How Relationships Shape Everything: A Conversation with Entomologist and Educator, Eric Olson

I’m totally convinced that everything tastes better outside, and that the things you learn outside stick.
Prof. Eric Olson

Rumor had it that the Field Biology elective was the best class to take as an undergraduate at Brandeis because you got to hike, fish in the Charles, and, most importantly, avoid fluorescently lit lecture halls for six hours a week.

Rumor had it, there were no mind-numbing exams, no long taxonomies to memorize, no unfair grades.

As a stressed biology major, I and a whole waitlist of other students were 100% in.

On the first day of class, Prof. Olson trots into the classroom sporting khakis and muddy hiking boots, balancing various nets, sticks, and packets of paper on his person. He hands us an article about Bagheera kiplingi, the first vegetarian spider which he happened to discover in Costa Rica, and informs us that we will each be responsible for nursing a promethea silkmoth for the bulk of the semester in our dorm rooms. A burning question nudges at me that first day – why in the world would someone study bugs?

My little friend, the promethea silkmoth, 2015

Meeting someone who really loves bugs is a good thing for the world.
Prof. Eric Olson

For one, grasshoppers existed long before dinosaurs (1).

For two, moths hear sound through their wings and navigate with the light of the moon and stars or geomagnetic cues (2).

For three, insects are the dominant lifeforms on Earth. One fun estimation shows that for every one pound of humans, there are 300 pounds of insects (3).

If that fact doesn’t quite land with us, another way to think of the sheer abundance is that there are an estimated 10 quintillion individual insects on Earth, and even this estimation is probably inaccurate because we’ve only discovered one fourth of their diverse forms (4).

Basically, insects are indispensable.

Not only are they the critical backbone of most food chains on the planet, but they are also incredibly inspiring to observe. In learning even a little bit about their diverse means of survival, defense mechanisms, and artful bodies, it’s impossible not to develop reverence for these underrated heroes.

One of Pro. Olsen’s favorite books on the subject

As the abundance of insects diminishes, in some places up to 75% in the last thirty years, it becomes increasingly urgent for us to explore and, dare I say, fall in love with, the critters who stitch our world together.

As an entomologist by training and generalist by practice, Prof Olson devotes his life to studying bugs. He is especially fond of the giant silk moths (of which there are over 2000 species!) and explores how ecosystems weave together, and how to best bring the bounty of knowledge to unsuspecting students of all ages.

In writing this post, I had the privilege to sit down with Prof. Olson, share tangerines, pick his brain about ecology, and get a “sense of how people get obsessed” with bugs.

Uncertain of where our conversation would meander, I was pleasantly surprised when the common thread emerged: relationships shape everything.

Prof Olson’s study of evolutionary relationships between insects and other beings (plants, animals, soils) is inextricably linked to our own relationships, our understanding of transformation, and the sheer awe that comes from recognizing beauty when we see it.

When my son was 12, he asked me: Dad, why are there so many naked people in the pictures at the art museum?
I said: Because the human body is so beautiful.
…Silence.
Prof. Eric Olson

As a young lad, Olson went hunting for bugs with his father, who was a busy doctor with a fierce passion for the outdoors. In their few but memorable bonding moments, they were often crouching in a patch of Michigan woods, identifying bugs and capturing them for collection.

His curiosity quickly sprouted when he found a book called “The Moth Book: A Guide to Moths of North America” by W.J. Holland in a bookstore on his way home from middle school.

“I was so excited. I biked home and got money from my mom to bike back to buy this book. And this is the actual copy [photo below]! You have to look back and say, ‘what a nerd, what a cute little nerd!’ I guess it was my calling”.

Published in 1903, The Moth Book flaunts that classic Victorian naturalist quality with poems sprinkled throughout, and snippets from Shakespeare and the bible. Unlike most textbooks I had to read for my biology classes, this one integrates taxonomy with the intangible, poetic experience of awe of evolutionary diversity.

Olson was so captivated by his first foray into moth mystery, that after studying geology and forestry, becoming a naturalist in Minnesota, and teaching in private schools, he pursued his doctorate work focusing on a moth named for a famous patron of British Victorian era butterfly collectors, Lord Rothschild. The detailed ecology of the picture wing moth, Rothschildia lebeau, formed his PhD. Then for his post-doc Olson spent six summers “stud[ying] insect poop”, conducting abundance surveys in Costa Rica with Earthwatch volunteer groups to help him. He would collect insect droppings, weigh them, and do the math. When I asked what the energy was like during those collections, he exclaimed:

It wasn’t quiet, it wasn’t like being a hermit. I was never really alone. I was surrounded by people, and it was fun!

In studying the three-dimensional world of the jungle through insect poop, he was contributing to the very few exhaustive baseline surveys of insect populations. These are important to see what kinds of changes are happening in the insect world in terms of sheer abundance.

In studying the picture wing moth specifically, he learned that out of the hundreds of eggs the female lays, only about two moths survive to adulthood. Predators swoop up the tasty caterpillars, wasps infiltrate their cocoons, and “it’s a total slaughter”. Olson admits, “it’s a terrible gamble and I would not want to be a bug”.

The flipside of the “slaughter” is that it allows for so many other animals, like birds, to have enough nutrients to flourish. Entire systems depend on caterpillars, for example, as a main source of food for their young. “The reason we have the diversity that we have, of songbirds like warblers and chickadees, is because of caterpillars mostly,” Olson reflects, “and most creatures up the food chain just wouldn’t exist without bugs in the picture”.

Darwin landed on Madagascar on his trip on the Beagle, and somebody brought him an orchid that had a big white face and this narrow tube to get to the nectar that was something like 18 inches long. He said “somewhere on this island, there shall be a pollinating moth found that has a matching tongue”. And sure enough, that moth was eventually found.
Prof. Eric Olson

Not only do insects fuel the food chain, but they also play a role in the arms race of plant diversity. Much of this diversity bleeds into our own prospects of medicine. Plants need creative defense mechanisms to protect against insects who would use them as food and breeding grounds.

