💫 Good morning to everyone... except the tankies and anyone else with a throb-on for the possibility of more death, more war.

To the armchair spectators gleefully dehumanizing other people in service to gamified views of foreign policy:

May your socks always be cold and wet.
May your water never boil.
May you grow to realize that this is not a freaking game.
May you never be in a position of any meaningful authority until you grow up.

🙃 Everyone else...

Hot coffee? ☕ Tea? 🍵

Happy Tuesday. 🫂

*Filled, but eff it. The typo stays in the picture.

I'm off to teach.

The night sky is heavy with storm clouds and distant flickers of lightning. On my laptop, I have a window open to scenes half a world away, where the sky lights up for reasons far worse. 🖤

Night CoSo.
Be gentle wherever this hard world allows.

Today's poem on Rattle is a nice one, which might elicit a weary smile or rueful chuckle. It does what #poetry can do better than most any other form: carry deep concepts forward through slight images, quotidian scenes.

This one's title encapsulates that range well: it *is* about dogs, and grief! But mostly, it's about how we move through the world with our wounds. Imperfectly. Messily. Fill with embarrassment, some days. But pressing on, all the same.

👌🏻 Tent delivered to the fellow sleeping rough across from my building. Best part is that he was sleeping soundly, so I could leave it without awkward exchanges / forced gratitude, and I still got back to my apartment in time to watch him wake to it from my balcony. He's setting it up now, which is good because I think we're in for evening rain.

Being houseless doesn't mean one doesn't merit safety, privacy, a home.

Happy Thanksgiving, all. However you honour it: thank you thank you thank you.

Hey CoSo--

Remember: We didn't evolve alongside online tech. It is *very new* for our brain chemistry as a species, which means that the way it plays on our reward response and around hormones for threats/stress is *hugely* out of whack with real danger.

Right now we're all super primed to see threats in others' posts. Death is unfolding as news spectacle, & some are 💯 confrontationally posting to grieve/vent.

Just don't to let the screen consume you. Touch grass. Hug a loved one. Hydrate. 🫂

I'm not sure what wearies me more: that there are still 2.5 months this year for us to muck up, or that we have so much decade left to fumble, too.

There *are* good things in life.

And we treat life far too carelessly.

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful I was in a position to *try* to help others this year. And I'm thankful for all of you, who help in so many ways.

And...

I'm thankful to still be here, I suppose--that I may try and try again.
May you never forget the gift of your presence too.

Morning, CoSo. 🕊️

Today, I summarize some key regional context and ways to think about the news you're seeing about the violence in Israel and Gaza. Hamas, Iran, political spin, Palestinian struggle with local authorities, Israeli internal politics swept aside by these attacks...

It's titled, simply, "War, again", because there is enough gamified media whenever the world falls apart.

The main goal is to retain the better parts of our humanity every single time it does.

https://onlysky.media/mclark/war-again/

Friendly reminder:

There are many places where one can find footage of what's transpiring.

Be careful when wading through it.

The littlest things can break you.

In one, a girl held hostage explains that her sister was killed. An outsider tells her she's in heaven, and that calms her. Automatically, she says it's better to be there than here.

I'm glad religion brings some comfort, but when a child can so readily agree that it's better to be dead?

We have so utterly failed.

I've been pacing between writing all day.

For the better, though, as new details keep emerging. There's now been time to observe dominant threads of misinformation and media focus: some surprisingly better than in the past (maybe we can learn after all!).

You folks know I don't do clickbait, and I don't fall into approaches to situations that de-centre the complexity of human beings.

So.

I'm going out for another long pace.

Let's see if anything else drops before final revisions, eh? 🫂

I did not wake in a good brainstate today.

Sometimes the range of terrible things humans do to one another just knocks the whole narrative of life's charms away.

Everything can feel so flat & hopeless, & one can boggle at the idea that they ever thought otherwise, ever tried to build something more.

The brainstate will tell you it's being rational. Responding logically to new intel.

But the brainstate is a form of grieving.

Go gentle into your days, lovely ones, if you're in grief as well.

And a little Leonard Cohen before bed. #CoSoMusic

It's not a deflection from the day's traumas to lean on art forged by other griefs in other eras. We have been here before. We have grieved these griefs season after season.

O fragile Earth so filled with survivors - when will it be enough? When will we learn?

When will we ever learn?
https://youtu.be/-IsuYu1MX0Q

Also, my piece wasn't chosen for Rattle's Poets Respond this week, so I can share it here with you instead.

It was inspired by news of a Russian woman who learned that she'd lived her whole life with a needle in her head - clearly a failed attempt at infanticide in the 1940s, when life was hard, and many thought better days would never come.

How striking, no? All the things that do not kill us... even when we're sure they must.

#Poetry

#Poetry for the day, this terrible season.

#War

And yes, I'll be writing something more formally, to post tomorrow:

About what to watch for in the gamification of war news.

About the instant weaponization of religion, in many forms, that arises at times like this.

About our declining capacity to value human life, in a world inundated by wartime propaganda.

But for now I'm going to the market.
Buying ingredients for lunch with a friend.

And unless you can call a ceasefire yourself, please remember to step away from the screens today, too.

I'm thankful to be sharing a forum like CoSo on days like these: a place with people who always remember to hold space for the fact that war is suffering.

Never glorious.

Never righteous, no matter how inevitable a breakout might seem.

Never a situation with "winners", either: only those who survive, and the world they will forge out of trauma in the aftermath.

May our humanity survive.

May we remember that *this* is the aim.

Today I'm making lunch for a friend, in honour of her new apartment. I haven't been able to cook for anyone in a long time, so this makes my heart feel pretty darned good.

Hope your own weekends are filled with loved ones, human or otherwise - and may the company you keep never leave you feeling lonely. 🤗