Palpable Infinity
The mushroom of the mycelium (tip of the iceberg, breath of the sky, wave of the ocean—tiniest incarnation reaching across the divide)
2024’s Miyazaki Whimsy and Levinasian Ontology
The elderberry wine my Grandma Linda made me with foraged berries and wild yeast glows through me like moonlight. Or maybe moonshine–two sips in, and I’m already tipsy. I’m full from an improvised recipe of harvest linguine with shallots, pumpkin seeds, kale, and buttered chanterelles–mushrooms I found in the Middle Fork Snoqualmie with new friends–, and I’m about to watch another episode of a gorgeous watercolor anime, Mushi-Shi, whose genre can best be described as spiritual ecology. It occurs to me that I am happy. Wonderfully, wondrously, easily, happy. It’s the practiced sort of ease that yoga encourages, movement flowing into movement flowing into the disciplined call to “relax.”
2024 is the year that I flow into a being beyond the tight confines of my mind and slip free from the alienation that comfort-through-normalcy demands. This is one of my Big Things this year (oh no, now you’re trapped in a longer convo at this New Year’s party than intended when you asked what’s on my mind). You see, there’s a superficial ease in modern society. It’s produced by isolating oneself from the weather, the seasons, the air, and especially our neighbors. Turning on an artificial light at the same time every morning, exercising on the same machine before drinking a smoothie made with the same fruits all seasons, then heading to a climate-controlled office where one works the same eight, nine, ten hours before driving the same route home to the same light turned on in the morning until finally, at the same time all year, turning it off. Days and years blur together. The life is perfectly and totally self-contained. An existence narrowed to the individual mind,
This is a life where one’s never shivering, never relieved to sweat in front of a fan, never attendant to the sunrise or to how their neighbor fairs on the ice. It’s comfortable, like Descartes' chair by the fire. And it’s isolating. One’s separate from their neighbor’s experience of the world, separate from the birds (puffed up in the cold), separate from the almanac’s teachings, from the air and from any sense of embodied time. Standardized comfort alienates you from the world and yourself. And the antidote? For me, it’s connection, through disciplined whimsy.
So, in 2024, I follow the cosmos and the Dipper. I choose these guides in February, when I celebrate Imbolc and later catch sight of two American Dippers in the South Fork Snoqualmie River. Imbolc is the pagan holiday nested between winter solstice and spring equinox; it’s a time of celebration as we survive the depths of winter and turn toward the light. For Imbolc, I prepare a root vegetable medley, mead, and a Russian honey cake that demands a ten hour process, from burning the honey to spreading eight thin layers of batter that must be individually baked. Friends–old and new–arrive from the dark with beeswax paper for candle making, cider, tarot, witchy dresses, and wrists ready for candle tattoos. Melissa loans me a book on Celtic practices and traditions, and I decide to honor my pagan, Lativian roots: this year I will attend to the cosmos.
In May, I see the Northern Lights, and as they drape and dance over my home valley, I hear the people beside me, pulled over just outside city limits, calling and calling and calling everyone they know, saying “go outside! you have to see this! look up! look up! look up!” So many strangers and I, weeping with joy on the county road. I see the lights again in August, blurring the Perseids meteor shower, then again in October, an aqua shimmer over red and orange maple leaves in North Alder Park. I witness all four Super Moons, bringing tea with me to a fence by a field, waving as I pass the same neighbor each time who is also out to see the moon, and to smoke a joint. I let my cats out onto the balcony each summer evening, glad for this contrast to the beginning of the year: two straight weeks below 0 degrees Fahrenheit–more than thirty-three degrees below freezing. I watch a thunderstorm from my parent’s balcony as purple flashes of lightning illuminate Swuak Prairie before the world disappears again into a rumbling blue. In all these moments, my awe intersects with the lives of millions of existences beyond my own. Unlike Descartes’ isolated self, I have a Levinasian ontology: I bloom into being through my encounters.
My second guide, the Dipper, I encounter first on a work retreat. I’ve likely seen a Dipper before, but I’d never noticed them. They’re gray like river rocks, but upon closer inspection, only their color is plain. Plunging fully under the flowing water to walk against the current, then emerging to dance (dipping) on exposed rocks, sometimes with water and froth rushing over their feet, the Dipper is our continent’s only aquatic songbird. The sight of their delicate bodies forging up a whitewater river startles me into a delight and enchantment that infuses my year. I sing to them, hoping to hear one of their burbling replies over the snow-melt whitewater, and I decide to follow their example in 2024, and to follow the chance of their song. I venture out to the North, Middle, and West Fork Teanaway Rivers, the Middle and South Fork Snoqualmie, the Columbia, the Yakima, the Spokane, the Cle Elum. I bathe in rivers and their sounds and their stories.
