The art of persisting

Happy Solstice. Sometime today or tomorrow sunlight will start receding or surging in tiny parcels each day, depending upon where you are.

So it’s a good time to pause, notice where the sun rises along your horizon, even if behind clouds.

For me, the sun now rises out of a ridge of distant redwood tips, the first spark of morning appearing between two specific trees. I already know that by the next solstice, in December, it will seem to climb out of my neighbor’s roof.

That bright plate of light will have shifted from northeast to southeast. The sun, one of my favorite migrants.

Yes, this a meaningful day to get your bearings. A way to be reminded that you are on a journey—your life is not still, but moving forward. Helpful to know that whatever is happening, radiant or ruinous, won’t last forever. So you can savor what you hold dear and take solace in knowing whatever feels bleak or wounding won’t last.

In the meantime, I want to thank each person who responded to last week’s survey to help me make this e-journal the best possible read for you.

While I’m still working through the individual comments, what I overwhelmingly heard is that there is very little anyone would change, other than letting go of the linked resources that aren’t visited by most and keeping the mind-opening question.

I’ll be taking a pause from publishing for the next 2-3 weeks to absorb the feedback and tend to things on the homefront. Now, let's keep moving.

From my journal | June 10, 2025

In conversation, a friend says a dove only exists to be prey, to be consumed. I’m so caught in the comment that as he continues talking, his voice becomes a distant stream.

My mind becomes a Mourning dove. If I were to speak, there would be no words. Only cooing, only scratching into the tapestry of the rug below my feet. And because I do not have claws, I think it would hurt. I think there would be blood.

I think we are all prey and all predators.

Who isn’t ultimately consumed? Who doesn’t consume?

The dove not only takes seeds into her belly, she sometimes takes caterpillars and beetles into her beak to make rich crop milk for her nestlings. For her young, she’ll be a wing-whistling life-taker.

But. Is anyone’s purpose simply to be stalked, to be decimated, to feed the hungers and desires of another?

By anyone, I mean not just you and me. Also the dove, the deer, the moth tangled in the orbweaver’s web.

Right now, off the coast of South Africa, shoals of sardines swim as one flashy ribbon, moving with a current of cold sea, pushing north. With them, torrents of hungry dolphins and sharks. Surges of sky-spiraling gannets plunging like knives into the waves, into the watery murmuration of billions of fishy beings.

Is this what we are meant to be? Only a small bit of life in a jaw and nothing more?

No.

To say, yes, well, perhaps that’s the disturbed landscape of the present world casting it’s dark influence. Fighting, fear, famine, ferocity. A view through a distorted lens.

To say, yes, is to speak of the worst kind of politics. Power trumping each one’s intrinsic worth, reducing the individual to a link in a food chain, literally or metaphorically.

A sardine may be no longer than a tablespoon in the vast ocean, and yet each one is a living wave of silver, luminous in the churning tide. A spark with a heart beat.

I’ve never sat down with a few sardines over a cup of tea to ask why they think they exist, but I’m confident the answer would not be, Only to die, only to feed another.

When I’m done with my body, if someone doesn’t turn it to ash, then I’m happy to let it feed others. Here’s looking at you, grubs.

But. Am I here only to give grubs a feast?

In the end, all life is about persisting.

Yes, I’ve found a pile of dove feathers, and know she didn’t decide to take off all her bird clothes and go for a dip in the pond.

Yes, the dolphins and sharks and gannets can eat so many sardines, technically Southern African pilchards, that their bodies are heavy, sluggish with their catch.

Yet, at least until we’ve wrecked the world so thoroughly that everything is out of balance, there are still Mourning doves, landing with their flute-like feather-song in the yard. Still sardines by the billions, shimmering water-stars, pulling oxygen from the sea, breathing themselves northward.

This, despite the hunger that underlies all life.

Longing, wanting, desiring, hoping, aching—so many ways we want to be filled beyond food.

Do you feel it?

We live to live.

To be our one-and-only selves in this certain time, embodying this sole space that no one else can occupy. I mean this literally, though word-lover me thinks we are each a soul space, too.

There is this one mouth, yes, craving to be fed, but also wanting to offer songs, make stories, send a calm humming, echoing out into an otherwise enormous and empty universe. Loneliness is a hunger, too, yes?

I once wrote what still feels true about how we go on. It’s also why.

To keep on singing, is to keep on, singing.

From my journal | June 18, 2025

Making dinner.
Alaskan salmon, black rice simmering
in purple water, seven vegetables
tossed with arugula and baby lettuces.

But who made the salmon?
How did that once forbidden rice arrive
in this kitchen? Who conjured
the cilantro and dill sprinkled over
everything, a savory green dust,
an edible blessing?

Homely mushroom, you are
little more than a clue, umbrella of spores,
bit of hope pushed out of mud,
the real story told in mycelial threads,
filaments of white lightning, flaring
through soil, sometimes for miles, persisting,
long after your dance in this skillet.

When I close my eyes, I don’t see
God. Only the one ocean, strings
of rain, sun working dirt, all the wild lives—
plankton, herring, eagles, bears,
microbes, bees, wrens, bats,
then the many hands, touching,
bearing what will feed me.

To eat is not a solitary act, even
in a quiet room no one sees
in the redwoods.

To eat is to pray, inviting
the invisible others
into this body.

To keep going is a wild-hearted choice

Living in this world—being in it, wholly and intentionally—can feel like a rebellion, refusing to chase or to be chased.

When the body aches, when despair or fears hollow out our days, when the noise of the world pulls us into the dark corners of the mind—insinuating we should be more than who we are, or worse, that we don’t matter at all—well, to simply keep going becomes a radical choice.

Persisting is the most sacred act you practice every day.

Not because it’s heroic, but because the world—both the outer one and the inner one—is a storm of forces. Grief, fatigue, injustice, loneliness, aggression, relentless change, overwhelm—they whisper, Why bother?

What can you do? You rise, just as regularly as the sun.

You pour coffee into a cup, cracked, but carrying memories. You whisper love to your cats or dogs, scooping kibble into their bowls. You scramble eggs in the skillet, then slice strawberries that, when you pause to notice, look like bright, juicy hearts hugging your plate.

You fold laundry, mow grass, wave to the neighbor who carries her losses just as quietly as you carry yours.

These are not small things. These are fierce devotions, tender rites of endurance.

In a culture focused on power and purpose, it’s easy to think you need a grand why before you believe you can move forward. But often, especially in the wake of uncertainty and disenchantment, purpose isn’t something you find.

Purpose, or rather a sense of purpose, emerges because you keep going. You don’t have to know why you’re here to know you belong here.

Sardines, threading their silver bodies through dark sea, don’t get caught wondering about worth or what-if’s. Mourning doves don’t actually mourn what is or might have been.

They intuitively go about the art of living. They instinctively travel together. The one, a necessary thread in the larger web of others.

Look at your fingers. No one else has your fingerprints.

Look at your hands, they are meant to hold and to be held.

If you bring them together, they could make a prayer, or just touch each other, feeling the heat of being alive, proof of your persisting.

This week's question