This counter-evolution results in plants having a “unique cornucopia of chemical profiles”. With 40% of our prescription drugs (including aspirin!) coming from plant extracts or compounds (5), not to mention the myriads of herbal traditional medicines used in most cultures, our human bodies and economies profit significantly from the diversity instigated by insects!

The reality is, I still can’t tell a moth from a butterfly most of the time. Last August, I found a strange insect face with a bent wing in the grass near my bus stop and was shocked when the iNaturalist app identified it as a cicada. I guess I had only ever heard them, but never even seen one!

The Grand Canyon is like a monument. It’s this enormous gash of rock and vistas, a sense of volume of air. If you walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon and you look out, you just go: I get it now. But instead of a cathedral or monument, what we’re making when we go to the woods in a place like suburban Boston, or to the Charles River — it’s more like weaving a tapestry, or a quilt, or a painting. Each point in the whole is just this little thing, but over the course of the course, you hope that something of the richness clicks and the connections of the pieces come into view.
Prof. Eric Olson

How do we really learn to distinguish the fact that we live in a world full of diversity?

Prof Olson’s mission is to facilitate experiences that lay the groundwork for curiosity.

He notes that plants are a great place to start, since they “just stand there” and can’t run off to a nest, or burrow under the ground, or attack us.

“You can learn about the colors, patterns, textures, smells, the life cycles, seeds, fruits, dispersal, and plant chemistry” by looking at trees rather than trying to track down insects and birds with big groups of students.

“The concern about our modern training of young people is that for a lot of people, driving through the world or walking through the world, it’s just ‘green’. There’s no distinctiveness to it! It’s just green! That phenomenon is called plant blindness.” (6)

With botany in the modern day being viewed as “archaic”, most biology programs at universities don’t even offer courses in plant science. What’s more, the exposure to plants that does exist feels stiff and technical, with little room for poetry and spirituality as resources like The Moth Book flaunted.

As a passionate educator and lover of the natural world, Prof Olson breathes life and wonder into the classroom. He designs his Field Biology class at Brandeis to be experiential, focused on the stories and surprises abundant in nature. When asked about what he hopes students take away from his class, he responds with a little memory:

“I remember one time I was walking around campus with this entourage of twenty students behind me, we were carrying nets and stuff, and this visitor to campus was coming up our way and he said “is this a field bio class?” He’s like, in his 50s. And I go, “yeah, why?” and he goes, “that was my favorite class in college!” and then he just walked on. And that’s what I want. I want these kids to look back on this and say ‘boy, that was fun’.”

It was definitely fun for me back in 2014. The experience shaped much of how I examine relationships today. Learning even a little bit about insects, their complexity, and their mysterious abundance, challenges us to distinguish subtle systems of connectedness between all things.

With the insect world diminishing at alarming rates, we can’t help but mourn the loss of both biodiversity and abundance on this planet.

This loss is ours too – it is held by the weight of networks that drive infinite reactions, evolutions, and feedback loops. When our world falls out of balance and into monoculture, so do we, not just in terms of bugs and forests, but also spiritually. The more loss of life, the more “extinction of human experience” (7).

What we understand about the natural world comes from years of research and collaboration between observers, teachers, philosophers, mystics, and scientists.

The more we experience this vastness, the more we can recognize our humble, but integrated place in it all. The more we love and protect the vastness, the more medicine we have to heal ourselves of loneliness.

Prof. Olson is retiring this year and launching a reforestation project in Nicaragua.

To learn more about the reforestation project check out this video. Follow, donate, and learn about it if this interests you!

Thank you so much to Prof. Olson for making the time to hang out, share moth books, and chat at length about so many intimate aspects of his life. I’d also like to extend a huge thank you to my dad for encouraging me to attend Brandeis, a decision I grow more and more grateful for each year. Thank you so much to my friends who have dealt with me throwing moth facts at them. I would love to see any cool photos and identification of bugs around you, any moments that you had with insects that stick in your mind! Love you all ❤

Posted on April 3, 2020 by awindowinside 0

A Tale of Two Nurses: An Ode to Friendship

Like all the sweetest stories, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The year is 1990. An ice storm slams the streets, just like the forecast had predicted. Four dialysis nurses plan to meet at Paparazzi’s, right off of the highway in Burlington, Mass. A perfect halfway point between all their hospitals, they decided while strategizing this parley weeks earlier. They had to get cracking on organizing the annual regional dialysis conference. As nursing managers, time is always of the essence.

Diane calls Rhonda.

Do you still think it’s worth meeting up today?

Diane and Rhonda call the other two nurses to ask the same question.

The question is almost rhetorical.

Let’s try, each one affirms.

On the South Shore, Diane scrapes ice off her small sports car and hops in, revving the engine. Inland from the west, Rhonda climbs into her ice-caked rickety Camry. A little fishtailing never scares them. Both have an extra bag packed in the backseat, always prepared to stay overnight at their respective hospitals in a snowstorm.

What could have been a thirty minute drive any other day spans into three hours of perilous tire-skating in the ice storm.

Diane is the first to make it to Paparazzi’s. One by one, the three other dialysis nurses stomp in, covered in white mottle. Each orders food and alcohol. They eat and chat and laugh. I can’t believe we’re here, they keep echoing, chewing on fries and plastic straws. They don’t quite get to organizing the dialysis conference. Meanwhile, the snow piles up and up and up. But they don’t worry about the weather. As a nurse, you have to follow through, no matter what. The line between life and death is thin as ice. It demands commitment and preparation and good luck.

Thirty years later, Diane and Rhonda comfortably share an office on the 10th floor of Dana-Farber where they work side by side as nurses. Their friend’s twelve year old plant spirals out over the cabinets, brushing up against family portraits and colorful knickknacks. In terms of commitment, preparation, and good luck, they hit the jackpot.

Rhonda (left) and Diane (right) at Dana-Farber, February 2020

Diane and Rhonda have been close friends for forty years. They’ve shared this office for four. This March, Diane is retiring. Though they don’t harp on it often at work, Diane and Rhonda have been each other’s rocks throughout. Their journeys have been winding, wild, and intertwined.