In the quest to notice, I see lives beyond my own and rejoice in them. I bring Asad on a search for orchids in the community forest, stumble with volunteer photographers through a beaver dammed wetland with pools like fae portals, kayak over a kelp forest among sea otters, and see hundreds of species of mushrooms and lichens that I’ve never noticed before.
One day, while driving, I see a crow flutter down to the dip in the sidewalk. He looks both ways, and, having sufficiently stared me down, hops line to line along the crosswalk. In my breaked car, I’m stunned. Once he’s reached the other side of the road, he looks over his shoulder at me and flies away. He’s the second animal I see using a crosswalk this year; a cat across the road from my apartment buildings will wait on the sidewalk until a jogger nears the road, then she’ll trot beside them to cross it before slinking off to hunt birds in the bushes across the way. She accompanies me on at least eight crossings over the year.
Crosswalk Cat is a neighbor, much like Teenaged Grosbeak and his dad. Teenaged Grosbeak cannot, for the life of him, figure out my parent’s birdfeeder. While I housesit for them, he sits on their railing, below the birdfeeder, screaming at the seeds as his disgruntled dad models, here, you hop up onto the feeder, put a seed in your mouth, please, just hop up here, ugh, uggghhhhh, fine, I’ll bring some down. It takes two weeks for Teenaged Grosbeak, with his awkward assemblage of downy and adult feathers, to finally learn how to feed himself. I’m so proud of him, and I imagine his dad to be so wearily relieved.
Hearing a Dipper sing takes me a long time, too. It’s not until October, as I watch zombie salmon run up the Cle Elum River, that I spot another Dipper. She sings like she’s the river herself. I return several times to see her, making my parents stop their car on our way to a hike when I spot her from the road. This is the spirit that’s driven me all year, not just outside, but also in my commitment to forge ahead even as cold water crashes around me.
I have a lot of Miyazaki moments this year:
Teaching Shen to whistle with a grass spear as we sit in waist-high prairie grasses that ripple like an ocean
Sharing a tea bath, sento style, giggling
Dashing through the Vancouver botanical gardens toward the most beautiful tree my sister and I have ever seen
Digging wild onion bulbs out of hardened shrub steppe earth with my bare hands alongside August and their partner
Sharing homemade pine needle soda with friends
Choosing a Latvian middle name, Alnis—which means elk or moose—thus accidentally giving myself Grandpa Indul’s nickname
Traveling to the coast for a long weekend with my DnD group
Petting a teacup poodle at Paisley’s Tea Room as my work friends sip from mismatched china
Flying through salt spray on the bow of a sailboat as flying fish erupt out of the waves all around me
Watching butterflies flutter between islands in the Caribbean
Snorkeling through mangroves wound with corals, clams, schools of fish
Witnessing a coyote, a kestrel, a golden eagle, a stingray, a lionfish, a red hawk, and an octopus on their hunts
Dashing after glimpses of mushrooms in the woods as new friends teach me to forage chanterelles, inky cap, Hericiums
Reading poetry beside the Puget Sound and my sister
Backpacking, laughing, sailing, and crafting with my parents
Watching Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Boy and the Heron, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Ponyo, all for the first time
And also watching Grave of the Fireflies.
This is the year that half my journal entries end with “fucking dystopia.” That I attend not only protests, but also direct actions. That I stand for hours in the rain with strangers and signs that say “Free Palestine” and “No Taxes for Genocide” until our fingers are far past numb. That I tell my mom what to do if I’m arrested. That I’m heartbroken by people I trusted, and I’m heartbroken to realize how cruelly I’ve treated others so that I can be cruel to myself. In order to dismiss my own pain, to tell myself that I’m worthless apart from meeting a metric, how many lives have I dismissed? How many people have I endangered to prove that I’m not demanding?
In March, I complete one of my resolutions for the year: a 60 hour fast. For a long time, I’ve paired prayer, or any sort of big decision making or recentering, with fasting. I share the reflections of this fast in a post on my social media:
Broke my 60 hour fast alone this morning with a delicious meal. I write. Good Friday through Easter morning seemed a fitting time to reset my perception, to choose clarity and renewed delight. Hunger reminds me of my own daily comfort and woes and attunes me to those sensations; it also reminds me how much of what I see as my own self and personality is reliant on that comfort. How often I think I’m a patient person, but really I’m patient when I’m fed. I think I’m an outdoorsy person, but really I’m only active when I have the energy and time.
