It was a difficult adjustment, but ultimately I fit in well with city life. I met many life-long best friends in high school and early college and I am deeply grateful to them. I have not had a lot of luck with romantic love. Or in my career. I have had a lot of opportunities to travel, party, enjoy the arts, meet lots of interesting people. I have trouble validating myself, but I am ready to become the most empowered version of myself. I’ve had a few run-ins with love, i’m just now getting out of my first relationship and it was full of tenderness, affection, heart-ache and insecurity. I hope dearly the next time I love I feel safer.

12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

To speak many languages. Or just a general sense of confidence / direction.

13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?

I’d want to know the good things. And maybe how to prepare better for the bad things. Like little tips about the future.

14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

I think I need to reconnect with my dreams. I may have convinced myself they were out of reach and not to dream them anymore.

15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

Traveling internationally. I dreamed of it as a child and it’s something I didn’t know if I would ever be able to do. 

16. What do you value most in a friendship?

Stability and intimacy. My friends are my family and I need to know that they feel the same. 

17. What is your most treasured memory?

Driving down the coast with Whitney holding hands with the windows rolled down. Laying in a hammock drinking liquor and opening up our hearts to each other. Watching him set up camp in the middle of the night in a beanie smoking a cigarette. When I was his only girlfriend and I felt secure. 

18. What is your most terrible memory?

When Whitney told me he fell in love with someone else. When I spent months trying to be someone I couldn’t be for him. When he broke my heart on the first day of a state mandated self-quarantine at a time I was already feeling scared, lonely, anxious, and in need of a lover and a friend.

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

I would move in with Anna, spend all my money on traveling, seeing friends, participating in the arts. Make a small clothing line and buy a harp. Swim more. Try to fall in love.

20. What does friendship mean to you?

Supporting and encouraging each other to find our best self. Finding joy in the mundane together. Taking risks together and trusting in the importance of change and adventure. 

21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

They mean so much to me and when I allow myself to develop it with someone it comes very naturally to me. Unfortunately I am often to afraid to allow someone that close.

22.  Share 5 positive characteristics of yourself.

1. My intentions are always pure. 2. I can almost always see the silver lining in things. 3. I don’t judge people for their past or for their differences from myself. 4. I constantly strive to be better. 5. I still believe in love.

23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

Not so close, not so warm. I don’t remember a lot of my early childhood now.

24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

It’s distant and I don’t think it’s very fixable. I’ve always felt she never tried to know me as a complex and sentient human being. I wonder how she sees our relationship.

25. Make three true I statements.

I am listening to french pop. I am in bed. I am doing my best.

26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share... “

..,my life with, build a home with, feel safe with, share love with.

27. If you were going to become a close friend with a partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

Friendships last a lifetime for me. Once I let someone into my heart they never leave it. Even when we don’t speak or see each other anymore. Please commit to being gentle with my heart. Please commit to helping me heal from you if you decide to leave. 

28. What did you like about your last partner?

I liked how tender they were. How they wrote me poems, played me music, wrote me letters, and made me little radio shows. How often they professed their deep love and admiration for me. How passionate they were about my mind and my body. How he read me to sleep and took joy in giving me joy. How we would go on adventures to nowhere together. How we were happy no matter where we were as long as we were together.

29. What is an embarrassing moment in your life?

Im embarrassed anytime I am unhappy and unsure of myself.

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

I’ve cried a lot lately. In front of people and by myself.

31. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

I mean know your audience. 

32. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

I would want Whitney to know I love him, but he doesn’t want to hear from me. And he already knows I do.

33. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

A box of photos and love letters I’ve collected.

34. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

My mom. Because I do love her and she means well and neither of us knew how to bridge our distance.

35. Share a personal problem.

I think I need professional help in sorting out my childhood, insecurities, anxieties, and view of relationships. But it seems so difficult to obtain any help, let alone the kind of help that might actually make a difference. I try to manage everything on my own, and I fear this will only lead me in circles.

[tshepiso-reads-books]

Best Books of 2020 | So Far…

2020 has been a particularly strong reading year in its first six months. In this post, I’ll be discussing my six favourite books of the year so far. This was a fairly difficult list to put together because there were so many books I felt deserved a spot on the list. I finally managed to pare it down to six and I’m excited to gush about them.

