Hello from Mexico!
I write to you from a wooden desk in an egg-yolk-colored house on the edge of a town that smells like warm tortillas and cold clay.
In just a few days, the light seems to have turned me orange:
I’m here for a spell writing a book, by which I mean I’m actually writing a book!
This is different than what I’ve been doing the last three years, which is saying “I’m writing a book” but really just…thinking about it.
“Can you really write a book in a couple weeks?” various friends and dental hygienists have asked me.
Well, I’ve done it twice before, and I hear that a third time has a certain charm to it, so I hope so!
But I’m not a writing speed-master superstar. In my experience, the creative ‘gestation period’ is long, but labor is short. Once the project is ready to come out, it’s a surprisingly quick process.
My midwives are:
a different, stimulating atmosphere, but nothing TOO exciting (I’m in a small city that doesn’t have a whole lot going on outside of its olfactory offerings. Last time, a town just outside of New York had the same effect.)
a perfect writing desk: sturdy, small, and solitary
lots and lots of notes collected from conversation snippets and screenshots and underlined/starred/circled paragraphs in books
my St. Francis necklace, which I hope will inspire me with his tender wisdom about the natural world as I write about animals:
I am thankful for every moment and sentient being that has brought me to this place, and very very grateful to write. It’s my favorite thing to do and I can’t believe I’m fortunate enough to get the time and space to do it.
I’m also elated to be on my first proper solo adventure in a while! The last was cut short by a certain virus, so it’s been a minute.
Whenever I travel alone, I always re-get to know the purest version of myself: the awkwardest, clunkiest, bravest, strangest essence of my being. What a trip. How can something be so humbling and empowering at the same time?
I also love speaking Spanish all the time because my cadence tells a history of my life: I learned it in Chile (a very insane place to learn Spanish, if you know anything about the accent), seasoned it in Guatemala, corrupted it with crass slang from 20-year-old male roommates who had recently walked the desert to the US from Mexico City, hardened it in Spain (mostly in an Andalusian hospital), tweaked it in Patagonia, then finally clarified it with that mellifluous Colombian modulation from a teacher.
I’ll never get rid of my American twang, nor do I want to; I value sounding like a foreigner who’s trying her best.
Trying so hard that I’ve been all over the world trying to find ‘My Spanish’ and, as it turns out, it’s been with me all along—my little companion over mountains and in salsa studios.
It’s all mine, this accent particular to me, and I like carrying it with me as a living biography and souvenir of so many places that have formed and blessed and harrowed me.
I should really be saving all this effusing my journal, so here’s my monthly recommendations list:
BEING
Mr. Mari and I have both become enamored of a book/concept called The Comfort Crisis, which is waking us up to the many ways we’ve become stagnant in this miraculous world.
The author Michael Easter says that the single best thing we can do for our health is frequent exercise, to at least try and match the wildly high activity level of our recent ancestors.
Now, you can look at a bookshelf in the self-help section and everyone will have a different claim for the single best thing we can do for our health, but learning more about anatomy has me thinking he’s got the right idea.
He makes us feel queasy with all kinds of disturbing facts, such as: the average hunter-gathering woman was 14 times stronger than the average Olympic rower.
And a 70-year-old hunter-gatherer would walk 40,000 steps a day and could still sprint for long distances when needed (which was apparently all the time).
I’ve been thinking about how we can’t approach the amount of exertion that our bodies were made for unless pretty much all our hobbies are physically active.
This is easy for Mr. Mari; his hobbies are powerlifting, bodybuilding, running, mountaineering, kayaking, boxing, and reading.
Mine are: sitting in a cafe thinking about life, sitting on my couch thinking about how perfect and beautiful my cat is, sitting in my office with 27 tabs open on my laptop while claiming that I’m answering emails, sitting at a restaurant noting the ambiance, and, uh, gentle yoga.
So, I’ve upped the ante. I am not going to become a boxer in this lifetime so I’ve returned to my first love of dance and I’m schlepping my leg warmers all over the city: to hip hop, to salsa, to ballet, to samba, and—forever my favorite—Broadway jazz.
Because of lingering effects from Guillain-Barré Syndrome, I will never be able to move like I used to, and that really frustrates me.
But when I close my eyes and pirouette, you can’t tell me I’m not a prima ballerina on stage, and my body feels exactly as she was designed to feel: strained to the point of euphoria.
Activity begets more activity. The more I dance, the more I want to dance. And because I love dancing, I put a lot of oomph in it: I feel stronger and have more muscle tone than I did when I was weightlifting every day. Funny how you work harder at things that make you feel magical.
If you’ve never thought of dance as exercise, allow me to introduce you to my samba teacher:
All this to say: Nobody has to become a dance machine to be a healthy person, but the past month has taught me the beauty of being in motion all the time.
It doesn’t mean physical motion, although I’m sure Michael Easter would love that. It means being engaged with the world through the body at all times.
We may not be as fast or strong as hunter-gatherers, and that’s okay; our bodies will adjust as humans are miraculously adaptive. But I think we can replicate how in-tune our great-greats were with the land, with their humanness, and with each other.
We have billions of ways to avoid our creatureliness and the world around us; isn’t it nice to bounce around those 27 open tabs and forget about climate change and our struggling neighbors?
But I don’t think that’s what we were made for—avoidance. I think we were made to stay in motion, to feel every cell that comprises our body, even when it hurts and feels uncomfortable.
The discomfort contributes to a whole human experience that convenience will try to rob from us. We can reclaim our being-a-person experience, though, with constant motion (whatever that means for you) and getting a little sore for the benefit of full-body exhilaration.
To be: In movement.
DOING
I started taking singing lessons. This is outrageous because I have a horrible voice. I cannot even bear a single sound out of my pathetic mouth, and yet…I love to sing. I adore something I’m terrible at. (Thanks, God!????)
But then I learned that my friend was taking singing lessons, and she does not identify as someone with a good voice. What a concept! Maybe I can do that too.
I thought you had to be a good singer to take singing lessons! And I thought you had to be an artist in order to start making art. These are two myths that I have personally debunked in my own life.
I became an illustrator, somehow, despite not being an illustrator.
And I’m learning how to sing, somehow, despite not being a singer.
My voice will probably be unlistenable forever, but you know what, I’ve already gotten just a tiny bit better.
Will I be Mariah Carey? No. Will I be a Broadway star? Well, uh, between the jazz classes and the singing lessons…maybe….
Okay no, that ship has most likely sailed.
But I love my lessons, and I love singing hymns at church with just slightly less disgust at my own nasal droning, and I love imagining myself some day killing it at karaoke (and by killing it, I mean not physically hurting the ears of people around me).
To do: Consider taking a lesson that you assumed was only available for people who are already good at that thing.