It’s been a very long nearly-year since the last Morning Report. Maybe you forgot you subscribed? Until recently, I was convinced very nearly that I had forgotten how to write anything other than corporate emails and tweets.
An amazing thing, how unexpected things can change you. For me, an extended bout of migraine and chronic illness knocked the letters right out from underneath my fingers. The year dragged with day job work and early bedtimes and doctor's appointments and the acute sense that I had forgotten something very important. It turned out, my body had forgotten how to make some important thyroid chemicals, and consequently, I forgot how to do anything other than eat, sleep, kiss my friends, and show up for work.
And just like that, decades of muscle memory was gone: the daily journal writing, the habitual jotting down of weird phrases and half-formed pitches. Outwardly, I had every appearance of a functional human, aside from the days in bed while I figured out dosages and liters of water. I showed up, I did my work, I tweeted things. I even taught myself some very accomplished cookery in an effort to keep my creative fire lit. But it was the emotional equivalent to a very long winter, the tufted green onion grass of my thoughts and feelings quilted by a necessary layer of chilly, protective preservative while my body figured out how to behave again.
Yesterday morning I left to walk the dog and it smelled and felt just briefly like spring, the sun warm and low on my calves at 7 am. The snow was still lying in clumps on the curb, but the birds were loud as a March morning. And even though it was 10 degrees and I was bundled, I could feel a flash of anticipation. The thaw is coming.
In the meantime of my personal quiet season, I did do a lot of non-writing work I am proud of. Some of it is won’t ever see the light of day because it is corporate, or non-tangible in ways that are meaningful only to me. I read a lot of books, shaving down my to-be-read pile to what one might find in a normal person’s home, rather than someone who anxiety purchases every book they find appealing. And I, with a wonderful partner and a clutch of great contributors, put out another issue of HumanxNature, an anthology of unconventional natural writing essays. This issue also included a robust, action-oriented climate change workbook, a culmination of many drinks and conversations about how we wish the world could be different, and what we could do to make it so.
I am feeling very much myself lately, which is to say I remembered at least how to type again, if not how to write. And if you stick around, you might even get to read some more nature writing here shortly.