The days are beginning to change so swiftly, it’s that time in the turn of the year that the word melt moves back into the landscape in earnest—the sun higher and so noticeably bringing warmth to the still cold air that the house stays warmer. Last week it was a bit unseasonably cold, hovering in single digits to zero, and the house always has a hard time keeping up at those temps. Now within a week, the house is warm and full of light, despite temps only as high as 28F. My bulldog Gimli, enjoying the quiet of this morning, has slowly chased every angle of sun to bask in as the sunlight journeyed through the house. I learned years ago that a word for this is
This beautiful post is another shovelful of fuel on the flames of constant yearning I'm finding more and more difficult to live with. On a long drive this last weekend I was listening to a book about beavers, and therein was referenced a word – I can't remember it at the moment, and I don't have the book close to hand to look it up – that refers to a longing people have for places like our bioregion, which is so different from what it used to be. In the case I mention, a longing and sadness for the utterly different landscape that existed before beavers were essentially eliminated from it. I feel this, the same way I feel a yearning for the Great Plains and what it was like when it teemed with life unextirpated, unplowed, undestroyed. It is heartbreaking and I miss it so deeply, even though these physical eyes have never witnessed it.
I'm also struck and heartbroken by all these words from languages from the other side of the world to try and explain phenomena that exists HERE. Certainly every Indigenous language had words specific to every possible configuration of weather, and light, and the spirit tying it all together ... yet like those vast herds and flocks and swarms and marshy pools, are all essentially extinct, and most of the people whose ancestors knew them gone too.
“There’s a painful landscape in those terms but also such beauty—a capacity to long for something that is invisible, perhaps that will never be fully known. And maybe it also means there are things we can sense that are simply not knowable through the typical ways that we make sense of the world. Maybe we are responding to the space between experiences, the knowing that there can be impossible things—precisely because they are impossible.“
Ohh Freya the beauty and truth of this paragraph aches me so much that I cried a little. What would I not give to hear someone read this in my ears. And I also am now longing for apricots serbat from around Ramadan weeks. Here we call them ‘mohabbat ki serbat’ meaning juice of love!
This is so gd beautiful!! Gimli apricating! Moon of the faith!! “basking, of being exposed, open to the sun”!!! I cannot with this post. The Impossible, homesickness for a place we’ve never been…reminds me of our dreams, too, these impossible hopes we have which seem so impractical and cause so much rending in our earthly hearts (while perhaps calling us forward in celestial bodies?) It does remind me of the desire to write, and a story I’m working on that feels so burdensome and magical, flip flop flip flop. Thank you for giving voice to these mysteries. I am basking in the sweetness of this moonlit, warming, windblown post.
Mar 14, 2023·edited Mar 14, 2023Liked by Freya Rohn
Now that I've actually read it ... what a lovely thing about apricots. I never thought of them that way because really is an apricot bought at a store ever any good? My mother, who is one of those people who can make gardens bloom anywhere, has an apricot tree in Montana that's grown enormous and produces fruit like nothing I've ever tasted. Which I guess would make them *apricots,* and whatever I've eaten before ... something, but not apricots.
Maybe that's part of what many of us who find one another in this strange newsletter space are doing: finding the cracks between things.
This beautiful post is another shovelful of fuel on the flames of constant yearning I'm finding more and more difficult to live with. On a long drive this last weekend I was listening to a book about beavers, and therein was referenced a word – I can't remember it at the moment, and I don't have the book close to hand to look it up – that refers to a longing people have for places like our bioregion, which is so different from what it used to be. In the case I mention, a longing and sadness for the utterly different landscape that existed before beavers were essentially eliminated from it. I feel this, the same way I feel a yearning for the Great Plains and what it was like when it teemed with life unextirpated, unplowed, undestroyed. It is heartbreaking and I miss it so deeply, even though these physical eyes have never witnessed it.
I'm also struck and heartbroken by all these words from languages from the other side of the world to try and explain phenomena that exists HERE. Certainly every Indigenous language had words specific to every possible configuration of weather, and light, and the spirit tying it all together ... yet like those vast herds and flocks and swarms and marshy pools, are all essentially extinct, and most of the people whose ancestors knew them gone too.
This land is a hard, hard one to exist in.
“There’s a painful landscape in those terms but also such beauty—a capacity to long for something that is invisible, perhaps that will never be fully known. And maybe it also means there are things we can sense that are simply not knowable through the typical ways that we make sense of the world. Maybe we are responding to the space between experiences, the knowing that there can be impossible things—precisely because they are impossible.“
Ohh Freya the beauty and truth of this paragraph aches me so much that I cried a little. What would I not give to hear someone read this in my ears. And I also am now longing for apricots serbat from around Ramadan weeks. Here we call them ‘mohabbat ki serbat’ meaning juice of love!
This is so gd beautiful!! Gimli apricating! Moon of the faith!! “basking, of being exposed, open to the sun”!!! I cannot with this post. The Impossible, homesickness for a place we’ve never been…reminds me of our dreams, too, these impossible hopes we have which seem so impractical and cause so much rending in our earthly hearts (while perhaps calling us forward in celestial bodies?) It does remind me of the desire to write, and a story I’m working on that feels so burdensome and magical, flip flop flip flop. Thank you for giving voice to these mysteries. I am basking in the sweetness of this moonlit, warming, windblown post.
The light, the moon, the wind and the fox of your wonderful newsletter - imagine that!
Let Evening Come
BY JANE KENYON
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Now that I've actually read it ... what a lovely thing about apricots. I never thought of them that way because really is an apricot bought at a store ever any good? My mother, who is one of those people who can make gardens bloom anywhere, has an apricot tree in Montana that's grown enormous and produces fruit like nothing I've ever tasted. Which I guess would make them *apricots,* and whatever I've eaten before ... something, but not apricots.
Maybe that's part of what many of us who find one another in this strange newsletter space are doing: finding the cracks between things.
I’m sorry, I couldn’t get past Gimli! Please tell me that’s a Lord of the Rings or Hobbit reference. 😀