Lucy Bellwood

A Blaze of Kindness

The Terra Nova Expedition is the Millennials’ polar expedition. We’ve worked really hard, we’ve done everything we were supposed to, we made what appeared to be the right decisions at the time, and we’re still losing. Nothing in the mythology we’ve been fed has prepared us for this. No amount of positive attitude is going to change it. We have all the aphorisms in the world, but what we need is an example of how to behave when the chips are down, when the Boss is not sailing into the tempest to rescue us, when the Yelcho is not on the horizon. When circumstances are beyond your power to change, how do you make the best of your bad situation? What does that look like? Even if you can’t fix anything, how do you make it better for the people around you – or at the very least, not worse? Scott tells us: you can be patient, supportive, and humble; see who needs help and offer it; be realistic but don’t give in to despair; and if you’re up against a wall with no hope of rescue, go out in a blaze of kindness. We learn by imitation: it’s easy to say these things, but to see them in action, in much harder circumstances than we will ever face, is a far greater help. And to see them exemplified by real, flawed, complicated people like us is better still; they are not fairly-tale ideals, they are achievable. Real people achieved them.

I am leaping out of my chair and whooping and cheering and hollering about this passage from Sarah Airriess’s latest Patreon post. (The whole essay was released early for Patrons, so you can either become a supporter to read the whole thing today or just wait it out until it becomes more widely available in a month. Personally I’d recommend the former, because Sarah’s Patreon is one of the best around, but I’m biased.)

This talk originally accompanied the launch of The Worst Journey in the World, Vol. 1, Sarah’s graphic novel adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the Terra Nova Expedition. I’m holding my copy right now, and it’s one of the most beautiful comics I’ve ever seen. Again: my appreciation is probably heightened by the fact that I’ve been following along on Patreon for years as she’s shared the process behind every page, but even without that context it’s a beautiful, beautiful book.

A page from "The Worst Journey in the World" showing a view of pack ice from the rigging of a tall ship.

A page from The Worst Journey in the World showing two characters observing a beautiful sunset.

In the microcosm of caregiving, I’m learning this lesson over and over again: it isn’t the systems that make it bearable; it’s the people. It’s Gabriela texting to say she’s bringing over a rotisserie chicken. It’s Jim coming by in an hour to take my dad out for a visit to his favorite coffee shop. It’s Jen holding space for our cohort of young caregivers to show up and commiserate with each other over Zoom because she went through what we’re going through and wants to pay it forward. It’s Hayley texting a loving thought from across the country when I somehow need it most. It’s Sarah picking up my watch from the place in Ventura that I keep forgetting to stop at and then coming to help me build a bed frame. It’s also whoever left a free mattress in the parking lot behind Vons.

I think back on the way I lived through the first ten years of my career and it feels so different. I was bolstered and supported by community, it’s true. I was even asking them for help at every turn to make my books and my work possible! But somehow the ways I’m relying on others right now feel so different. I’m humbled so much more thoroughly by letting people in during this season of my life because it’s not just creative anxiety anymore. That’s peanuts. That’s easy.

This is the real shit.

It’s not freezing to death in Antarctica shit, but some days it feels real close. I’ve feared and loathed the thought of anyone seeing me like this for so long, but time and time again I see that people want to help each other. Or, at the very least, my people want to help me. And my dad’s people want to help me. And my hometown wants to help me.

I just have to let them in.

Delights, Reading

“If you don’t believe in god, say ocean.”

If queerness can be understood as a longing, a technology that allows us to glimpse something new that we sense before we can see it, a dowsing rod, a black light, then water might be the catalyst that dissolves our attachment to whatever is keeping us from it, from ourselves.

It’s very hard not to quote the entirety of this essay by J Wortham, which manages to articulate so many angles of my obsession with getting into bodies of water. I wrote a fair bit about my plunge habit when I first moved, but there were many more beyond what I covered. This week it was the frigid Pacific Ocean under a drizzly Santa Barbara sky, then the broad arroyo of the Ventura River, then Thacher Creek in Horn Canyon.

Thacher Creek rushing past sunlit boulders.

It’s been a winter blessed with unusual—almost unprecedented—amounts of rain.

Part of the reality of searching for queer respites is that they are fleeting, ever-evolving, a question without a resolved answer.