Beastars · Paru Itagaki

My dive into the Beastars manga was unplanned but appreciated. This shonen manga follows a world of anthropomorphic animals in a society that bars the eating of meat. The manga primarily explores the complex relationships between herbivores and carnivores in the high school Cherryton Academy. Beastars is dark, gothic, and impactful. Paru Itagaki’s character work and the ways it interacts with her worldbuilding is impeccable. The way Itagaki delves into the power dynamics and hierarchies of the relationships between herbivores and carnivores is amazing and I adore the deep dives she does into the various characters and how their place in the pecking order of society affects their views of themselves and the people around them.

Sovereign · April Daniels

Sovereign is hands down one of the best pieces of superhero media I’ve consumed this year. The sequel Dreadnought elevated this story to something more than a standard YA superhero tale. April Daniels tackled trauma and the after-effects of violence impeccably. She allowed her characters to naturally progress as people. Danny isn’t the best person in this book and the effects PTSD had on her weren’t pretty. But her growing to recognize the toxic patterns she fell into, apologize for her mistakes, and get help is such a satisfying story. Sovereign went way darker than I expected it to, but that was to the story’s benefit because Daniels delved into these themes wonderfully and ultimately told a story filled with hope.

The Kingdom of Copper · S. A. Chakraborty

S. A. Chakraborty is a masterful writer and The Kingdom of Copper sings because of it. Chakraborty’s tight-knit ever moving plot thrust me through this 625 paged tome in 48 hours. The character work in this book was stunning and seeing the ways Ali and Nahri had grown and changed in the five years since The City of Brass was appreciated. The intricate political machinations of the Daevabad trilogy are what make it stand out and Chakraborty absolutely nailed this tense and hair raising conflict throughout the series so far. What made this book so compelling was the blending of politics, characters, and worldbuilding that made every action and every plot movement intense and breathtaking. Chakraborty is good at what she does and I cannot wait to see how it all ends in The Empire of Gold in a few weeks

The Fated Sky · Mary Robinette Kowal

The Lady Astronaut series is exemplary on so many fronts and The Fated Sky went above and beyond my already high expectation. Were Mary Robinette Kowal shines is in her characters and relationship building. Dr. Elma York is such a fantastic protagonist because Kowal’s writing brings her to life. All of Elma’s interpersonal relationships were so rich and engaging; from her wonderfully supportive marriage to the various antagonistic relationships Elma has with her coworkers. I was invested in all of them because I genuinely cared about Elma and wanted to see her thrive. Kowal is also excellent at unpacking the bigotry of the 1950s and 60s in a way that feels genuine and speaks to our modern sensibilities. Elma in The Fated Sky is constantly confronted with her privilege as a white woman and learns how to use that privilege for good without speaking over the people she’s trying to help. I’m also an absolute sucker for space so the actual space exploration in this book was wonderful. As someone who loves movies like The Martian and Hidden Figures the way Kowal integrated real science with the magic of space exploration worked for me on every level.

The Broken Earth Trilogy · N. K. Jemisin

It’s difficult to describe in a handful of words the power of N. K. Jemisin’s writing. I’ve never read anything as moving and rich as The Broken Earth trilogy and journey Jemisin took me through was painful and heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful and beautiful. I will never not be in awe of Jemisin’s work. The way she tackled themes of oppression, the cycles of violence, and generational trauma was astounding and her intricate character explorations were phenomenally done. At this point, if you are in any way a fan of adult fantasy and you haven’t read The Broken Earth trilogy you are actively doing yourself a disservice because these books are some of the most stunning pieces of literature I’ve ever read.

The House in the Cerulean Sea · T. J. Klune

Finally, my absolute favourite book of 2020 so far is The House in the Cerulean Sea. This quiet, unassuming novel blew me completely out of the water and filled me with so much joy, love and happiness. This simple story about a man who has allowed his life to slip into mundane mediocrity finding love and family shattered my entire being. It’s very difficult to describe the warmth infused into every page of Klune’s writing but believe me when I tell you I can’t imagine anyone disliking this book. This is a story about healing from trauma, standing against bigotry, and protecting the innocence of children and on every level, T. J. Klune wrote a story that spoke to me.

So those were my favourite books of 2020 so far. I hope you can tell just how much I love every single book on this list. If you need further convincing to each of these story’s brilliance I have full reviews for every book I talked about here on my blog. 2020 has been a wonderful reading year so far and I can’t wait to see what the second half of the year has in store for me.

[defiantscribe]

What Step Was Acceptance Again?

I'm in the last leg of my time away from my job and I've finally decided to accept some bits of my personal existence that I just won't be able to change.

For the record, this is going to be me whining about my current station in life and just generally feeling sorry for myself, so if this isn't what you were hoping to see or read, I'm at least being up front here and now so you can save yourself the headache and find something more entertaining or joyful on the internet.