Diane grew up in a small town in New England and moved to Boston, the “big city”, to go to nursing school. She and her best friend applied and enrolled together, helping each other study and survive the trials of clinical rotations. Nursing was a natural choice for her; she always wanted to “make life easier for people, get them through difficult times.”

Rhonda, on the other hand, never quite knew what her career would look like. She went to college for a semester, and got married at eighteen. At nineteen, she gave birth to her daughter and got a divorce. She realized quickly that she needed a job. She became a nurse’s aid, went to licensed practical nursing (LPN) school when her daughter was 18 months old, and worked in a nursing home. Then, one fateful day, she saw an ad in the newspaper for an open dialysis nurse position. She got the job and Diane became her boss. The year was 1980. At this point, her daughter was four years old.

When the time came for Rhonda’s first evaluation, she walked into Diane’s office and burst into tears. Surely, she thought, she had messed something up, and she would get a strict talking-to. “That’s not what an evaluation is at all!” Diane exclaimed. This is how their friendship began.

From that point, Rhonda decided to go back to school to become a registered nurse. She told Diane, “this is what I’m doing. Give me the hours I need.” Diane thought, “Dear, I don’t know how she’s going to do it. She’s got a little one at home, she’s running a household, working, and now, school?” But Diane obliged.

Rhonda enrolled in the same program Diane had graduated from years earlier – the New England Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing, which has since closed. Her schedule was the epitome of hectic – juggling time as an olympic sport. Diane and Rhonda juggled time side by side for four years. Outside of work, on bright summer days, they would convene at another nurse friend’s house and enjoy the poolside. Rhonda’s daughter and Diane’s niece played in swimming pools together.

Rhonda’s graduation from Emmanuel College, 2009
Rhonda (first on the left) and Diane (third from the left)

Eventually, they separated ways, growing into their nursing scrubs as managers of dialysis in different units. They would call each other and organize conferences, projects, and chat about their families.

As nurses, they witnessed the horrors and surprises of the human spirit. They felt their patients cower in pain, and fight through it. They nurtured hundreds of families through mournings and miracles. When their close friend, a fellow nurse, fell gravely ill, Diane and Rhonda held each other and tended to their friend together. When their friend died, they grieved together.

They went on to keep each other up to date in the nursing world. Diane would write glowing references for Rhonda- so glowing in fact, that her interviewees would ask “Do you also walk on water?”. Rhonda often felt restless, itching for new experiences. Diane would pull through, even when it meant Rhonda would be leaving the nest of Diane’s wing. Rhonda listens to Diane “go on and on” about her family; Diane has supported Rhonda through “every stupid decision” she has made. We all make stupid decisions, Diane laughs.

“Hard at work” at the Kraft Donor Center ~2008/2009
Rhonda (Top, second from the left)
Diane (Bottom, second from the right)

Four years ago, Rhonda called up Diane when a new nurse position opened up at the Dana-Farber. I watch them stroll in the halls together with ease, like sisters. I hear them chatting about patients, sharing heartwarming stories and stressful encounters. With Diane retiring, Rhonda recognizes the end of an era. She will miss Diane’s calm presence balming their office.

Diane is looking forward to finally cleaning out her home, starting fresh, spending time with her nieces and her husband. “Our friendship will still be there, our friendship will go on,” says Rhonda.

Nothing can stop these two nurses from their auspicious devotion to each other. Not a hard day at work, not a snowstorm, and definitely not retirement.

“As nurses, you have to go in no matter what. It could be a giant snow storm, but there were always patients. If patients on dialysis don’t get their treatments they die,” Diane declares.

Rhonda adds matter-of-factly, “That carries over into other things we did. Bad weather? Whatever. That’s why we’re friends. Whatever we need to get done, we get it done”.

As for retirement, it will be a new and significant journey for both Diane and Rhonda. As Charles Dickens wrote to top off the Tale of Two Cities, “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

Happy retirement Diane!

They often wear matching outfits by accident

A huge thank you to Diane and Rhonda for sharing their stories and photos with us, and for being incredible people to work alongside! Thank you Audrey D. for sharing this ode to friendship with our genetics team at DFCI!

The 12-year-old plant in Diane & Rhonda’s office!

Posted on February 26, 2020 by awindowinside 2

The Healing Power of Noticing: Tending to the Deep Stories of Plants

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

The morning glory unravels her colorful petals at dawn, inviting her face to receive the life-giving nourishment of sunlight. At nightfall, she twists her petals, fashioning a protected envelope ensuring a soft slumber.

Deep into the rapture of the season’s blooms, Liam Kelly finds morning glories curled around wooden posts and native plants, strewn about his new neighborhood in Jamaica Plain.

He collects their seeds and spreads them around wherever he goes: dark South Boston alleyways, Egleston square front yards, shady woodland areas. The following summer, he notices the myriad of morning glories sprouting up in the places he had scattered them.

He and his friends in Brooklyn, NY start to swap varieties of morning glories and plant each other’s in and around their homes. The erupting glories tie him to this moment of change, to places where he explores and struggles with the growing pains of self-expansion.

The recognition of those flowers around town, the burst of life that comes from just one seed, is not only a memory, but a lesson to be learned.

It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a “species loneliness” – estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

I’ve noticed that many of my own conversations about “nature” often make me feel even more separate from nature. It’s funny given that nature, however we cut it, is inseparable from being a human on Earth.

And yet for many of us, nature remains a foreign and “outdoor” concept: a jungle, a coral reef, a rocky trek, a blue-skied view. “Nature” evokes guilt – our inevitable and hopeless participation in pervasive systems and economies that run on maniacally consuming the world’s resources.

But it also feels true- we are separate, in a way. Nature can be terrifying and deadly to us. Nature is unpredictable, unfathomable, uncontrollable.

I have felt ashamed deep down to realize that no matter how much I love hiking and seem to love birches, I am afraid of being in the woods alone come sundown. Deep down, I feel that nature and humanity are incompatible, an abusive pairing that I am unable to reform.