Fasting is a reminder that I am wholly of and in my body, and I need to care for it, and for other people’s material well being as well. Think Sermon on the Plain, instead of Sermon on the Mount. Asserting my agency in this small way, and carefully tending to my body’s sensations—allowing myself to be slow and restful, and anticipatory of a planned meal—was a necessary reset. It felt especially meaningful this year as Hunger has been deployed across the world as a tool of, instead of spirituality or contemplation, war and genocide.
Easter is about a Palestinian man, murdered by the state and religious institutions for the way his model of radical love threatened a colonial regime, rising from the dead. To celebrate I fasted, yes, but I also donated money for aid and e-sims in Gaza. Because fasting is, at its core to me, a reminder that spirituality and theory need to be rooted in caring for physical bodies, our own and others, especially those that are hungry.
I think I’ve remembered something in the fast, about embodied beliefs. The same morning I post this, Easter morning, my Grandma Jan dies.
For the past year, I’d been promising her “Summer 2024.” I was going to visit her in Michigan in the Summer of ‘24, and now on Easter, the promise resounds empty. Hollow words. I’ve always associated Grandma Jan with warmth: the Sedona sun as we hiked up red rocks, the sweat drenching our shirts as we biked over the continental divide three times in a day, the ferocity of our arguments and the loving attention that infuses her scrapbooks and her gifts. I cannot imagine her cold. This becomes a year when I can no longer bear empty words. When I’m determined to make plans solid because I cannot just wait for a better time.
I plan and host a dozen themed parties for my friends: Mulan Drag night, regency balls, muppet making… I speak on a panel at the local university, submit two essays to be published in the local zine, read a new poem at a local gallery. With friends, I attend local performances: plays, a drag show, an opera, a musical, lectures, oral history events. Mondays are for DnD or Stitch ‘n Bitch, Tuesdays are for Mitchi, Wednesdays are for trivia.
In the face of violence, violence, violence, despair, I finally turn away from numbing, from comfort through disconnection or universalized perfection, and I turn toward life. Messy, vibrant, fiercely fought for, life. I give more than ten percent of what I make to mutual aid funds. I spend an obscene percentage of my food budget on ube lattes from Wild Flora, a new local bakery, and on specialty snacks from Happy’s Market. I pick up hitchhikers on my way to work in Cle Elum. I cry in at least six different houses, four cars, two sailboats, and a bus. I wake up, whisper “fucking dystopia,” and try to create something more. I resolve to see the world as it is: countless intertwined.
A few days before the fall equinox, two weeks after my grandpa and an aunt are both briefly hospitalized, I fly to Detroit and drive up to Birch Run. The last two times I was in Michigan, I came for funerals, but this time I come to keep my promise. I am here for the final days of “Summer 2024.” I stay with my grandpa, and we talk for hours as we watch the birds. I walk miles with cousins and aunts, whom I’ve hardly spoken to since I was a child. I play a Wildcraft board game with my Aunt Beth and her grandson. My cousin Emily and I explore the Dow Gardens, where my parents got married, and we wobble along rope bridges and nets on the nation’s longest canopy walk.
When I return to Washington, my grandpa sends me a photo: a mushroom he saw while out golfing. And I cry because it feels like another gift from my grandma. How the promise I made to her gave me so many wonderful moments with our family this year. Her life isn’t some singular, self-contained thing: I keep glimpsing it in my dad, in how the carpet on her floors was worn, in Kasey Musgraves’s song “Cardinal,” and in how that song shares an album with the lyric “Made it through the tears to see a Miyazaki sky.”
Yes, an identity founded in encounter is too sloppy and too big to ever be something we can comprehend (can grasp onto, can shove into a neat box), but what if your life is tied to the spiraling of the stars? To the water in your nearest stream? To the whims of a Dipper? What if you and a cat and a corvid testing street etiquette share the same crosswalk? What if, someday, you need to teach a friend how to make a whistle of grass? What if you call them and make that day tomorrow? What if your dinner is the collision of a thousand stories and lives–some devastating, and others more strange and wondrous (and mycelial) than you can imagine?
2024 is the year I follow the cosmos and the dipper. The year I value words and plans embodied. It’s a year of enchantment, sorrow, whimsy, friendship, and art. A Miyazaki year, and a Levinas one, and, mostly, a shared one. A year infinity is made palpable, and I swim in it like a mountain river.
For 2025, come on in: the water’s freezing. It makes you feel alive.