I go back to work in 3 weeks, which sounds like a long time away, but for me it's going to pass in the blink of an eye and to be honest, I'm not sure I'm ready.  Not that I don't want to go do something constructive and use my skill set that's been getting lazy, but I just don't know if things are going to be better or more of the same tired bullshit I took the break to escape. Also, I'm worried about the potential animosity that will follow because my co-workers will definitely be happy for my return, but they've been struggling with bullshit for the past two months without me and that shit wears THIN after a bit.  So, that's another thing sitting at the back of my head as this return date approaches.

In this whole time off, I was hoping to find something "extra" to do that might bring me joy.  I will be straight: I haven't.  And I won't. I had all these grand ideas and things I wanted to accomplish and I'm working on the important things: going to the gym and exercising, trying to make sure I take my diabetic medications like I should (brb, need to go take my insulin shot), I have an appointment with a dermatologist in the next week to look at a sore that seems to have issue with healing that has prevented me from having "adult relations" with my wife for over a year, etc.

So it's not like I'm not doing anything, but as for trying to order my house, make things easier for my family, finding a set schedule, setting up rules and operations that would help keep things easy and functional have all floundered.  I started "vlogging" and after about 2 weeks of solid attempts, I bailed.  I straight bailed.  It was a hassle to update daily and when I didn't do anything of any intrinsic value, it was hard to keep updating on people that I'd crater in and watch anime or YouTube for most of my day until I had to pick up my kids or my wife.

And the YouTube thing was what I meant about trying to find something extra.  However, I learned a lesson in all this:  I'm boring AF if I'm not engaging with someone else.  Me, alone, is BORING. Some can do it, they can tell their stories and they're able to engage people without ever having another living soul to work off.  I'm not that way.  I work best when I can have someone to work off of or work with; me sitting in my upstairs, with nothing much else but a wall behind me was about as entertaining as listening to a toddler try to explain quantum mechanics.

Writing has been about the only thing that I've ever been "somewhat" good at.  I can get my point across, I can make my jokes or edit the dumb shit I say so this way it doesn't look like I'm a raging idiot. And for the record, this is all being written mostly on the fly.  I usually write in Notepad, then slap this trash into Word for spellcheck purposes. I change very little that I actually write. I feel that writing what comes to mind and sticking with it is the most honest version of writing and I'm not here to yank your dicks around, I'm here to get all the stupid shit that bothers me off my chest and hope that someone else out there reads it, relates a bit and maybe feels a bit better about their situation if mine is worse.

Another part of what I was attempting to do during this break was to learn how to use my non-linear editing software. It's HitFilm Express for anyone interested, it's free, but has paid versions for extra perks. It's a lot like Premiere, so check it out if you're looking at video editing.  There's very little I haven't been able to do with it and they do tutorials on YouTube and all that.  Shameless plug for them because seriously.... this program is pretty bitchin for being free. But, even with that, I haven't fussed much with it.  Two main reasons were: it's time consuming.  Like really time consuming.  And I just didn't have the time to invest in that.  I'm trying to do laundry, I'm trying to make things in my kitchen or clean after my family (it's a job in itself) and the second reason was that most of my imagination is toast these days.

Sure, I can paint a colorful picture when describing a tech issue (most of my co-workers and clients get a kick out of my analogies), but I just can't come up with the shit I could 20 years ago.  I turn 40 next month and I just can't think of things like I used to.  I remember some of my old ideas and I just can't expand and when I attempt to develop something new, I can start, but I never finish. That's frustrating to say the very least.

I've also gotten to a point in my life where I'm not really wanting and I don't have any goals left to set. I have everything (besides money) that I will need, so I don't really have any desire to reach.  I don't mind traveling, but that's not some big thing for me.  Getting up early, flying, finding new plane, getting on it, spending time somewhere else.... it's work.  It's not a relaxing time, it's like a scheduled event that I have to meet certain checkpoints otherwise it was "wasted".

I'm not really that creative with my art.  I can't draw to save my life, unlike my daughter who is ALL ABOUT THAT and is pretty good.  My son's into gaming and can literally spends HOURS doing it.  After a while, I get bored.  It's fun to play with friends.... well, online friends, but as they all trickle out, I get to a point where I'm just like, "Nope, gonna go do something else now..." and peace out.  I don't play games for hours on end.  I got Skyrim for free and I've played like 76 minutes of it because I know how involved it is and I just do not have the time to invest in it.  I already isolate myself away from my family for the most part, don't need something to help facilitate that.