The fear comes from a human place of needing to stay away from danger in order to survive. Fear also comes from dodging the unknown, the not-yet-understood. It is the immense gap in knowledge and relationship with the powerful world beyond (and within) human invention that many of us struggle to welcome.

We can’t talk about nature in this century without “climate change” blaring in our minds; most observations and discussions about nature centralize on the existential threat and uncertainty of our future. Many people are asking: how do we repair the world?

I’m asking us to consider another question today: How do we repair our relationship (little by little) to the home that gives us life? Maybe the only way is through the weeds.

I drop to my knees in the grass and I can hear the sadness, as if the land itself was crying for its people: Come home. Come home.
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

How do we gaze at the beings that share this sky and earth, the ones that toss acorns on the sidewalk, the ones that pile up and decay in our gutters?

It’s hard to perceive plants as memories, as capsules of 700 million years of evolutionary wisdom. But they, like us, experience migrations, invasions, vibrant communities, hopeful births, and lonesome deaths.

In my experience, storytelling is the best bridge for understanding. In this post, we meet Liam, who picks me up on Commonwealth Ave in a big green landscaping truck on a sweltering day in June and leads me through his memory of the deep stories of plants in Larz Anderson Park.

Can you imagine, for example, what trees do…whenever we’re not looking?
Mary Oliver

When I met Liam the first time last year, we quickly fell into a conversation about seeds. He invited me to the community gardens he tends to in Somerville, introducing by name tens of varieties of basil, all from different places, all associated with different memories and people.

Every seedling had a story, every plant a memory, spanning continents and centuries. This was the first time I realized the depth of stories and life that is constantly murmuring around us. Once the veil is lifted ever so slightly, a torrent of wonder and meaning rolls in.

To top it off, he gifted me a white jasmine flower that swelled my room with her sweet aroma for a week.

Sprouting up in a rural part of New England, little Liam hopped from interest to interest: volcanoes, gemstones, airplanes, military history, flowers. When people asked him, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” his answer was always “a farmer”.

At a tender age, Liam recalls his father often tending to a vegetable garden by their home.

“I remember being in that garden and feeling a connection with him,” he reflects.

In these first experiences with gardening, Liam started paying attention to how plants live- what they do, what they need, how they grow, and how it relates to him.

His first exploration was touching a Serrano chili pepper, then touching his face and balling his eyes out. He spent much of his time immersed in the woodlands, noticing trees, “seeing things happen”. He reflects,

“At some point, there came a threshold where I was aware of so many things happening in plants – it continues to blow my mind. They started raising more questions, which was groundbreaking for me – being asked a question back by something I am observing. It clicked – this is a being that I am communicating with and having a relationship with.”

When Liam stumbled upon the story of chestnut trees in New England, he had a “visceral feeling of connection”. He told me this story while smiling affectionately at a tall chestnut in Larz Anderson Park:

“It was one of the first instances where I was made aware of the massive changes that have happened in our ecosystems over the past couple centuries. There’s this tree that is a behemoth, that rivals the Redwoods but lives on the east coast making nuts- the sweetest chestnuts out there. There were an estimated 4 billion trees growing between Maine and Georgia. But then, within a couple of decades, they were all gone from this blight fungus. This was so catastrophic. So much life depended on them. But they are still around. I remember being so taken with that story – fortunately they grow everywhere where I grew up. What’s cool about these trees is that even when the huge trunks die, the root collar stays alive indefinitely. Today, you walk around and see chestnut trees in the woods – a lot of times they are growing in a rough circular shape and you can see the diameter of the old trunk. On the soccer field where my little sibling played, the field had a bunch of chestnut trees growing around it and for some reason, I’m not sure, maybe just luck, the trees there got big enough to flower often. There was one summer that I went around and pollinated the flowers to try to see if I could grow some and redistribute them. I was reading obsessively about how to propagate these trees, how to graft them, how to pollinate them. I got to eat a couple chestnuts. It was like carroty-sweet, like carrot cake. I finally got some American chestnut seedlings – and then my cat Monty ate them. Every single one.”

Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Thinking of plants as living creatures with histories and families is one way to feel connection. Another dimension involves recognizing how humans and plants have been intertwined for centuries.

Our journey as humans depends on plants for food, medicine, and protection. The plants we have ‘tamed’ have shaken hands with us too. Liam uses the evolution of crop plants as an example:

“Something that I learned about wheat versus the wild grasses: once their seeds are ripe, they need to disperse them. The wild ones usually just fall right off the plant. But wheat holds on to the seeds because they can’t be dropping on the ground when we’re trying to harvest it. If wheat was growing like that in nature, it would have a really tough time. It wouldn’t be able to disperse itself – it’s fitness would be poor. But people cultivate it. That’s not just a coincidence that that is the case. It’s trust. It’s completely two way, too. It’s not just that we are taking advantage of that plant when we eat it.”

Digging deeper into the inner lives of plants, Liam explains what we can learn from plants not only about trust and evolution, but what trust they have in their own families and homes.

Discussing the harsh realities of American capitalism, Liam brought the conversation back to asking questions about what it means to exist in a system:

“The individual is important to the masses. There are trees that fuse their roots together and add nutrients to one another so that when one is disadvantaged and another is thriving- it’s like social welfare. Looking at the questions that are asked of me: looking at how a tree lives, how they see the world and think and understanding things. Invariably there are lessons I can learn. There are a lot of lessons based on equity and reciprocity.”

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

As a gardener, Liam is often tending to plants both indoors and outdoors. The indoor plants require constant attention, watering by hand and repotting. He reflects that the practice of paying attention to something and caring for it is a lesson that can be transposed to other places.

To aid a plant in its growth, you need to have a relationship with it – to watch for how much sunlight and water it needs, when it flowers, how it bends, what insects and animals flock to it.

He loves to grow plants for other people and gift them. He loves when he receives a plant as a gift. “Transfer and capacity, a plant holds more and more,” he says.

