BLOGANUARY 2025 DAY 28
…that I’m a day behind. I’m definitely a morning person, what can I say? Perhaps it’s something about reflecting on the day before after a night’s sleep, rather than in the evening when it’s all still fresh. I write morning pages, and really enjoy that process, but I find if I write a journal in the evening, it churns everything up again so I prefer to just go to bed and zone out, then be able to look at things with the benefit of a day and daylight ahead of me. I don’t like the nighttime, and it’s part of the reason I have a cat: Sobbs is up and about and happy to chat in the night if I wake up and feel anxious, whereas my dog Ned is comatose, and grunts at me if I poke him or stroke his velvety ears.
I’ve been following – or trying to follow – what is happening over in America, with little success. I normally buffer myself from worldly things that are too much for me to comprehend, and for which there is nothing I can do to influence. I have kept a safe distance from the Ukraine war and the whole Isreal Gaza Palestine debacle, not out of being precious and privileged, but more because I’m not in any position to influence anything or make a difference, and I don’t even feel that drawing people’s attention to it via my social media or writing or other publicly visible channels is helpful as it’s soooo difficult to establish a source, and hackneyed though it sounds, I’d rather do my best to spread joy (you’re doing a great job right now Jen 😆).
I love America, and there was a – admittedly very short – time when I might have moved there. I so enjoyed my Birds of the Mogollon Way project, and undoubtably because of the films and music and culture and aesthetic that I absorbed as a teen and young adult, I feel warm fuzzy thoughts about America as a whole. I visited Canada a couple of times when I was in my late teens/early twenties, although it never grabbed me quite like the US did, and visiting Chicago a few years ago was a pivotal moment in my life. Most of the podcasts I listen to are American, and during lockdown I went on numerous virtual guided walks across different parts of the country, and got to know NYC really well. Seeing all this…hot mess…unfold is genuinely astonishing, and while I feel so sympathetic for my friends and the people I “know” having followed them for years, there’s also a kind of understanding that this is clearly an inevitability given what is now bubbling up to the surface – and it’s not the old adage of cream rising to the top.
Consequently I am doing my best to focus on nature, and try and support my lefty-liberal Dem-leaning friends by checking in that they’re doing ok. It is distracting though, and definitely pervades my general mood. I’m pleased the birdwatching logbooks give me a sense of purpose and help me feel like I’m making a tiny difference to things that are important.
Anyway, here is a drawing I did yesterday evening:
