Turn and Face the Strange

This Morning, No 71

This morning, when titling this piece, I mistakenly wrote “This Mooring.” I deleted it and then I realized, yes - This Mooring. It would be sweet if my notes entered your inbox like a mooring, something that steadies you, amidst all of your everyday changes. September feels like the year’s mooring, when we settle back into routine and reset for the year ahead. I love a routine. We all love a routine until it is rote. But right now, it is fresh, a revelation, as though it’s the first time we’ve ever done any of this before.

Recently, I went out to my brother-in-law’s boat, with my sister and their girls, Aggie and Faye. We motored out into the Long Island Sound to go swimming. The waves were rocking us about, not even that violently, but I guess my gentle system isn’t used to it. I quickly got a headache, my canary in the coal mine of ailments, followed by a cascade of nausea and a stomachache. I sought refuge in the cool waters surrounding the boat, which worked for a moment, but once I was back aboard the low-lying feeling of being unwell descended. When it was time to eat, we motored back into the harbor, back to the safety of our mooring. Once we adhered the boat mostly stabilized. We ate our sandwiches - turkey BLT, chicken parmigiana, and Italian, as the vessels surrounding us bobbed about on their various tethers.

That transition from August to September is always twinged with melancholy. Or, more bluntly, I felt quite depressed last week. There is something about shoulder seasons, their transitional quality, no longer there, not yet here, that always mark the passage of time so starkly. You are moving from one point of the year to another - what do you want to bring with you? What needs work, a shift, a re-examination? What needs to be shed? And then - that first gust of cool morning breeze greets us, we grab a sweater and turn the fans off. We are shrouded in the silence of September and the clarity of its severe sunlight. We catapult ourselves towards soups and warming tonics and throw ourselves into the work we need to do.

There is such generosity in this moment’s produce. The peak of summer’s offerings, tomatoes, plums, and zucchini, intermingles with the first of fall’s; concord grapes, delicata squash, and African daisies. I often resent carrying all the heavy fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and sourdough loaves from the market two to three times a week that my work requires of me. But this gets easily overshadowed by my gratitude in having the market be my timepiece. Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4, mean little to me. The shift from tomatillos, fresh scarlet runners, shishitos and marigolds to winter radishes, kabocha squash, and various kales - that locates me in time and space. New York, September, 2024.

The non-edible plants too generously burst before their waning. While canvassing yesterday in upstate New York, we were driving by fields of Canadian Goldenrod and New England Aster. This pairing will always remind me of Ohio, where I went to college. It was the backdrop of my first canvassing season for Barack Obama in 2012, but it formally entered my bodily memory during a bad breakup in the fall of my senior year. I was in so much pain at that moment, so I took myself on a run, bawling my eyes out as I jogged through Ohio hills. I took refuge in a field of goldenrod and aster, stopped and laid down, and was enshrouded by a blanket of gold and purple. I was doing it mostly out of physical and emotional exhaustion, and as a way to hide from the reality of my current circumstance. To disappear for just a moment. In the midst of giving myself over to the drama of hysterical tears and wallowing, I was surprised to suddenly feel held, or know, that I was going to be okay. Though our relationship was over, I got to stay with me. Me, the one who was able to perceive the beauty of goldenrod and asters, side by side. That I was moored by my and to my Self.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, uses the relationship between goldenrod and aster, to frame the way her Westernized education in Botany attempted to strip her native knowledge of plants as interrelated beings, by dissecting and compartmentalizing them into their component parts. This was the inverse of the way Kimmerer had learned to understand plants. As relational beings with beauty as one of their primary forms of intelligence. It took many years, but she was able to marry Western science with indigenous knowledge to create a coherent understanding of the natural world.

“That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science – can they be goldenrod and aster for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.”¹

In this shifting of the seasons, and in this shifting landscape within me, I’ve been using the I Ching. It’s a Chinese divination system that originated over three thousand years ago. Sheila Heti, in her book Motherhood, uses a coin flipping technique inspired by the I Ching, that basically attempts to answer the incessant question that seemingly runs through much of her various works, how am I supposed to be in my life? She uses one penny; heads means yes, tails means no. She describes the I Ching:

“Kings used it in times of war, and regular people used it to help them with life problems. By flipping three coins six times, one of sixty-four states is revealed, and a text elaborates their meaning. Confucius, one of the most important interpreters of the I Ching, said that if he had fifty years to spare, he would devote them to the book’s study. The original text of the I Ching is poetic, dense, highly symbolic and intricately systematic, profoundly philosophical, cosmological in its sweep, and notoriously arcane.”²

I took a workshop led by my friend Satya Doyle Byock on the I Ching. She advises to use the I Ching not to receive yes or no answers, but rather to receive the guidance that we need in that moment. She taught us to journal about the situation we are wanting guidance on before tossing the coins.At the end of journaling ask the I Ching, what do I need to hear? Toss the coins and then to be open to what comes through. The I Ching translates to The Book of Changes. This makes me trust it inherently. It is not the book of solutions or answers, it is the book of changes; the only thing we can count on. There are so many modalities, tools, divination techniques one can use. It’s a lovely feeling to notice when a particular one actually feels true to you. I think it has something to do with the I Ching being based in the natural elements; earth, wind, fire and air, and also that it reads like a book of poetry. I connect with poetry, words in general, more than imagery, like a tarot deck. Hearing something allows me to tell if it “rings true to me”, much more than seeing something does.

The first time I threw the I Ching this season I received the hexagram titled steadfastness (in my translation). How it informed my current situation: trust the decisions you’ve made so far, remain committed to them, remain steadfast as you allow for transformation. I’m noticing most people in my life are shedding certain aspects of their lives, letting go of parts of their experience that are no longer in alignment. I feel it in myself, and I feel it on a larger scale as well. My I Ching reading reminded me, that throughout the changes, we can remain steadfast and tethered to our moorings. So that when we get up the courage to turn to face the strange changes³, they can be birthed from a place of steadiness and trust rather than turmoil and fear.

1. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Canada: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 47.

2. Sheila Heti, Motherhood (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2018).

3. David Bowie, Changes, 1972.