Birthdays During Quarantine, First Pink Dogwood and Goldfinch, Finding Hope In the Apocalypse

First Pink Dogwood Branch

Birthdays During Quarantine

Well, I’m turning another year older this week. And I feel lucky to be doing it – just a couple of years ago this week, I had been about to start chemo for what I had been told was terminal cancer. This was right before I was diagnosed with MS. So, I appreciate being here to celebrate another birthday, I do. It’s hard to celebrate any ordinary thing – like a birthday – while in quarantine, while our country loses over 50,000 people in just a couple of months to a virus that continues to confound doctors and scientists around the world. It’s been hard to celebrate the fact that I got into two of my dream journals, Poetry and Ploughshares, this month, places I have waited years to get into, while worrying about the future of the post office, small publishers, and small bookstores.

First goldfinch, with faux bird

First Pink Dogwood and Goldfinches

One thing I’m definitely doing to stay cheerful – or, well, at least sane – is spending time noticing the small beauties around my home, even on rainy days that don’t seem immediately cheerful. The birds that stop at the feeders, the new flowers as they open. This week, it was pink dogwood, one of my favorite flowers (and one that repeatedly shows up in my poems,) water iris, and goldfinches. Please enjoy this tour of Woodinville birds and blooms.

Finding Hope and Humor in the Apocalypse

I was talking to a friend yesterday about reading during the quarantine. We were talking about how much we hated The Road, and I commented that Cormac was projecting his own inner bleakness onto his apocalypse. I brought up Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John; one imagines a heroine who rescues the world with her creative force, and the other imagines a post-pandemic world welcoming a traveling tour of Shakespeare performers, a world of grief and terror, sure, but with room for art and artists.  These two books, I think, find the hope in the apocalypse. I like to think Field Guide to the End of the World was my attempt to imagine all the apocalypse scenarios, from Twilight Zone to 2012, with an eye towards the hope and humor of those scenarios. It is intensely difficult to keep your sense of humor and hope right now, I know. It’s scary. I’m having nightmares almost every night.

Tell me how you are coping. Do you have more reading suggestions?  ( I also recommended Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell, a hopeful version of disaster history in the United States.)

In the meantime, here is a video of me reading on YouTube of “Martha Stewart’s Guide to Apocalypse Living,” another poem from Field Guide to the End of the World. I hope it makes you smile. Take care of yourselves this week. Stay safe. Stay well.