March 9, 2020
It’s called a Worm Moon—the first full moon of spring. The temperatures are warming, and earthworms, asleep all through the cold winter, begin to waken and wriggle up out of the newly thawed ground. Sharing a close rhythm with the earth, they easily sense its shifts.
It was the biggest moon I’ve ever seen. Fat and milky yellow, it was fuzzed over by wispy clouds hanging low on the horizon; dreamlike. But as it rose it seemed to condense, gathering in its edges and polishing them. Its light intensified, making my eyes water. I imagined little earthworms poking up their heads under its sharp glow, knowing it was for them.
March 22, 2020
Another walk today. Everyone seems to go on walks now. We’re all careful though to keep a wide berth, our paths cutting hasty and sweeping arcs around each other, careful not to get too close.
March 26, 2020
I feel on the verge of imploding, as if there’s nothing inside to prop me up and keep me whole.
April 12, 2020
I found a four-leaf clover. It was large, roughly the size of a half-dollar when fanned out, with little dimples at the crest of each leaf. I’ve always had a knack for finding them. Never when I’m actually looking, though.
April 26, 2020
The sunflowers are about knee-high with broad, coarse leaves and nickel-sized buds closed up tight. I planted them back in late February, before I knew just how much I’d need green, growing things.
May 10, 2020
The park’s rose garden is in full bloom. Pink-flushed peach plots of “Rainbow Sorbet” and sticky sweet “Marmalade Skies.” “Walking on Sunshine.” I stroked their petals, the feel of damp silk, and had the urge to crush the flowers whole in my fist. Not to destroy, but to absorb—their perfume, their vivid colors, even the bite of their thorns. I wanted to run from bush to bush gobbling them up like a demon, spitting and spluttering petals as I ravaged. Even though I brought my face right up against their dense pleats, behind my mask I couldn’t smell anything.
Anger leapt unexpectedly from deep inside my belly, stinging at my eyes and causing tears to prickle and pool. I was embarrassed by the ferocity of the feeling, which only made the tears gather more quickly.
June 13, 2020
On a walk I watched bees humming about a bush filled with tiny purple flowers. Their industriousness unnerved me.
July 3, 2020
Bristlecone Pine trees grow very slowly. So slowly that it takes about a hundred years to add only an inch of growth to their trunk. Some years don’t even register a perceptible ring. Yet the wood bears the memory all the same—of the fierce winds twisting unrelentingly at their limbs, the too-short summers, and the constant thirst for nutrients in dry soil. Because it can’t grow quickly, it grows strong, building a defense of hard, resinous wood that has made it largely impervious to outside threats. As a result, Bristlecones are some of the oldest living organisms in the world. The oldest—a tree named Methuselah—is nearly 5,000 years old. When it was a seedling, the Great Pyramids were still centuries from being built. It was alive when the last of the Woolly Mammoths went extinct. When Hannibal crossed the Alps. The whole of the Middle Ages, and the French Revolution. It was alive then and it’s still alive now.
At the trailhead I saw a sign pointing out a group of Bristlecones, each of which was uncharacteristically tall and full. They had been favored with typically “good” growing conditions. But, the sign pointed out, their destiny wasn’t to be among the ancients. Without the hardships their wood grew soft, penetrable. Looking out past those falsely robust trees to their stocky, wizened brethren on the rocky mountain slopes beyond, it felt like a bitter analogy—even more so because it was such a tempting one to cling to.
As I hiked through the forest of ancients I reached out to touch their twisting branches burnished smooth and radiating warmth under the day’s summer sun. I ruffled thick bottlebrush needles and gently cupped a plum-colored cone hanging from the edge of a branch, sticky sap oozing out of its scales holding tight the seeds that might yet see thousands of years. Where strips of bark remained, my fingertips traced fine, swirling grooves etched by millennia.
July 10, 2020
I learned about an artist couple who believed that through the right architecture the body could be taught not to die—a philosophy they called “reversible destiny.” They built houses with bumpy floors that sloped and required the use of strategically placed poles to get around. There were clashing colors and textures, and walls that intersected each other at irregular angles. The goal was to keep the body guessing, trick the synapses into working harder.