I buzz with life’s questions, questions that perhaps the plants have mastered in their evolution.

How do we reanimate what is lost or broken?

How do we help each other grow?

How do we as individuals persist?

How do we practice patience?

What is the root of devotion and trust?

What does it mean to belong?

Walking through Franklin Park, we came across a few little Oak saplings. Liam gingerly touches their fresh leaves and muses,

“These have a long way to go before they become the big Oaks they hope to be. Maybe they’ll still be young long after I’m gone. They teach me patience.”

A mammoth-sized Thank You to Liam Kelly for taking long walks and sharing his passions with us, and for re-introducing me to Mary Oliver, the poet who is known to wander and be inspired by the deep woods. Thank you so much to Jason Kimball for letting me read your copy of “The Overstory” by Richard Powers, which has also shifted the way I connect with plants (highly recommend!). “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer was also super influential as inspiration for this post. Please share any thoughts, stories, and questions you may have (about the universe). Love you all ❤

Posted on January 19, 2020 by awindowinside 0

Opening the Portal: The Secret World of Imaginary Friends

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
Ursula Le Guin

Lights off and windows shut, a tear rolls down my cheek as I tell my dear friend Rachel I think it’s time that we part ways.

For years we whispered into each others ears. We laughed together in the bathroom at some juicy middle-school drama. We hugged on icy nights when the gas heat wasn’t on, and falling asleep was hard. We asked each other questions about the day’s happenings: what was your favorite part of that song you just heard on the radio? Did you see grandma get tense when the bank teller couldn’t understand her accent? What if Shane never loves me back?

I would get upset at my dad and she would offer a different perspective, “maybe he was just stressed today because of work; tomorrow will be better,” she would posit. And it always was better.

Rachel was my compass. I trusted her with all my heart, especially in the moment of saying our goodbyes. I was in high school and feeling ready to take it on alone. Keeping up our friendship would make us emotionally dependent each other, I realized. She would become an appendage, a vestige of a relationship that we could no longer learn from. We assured each other that night that we would both be safe; she would go on to love another human being and I would go on living and building new, meaningful friendships.

As great scientists have said, and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula Le Guin

Rachel didn’t have a face, nor a body. She floated as an invisible, twin-soul above me. I understood that she was my invention, yet she would still come and go as she pleased, independent in body and mind.

A surprising 37% of children develop imaginary friends at some point (1). In my younger years, I thought people would judge me if they knew about Rachel. In contemplating imaginary friends, I asked my in-the-flesh friends about their childhood experiences. It’s a whole different sensation to dive into the intricate, varied, and wildly imaginative worlds of friends’ invisible, sometimes secret relationships.

Considering how common imaginary friends are, it’s poignant that as adults we often forget about them or feel shame about them. It’s easy to make fun of ourselves for having made-up beings to talk to. We may even wince at the thought. But for some of us, these imaginary friends have guided us.

Imaginary friends have helped us make sense of our world. These inventions can help certain humans find comfort in times of loneliness or boredom, difficult transitions, and moments of low self-esteem.

*The Eastern eyed click beetle (Alaus oculatus), Silver Springs, Maryland by Jason Kimball*

Some of the most well-known fiction writers, such as Ursula Le Guin, converse with their characters in vast, fantastic worlds steeped in deep history. What better way to practice relationships and storytelling than with a universe that you invented yourself?

In contemplating imaginary friends, I asked my in-the-flesh friends about their childhood experiences. It’s a whole different sensation to dive into the intricate, varied, and wildly imaginative worlds of people’s invisible, sometimes secret relationships. I heard about an invented family of a hundred cats, a best friend twin-soul (similar to my own), fairy adventures, little beings living in the walls, superheroes, and the list goes on and on.

Reflecting on the experience of having imaginary friends also reveals something deeper — an intimate window into someone’s inner world. By tapping into memories of our forgotten imaginary friends, we can learn a lot about our own and each other’s journeys through life.

In this post, we will meet some of the characters that became companions and platforms for experimentation for real humans. We will explore reflections from two different A Window In readers!

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, [s]he would grow up to be an eggplant.
Ursula Le Guin

First, we meet Sarah and her two high-school aged (invisible) brothers, Dave and Charles. In juxtaposition to their mischievous company, Sarah was “the only level-headed one”. In reality, she was an only child of an aerospace engineer and a stay-at-home mom living in the hustle and bustle of LA. Sarah didn’t keep her brothers a secret from the adults in her life. She would go on and on about them to her parents, and they played along, shaking their heads, oh those boys!

When it came to the kids on the block, however, Sarah kept it secret. She felt like the odd one out, the solitary girl with no siblings.

“When I was growing up, a lot of people had siblings and I was like, “what’s wrong with my parents that they can’t have another kid? Why did they give me this weird lifestyle of being alone by myself?”’

She felt “weird” and isolated, and was afraid that kids her age would think she was “pathetic for wanting siblings so badly”.

As Sarah started socializing more and being involved in dance at age seven, she started interacting with humans outside her own head. She suddenly stopped talking about Dave and Charles. Her mom asked once what happened to them and Sarah, a clever little chap, explained, “they went away to college”.

She doesn’t think about her big brothers now that she’s in her mid-twenties. She reflects:

“It set me up for creating a reality in my head for what I could consider as normal, comfortable, and protected.”

Now, she uses listening to music and dancing as portals to fantastical worlds where she can explore, be comfortable, and be free.

There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.
Ursula Le Guin

After initiating this topic with another friend, Liam, our discussion flowed in a totally different direction.

Exposed to Irish folklore as a child, Liam and his (real life) siblings fashioned miniature homes, completing them with waterproof roofs, little plants in little gardens, including windows, making the designs stylish and complex. Despite never befriending a fairy in real life, he wanted to make make sure they had a place to sojourn.

The imaginative story became a family affair. His sister, Grace, joined him in the construction. His mom would put marzipan potatoes in the huts as gifts from the leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day.

“It felt good and right making them homes, even when we didn’t get to hang out together”.

