Last night we sat under the almost full moon between the apple trees and garden in a friend’s backyard. I have been lonely in all of the usual pandemic ways. Underwater swimming upstream. How are you? I have taken to sketching birds during Zoom meetings–there are so many. Sometimes I walk to the pumpkin patch alone just to stand beside their fairytale vines on the hill and look out. Every week a new sorrow.

Mostly I want to live in the smallness of the world. To knit a story of the land, to make my own rituals that don’t involve capitalism, buying, making things look a longed for way. I want to gather before the bonfire to perform a ritual as old as dirt. But we have none. We have buying. We have the gods of stuff. We have more and better and slimmer and less wrinkles; we have music lessons and soccer and what’s best for my child. We have gear. Endless amounts of gear sold to us as though we too might scale a mountain free solo or become that woman in the Athleta catalogue serenely poised on a mountain in mountain pose. We have all the Patagonia in the world isn’t going to save the world and our sadness can’t be eradicated in perfect picture squares of neutral shades, raw wood, and white linen.

We bow down to the Gods of Capital like no other society in the history of the world. “Capital,” my colleague Nina reminded me the other day during a phone chat, “doesn’t care about gender or race or ethnicity or class. Capital uses them to get more capital.” I am not immune to any of this. Maybe I am writing this to myself, dear reader. There is nothing, it seems, untouched by consumerism. Nothing that can’t be repackaged and sold to us. And our refusal to see the way this has taken hold of all we do is killing the world.

Underneath the misshapen moon around the bonfire in late August, the three of us shared warmth. In the window from the house, my friend’s daughters peeked out, shining their flashlight like a tiny beacon from across the sea of the lawn. “Go to bed, girls,” she called. And suddenly they were gone, swept back into the comfort of their old wooden beds and fluffy quilts, their fairy books and stuffed animals. Perhaps, like I did as a child, they line their beds with stuffed animals before they fall asleep, a ring of protectors. Their silent prayer to the night fairy: please don’t let them fall into the dark sea of floor where the unseen disappears. Keep them safe.

This morning, endless crying, fights over the kitten. Pancakes shaped like chickens, maple syrup from a mason jar. This morning, coffee while we sit in our chairs, my husband telling me his dreams before work. This morning, the same ache of loneliness that never leaves like a phantom girl I refuse comfort or just from looking again and again at the way it all shapes and reshapes who we are, who we might have been, and what we will become.

~with love