But no matter how disorienting the environment, if you spent enough time there, wouldn’t you get used to it? Humans are conditioned to adapt. “Unprecedented” is only unprecedented once. Then it becomes established. Soon it becomes routine. I’d like to think that it’s possible to construct a world where we can cheat the natural frailty of our bodies. I feel so permeable, so flimsy. When viewed through a screen or at a distance, so does everyone else. Just shapes, a digital amalgam of pixels. No marrow, no sinews. We rushed to construct a world that can help us stay safe, alive, but it lacks the surprise and tactility that keeps our synapses sparking.
July 13, 2020
I dreamt that my feet were rotting. The right one was in particularly bad shape—swollen, with patches of yellowy bruises and a crusty grey-green rime of mold. It was as if my body was beginning to disintegrate, right there on the spot. When I woke up I didn’t remember the dream until I went to put on my socks and it all came whooshing back so fast my breath hitched in my chest. I had a strong desire to examine my foot, as if insidious mold spores might actually be lurking there.
July 23, 2020
There’s a comet in our skies. NEOWISE. It was first spotted by astronomers back in March, but I suppose all the other news unfolding then drowned it out. But now the comet is everywhere. People are hungry for something beyond their front doors, a reminder that even though our personal worlds have shrunk and stagnated, the universe has not.
I usually feel a sort of comfort knowing that when I look up at the night sky there will be the generous cup of the big dipper—sometimes holding the liquid night close, sometimes tipped up as if it itself had just poured out the bright droplets of the stars, but always there regardless. When I aim my telescope at the string of three stars just below Orion’s belt, I know I will see the translucent splay of the Orion Nebula—birthing ground for stars yet to be. Lately though, my small, animal mind is struggling with the hugeness of it all. Why do we get so little time when the universe is filled with nothing but time? From a swirling cloud of dust and gas to a planet of oceans and mountains, humans with DNA that can be mapped and charted, computer chips and rocket fuel. Anything is possible with time. But we’re so impatient. I’m so impatient.
A comet is just what I need. A comet is now. The streak of its tail tells you it’s on the move, going places. It will see things I can’t even imagine. And years and years from now—6,800 for NEOWISE—it will return. To tell humanity what, I don’t know. What is it here to tell us now? Yes, it’s just a comet—a chunk of frozen gas and dust that bursts to brilliant, fizzing life when it wanders close enough to the sun. But when I looked up at the sky tonight, eyes scanning around the ladle of that dependable dipper, I felt something fizzing to life inside me too, in a tiny corner hidden away from all the years of accumulated human logic and knowledge. A jolt through time. Or maybe it was outside of time.
August 7, 2020
The beaches were too crowded to keep a safe distance from anyone. Instead I hiked along the lake until I came to a spot where I could scrabble down over boulders to reach the water. The cold was a welcome shock when I jumped in, and I reflexively let out a yelp from its exquisite sting.
September 9, 2020
Today was a day that wasn’t. When I woke up the room was dark, but I knew it wasn’t the middle of the night. I knew because I could feel the sun’s absence. Not in my brain but in my stomach, my guts.
Still in my pajamas I ran outside and found a sky of dark, menacing orange. It was true—there was no sun. There weren’t even any clouds that I could discern—just a flat, noxious orange pressing in from above. Was it even the sky? It felt like the earth had turned inside out and I’d fallen through to its fiery belly. I kept looking, searching for even a glimpse of light cutting through. But nothing. It just wasn’t there.
A car went by with its headlights on. Across the street someone walked their dog. California is burning. The whole west coast is burning.
I’ve heard that during a total eclipse, in the few minutes when the day suddenly flips to night, animals and insects have a swift and visceral reaction. Crickets begin chirping. Coyotes howl. Spiders break down their webs.
I kept staring at the sky that wasn’t. Inside of me, something splintered.
September 27, 2020
Albino redwood trees are extremely rare, so I didn’t expect to find one. But I did, hiding in plain sight just ten or so feet off the trail—a stocky bush-like growth that was stark white from branch to needle. Under the wash of bright sunlight peeking through the forest canopy it was hard to distinguish it from the glossy branches of its properly pigmented siblings, like an apparition glimpsed briefly out of the side of one’s eye and not fully believed. Fitting for a tree known as “ghost of the redwoods.”
