Urgent sky

On composting old rituals and good old-fashioned heartbreak

Hi folks. I’m still here, still at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, but let’s just say that God had way more than 40 days of Lent lined up for me this year. Those of you I’m close with have heard (probably too much) about the way my body betrayed me around late February in ways I still haven’t figured out or fully recovered from. But I don’t want to spell them out here. It’s sufficient to say that the old line about the body keeping the score is far too real, even when you have no idea what game is being played.

At the risk of overworking the metaphor, the closest I’ve come to figuring out what’s happening to me is to take a look around the court and see what kind of balls are being thrown around. I have essentially run out of savings. I am feeling the pressure to make big decisions about the future of my time at the Catholic Worker. I have cut myself off from my usual coping mechanisms: social media and some other vices.

How have you all dealt with periods of loss and confusion? I have to admit that part of the reason I’ve remained a Christian is because for better or for worse, it’s one of the few things that has helped me make sense of suffering. There’s a mystery about how we often have to go through hard things—die a little—in order to experience a new kind of freedom on the other side. Part of this dying has looked like saying goodbye all over again to a connection that was very important to me. The last few months have held a lot of heartbreak.

I don’t have much else to share in this newsletter right now other than one practice that’s been helping me lately. This came from asking myself: how do I carry on without all the rituals that I cherished in this relationship that I can no longer lean on?

The answer came from a couple of places: first, my Catholic Worker friend Kateri once made sweatshirts with the phrase “COMPOST THE STATE” blazoned across them. The phrase stopped me in my tracks. Compost. It was such a gentle, unsexy, almost funny verb. Instead of the usual calling-to-arms that I often feel in leftist spaces, it was a call to lay something down that no longer served its purpose. To re-purpose it, as a matter of fact. Let nature run its course and slowly eat something up until it becomes nourishing again.

Second, I was lovingly schooled by my friend Eli into remembering that it’s normal to mourn old rituals from romantic relationships—and that it’s okay to open them up to a wider circle of friends so as to keep the spirit of the ritual alive. These two ideas together led me to think about what it could look like to compost the rituals of my old relationship into the new soil of my friendships.

The ritual I’m talking about here is extremely simple: my former partner and I used to tell or text each other “urgent sky” whenever the sky looked particularly beautiful or arresting.

It’s corny as hell but it meant a lot of things: first, the willingness to be moved to awe at any point of the day or night; to notice beautiful things as frequently as possible. Second, the desire to stay aware of the natural world around us and the subtle ways it shapes our mood, our existence. Third, the practice of sharing these things with the beloved as a kind of signal: look, I am here under the same sky as you, alive at the same time as you. Isn’t it the most incredible gift?

So of course I have been longing for this shared language over the struggle of the last few months. I was driving on the freeway at night with a friend from LA recently and I gasped out loud as the moon, low and full, suddenly came into view. She yelped, thinking I had seen a car swerve in front of us or some other hazard. I laughed but felt a sense of loss, too: is the sky really so hard to notice here? I felt stubborn, defiant in my mourning of such a small but meaningful practice.

But since then I have made an effort to compost: to share this small thing with close friends. Small as it is, maybe it brings me hope that other, larger needs can also be met by my friendships. And that is the lesson I’ve been waiting nearly two decades to learn. Tough stuff.

So in that spirit, a few urgent sky pictures that I or other beloved people have taken.

daybreak over the mountains outside of Las Vegas

the uncatchable quality of a partial solar eclipse

storm clouds rolling away from Madison over Lake Monona

twilight in LA

<3

What else? I’ve been re-reading Elena Ferrante’s ferocious Neapolitan Novels and thinking about how women left to compress under society’s weight will either shrivel up—or explode. I’ve started a project that I don’t know what to call. It’s not exactly a graphic novel but it’s something like that. A graphic memoir, perhaps? A graphic love letter? I’m still scheming about how to host a Peter Gabriel-themed karaoke night somewhere in LA. I stitched a handmade patch to a jean jacket and I’m feeling powerful: send me your commissions and I’ll thrift/make you one too (seriously). Life at the soup kitchen continues as usual, with our crop of summer interns arriving tomorrow.

If this newsletter finds you with any extra energy to spare, I’d love to receive a photo from you of the urgent sky where you live. We’re all under the same one even though it looks so different everywhere. Mysterious, no?

Sending lots of love and peace—

Claire