One of the immensely valuable things I’ve learned from reading Indigenous writers and history (shout-out to Anita Heiss, Evelyn Araluen, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Terese Marie Mailhot, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Bruce Pascoe, David Treuer, Stephen Graham Jones, N. Scott Momaday and many more) is that looking at the United States and the Commonwealth of Australia and seeing colonial regimes that are fundamentally illegitimate is a real and viable option available to you at any time. Instead of doomscrolling, just think: Turtle Island. My shoulders immediately relax and I can breathe more easily. This land has seen empires rise and fall. This, too, shall pass.

This world is a network, not a hierarchy. You can tell by the immense amount of work and energy that pours into maintaining hierarchies. The empire really really wants to monopolize your attention because the second you notice it’s a party trick, it loses its power. Bullies hate knowing they peaked in high school. Billionaires are shit-scared of death, which is even a little bit poignant. The empire is a house which like all houses is only a temporary shelter against the rain. Water will find its way in.

Two obvious objections present themselves. First, isn’t this nihilism? I think it’s actually a bit closer to existentialism. And I’m not advocating for giving up on life and lying in bed being depressed, because I’ve tried that and it’s boring. Anyway the whole premise of this objection is, if not maintaining the empire then what? Which is more totalizing empire thinking, because it turns out there’s lots of things that are not the empire and a lot of them are really great.

For example: Charlie and I got to visit the Pueblo Indian Cultural Center. It’s amazing, a museum in a circular building that emphasizes the cyclical nature of indigenous time by, among other things, grouping artefacts by meaning and not chronology. This curatorial choice underscores the tenacity and continuity of a culture that succeeded in beating back the Spanish invasion and that endures to this day. Plus they have fry bread tacos in the cafeteria.

If not empire then how about ceremony? The rituals of maintenance, attending to the cycle of the years, tending to the land. Gardening, emptying the dishwasher, going to church. Or how about art? Making things or singing or moving your body around outside the relentless coercion marketplace. Forming relationships with particular wild or domestic animals. Being, just for the pleasure of it.

The second objection is that if you don’t consider imperial law legitimate, the empire’s goons can come and snatch you off the streets or shoot you in the face, which: yes. They do that. (Or the flip side of this argument, which is that as an immensely privileged white lady, I can afford to say that the empire is bullshit. Also true.) But while I was in Albuquerque I finally got around to reading Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Holocaust memoirs by their nature are drenched in survivor guilt, and the glib reading of this is that the good ones died and that a person had to do bad things to live. But Frankl digs deeper. To him even death in the camps could be a victory to the people who held onto their sense of self. When he talked about this sense of self I recognized it in myself as the person who thinks that we as Westerners should honour treaties with indigenous people or shut the fuck up. The person who can immediately disregard any argument that comes from a terf. The person who likes books and horses and Jeremy, and who is me.

A self is an amazing thing to have. A serious thing to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world, and so on. As I get older I spend more and more time enjoying consciousness for its own sake. All the middle aged cliches: learning the names of my backyard birds, closing my eyes the better to hear the music, drawing not to show other people what I’ve drawn but to find out what I am looking at, and whether my hand can cooperate with my eyes. When I was young and skinny it took me a long time to learn to float, but now that I’m old and buoyant I can simply lean back into the water and let the earth hold me in her cupped hands. That’s how it feels to me to have my self.

Trans people have taught me what suffering taught Viktor Frankl: that there’s a whole universe inside me that the empire can’t take away unless I yield it. The things I know to be true about myself: my treasure. My secret heart is both the only thing I have and, in the end, the only thing worth having. Find out what matters to you in this life and marvel at it. The stars over Wilbur Hot Springs, so thick and bright they were like rain. A lush-furred coyote outside Bandelier that turned to look at me with its dark golden eyes. The thirty years I’ve spent in cahoots with Jeremy: our witty and clever large adult children. What are the chances? All of it is astonishing. Worth it, despite despite despite.

Relationship building. > Empire building.

Cancel all uncreative, uninspiring time-sucks.

I was convinced that I’d never have any friends, so I had this idea of being one to myself. I could be honest and loyal and supportive. I could listen to myself and make myself laugh.

I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins.

Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories.

…we live in this hellhole, and we think it’s got to be this way. But what if we’re wrong?

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

Docent #1: I was trained as a geologist and a diver. We dived at Bikini and Eniwetok. Mostly Eniwetok. The trouble at Bikini is that there were a lot of shots on the same site, so it was hard to isolate the effects. At Eniwetok there were a lot of different sites. We scuba dived and had submersibles, for the deeper sites. We looked at the damage to the coral. This was 20 years later.

Castle Bravo was at Bikini, Mike was the big shot at Eniwetok. There was another shot that was in a tank, a water tank. That let us study the effects for the more modern type of weapons. Like the bunker busters, yes… You have a technical background? (No, but my father was an engineer and I think my grandfather was involved in the British atomic tests.) Yes, many thousands of us were involved.

Ironically I ended up helping to create the specifications we sent to the DOE for new designs. Because I understood the effects, as a geologist, I could advise on changes. Improvements. (More efficient? More destructive?) Both.