October 8, 2020
Last night I dreamt I was waiting in a long line to speak with an octopus. The octopus was an oracle and I was desperate to reach him. He could read minds, but you had to be careful—fumble your thoughts or lose focus and you’d risk drowning from being down in the water too long. The stakes were very high. And as the line grew shorter and I got closer to the water, my anxiety grew. I kept running through what I wanted to ask, but the more I practiced the more my mind seemed to fracture.
I woke before seeing the octopus and couldn’t for the life of me remember what I was going to say to him, though the specter of it tugged at the edges of my brain the rest of the day.
October 30, 2020
Walking deep into the Badwater Basin salt flat, it seemed as if time had stopped. Cars in the parking lot and other hikers receded to tiny points that eventually vanished altogether. Within the vast stretch of white there was a silence unbroken by rustling leaves, gurgling water, or chirping birds. I thrilled in the strangeness of it.
I stopped walking and lay down on the hard crust. After crunching across the flat for over an hour the sudden and total quiet pressed in with noticeable weight. Overhead the sky was a field of blue. I stared up at it, feeling the sun’s rays grow hot against my skin, and the rhythmic beat of my heart in my chest. As the minutes passed the sky began a slow pulse, expanding and receding as my gaze remained fixed on its undisturbed blue. My ears, searching and straining for sound, turned inward, and I realized I had been unconsciously holding my breath.
November 14, 2020
The tide was so far out that the beach had nearly doubled in size. Where normally there were waves there was a glassy surface, a liminal space that was neither shore nor ocean. When I looked out across it I could see the sky’s fleecy clouds mirrored back, blending with scattered clots of seafoam; a collapsing of planes. I bent over and gave my parallel self a bashful little wave, like a baby when it first sees its own reflection.
Tonight there will be a new moon. I’d looked it up expecting the opposite, having always equated the full moon with the muscular pull of the tides to their highest and lowest points. Somehow I’d never realized that the new moon, veiled by its own shadow, applies an equally powerful force. It makes sense though—after all, the moon’s phases are really just a trick of angles and light. Regardless of how it looks to us it’s always there in full 3D, exerting its cyclic and unceasing push/pull.
Such a human thing to so easily discount the power of something we can’t see; eyes wired to a terrestrial, animal language. Our senses allow us to interpret the world, but theirs is a limited vocabulary. Nature’s is far more sprawling. Intuitive.
In just a few hours, beneath the dark sky, the waves will begin surging back. I slowly begin building them inside my mind—wild and gurgling, they’re in a frenzy to regain the shore, urged on by an invisible object wielding an invisible force.
December 21, 2020
This evening, two giants hundreds of millions of miles apart in our solar system passed within a breath of each other here on earth. It’s been 400 years since Saturn and Jupiter have been this close, and 800 since that proximity occurred at night, making the conjunction visible to people the world over. Even here in the city where most of the celestial light is swallowed up before it reaches our eyes, the conjunction was unmistakable—two spots of incandescence sitting together just above the rooftops.
The planets are always moving. The universe is always changing. Each night I look up into the sky it’s different than the night before. But most of those changes are too subtle to perceive. The night sky is simply a backdrop to my daily life, a pattern vaguely registered but not fully catalogued. Occasionally though, like tonight, that steady and imperceptible forward thrum seems to a skip a few beats. The pattern is broken and I can’t help taking notice.
I looked at those two points of light so close to touching and could feel the residual lurch of those skipped beats. For almost a year now I’ve lived with that feeling—a wobbling in my legs and my guts as I try to work my way forward, not yet knowing what new pattern will emerge. Entire pieces of my life were flattened—textures blunted and colors muted, as in a system of irreversible compression; a copy of a copy. Other aspects grew in dimension. Time and space seemed more palpably plastic. Primal forces that often occupy the periphery of my conscious were suddenly thrust front and center. Quiet moments trumpeted loudly.
Even as I looked at it the conjunction was in the process of dissolving. The actual moment was just that, a moment, a blip as each planet traveled along its orbit independent of the other. In a few days, the night sky will settle back into a more familiar pattern and cadence. Yet the shift, that time out of step, has been marked. I’ve heard its silence and its roar, my ears now forever tuned to its frequency.
- Invisible Forces - August 23, 2022