Their writing makes me think of Heraclitus.

"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not."

Queer time is a sensate way of life, the kind treasured by people who perhaps understand with crackling urgency how circumstances can change in a moment, and the importance of pleasures that even in small doses can sustain you for weeks, months, years after the moment has passed.

Both times I’ve been at Wayward (a decidedly queer space) I’ve swum more frequently than any other time in my life, and yes: those pleasures have sustained me for the last three years. The daily naked plunges in the lake woke me up after naps and started me off right on foggy mornings; they soothed and refreshed and coaxed and shocked. They gave me a touchstone of what it felt like to be fully embodied, fully held. Given the self-obliterating caregiving role I find myself in now, I’ve needed it.

This total immersion of my body into water, repeatedly, without fear, allowed for a total surrender of the illusion of separation between self and the natural world, the universe, whatever you want to call it. If you don’t believe in god, say ocean. Diving nude into the ocean in broad daylight, without fear of reproach, opened a portal to a higher consciousness. Ordinary, and then extraordinary. To be near the sea is to be humbled by its magnitude, to watch your priorities be reordered to its scale. What are self-consciousness, fear of the future, existential worries, to the ocean?

The last night we were on the island, after the main cohort of retreat attendees had gone, we hiked through the forest and over the cliff to the sea. After warming up by a bonfire on the beach, there was no more reason to wait. Two of us waded out into the freezing black water, stepping gingerly over beds of oyster shells until it was deep enough to paddle. I was shuddering and staring, willing and wishing, just about ready to turn around and admit defeat when I began to see it: the water beneath me erupting in stars, bioluminescence eddying around my limbs, all of it too beautiful to seem real.

Each time I allow myself to be enveloped, something is remembered for me: a place, a feeling, a fluency. I can’t always name it, but it’s too powerful to deny. It’s almost as if the parts of myself that have gone missing are recollected in water.

The stars that night were glinting, and the bonfire on the shore waited like a beacon, but the brightest shimmer was running down my forearms, spiraling behind my palms, reminding me of everything I could be.

Hello, hello, hello.

Ojai, Photos

A View (3)

A hillside covered in lush grass with a cloudy expanse of sky above it.

(Previously from this spot: 2022, 2021)

It’s been hard to get out of the house recently.

Our neighbor of 31 years died in February, followed by my godfather in March. They each meant very different things to me, but both occupied an archetypal permanence that’s hard to reconcile with death. And all grief is linked, isn’t it? This thread pulls on that one and so on and so on until the tapestry unravels and you’re left holding a mess of snotty string.

The last two weeks of my wall calendar are utterly blank. I’ve learned to read these gaps in my paper trail as markers of total emotional exhaustion (although sometimes they correlate with the thrill of a new relationship). In this case, I know the data is missing because I’ve been too tired to track whether I wore my mouth guard, too forgetful to know if I attended a Zoom meeting, too frazzled to write Morning Pages. Too much. Too much.

Last night I finally turned my phone all the way off and threw it behind the bookshelf. I buried my laptop in the couch cushions. I hid my iPad in the closet. I hucked all this technology out of my room because I was drowning in it, trying to get away from everything.

Instead, today, I walked. Not for long, but enough to remember what my legs are for. Enough to see how everything has changed from storm after storm of rich rainwater filtering into the hillsides since January. You can stick a finger in the earth and water pours out. Every divot in the trail is a spring.

We’ve passed the equinox. Life is coming back.

Delights

Moananuiākea

Hey! The gorgeous double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa and her sister ship Hikianalia are setting off on another circumnavigation!! LOOK AT THIS VOYAGE MAP!!!

A map showing Hōkūleʻa's voyage itinerary.

I’m heartbroken this year’s trip to Juneau falls a month before the launch date, but also so excited to see these upcoming plans. I hope I can catch the vessels when they’re further down the US coast. (If you’ve never heard of Hōkūleʻa before, it’s worth skimming through her history on the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s website.)

Here are some drawings I did back in 2017 when I got to visit Hawai‘i for the first time and fell in love with the history of wayfinding. (Ask me sometime about why Disney’s Moana is basically a true story.)