I don't wood work, I'm afraid of most power tools (saws especially).... I'm not musically inclined (got a keyboard and guitar in the house, they collect dust) and about the only thing I'm good at is modern electronics.  I essentially have 4 smart TVs in my house, all with computers hooked up to them, but do nothing fantastic with them besides Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and use the Roku that's on all but 1 TV.

I've lost the desire, nay the zeal, to pursue anything more.  So, I've decided to simply stop.  Existing is tough enough, I think I just need to focus on that.  Don't misconstrue that, I'm not about self harm or the like, if you've read my older stuff you know my opinions, but I just don't get excited about anything anymore.  It's all mundane.  It's trite. And I've spent so much time trying to find something, ANYTHING, that gives me that youthful fulfillment and I got jack shit.

This is about the only thing that I still find enjoyable, but I don't have stories in my head.  I have one story in my head I've been working on since I was I think a freshman in high school, but it's a cringefest that if re-written by me today would be a completely different story.

And that's where I'm at. Just "here".  And as much as I feel I should be doing more, I have nothing more to chase. I'd rather take a depression nap because at least after that I feel awake. Angsty 39 year old guy writing on Tumblr, ghost copying over to Twitter.... this is who I am.  And, sadly, I'm indifferent.  Man, I'm a sad, lonely crab.  I really should find a hobby.  Suggestions?

One last note: After throwing this long ass bitch into Word, no grammatical errors (yay), but I don’t know how to properly spell: existence, definitely, intrinsic, pursue and apparently Word doesn’t understand ‘misconstrue’.  I guess acing English from K through 12 actually did something for me.  Don’t ask me about adverbs or adjectives or any of that nonsense, I still don’t understand that shit.

[oletacho]

Extraordinary in the Ordinary

All of us love hearing stories of miraculous healings. Our hearts are stirred when we hear about impossible situations being beautifully restored. We get inspired by people exhibiting supernatural strength and endurance when pushed to their absolute limits.   Truthfully, I’m a junkie for these kinds of things. Being a writer, I’m always on the lookout for powerful, moving stories for inspiration and ideas.   When we read about the miracles Jesus performed while He walked among us, they fuel our faith and give us hope when things seem hopeless.    But we have to remember that not every miracle was accepted or celebrated. Remember when Jesus healed on the sabbath and got the religious leaders all riled up. And when the disciples carried on His healing ministry, sometimes those miracles got them into trouble as well.    Today I read the story in Acts 14 where Paul and Barnabas healed a man in Lystra who had been crippled since birth. Paul saw in this man’s eyes that he was ready for healing and simply told him to stand. The man immediately stood up and started walking around like he had been walking his entire life.   The crowd went nuts! Can you imagine! I mean witnessing that in real life, seeing someone healed on the spot, would truly be life-changing.   Yet when the crowd tries to turn Paul and Barnabas into gods because of this incredible miracle, Paul stops them in their tracks and says basically, “Whoa, wait a minute! Yes, this is a miracle, but God performs miracles every single day in your life. He brings rain for crops and blessings every day. You just miss them in the ordinary routines of life.” (Read the story in Acts 14)   Paul’s words still ring true for us today, God reveals himself by being extraordinary in the ordinary.   God breaks through our lives in the tiny, ordinary parts of our days. He’s just as present in the routine as He is on the mountaintop. God doesn’t wait to show up just for the big stuff. He’s smack dab in the little things as well.    Honestly, I can get caught up in the dramatic. I want the big, miraculous reminders that God is in control, the “this can’t be explained any other way than God” kind of moments. I’ve had some of those in my life, and they’ve been truly life-changing. When I share them at events, years later I am still moved to tears as I think about how deeply I was moved by the presence of God.   But, and this is a very big but for most of us, what about the presence of God in our daily routine? What about the repetitive parts of our lives that seem to have no eternal significance? What about the mundane?   The Good News of the Gospel is that there is extraordinary in the ordinary waiting to be discovered by each of us.   As I look out my window and see all the snow, instead of thinking about how tired I am of winter and how annoyed I am by the cold, I realize there is a miracle waiting for me to behold. The snow is nourishing the ground and providing water for the grass and flowers that I so love in the summertime. The snow is paving the way for the miracle of spring.