Of course I worry they’re going to be used. Did you see the Doomsday Clock? (Yes, and I check it frequently.) Then you know we’re at 90 seconds to midnight. It’s the most dangerous time we’ve ever seen, and people don’t realize. The last of the effective treaties with Russia runs out next month. In the eighties, in the old cold war, people knew what we were up against. Now we’re in a new cold war, and people don’t even know how much danger we are in. I wish we had leaders who understood it.

Docent #2: Back when we had an Atomic Energy Commission, it paid for me to go to graduate school. Nuclear engineering. I worked at Sandia. I have a measly master’s and I worked in safety, an I would write these reports and the scientists would say, “I have a DOCTORATE.” They do say PhD stands for piled higher and deeper…

I was in San Francisco in the seventies and eighties. I loved it. Is it still like that? Are you all right? I was working with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore, and I would get over to the city every chance I got.

I had some other Australians in here this week! You’re from Australia, you know how common uranium is, especially in your country, but you don’t even use it for energy. You sell it all to China. (Yeah, like that’s not gonna come back to bite us.) Yeah, you get the money, but at what cost?

I think we should get rid of them all. Everyone who works on them feels that way. But the trouble is that if we get rid of them, the other guy still has them. There are nine countries that have them, and some of them, the leaders are pretty… Unreliable. (What can we do?) Don’t vote for the unreliable ones. You’re both younger than me. It’s in your hands now.

Working in media—new, old, or whatever—you got very used to the fact that almost anything that made any sort of money was, if you dug deep enough, controlled by the same three straight white men.

As far as she was concerned, the feudal era had never ended.

I read 109 books this year only if you count the four series I read (George Smiley, A Dance to the Music of Time, Jinny at Finmory and the Vorkosigan saga) as one each, so there’s probably another 20 or so in there. Looking back, the books that have made the biggest impression were Dan Ozzi’s Sellout, a venture capital story and the perfect accompaniment to My Chem’s Long Live the Black Parade tour; Elaine Pagel’s Miracles and Wonder, which I like so much I’ve started a podcast about it, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

I’ve been annoying my loved ones by thinking aloud that Origin may be the most profound book ever written in English. I first tried to read it when I was fifteen (my older kid: “Why did you try to read it when you were fifteen?” Jeremy: “You know what she’s like.”) Coming back to it forty years later is like returning to La Sagrada Familia with the stained glass windows in; it took my breath away. You may know that of all fictional characters my most ardent affection is reserved for Stephen Maturin. Brilliant, fussy, fretful Darwin is his original.

Origin of Species sees Darwin assembling forty years of patient, painstaking, insightful work in natural history, corresponding with a vast web of respected peers, and synthesizing a staggering amount of data into a careful, considered and powerfully supported argument. At the same time, he understands what the evidence points towards, and what its implications are. Christianity will never be the same again.

Darwin and his wife Emma buried their favorite child Annie when she was ten years old. There’s a glib way to read this – that the loss caused Darwin to turn against God. My impression is quite the opposite. Despite what the promise of resurrection held out to him, and to his beloved wife, Darwin perceives the world with tremendous integrity. One cannot reconcile the account of the creation as written with our current understanding of geologic time. His clarity on this point, and what it cost him, breaks my heart. He stands at the end of a Church of England ontology and with great courage, faces a new and chaotic modernity –

My older kid: “So what you’re saying is, he reminds you of your Dad.” Me: “HEY now. That is UNcalled-for.” Jeremy, sympathetically: “Oh no, have you been perceived?”

English, which had started out as a language of the oppressed, had become an oppressor.

Were there schools? A few, to train servants of the empire.

We had been lied to so often that we spent half our time seeing through lies, but inexplicable things still happened.

As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

Ate something regrettable on the plane and had night visitors:

• Dreamed our New York apartment needed extensive repairs. What New York apartment? The real owners came home and were very nice about my delusion
• Dreamed my new bff Gwyneth Paltrow came back from a shallow grave in the woods, writhing and sweating out a strange clear gel as she transformed into an anime ninetail fox
• Dreamed my ex-wife (what ex-wife?) came by the beach house trick-or-treating, wearing a horse’s head quite cleverly fashioned from a steel bucket and flowerpot

I may not be cut out for business travel after all.

It was pleasantly cool in the room. The old gentleman took the lid off the iron kettle, which had begun to boil, and as he did so there was a terrible flash of bluish-white light outside. It seemed to rush past from east to west—from the built-up part of Hiroshima, that is, toward the hills beyond Furue. It was like a shooting star the size of hundreds of suns. 

Flying to Tokyo again to teach a new class of startup founders. Looking forward to it. Highly anomalous. There was a decade and a half when business travel was grinding, career-building toil. Now at last I reap the rewards, by squatting like a goblin at my laptop and only venturing out of the house when the spirit moves me.

All of which is to say there was a corgi! In the airport! A flying corgi! Mirabile dictu.

Bring me the bones of Australian babies, the more the better.