The reality that seized me is the reality of a world more abundant and wise and beautiful than anything I deserved, its people more courageous and more generous.

A defeated, airless, ugly feeling rose in her whenever she heard a person of her parents’ generation talking brightly about home ownership, or foreign holidays, or financial serendipity, or education for its own sake, or second chances in a crowded field; she felt this way sometimes simply if someone spoke about the future – even the very near future – in optimistic terms.

We knew coming in here that the tall green stand of top-heavy, shallow-rooted blackwood acacia trees would have to come down, and that we would be lucky if they didn’t come down on the house. We lost them to this winter’s unending chain of atmospheric rivers. Even expected, their loss is incalculable. They were invasive, but the hummingbirds and woodpeckers and grey squirrels loved them, and so did I.

Without their shade and shelter, my little garden feels much more exposed. The patterns of daily sunlight have changed and the fog wind whips across the deck. I got two lovely Japanese maples from Flowercraft and put one on the deck and one in the shady alley above the stairs. I worried for the one in the shade, but the deck tree blew over half a dozen times and is dry and shocky. I have put it with its friend in what is now the maple courtyard, the shaded tree still green and thriving.

After considering buckeye – toxic to cats – and bay laurel – a carrier of sudden oak death – I noticed a tree at the barn, on the bank of the creek, with maple leaves and a weeping habit. Box elder. Paul at Bay Natives had two of them in fifteen gallon pots, over six feet tall. He’s had them for years and was delighted they finally found a home. They barely fit in the Prius, which is still full of their leaves. Aisea planted them yesterday and this morning I drank my bowl of latte in their dappled shade. No single thing abides, but all things flow.

For Easter I rewatched my favorite film, Jesus of Montreal, and reread my favorite novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Both of these, along with the sonnets of Donne and Hopkins, the complete novels of Graham Greene and the second season of Fleabag, describe unhappy love affairs with God, which I suppose makes that one of my favorite genres. At one point Angel Archer quotes Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” in its entirety. My unsettled mind latched onto “Reason, thy viceroy in me” and has been worrying it like a broken tooth ever since.

It’s easier to leave some parts of the church than others. It’s easier to leave the smiling horrible minister who was raping a teenager in the vestry, and all the others like him, easier to leave the inerrancy of scripture and a scholarship fund called Sons of the Parish than it is to leave sixteenth century choral music and the enigma of Jesus himself, remote as the Nabateans one minute, immediate as any other Palestinian freedom-fighter the next. I think Jesus is hardest to understand, or maybe believe, when he is at his simplest and most direct. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor. Okay I get that, I do, but Jesus I’m genuinely worried I haven’t saved enough for retirement?

Consider the lilies of the field, says Jesus, and I consider them a lot actually. Louise, my house’s benevolent ghost, planted calla lilies and roses in the garden, and while I indulge her survivor roses, I dig the calla lilies out by their roots as soon as I catch so much as a tender leaf unfurling. Sure, I can say they’re invasive and toxic to cats and that I’m trying to nurture wildlife habitat here, and God could say the same about me. This is Ramaytush land, pull me out by my roots, three-person’d God, you coward. So the lilies of the field are cold comfort to be honest.

My high school librarian Marie Suchting, may her name be blessed forever, never reread anything – she didn’t have time – but I circle back endlessly searching for clues. How in God’s name did I end up here? What ridiculous superposition of texts made this set of choices seem logical? I just wanted to be safe and happy and not to have to hurt anyone, and here I am working in the tech industry. Humbling to acknowledge how much of my ethics I owe to Hawkeye Pierce, how great my debt to Felicity Kendall in The Good Life. Reason, thy viceroy in me, frankly derives its political legitimacy from highly dubious grounds.

TREES ARE PLANTS THAT PEOPLE CALL TREES—A TERM OF DIGNITY, NOT botany. Personification is intrinsic to treeness.

The British called this conflict “The Great Game,” but no Russian people called it that.

Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.

Then came the inexplicable shame. Of not being believed. Of not being worth more.

“I feel a responsibility,” Mom said. “You always want to feel responsible for everything,” Lauren said. “And that’s so bad?” “It’s like—you want to feel guilty about it, like you’re being selfless, but you’re not, you’re just making it all about you.”

“…friendship risks the end of friendship…”

“The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.”

Even though this may sometimes seem quite hard to do, training yourself to enjoy only looking at things, instead of buying them, is very nice and also a good practice.

Happiness is not a solvable equation.

There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

“Why do you think it’s your fault?” she finally asked. It had never occurred to me that it was not.

Having traced my mother’s family to the Kingdom of Mercia I am in gales of laughter over the title of the most important surviving text in the Mercian language: The Old English Martyrology. Even other people who knew my mother and grandmother don’t think it’s as funny as I do. Story of my life.

“There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—”it’s a haunted house.”

America is Not the Heart and How to Read Now
Have you ever really thought about Fremont? No? Why not?

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
Learn your blood-drenched history and mourn your courageous dead

Another Day in the Colony
Know that history is in no way done with us yet

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Comics aren’t supposed to make me cry (are they?)

Homage to Catalonia
Reread old novels now that you’re big enough to understand them

Nona the Ninth
Meet the soul of the earth

Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case
Understand how power corrupts

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Consider alternatives

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred and The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)
Drive from San Francisco to Joshua Tree thinking about deep space and social justice

The Years
…so that when Annie Ernaux wins the Nobel Prize you can say “oh yeah Annie, I call her Annie, she’s great”

In that brief moment before the clouds shielded the sun again, I felt what it was like to be held. I was standing in the earth’s enormous hand.

The drive over the Golden Gate Bridge never stops being beautiful. In every kind of weather on every kind of day it’s a different kind of beautiful.