As I look at my dogs sleeping at my feet, I am amazed at their extraordinary love for me. They bring so much joy to the ordinary, mundane parts of my life.   As I reflect on some big dreams that my husband and I are anxiously awaiting some answers on right at this very minute, I realize that God will be there in the yes or the no. However this situation turns out, whether in a miraculous yes or a disappointing no, God will not be absent. He is ever present, and He is there to be praised and obeyed.   Yes, let’s believe in miracles! Yes, let’s continue to trust that God can and does heal in mighty ways! Let’s absolutely continue to pray for impossible situations to be turned around!    But let’s not forget that miracles are present in the everyday routine of our lives as well because God is with us, and that’s a miracle in itself!   When we choose to look at life through that lens, it will enable us to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary!   Hugs and love,   Jill  

Find out more about becoming a Women of Faith Ambassador.

    A living “Energizer Bunny,” Jill has a zest for life that is contagious! With humor and honesty, she shares her personal struggles and how God showed up in the midst of them. Through her songwriting, speaking and writing, she is simply a friend telling her story, hoping it will touch your heart, encourage you in your struggles and inspire you to keep reaching for your full potential. Her spiritual insights are relatable, insightful, and can be practically applied to your life.

Jill is a Nashville recording artist and recently released her 6th CD entitled “Twelve, the Freedom Soundtrack.” She has opened for the legendary Loretta Lynn and Brian Littrell (of the Backstreet Boys), performed a duet with NewSong, and sang the national anthem for President Bush and 11,000 people when he was in Sioux City. Jill has also performed at the legendary Bluebird Café in Nashville.

Jill realized a dream when she was named one of the new Voices of Women of Faith and will be serving the organization by leading worship, speaking, and writing.

Jill is also a certified speaker, coach and teacher with the John Maxwell Team and has written the first ever theme song for the John Maxwell Team.

Jill also writes a weekly blog and has written her first book, “Grace Finds Wings – A Journey in Song.” In her book, Jill shares the stories behind the songs on her CD, “Grace Finds Wings,” and finds ways to touch your heart and help you discover grace in things like infertility, adoption, divorce, financial struggles, marital infidelity and loss.

Jill and her husband, John, have four grown sons and live in the cornfields of Iowa with their two male rescue dogs. Jill is anxiously waiting for some daughters-in-law and grandbabies so she can get a little estrogen in her family!

Extraordinary in the Ordinary published first on http://womenoffaith.com

[how2to18]

PREGNANCY IS APOCALYPTIC, or it can be. There’s something both utterly mundane and completely shocking about bringing another human being into the world, and the process of adjusting to a new life — in both senses of the phrase — is challenging for many mothers, whether they admit it or not. Of course, many start out as tender, maternal people and experience few significant personality changes. But for others, the birth of a baby is the destruction of one way of life, one way of being, and the start of another. It’s a complete shift in worldview, a remaking of identity, a transformation that ripples out from the personal to the social and political. Meanwhile, for babies, their mothers or caregivers are their entire world, a governing force that controls all aspects of life. But what if suddenly women were giving birth to babies that emerged as some regressed, earlier form of human? Society as we know it would surely collapse.

That is the central, wonderful premise of Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God. As the novel opens, we’re devolving, though it’s not a straight or linear path backward. After all, as the narrator, 32-year-old mother-to-be Cedar Hawk Songmaker, points out, evolution was intuited from many different pieces of evidence, and it’s been known to push species sideways as much as it has forward. Additionally, our devolution, as Erdrich imagines it, is not merely biological, it’s political and social, as well. But what the reader might expect to be a dark and brooding story is instead frequently flush with knowing hilarity. The novel promises to be both apocalyptic and dystopian, but it takes its time getting there. The literary mixes with the colloquial, as in Erdrich’s other fiction (Love Medicine, The Round House), but the colloquial has the edge. Structured as letters written by a mother to her unborn child during a critical point in history, the novel is among the author’s most accessible works of fiction.

Cedar is the letter-writing mother whose contemporary, slightly forced humor colors the novel. She’s a Native or part-Native woman adopted by white Minneapolis progressives Sera and Glen. She notes, “Although I’ve seen Sera eat a gas-station hot dog once, and many years ago Glen had an affair with a Retro Vinyl Record Shop clerk that nearly tore the family apart, they are happily married vegans.” Throughout, Erdrich mocks Sera and Glen for being the sort of people who congratulate themselves for “how good their track record is on political idiocies and wars and natural disasters.” They see political trouble coming, and they are right. Since evolution is going backward, the government is taking an intrusive interest in pregnant women and the condition of their babies.

When Cedar describes her childhood as an adoptee, she notes, “I was rare, maybe part wild, I was the star of my Waldorf grade school.” Once she went to college with other indigenous people, however, she became ordinary. Unlike the other indigenous students, she had no struggles and stopped going to class. She explains, “I’d been a snowflake. Without my specialness, I melted.”