Though he never met these fairies, they left coins, bits of thread, and acorns for him to enjoy and cherish.

We dove deep into memories of how we learned lessons in generosity from roots of tradition. Listening to Liam remember the magic of giving homes to silent creatures, sparked my own forgotten moments of cradling a butterfly with a broken wing.

Nowadays, you can find Liam hopping around Indiana, working on land restoration projects, identifying plants, creating seed libraries, and building communities that prioritize sustainable agriculture.

*Silver Springs, Maryland by Jason Kimball*

There’s a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, “when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Ursula Le Guin

How can we use our powerful experiences with imaginary friends to summon such magic now?

Yesterday (November 23, 2019), at my friend Eva’s memorial service, her twenty three year old brother stood bravely in front of an overflowing church of grievers and began to deliver a eulogy about none other than their beanie baby collection, the political dramas in the beanie universe, and how much this play had helped them bond and understand the world beyond their own.

This moment of intimacy that he shared with the rest of us, who didn’t know Eva’s earliest creations, lands in a tender place in my heart. Her brother summoned this magic by honoring and integrating these stories into our memory of Eva.

What if we asked each other, “Did you have imaginary friends growing up? What were some worlds that you invented?” The people I thought I knew so well sometimes bare unexpected sagas of adventure, longing, loneliness, and kinship.

It is such a joy to remember these invisible beings who got some of us through lonely and experiential moments in our lives. These conversations elicit surprising intimacy that we can tap into by calling on our childhood imaginations. Our invisible companions not only cradled and shaped some of us, but still do in how we reflect and connect over their existence.

Having a relationship with ourselves means not trying to confine the galaxies inside our bodies that are too vast to map out and predict. Instead, it could be about finding ways to connect, to make our own diverse realities intersect, to learn, and witness, and listen, and imagine the world beyond what we perceive to be true. After all, the most magical forces are the invisible ones.

Thank you all for reading and sharing your heartwarming stories! Special thanks to Sarah Estrada and Liam Kelly for letting me interview you for this post! Thank you to Jason Kimball for contributing beautiful photographs to color this post! If you have any thoughts or memories, I’d love love love to discuss! ❤

Sources:

(1) https://www.journalofplay.org/sites/www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/1-1-article-taylor-imaginary-companions.pdf (this is actually a really cool paper, if you’re interested!)

Posted on November 24, 2019November 24, 2019 by awindowinside 0

Beyond the Motherhood Monolith: Reflections from a Mom

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
Sharon Olds

Sometimes, it’s hard to see past the monolith of motherhood. We often find ourselves reflecting on the classic pillars of the “motherhood experience”: obstetrics, child development, mother-child bonding, unconditional love, chicken pox. Our culture tends to focus on the development of women as mothers, but not on their development as an individual, complex person. Meanwhile, every person raising a baby out there has a wildly distinct experience that is generally kept hush-hush in public conversations. By sharing our stories and listening to each other, we can crack some of the tropes of motherhood.

In this entry, we meet Rebecca*, who gifts us with candid, thoughtful reflections about how her relationships have shifted since she became a mother. While she navigates the straits of having three young daughters, she is also balancing a full-time job, her marriage, her friendships, and her own identity.

I want to put out there that it’s possible and/or totally inevitable that her story doesn’t parallel your own experience of motherhood, marriage, or friendships. The landscape of relationships out there is as vast and mysterious as the deep sea. It’s impossible to generalize “motherhood”, despite all its monolithic glory. If any thoughts come to you during this reading, I would love to hear them if you are willing to share!

As a mom, there’s no space for you to be vulnerable or weak when you’re with your children because they need so much. So much of just your role as a mother, at least in my experience so far, is just security. It’s just: I’m here. I’m steadfast. I’m not angry. I am your rock. Period. Stable as hell. Because everything in a kid’s life changes every single second.
Rebecca

Rebecca describes herself as a “cisgender woman in a heterosexual relationship”. She married her high school sweetheart when she was twenty six and loves him to the moon. Growing up in a small town in the Midwest, Rebecca was one of the only women in her friend group to wait and have children later. When she moved to the East Coast for graduate school, she had to build a new support system from scratch. The shifts in friendships really became apparent once she “reluctantly stumbled into motherhood” when she turned thirty. When asked about friendships today, Rebecca easily slices her friends into two separate categories: mom-friends and nighttime-friends.

She defines mom-friends as friends she made when she became a mom, but “not because they’re mothers necessarily”. She says it “just marks a time in [her] life in which they became [her] friends”.

“Mom-friends have become so essential,” Rebecca describes. She admits that a huge part of why motherhood has been fulfilling so far was because of the opportunity to bond (and “commiserate”) with new friends who are also going through these challenging transitions. An important part of the mom-friend bond for Rebecca is the opportunity to vent, to be vulnerable, to break down the motherhood tropes with someone who can empathize.

“If they’re close enough, you can be like, “this is really hard”, and “you know what? I didn’t love my child for the first 10 weeks of their life”. You can say, “I don’t want to have a second child because I can’t wait for the time where I don’t have to be a mom anymore”. Those are the things that I have heard said, and things that I’ve said that make it really vulnerable.”

Vulnerability can be really hard for a mother because of societal expectations. A mother carries on her back the tropes of unconditional maternal love – the “instinctual”, the “selfless”, the “sacrificial” woman whose ultimate mission is inseparable from being a mother. The emphasis on these tropes diminishes the actual experience and humanity of the person within the mother.

“You as a mom are not allowed to say, “today my kids suck”. You as a mom are not allowed to say that; you as a woman are not allowed to say that. Not that long ago, before women were allowed to be in the workplace, all they had that was theirs and theirs only was kids, kid-rearing, and motherhood. Your power came from your ability to bring that life into the world. If you say, “this is not always great,” you are sort of giving up the only power that women have only ever had to themselves.”

Rebecca argues that “communal therapy” with mom-friends helps normalize some of the feelings of isolation and frustration. She argues that it helps to keep her marriage stronger.

