How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Several times a day, I wish for a sheet of paper as big as a room, and I imagine myself unrolling this paper and starting to fill in a gigantic web of connections. I want to be all on one page. Right now I have too many thoughts on too many subjects rolling loosely in my head. I know every last idea is connected, bound to everything else out of necessity, but I need the neatness of a sketched-out web just once, capturing all those systems and complexes and economies, and the people, animals, plants, ecosystems and assumptions that comprise each, and the thousands of relationships that link anything to everything.

The city hung in my window, flat as a poster.

I think this feeling is the one I fear the most—flatness, disconnectedness, being incapable of escaping from my own head. It’s not something I’ve ever experienced. I can only guess at how it would feel. What if one day I couldn’t immerse myself in the world around me and feel better?

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

SYLVIA PLATH.

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

Meatless Mondays on The Center for a Livable Future:

Meatless Monday has the potential to not only improve the populations’ health, but could also reduce unsustainable levels of demand for meat products, particularly industrially-produced meat, which use huge amounts of valuable natural resources and pose significant public health and environmental risks.



And Blackie.

When I was twelve years old, my family ate dinner a friend’s home and midway through the meal, our host commented on our hamburgers – “They’re pretty tough! Blackie was all muscle and he loved to run around in the fields.” And my preteen self was silently mortified—we were eating an animal with a name! Try as I might, I couldn’t force myself to finish my hamburger and hid the last few bites of meat under my napkin. And now—wouldn’t it be something to eat a cow or a pig or a chicken that lived such a full life, been the recipient of such attentive care that it bore a name of its own, that its keeper remembered it fondly and particularly? I've been reading about industrial farm animal production and may never eat anything again, just to be safe...

Eating is an agricultural act.

I spent a few minutes last night appreciating a red onion grown and handled with exquisite care: the weight of it in my palm, the way the skin crackles as it parts from the firm moist flesh, the crispness of the layers sliced by a sharpened knife in a steady hand. Incredible that something you can select for yourself at your neighborhood co-operative at $2.79 a pound can be as magnificent in its own way as an old cathedral.

The possibilities of the life of the body in this world.

"Life is not very interesting," we seem to have decided. "Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast." We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate" ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation — for what? … And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.



WENDELL BERRY. The Pleasures of Eating.

What, why and how.

What bothers you most about adults? Why? How do you want to be similar or different from adults you know when you become an adult?

On Sunday night, I was much more stressed out about the whole maybe-moving-on-next-to-no-notice-maybe-not thing... I walked down to one of the tiny parks overlooking Lake Monona and stood staring moodily out at the water. I don't know why I looked up, but there was a faint rainbow arched in the clouds. The kayaker who waved at me didn't see it. The family that joined me at the park didn't see it. It was somehow unreasonably reassuring to see it there.

Devil's Lake.

Yesterday, we slipped away to Devil's Lake to hike in the heat of the day. It was a sticky 92 degrees in Baraboo, and once when we plopped down on a boulder to rest, we were surprised by a long lean milksnake—no danger to us; milksnakes eat other snakes, not sun-struck daytrippers.










Wisconsin Explorers! My mom and I wrote these books!









Yesterday marked the first time I’ve worn a swimsuit in public (and by “in public,” I mean “outside of a changing room”) since I was 14. There were so many bodies unselfconsciously displayed there on that stretch of sand—fit and not, tanned and faintly unevenly pink, wrinkled and folded, muscled and bony. There was a space for every body there.

This morning, rain splattered down from a mostly sunny sky as I waited for the bus and everyone looked up, unable to help it—the businessman in his suit, the gangly teenage boys ditching school, the middle-aged woman with her pink tracksuit and impeccable hair—and me, too.

I am thinking in German again. I can barely articulate a sentence in English without its German translation springing thoughtlessly to mind.