Friday Dispatch: Pathos

Listen. We are all just visiting.

Jul 18, 2025

Friday greetings,

I have been sitting here for a while now. The humidity lifted. The sunporch is once again a place of enjoyment. A breeze, the sounds of chimes, birds, leaves swooshing, a lawnmower, intermittent traffic out front. A can of Diet Coke. Bare arms and legs. A peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich.

I’ve been sitting here for a while now, spacing out, listening, thoughts drifting like the puffy white clouds in today’s blue sky. I thought maybe I’d write about how spot-on my horoscopes were this week on the Co-Star app, and then I questioned whether that would be interesting to write (or read). I guess we’ll find out.

Rather than sharing in their entirety, here are some highlights:

“Your relentless self-criticism has distorted your view of your own abilities.”
”Let something wash over you without trying to fix or understand it.”
”Being wrong isn’t failure–it’s the fastest route to knowing what’s true.
“It is impossible to become another person. Your flaws aren’t problems to solve–they’re parts to understand.”

How much of my life have I spent criticizing myself, trying to fix things, fearful of getting something wrong, and trying to be something or someone I’m not?

Note to self: Nothing is wasted. Everything, everything is information. Everything is an opportunity to learn and grow. This may sound like so much pablum, but it’s not. It’s magic in the same way photosynthesis is magic, or a house finch sitting on her four little eggs, or the fact that we woke up again today and got to – get to – be here.

It has taken me a long time to know the value of sitting here doing what looks like nothing, and that nothing can also be everything.

I felt such a deep sense of peace earlier as I tended to things around the house. I watered all of the plants and spontaneously exclaimed, “Oh my God, you are so beautiful!!” to the jade. I cut some daisies to put in bud vases on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. I swept the floor and scrubbed the dog bowls clean, folded the blankets on the couch, and arranged the pillows. I became mildly ecstatic when I spotted one of the guys delivering new recycling bins taking a book from our little free library, a smile on his face. I put our sheets in the dryer and loaded the dishwasher. In many ways, this is my favorite self. The tender. The homemaker. The putterer, quietly moving through space alone, making something beautiful.

When M.J. came down from their shower, we did our morning Tarot readings and talked a little. The Empress has shown up for me two days in a row. Yesterday, she was by herself. Today, she had company that suggested dedication to and/or mastery of a skill, as well as nostalgia, perhaps for childhood innocence, and healing from past hurts.

One skill I continue honing is that of becoming more fully myself. This is nothing new; I’ve been at it for 51 1/2 years, after all! What is new is that I’ve grown more able to release or at least soften self-criticism, embrace my flaws with greater acceptance and curiosity, and loosen my grip on trying to get things right. Little by little…

Yesterday, I was listening to Ludovico Einaudi, a composer I just heard of for the first time this week, whose music is as immersive as the ocean I swam in on our day trip to the beach last weekend. I was driving but wanted to write, so I sent myself a series of short texts to return to later.

Sometimes I think all I ever did was let go.
I see stories everywhere – the police car lights flashing up ahead, a car pulled over, the field with the children playing soccer, probably a summer camp – as I drive through this well-kept suburb.
The song I’m listening to is called Pathos. It’s atmospheric and cinematic. It lends itself to seeing the world through the lens of film, as if there is always something between me and the place itself, something seeing, imagining, perceiving, observing, absorbing, taking in. This layer of consciousness rarely rests. This can be exhausting, or it can be a gift, or it can just be.

Come, come. Look at how the Monarch butterfly and the white moth flutter around each other in the garden. Watch the mother in a restaurant spoon-feed her baby and wonder if she is happy and how things will go for her. Answer the call or turn off your phone and walk into the forest, the lake, the arms of an angel in human form.

Learn to listen, really listen, for the desire or the need standing shyly behind every heavy “should.” Water yourself. Oh my God, you are so beautiful!

I live here, but really, I am just visiting.

We are all just visiting, my love. Listen.

To be earth, to be feminine. To be divine. To be fallible. To be a mother, the mother. To mother myself. To ache for all of the children who have lost their mothers and for all of the mothers who have lost their children. To be so moved by the music that it is impossible to keep my hands on the wheel. To see my hands dancing in the air, just as my mother’s hands dance when we listen together.

To hear my daughter’s voice on the phone, cheerful or shaky or tired or sly. To hear new layers of knowing in my son’s voice.

Listen to the music of listening. The music of the muchness of these precious lives.

Listen to hear my heart, this heart, this wet, whooshing, gushing, mechanical, thriving thing that seems to have eyes, that seems to have ears, that seems to have a heart of its own, the heart of my heart and the heart of my heart of my heart.

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

Here are some of the photos I pulled from my phone, thinking they might spur some writing this morning. You can decide what story they tell.