“I decided at some point: you’re the person I’m going to be with forever and ever and we’re going to figure shit out and I’m going to commit to that every morning I wake up.”

“On the surface of things, he is somebody who stands right there with you,” Rebecca describes her husband. Everything had always felt equal between them since they were 15; they stood by each other while moving across the country and changing jobs. “And then we had the girls,” she states.

“You don’t realize how much you learn as a woman just through being a woman in society that men really miss out on. I don’t know a single woman who made it into her 30’s who has not bottle fed either a real person, a baby animal, or a doll. These are the things. We are still raising our little girls to be mothers, and not raising our little boys to be fathers.”

Suddenly, she is the only one who could pump and breastfeed the girls. She needs to take more time off of work. She needs to stitch her “body back together”. She stays home more so she knows what the girls’ cries sound like. She knows when they’re hungry. The pediatricians call her instead of him. When the diapers run low, she is the one who notices.

“It’s these little things that we’re all, myself included, contributing to that make motherhood in some ways harder than fatherhood. And my husband is 100% there. He is all in when it comes to being a dad. Even if the work that we are doing day to day is 50/50, I’m still doing all the management.”

Rebecca’s frustration with the blatant imbalance that flooded her marriage came as a shock. She expresses that she feels incredibly lucky that the foundation of their relationship is strong, and they are able to discuss the problems as they arise. “We need to stop saying that everything should be equal,” she retorts, “instead we should think about fair.” She reflects that the inequality isn’t only biological – it’s how we’ve been conditioned in ways we didn’t choose. She looks at the new challenge in her marriage as “covering each other’s weaknesses”- learning and developing ways to find balance as a parental unit and as individuals.

Rebecca also sensed that it was difficult for her husband to get to know his children and what role he played in their lives.

“I knew my girls way before he knew them. To some extent, their personalities now are similar to what they were in the womb. If I had described to you the children that I was carrying, to some degree it would be these children. I got to know them so well.”

Benjamin*, her husband, was able to take a chunk of time-off at work to spend one-on-one time with their oldest daughter in their first summer as a family. With the younger daughter, he wasn’t able to do that. Rebecca noticed that “it really changed their relationship. It took a lot longer for him to get to know her. He misses it. It made becoming a parent harder for him”.

Beyond the logistical balancing act that marriage may encounter with children, there is also an emotional balancing that needs to be addressed. Rebecca jokingly referenced a book called “How to Have Children Without Hating Your Husband”, which helped her name some of the shifts.

“There are so many things that tell you how to have a good marriage, but there aren’t many things that tell you how to balance this physical, immediate love that you have for your children with this esoteric, very brain driven love that you have for your spouse. One you choose, one you don’t choose. How do you balance those two loves? How do you not get consumed by one or the other?”

Some of what we learn about partnership and parenting is through observation and experience. Rebecca notes that her own parents had a difficult relationship with each other and got a divorce. Her becoming a mother has also prompted profound reflection of her relationship with her own mother.

I was like – holy shit, the only other person I feel this way about is my mom!
Rebecca

Rebecca followed in the footsteps of a long line of women who worked in education. Her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother all worked full-time most of their lives, a historic rarity. She didn’t “identify with motherhood” at first, and found it difficult to imagine herself sacrificing her independence to take care of a bunch of drooling babies. When asked about what she may have learned about motherhood from her upbringing, she shared, “hearing my mom and the older generation’s experiences of motherhood, both good and bad, led me to make a lot of choices within defining my own sense of who I am as a mom”.

The intergenerational trauma and learning regarding motherhood directly impacts how women slip into their roles as mothers. Rebecca’s mother’s story is totally different than her own. Her mother had married “late” (in her 30’s) after “sowing a lot of wild oats first”. Rebecca speculates that one of the only reasons she was married was because she “was ready to have kids”. She never really had a partner in raising children, and got divorced when Rebecca was a teenager. She and her own mother’s relationship was one where the “two women broken by circumstance loved and hurt each other in equal measure”. Rebecca’s mother often felt isolated and alone.

Rebecca reflects that she and her mom are “close friends”, but sharing her challenges can be difficult because of her mother’s trauma. She says:

“In some ways, it’s hard to talk to her about my experiences. She says, “well you have it so much better than I had it”. But I’m sure she never really had a voice to say “I had this bad experience”’.

On the other hand, she’s grateful for the powerful and foundational relationship with her mother. She can share her developing identity as a mother with the woman who carried and raised her from birth.

“I don’t know that I appreciated my mother. I don’t think I appreciated the connection that we had and the physical love behind it. Now we’re connecting as adults over a bond that we’ve had your whole lives, even when she were an adult but I wasn’t. To realize, I’ve been completely obsessed and in love with this person and never, ever realized it until I had my own person that I was insanely in love and obsessed with.”

Despite all the difficulty, Rebecca finds wonder and gratitude in watching her young daughters discover the world.

“My oldest just started this new thing where she says “It’s a mysteryyyyy” and she’s just really cool – she’s just a cool human being. I am cultivating this person who didn’t choose to be here. That’s a lot of responsibility.”

Thank you to Rebecca who shared these intimate details of her life with us! Thank you Sam Bavelock for the cover art made from beet juice. Thank you to all the humans willing to converse about motherhood in the interim to help me write this in a semi-cohesive way. This entry may not reflect your own experiences, and of course there is a lot of nuance here with various family structures, gender roles, culture, and the list goes on forever. Motherhood is such a monolith to tackle, so this really just represents a morsel of one person’s reflections.

*Names are changed for some semblance of privacy!

Posted on July 7, 2019July 7, 2019 by awindowinside 0

From Margins to Masterpieces: Reflections on Doodling

…I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
For love, for your dream,
For the adventure of being alive.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer (excerpt from “The Invitation”)

If you look around you right now (even if you’re on woodsy trail!), you will find both functional and aesthetic representations of some human’s vision. Airplanes, roads, state houses, cartoons, wine bottles, maps – all manmade inventions are inevitably a product of the natural force pouring out of us: imagination.