As the novel begins, Sera gives Cedar a letter from her biological mother, an Ojibwe woman named Mary Potts. Cedar learns that her Native family has “no special powers or connections with healing spirits or sacred animals,” and is, in fact, bourgeois. One set of relatives even owns a Superpumper gas station. Pissed off, Cedar thinks, “Who are the Potts to suddenly decide to be my parents? Worse, who are they to have destroyed the romantic imaginary Native parents I’ve invented from earliest childhood, the handsome ones with long, both-sided braids, who died in some vague and suitably spiritual Native way […]?”

Still, because of her pregnancy — the baby is due on a date of symbolic importance: December 25 — she drives out to meet her birth mother, who goes by “Sweetie.” As she approaches the reservation, Cedar is welcomed by a huge sign that reads “Future Home of the Living God,” and once inside she meets Sweetie’s boyfriend Eddy, an endearing writer. Like several others in the novel, he’s reminiscent of an E. L. Doctorow character — artless and naïve, or self-deluded, yet also weirdly knowledgeable. He “doesn’t have the modern sort of depression” that can be “treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” and he has written a manuscript that’s more than 3,000 pages long.

Eddy likes theorizing about the world, and he’s the first person to whom Cedar discloses her pregnancy. When Cedar asks him what he thinks is going to happen, the following exchange takes place.

“Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we’ll keep adapting.”

“But the world is going to pieces.”

“It is always going to pieces.”

“This is different.”

“It is always different. We’ll adapt.”

After meeting her biological family, which includes her drug-addict half-sister Little Mary and her wise Native grandmother Mary, Cedar returns home to the father of her unborn baby, Phil, and hints of dystopia start emerging. Looking at Cedar’s ultrasound, her OB-GYN notes that every part of the fetus is perfect. He tells Cedar she should leave, and though she’s initially confused by the warning, it turns out that the government is searching for any pregnant women carrying babies that are not devolving.

Once Cedar’s pregnancy starts to show, she cannot go out, even to shop for food. She becomes confined to the house and has to construct a secret food cache in the basement. Her progressive parents disappear from their house, and fake people with fake smiles and gentle voices move into it. She cries over all the “wonderful, normal times” that she’s eaten crackers and cheese with parents or friends. The government is taken over by the Church of the New Constitution, which conducts surveillance through her computer. It turns on by itself and says, “Hello dear, this is Mother. How are you tonight? I am worried. We don’t seem to be communicating very well.”

It’s end times.

Reading the first 50 pages, with all their satire and humor, I was humming R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” But as the novel progressed, I came to understand that it would be grimmer than other dystopian novels I’d read and, because of its recognizable ordinariness at the outset, more terrifying.

Indeed, events grow steadily more horrifying and visceral — in one memorable scene, Cedar is forced to crush and kill rats to keep them from swarming a stillborn baby. But as the action grows more intense, the government’s will becomes increasingly baroque, simultaneously over- and under-explained. Why are people trying to escape to California? Why is the government targeting Minneapolis? Why are the news anchors all white? How does Mother appear in computers in which the power has died? These questions need not be answered, of course, and the supernatural elements in the basic premise provide Erdrich some freedom. But the way in which these questions are raised and then just as quickly dropped feels rushed rather than intense and mysterious.

Somehow, in a fortuitous blast of pregnancy hormones, Cedar remains optimistic through the darkest of times. But Future Home fully conveys the intensity of pregnancy during an apocalypse — if it can feel harrowing for an individual mother in normal circumstances, how much more earth-shattering must it be when you’re carrying one of the last fully evolved humans? The conceit of a mother writing to her unborn child is well executed, and the nature of impending motherhood is handled with care and accuracy. Cedar notes, “I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick and glorious.” This spirit of looking at the world as a source of amazement, as being pregnant with possibility, rather than with sorrow or wistfulness, permeates the book. The tone shifts from frank and satiric to philosophical and tender but rarely sinks into the deeply melancholic voice that we’ve come to expect from the genre.

Designing a fully realized dystopia that speaks to the present moment is an ambitious and challenging feat of world building. Although the novel is slow to move into a dystopian register, the newly oppressive governmental institutions Erdrich fashions for Future Home make sense. The reader can easily imagine how our current government, which is already obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive systems, would become even more intrusive when there is a premium on “normal” babies.