Brain Food, Reading

Five Rhymes

We think of people as settling down when they get older, getting more set in their ways. But that hasn’t been my experience. Instead as I get older, I’m itching to get weirder. I think that in my twenties, I was so determined to carve out space for myself in the world. And now that I have that space, I don’t really feel like I have anything to prove. So it’s safe to ask some big questions about who I actually am. I’m more up for rethinking what I thought I knew. I like the idea of not being content with the apples you can grasp.
Shay

Is it that we actively pull ourselves into being by our very actions, our choices laying the foundations brick by brick for who we are and who we will become…?

Or is it that what pulls us into being, what pushes us toward action, is the ache, is our future selves, is the wisdom in our present yearning, foretold and prophesied by a future world who wants us to become who we inevitably need to become to create itself…?

Yes.
Christina

Maybe this swirl of awe and marvel and good intent for the world and gratitude for ourselves in it is where all the religions came from. That is where our feel for the sacred in the world is conjured, surely, the ordinary, staggering mystery of where it all comes from before it is born here among us and where it all goes after it dies away from us, the starry midnight courtship of the heart that whispers, “What is gone is still with you, still here. As you will be.”
Stephen

Not every experience needs to be put in the basket of “turn this into a beautiful piece of writing for the people”, but everything goes in the basket of – perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye.
Marlee

This is the inheritance that no one ever told you about—wild and curious, unblinking, sorrow-eyed and courageous chested, shuddering the rain from its feathers, ready to launch into the dusking light.
Martin

Patreon Essays

Penny Stackin’

A colorful graph comparing the relative merits of six different income streams: 701 Work, Seacritters, Housesitting, Buyolympia, Freelance, and Patreon.

I joked with my partner that this behavior feels like stacking my pocket change. “Look! I can make a pyramid! Or a square! Ooh this one has rust on it, but the other one doesn’t! I WILL CATALOGUE THEM.” It’s fun, but at the end of the day it doesn’t change the fact that I’m just stacking five pennies as many ways as I can.

BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT, I PROMISE. IT REALLY MIGHT HELP.

Blog

Noir Bean Dreams

[Unpublished draft from October, 2021]

I’ve been having batshit dreams all week. Exhausted, unable to sleep, restless when I finally go down. But last night I got a reprieve and had some really fun ones, most of which I’ve now forgotten. The last remaining vestige was a hardboiled detective saying “The dame walked into my office. She had a face like four cubed beans coming out of a boat.”

Okay, Brain.

Reading

The Society of Split Minds

Two pages from J.B. Priestley's book Delight.

I’ve been reading J.B. Priestley’s book Delight during my morning excursions to the lavatory for the last couple months. Maybe this is a sign I’m turning into my father as I age, but I’ve really embraced the art of reading in the loo. I have yet to achieve his ability to stay in there for a half hour every morning, but I’m learning the ins and outs of the practice. You can’t, for example, just pick any old book! You need something with short enough chapters to remain enjoyable and engaging even if you’re only reading a page or two a day.

When I look back at 2022 in reading I realize a lot of my favorite books from this year happened to be Loo Reads. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, The Timeless Way of Building, A Primer for Forgetting, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, Delight, 300 Arguments…I’m sure I enjoyed them for their own merits, but I also wonder if the pace of consumption didn’t have something to do with it as well. They kept me company for far longer than books typically do, and with far more consistency.

Anyway, Priestley is marvelous. So many of these entries feel like they could’ve been written yesterday; I’ve been resisting the temptation to write about them all. (It does, however, give me great pleasure to see Robin blogging about bits from the copy I sent him. I love it when a gift finds its mark.)

Brain Food

Matt Thoughts

Got to catch up with the inimitable Matthew Bogart on the phone the other day after an embarrassingly long lull in communication (although his Patreon updates make me feel like we’re good pals just chatting away on the regular, so maybe that’s why I lost track). At one point he said “That’s the entirety of comics for me: turning story into space” and I think that’s a REAL GOOD LINE! I wrote it down immediately because YES! EXACTLY! What a great form of wizardry to practice.

But now I’m thinking about why it is that pictures occupy spatial real estate for me in a way words…don’t?? I’m tired and it’s the end of the day so I’m not going to dig into why right now. Just chucking it into the posterity machine.

Anyway: Matt’s a good dude. The last time I saw him he was letting me borrow his corner rounder during the Pandemic. That’s a real friend.