When we think of “art”, many of us imagine the Sistine Chapel with its biblical frescos or the Mona Lisa hanging solemnly in a high-security museum. We may think of art as an expensive object that sits on a table or lives behind glass. We may think of its creation as reserved for the trained eye or the lonely romantic. In short, art can feel inaccessible and exclusive.

I’ve heard many a friend remark “oh, I’m not an artist, I can’t paint a human body to save my life!”. Then, in chemistry class, I catch them drawing peculiar aliens or zig-zagged hats.

A doodle is defined as an absent-minded scribble. Even though it usually has a frivolous connotation, the absence of the mind may be exactly when the walls of self-consciousness come down. It’s not so frivolous at all! Given how ubiquitous doodling is, it is important to consider that it can be a window into someone’s inner world. If doodling is born from a mind right on the edge of daydream, meditation, and awareness, there is a vulnerability in creating and even sharing the fabric of one’s inner wonderings.

To call some attention to the improvisation in processing our daily lives, this post will explore the experience of doodling. We meet Sam Bavelock, who regularly experiments with visual art. Sam bridges two (often overlapping) worlds: that of the “artist” who shares with the public and that of the human who creates purely for the sake of expression, processing, and fun. Over the past decade, Sam has created pieces using all kinds of mediums – some for commission, some for gifts, some purely for herself, some without a destination in mind. She has graciously shared some of her doodles with us for this post!

“One of my favorite companions”, a doodle by high-school Sam Bavelock

I barely ever put pen to paper with a plan. A plan is exactly what I try to avoid!
Sam

Sam started doodling in high school. When she found herself weighed down by expectations or longing to be outside during class, she would open up her notebook and let her imagination run. The margins “were a secret asylum for doodles”, a portal into one of the only spaces she felt she could “expand into without consequence”. In short, doodling was a refuge.

Today, when asked if she shares the contents of her sketchbooks, Sam quickly says “no”. Swiftly, she adds, “I’ll show a doodle once in a while or I’ll be drawing in public. But rarely do I intentionally present it to an audience”. The privacy of the sketchbook struck me as akin to a journal. It made me realize that doodles are similar to words, and just as powerful. Sam’s sketchbook contains what she describes as “lots of processing and dreams” – illustrations of difficult conversations she has experienced, visual representations of fears and desires. Where do the visuals come from? From where are our doodles born?

There are all kinds of handwriting experts and psychologists who claim they can decipher your personality through analyzing doodles. Online, I found some interesting (but probably reductive) interpretations of swirls, triangles, faces, buildings. But basically, the nature of doodling is an exploration of your personal imagination. That is why it can be such an intimate experience to catch a glimpse of someone’s doodle.

“This guy is a creep. I like him.”, more high school doodles from Sam Bavelock

Sam reflects on the experience seeing two of her favorite artists’ sketchbooks on display in New York’s Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim:

“To see the sketches and doodles of well-known artists is provocatively imposing. When I went to see Frida Kahlo and Hilma af Klint’s sketchbooks, it was amazing how different the two were. Hilma’s were methodical, very geometric. Her drawings were plans, documented processes for her large scale paintings. Frida’s were more loose and didn’t feel like plans for other pieces. They were pieces by themselves.”

She also recounts a story that gave her a possible peek into the subconscious of a stranger:

“One time when I was sitting in a cafe, there was someone drawing an image of a girl. The image had the word “hello”. When I complimented her, she seemed very open to engage. The consistency of her inviting demeanor on the page and in our interaction was noticeable. It’s interesting to see what imagery comes up for people in relationship to how they are feeling.”

A doodle by Sam Bavelock; a cursory photo captured on New Years 2018 by me

Doodling is not just a way to heal, improvise, or keep your hands busy in a meeting. It can also be a way to communicate and share the experience of a feeling. I have a vivid memory of the first doodle Sam gifted to me. On New Years Day (2018), Sam invited me to leaf through some old notebooks in her room. A little circular cut-out fell out (pictured above). For some reason, I was immediately in love with this head-planet. To our soft, hushed pondering “how do we keep from feeling alone?”, the calm saturn-face provides a resolution without a word. This cut-out now hangs above my desk. When I’m feeling gloomy, lonely, meditative, or just spacing out and staring at my wall, I remember the feeling of the gift and the moment Sam said “keep it”. Knowing that this creation sprouted from the spirit of my dear friend, that it resonated so deeply with me, and that she trusted me enough to hold onto it, I feel a surge of closeness and love every time it catches my gaze.

Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.
Frida Kahlo

As someone who practices “art” regularly, Sam encounters different phases of her creative process. Though she admits that developing technical skills can be an important component for understanding the limits of creation, she is a strong proponent for improvisation and experimentation. Coming to the page with no agenda is liberating! But that approach can be pretty hard to do for all of us, even those of us who consider ourselves artistically inclined.

Inspired by the Gorillaz & Castle in the Sky, “anything floating, anything magic”. A doodle by high school Sam

There always seems to be judgment, a voice in our heads that says “this isn’t good enough” or “why bother trying” or “naked mermaid sketches are inappropriate for work meetings”. We all have loved ones who hide their doodles in fear of being judged, or for worries of not being a “real artist”. Making doodles and sharing them is a really vulnerable experience that we often overlook or shy away from. Within that thread, Sam notes one of the reasons that she shares her doodles from time to time:

“When I do share my doodles, there’s a hope that seeing my weird, crazy, nonsensical drawings may inspire someone to realize that making art doesn’t mean they have to know how to draw perfectly. They can just goof around and have fun with it.”

We can all tap in to our natural imaginative forces. Many of us doodle, or love someone who does. This art is free, uninhibited, and abundantly available to create, appreciate, and enjoy!

A huge thank you to Sam for letting me interrogate her about her artistic process & for being open to sharing her private doodles with us. If you are interested in checking out any of her other creations, visit her Instagram at @r.e.m_ember.

Thank you as well to the lovely, brave humans who donated their doodles (below) for this post! Please join in celebrating them! Thank you for reading!

Doodles by Maria Terentieva: