Laurie Brown ruminates on the return of the music in this week’s Pondercast.

It made me cry.

Today’s a crying day. In a crying week. In a crying month. So many signposts. 

Twenty-one years ago I sat holding Catherine’s hand in the operating room at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, as Oliver emerged from inside her, a gelatinous silent blob of struggling life.

Twenty-one months ago, and a thousand feet east, I sat holding Catherine’s hand as she breathed her last breath. 

The original tears, the tears forged in those dying moments, were stinging tears, the tears of loss, sadness, change, disbelief. I had no distance from those tears: they were inside me and on top of me; I breathed them in and I breathed them out. There was nothing else.

Grief, I have learned, cannot be understood, predicted, anticipated, only lived. But there does seem to be a faint Darwinian logic to it, inasmuch as it metes itself out in evolving waves: waves I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend then, are the waves that wash over me now.

So my tears today are less tears of loss, and more tears of emergence.

And that’s why Laurie Brown made me cry today:

There is an upside to music dropping out of your life, and that’s having it return.

Little by little the music is returning; that inspires a mixture of wonder and challenge. 

I’m so so so fucking angry at Catherine for dying.

I’m so so so fucking thankful for the years we had together, for the daughter we raised.

I’m so so so fucking overwhelmed by the chrysalis I find myself in.

I’m so so so fucking happy to be alive.

The waves of those things overlap and resonate and coexist.

And make me cry.

A few weeks ago, driving back home from Freetown, after a wonderful hour riding Tye the horse, I felt a kind of elation that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I luxuriated in it, and feared it would quickly disappear, and then luxuriated in it some more. The weeks since, I’ve been able to evoke that memory as a Polaris, a reminder that happiness is possible, that all stories don’t end with the hero dying, and that if I follow my instincts I can find my way through this.

Tonight we will celebrate Oliver, who begat Olivia. Oliver who emerged from that gelatinous silent blob of struggling life into remarkable, confident Olivia. There is Catherine in her–so much Catherine. And there is so much of me in her. And, more and more, there is her in her, a new thing entirely. I love her so profoundly. And that too makes me cry.

As the music returns, finding my way to being excited about what comes next is one of the gifts it brings.

That is terrifying, exciting, daunting, hopeful. If I focus too much, I can get lost, washed over.

But if I soften my gaze, I can see it.

I can hold it in my hand long enough to have faith in it. To find my way forward.

To light.

 George Monbiot in The Guardian:

Everywhere, governments seek to ramp up the economic load, talking of “unleashing our potential” and “supercharging our economy”. Boris Johnson insists that “a global recovery from the pandemic must be rooted in green growth”. But there is no such thing as green growth. Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.

Icelandic artist Shoplifter interviewed on the Louisiana Channel.

Thanks to the diligence and generosity of my mother, I am now the custodian of my great-grandfather’s barometer.

I happened upon a bootleg of this seminal episode of thirtysomething last night. I was reminded, yet again, how groundbreaking the series was, on so many levels.

This particular episode touches on war, American patriotism, free speech, advertising, and career burnout. It aired in May 1991, in the shadow of the Gulf War, and, in a way that would have been inconceivable in an earlier day—or, for that matter, since—it both called that war into question, and placed it inside the context of a military-industrial-advertising complex.

This all played out against the background of Michael Steadman (Ken Olin) having increasingly severe anxiety about his personal and political role in all this, playing against the unvarnished capitalist Miles Drentell (the brilliant David Clennon).

The part of the episode that hit me the deepest, though, is how Michael and his wife Hope (Mel Harris) touch each other: again, in a way that wasn’t seen on television before, and has seldom been seen since, it is the unhurried workaday touch of mutual affection.

It’s not surprising I was drawn to that, I suppose, because in my own life it is that touch I miss the most.

Paul Hawken’s new book Regeneration came out last week. I have been following Hawken since his Growing a Business was published in the mid-1980s. I’m skeptical of “all we need to do is X and the climate crisis will be solved” books, but at this point I’ll take any help I can get. I’ll report back on what I learn.

If perchance you wake up one Monday morning, realize you forgot to go grocery shopping, and fall back on the leftover waffles from Sunday morning to feed your daughter breakfast, here is a piece of advice for you: wild blueberry mustard is not an acceptable substitute for blueberry compote. Your daughter is liable to say something along the lines of “these waffles are horrible!!”

I thought I could get away with it. I was wrong.

I thought this post on GNOME launchers would cover the same ground as this 1980 Maclean’s article on gnome launchers. But it didn’t.