If I haven’t responded to your email or message recently, please accept this as my explanation and apology.
I got a puppy. She is small and black, and fluffy. I was considering calling her Nervous Breakdown. Or Grief. Or maybe The Abyss. (Abbie for short).
Her name is Spook. (Or as my 3-year-old calls her, Scoop).
Spook is a verb. Spook is a ghost. Spook is that deliciously unsettling feeling that something just slipped past the edge of your awareness.
Remember how I said I wanted to be haunted last time I wrote to you? Well, here I am.
She is very, very soft.
Before I got her, when I imagined her softness, I felt myself opening to sadness. I imagined she might help me face hard things. And it turns out, she does.
And it turns out, I am really, really sad. About the world. About the structures that fail people I love. About systems built on extraction and performance. About quiet, private losses I can speak about to almost no one.
Spook is wonderful, and cuddly, and she is also a puppy, therefore crazy. But she has not yet eaten a dead bird and thrown it up in my shoe, and for that I am grateful.
A dear friend recently told me that one of her life’s great loves is giving her dog a lopsided haircut. ‘She just looks so silly,’ she said. And I wanted to cry. Because clearly I am not ready for a dog. I’m too tired, too porous.
Children, I can manage (sometimes, almost). But a puppy is a whole other thing.
Yesterday was budget day. Last night I lay in hot water with friends, our bodies bubbling like fruit in a warm soup. The government won’t consider a wealth tax. They refuse to imagine redistribution. They refuse to care.
This piece of writing is rambling all over the show, but I don’t care. There is a shadow at the edge of my awareness, chewing on something…
People in privileged positions prioritising joy as activism… as if their pleasure alone stands for activism. I don’t mean them, I mean me. I mean us. I am privileged.
Joy without justice is insulation. Still, I like bathing with friends under the stars. Some things are only visible in the dark.
The other morning, in the early hours, I took Spook out to pee. My three-year-old followed. As I was praising the puppy for emptying her bladder in the designated area, my kid pointed at the sky and said, “Look, it’s a moon! A tiny moon!”
It was smaller than the moon, but bigger than a star. It was a circle, bright on the outside and dark in middle like an unblinking eye. My first thought was, Fucking Elon, Get out of my sky.
Gentle reader, it wasn’t Elon. It was a giant weather balloon, the size of a rugby field, floating way up high like a collective hallucination. (I quietly put my alien abduction fantasies back to bed).
Corporations are collective hallucinations. Legal fictions. Figments of the human imagination, eating up the actual planet.
It’s hard to keep my heart open when I think of Elon Musk. But the worst thing we can do is become polarised with ‘us’ versus ‘them’. We’ve got to keep the whole world in the circle of love. Joy isn’t a shield, and rage isn’t a compass etc. So what are we supposed to do again?
I’ve been learning about oxytocin, the love drug. It’s the hormone that makes us bond with the ones we love, but it turns out it also makes us suspicious of outsiders. We live inside oxytocin balloons. We can practice stretching those balloons.
I know this because I’m obsessed with dog training. Dogs are fluffy bundles of neurochemical attachment. Spook doesn’t know or care about billionaires or budgets. She knows about timing, and tone, and chewing on zips. Together, we’re learning about trust.
It’s absurd that such softness can exist in a world where bombs get dropped, but here she is.
Her nose is close to the ground. She’s not looking for meaning, she’s looking for what’s real… the scent of it, the shape of it, the place where something interesting passed through.
Spook is here to haunt me, to teach me how to stay with the thing that is chewing at the edge of my awareness.
Recent posts…
"Joy without justice is insulation." This line will stay with me.
Rats this is just gorgeous writing I have had little appetite lately and am trying to relearn my previously good skills at making food and trying remember and practice how to nourish myself. Your story resonates. Your words align and are so considered and thoughtful.
Thank you