The immediate comparison is to Margaret Atwood’s similarly hellish masterwork The Handmaid’s Tale, but the two novels have quite different political viewpoints. Given the Trump Era rise in reactionary conservatism, Atwood’s storytelling may seem eerily of-the-moment to those watching the Hulu television show based on the novel. However, the novel was published in 1985 — it was Atwood’s insightful response to what was happening politically during a decade that was crucial to the advance of the Christian right. Catholic right-to-life organizations had made Roe v. Wade a significant political issue by 1976, former Southern Baptist minister Pat Robertson was calling abortion a “theological matter,” and it was taken up as a pet cause by Evangelicals who came together to form the Moral Majority. Atwood’s novel simply takes the Moral Majority and pushes its beliefs to their logical end: a violent theocracy. She plainly modeled Serena Joy after pro-life conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, who said in 1977, “Women find their greatest fulfillment at home with the family.”

The Handmaid’s Tale has an elegiac atmosphere, a longing for a yesteryear in which secular democracy, rather than theocracy, was the social norm. In Atwood’s dystopia are the seeds of a utopia. The novel sets as its ideal a time prior to the seizing of political power by Evangelical fanatics. It’s unforgettable partly because the narrator, the handmaid Offred, turns ordinary secular details like shampoo into objects of visionary poetry imbued with a loss and sorrow that pervades the entire work. This poetry of the everyday is shared by notable contemporary dystopian novels such as Laura van den Berg’s Find Me (2015), which touches on the search for a mother, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), as well as arthouse films such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). Everything social and political that is frightening in Atwood’s universe is intensified through lovely references to the utterly banal. Look at what you could lose, her novel seems to say.

Future Home shares the intensity of Handmaid’s Tale but doesn’t dissolve into melancholy. It cannot be read as an elegy for a lost world the way Atwood’s novel can. Cedar’s moral and religious worldview is different from that of the more liberal narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale. For instance, Cedar writes a Catholic newsletter, and this is in line with the book’s choice to treat her unborn fetus as a person, a potential recipient of all her letters. Perhaps Erdrich’s approach to what is dystopian arises from her different starting point — our existing world is not a utopia, and Erdrich will not pretend that it is.

Unlike Atwood, Erdrich uses banal imagery — particularly food and pregnancy, but also snot and technology — to generate a surreal sensation. She evokes the feeling of crazy end times by showing how institutions have gone completely haywire even as most sensory objects are experienced and sought after in the same way. In one scene, for example, Cedar is out getting a Subway sandwich when she sees the police seize a pregnant woman and her husband off the street, leaving their child to be swallowed up by a crowd. Cedar writes, “This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.” Erdrich captures the flavor of our Trumpian reality perfectly.

Future Home also shares literary DNA with P. D. James’s reproduction-focused dystopian novel The Children of Men (1992), though the latter is set in England. James uses fertility issues as a launch pad for concerns about totalitarianism. In the novel, the last baby was born in 1995, and by 2021 humans are on the brink of extinction. The narrator’s cousin is the Warden of England, and his critics view him as a despot. He’s a paternalistic force who purportedly acts out of concern for order but actually seeks to retain and enforce power. A subplot about a baby’s paternity echoes and reinforces the larger plot’s commentary on the rise of a tyrant, which is rendered authentic through James’s use of real history and politics — heretofore run by men, by fathers — to inform her narrative.

Instead of a masculine-centered totalitarianism that can be read as paternalism run amok, Erdrich imagines the government of Future Home as a creepy mother. As it acts to control the reproduction of Cedar and other pregnant women, the government explicitly projects itself as “Mother” — soft, maternal, concerned. But it’s a mother that desires control, a mother who may seem nurturing and progressive but is really just as autocratic as a traditional father figure. Where James’s paternity subplot clarifies her vision of totalitarianism, Erdrich’s government-as-creepy-mother framework muddles hers. It feels like a literary attack on a progressive vision of government, especially when juxtaposed with the lightly mocking satire directed at Cedar’s progressive, white, adoptive parents.

There is a conceptual basis for Erdrich’s decision to make her intrusive government maternal and solicitous, or falsely nurturing. As the linguist George Lakoff has pointed out in multiple books, including Moral Politics (1996), we tend to understand nation metaphorically as family. Traditionally, the left and right wings in this country have held ideological worldviews that can be understood as two different family models. Within this framework, progressives are identified with a nurturant parent model in which empathy is crucial and children become self-reliant with the help of caregivers, often mothers. In contrast, conservatives subscribe to a strict father model, which positions the father of a traditional nuclear family as the primary protector of children and sole authority devising rules of behavior and providing enforcement. Thus, one group sees the role of government as nurturing and supporting its citizens while the other sees it as an enforcer of rules and order, nothing more.

The text of Future Home drives toward the idea that a nurturing, progressive vision of government could and would lead to an abuse of control just as the strict father model does. This may, as an abstraction or in a historical vacuum, be true. Humans of any gender have within them the capacity to abuse whatever power they get. However, our real-world experience shows that most of what we know about how abuse of power plays out corresponds to a right-wing, authoritarian, strict father worldview (think Nazi Germany). The Children of Men gets this exactly right. The nurturant parent model, on the other hand, has only ever partially been implemented in the United States through programs such as Social Security. It simply doesn’t, by its very definition, correspond with the idea of brute governmental force.

Moreover, Erdrich’s political intentions for the novel as expressed in her author’s note are precisely the opposite of what her text suggests. She started writing the novel in 2002 in response to what she saw as a regressive political moment — the false intelligence that went into justifying the war in Iraq and President George W. Bush’s reinstatement of the global gag rule. She revisited the novel in 2016 after Trump was elected, when it appeared that we’d circled back to the politics of 2002, only worse. In the note, she points to deaths from unsafe abortions and the newly reimposed global gag rule, writing, “I only have to look at photographs of white men in dark suits deciding crucial issues of women’s health to know the timing is right” for publication of Future Home.

But the political concepts in Future Home are not fleshed out enough to comment effectively on our current moment. The symbolic connection between mothers and power that Erdrich wants to make is handled much more thoughtfully by Octavia Butler in her strikingly prophetic 1998 novel Parable of the Talents. In Talents, a demagogue president takes control of the country by promising that he’ll make America great again. A group of his Christian Crusaders are kidnapping the children of heathens and raping women, though he formally distances himself from them. The novel’s protagonist Lauren Olamina, a cult leader whose daughter has been kidnapped by the Crusaders, desires power and influence, too. However, she’s a black woman, not a representative of the established white-nationalist government, and she’s not given to offering up fake nostalgia in an effort to gather followers. Instead, she creates her own religion by seeking out like-minded followers through conversation and discussion — in other words, she’s nurturing.

But in the end, Olamina’s daughter Larkin, who may have been brainwashed, perceives her mother as being just as frightening as the totalitarian president. Through Larkin we receive the truth that power-seekers are always, regardless of gender, capable of manipulation and abuse. This, I think, is the truth Erdrich is working toward in Future Home. But Butler’s Afrofuturist version speaks more directly to our times. Olamina is never in a position to wield the brute, oppressive force of the government — she never has the power to create apocalyptic conditions the way Future Home’s Creepy Mother regime does. She may offer a form of salvation, but it is not to be had on this Earth.

Future Home is a departure from the lush intimacy of Erdrich’s Love Medicine and the dark, unforgettable storytelling of The Round House. As a gifted author’s flawed, experimental foray into dystopian fiction, it illustrates an important distinction between dystopian writing that arises from dreams and fantasy and that which arises from observation. At Future Home’s core is a fantasy about the visceral relationship between mothers and their babies, and between humans and Mother Earth. Dreams are inexorably personal, private, and idiosyncratic. They arise more from how we feel about things than from what those things might mean apart from our feelings about them and so fall outside the shared public sphere of the political. Erdrich’s dream-like approach to dystopian fiction contrasts with that taken by Atwood, James, and Butler, who were articulating shared visions rather than private ones, those they’d extrapolated from tangible situations that could be observed by anybody in our world who was interested in looking.

In the later part of the novel, Erdrich alludes to a famous Bertolt Brecht quote: “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” In the scene, Eddy says, “Humans have always been superfluous troublemakers […] But at least we’ve got good songs.” Cedar points out that not everyone has good songs, and notes, “Mother — you know that Mother — has no song.” Eddy replies, “People sick for power have no song. But your baby is going to have a song.” Future Home functions like a song about the dark times, a blues hymn about how surreal life under Trump feels to progressives. But it’s not really a song about the specifics of our dark times. Rather, it’s a beautifully written, if imperfect, thought experiment that pushes the boundaries of reproduction-focused dystopian fiction. We may be in a historical moment that feels brutish and regressive, but it could, Erdrich suggests, be even worse.

¤

Anita Felicelli has contributed essays and reviews to The New York Times (Modern Love), San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and The Rumpus. Her short stories have been published in The Normal School, Joyland, Kweli Journal, Eckleburg, Strangelet Journal, and The Stockholm Review.

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