A pretty well perfect day
Hit and Miss #471
Nine years ago (accounting for leap years), in the first issue of this newsletter, I wrote the following under “An update on my life”:
I’m writing this at the end of a pretty peaceful day—a rarity for me in the last month or so.
From 2017 to 2026, much has changed, but that sentence still fits. I’m writing this in the late afternoon of a pretty peaceful day—a rarity for me in the last month or so (heavy on the “or so”).
Over the last several months, T and I have been hard at work in the off hours and days of the week, getting ready for yesterday, when we gathered friends and family at a big farmhouse in Prince Edward County to share in a pretty well perfect wedding day.
T and I met just under five years ago, going for our first date on Halloween. That evening, I wrote that I was “writing to you late, after a nourishing weekend of housework, walking, and friends (new and old alike). I’m leaving October on a high.” That issue was titled “Surviving November”—meeting T, that new friend, made that November so easily survivable, I don’t even remember turning to the survival guide I wrote in that issue (except to share it with her, one of those “here, this is me” novelties).
In the years since, literal Novembers haven’t been so hard. We’ve faced our share of metaphorical Novembers, but have built our own survival guide of sorts: after-dinner walks, snacks when we’re stressed-but-maybe-hungry, cuddles with the cats, check-ins and taking-ons, and quality time with friends and family.
Those same friends and family were key to making yesterday happen—for the first day in I can’t remember how long, we were gifted with having no responsibility short of getting ourselves dressed (which, I acknowledge, involved much more work for one of us than the other!). Our impulse to take things on (or, perhaps, lack of impulse to delegate) was met with gentle but firm reminders that, for one day at least, we could just be. And what a day that made.
In one of the quiet moments (which friends wisely recommended we schedule into the not-too-scheduled arc of the day), we reflected on the love and generosity that surround us, most acutely yesterday but in little doses every day. That same love is woven into our relationship itself—we truly would not be where we are today without those that joined us yesterday, for which we’re deeply grateful.
We bonded early over a shared love of Mary Oliver. Many of her words graced our day, benedictions from a poet who’s been with us in moments light and heavy alike. This newsletter is nominally about what I’ve been reading, and Mary certainly fits the bill, so I’ll share here one of our favourites, “The Summer Day”:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
At the end of that first newsletter, I wrote the following:
The title of this letter, “Earthworming,” is a reference to [Ursula] Franklin’s sixth lecture. In it, she shared “Franklin’s earthworm theory of social change”:
Social change will not come to us like an avalanche down the mountain. Social change will come through seeds growing in well prepared soil and it is we, like the earthworms, who prepare the soil. We also seed thoughts and knowledge and concern. We realize there are no guarantees as to what will come up. Yet we do know that without the seeds and the prepared soil nothing will grow at all. … What is needed is a lot more earthworming.
Franklin was referring to changes in society, but “social change” can also be taken to mean changes in people, individually and in relationship. There are no guarantees as to what will come up in a person or relationship, but we can prepare the soil. T and I have prepared and seeded the soil well these past five years—I can’t wait to see what grows in all the years to come.
With love, gratitude, and excitement—all the best for the week ahead,
Lucas