My Compliments to the Cat

World peace begins at home.

Dear reader,

During my first spring on the Central Coast, the total rainfall measured two feet taller than me. Journal entries from that time loop like a soggy record: Everything is wet. The power is out again. It’s still raining. Has it ever not been raining?

This season, we’ve had barely a fraction of that deluge, and still, the hills of Jenny West grow greener by the day. It’s an offering the land still knows how to give. This is a love that cannot go wrong.

Lately, I’ve been looking outside of myself for answers less than usual. I like to imagine that if I get quiet enough, a kind of primal recall will root to rise—as if I’m remembering something I never learned, but already know. The hills know what to do. They don’t ask anybody. How can I be more like them?

I’ve been overwhelmed with other people’s words. I’m weeks behind on nearly every newsletter I subscribe to. My appetite for screen-bound thought, and for the constant dispatches of grief and confusion, has waned. I’m often full with my own.

There are so many questions floating around like balloons. What are we supposed to do? The urge is to fill the air around them, to pull their strings back down to earth—as if holding them all at once might enlighten us, or make uncertainty disappear. But I wonder: Are we even asking the right questions?

The shape of any revolution will reflect the state of the people inside it. After all, revolutions aren’t abstract. They’re made of individual people. And most of us are exhausted. Unsettled. Half-present—not because we don’t care, but because surviving this world requires a lot. And, it’s noisy here.

These days, I’ve been tending to the small work of caring for my own heart. What attitude will I bring to a collective healing if I don’t acknowledge my own shadow first? What presence can I bring to a movement if I don’t know how to settle in my own body? How could I know what to offer the world if I refuse to sit with myself in it’s glory?