Under the Paling Stars of the Morning

I’ve been sleeping amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bedroom as dark as this bedroom in the wintertime; the room I was in last winter was on the second floor and its huge windows looked directly out at a streetlight that beat the night back, whose light glittered the hoar frost and then filtered into all the corners of my bedroom, in whose beams I could watch the snow fall. There are no streetlights near my current bedroom window, though, and I pull the blackout curtains down as well, and my room becomes the darkest place that’s ever existed, heavy with the silence of winter. At night I turn off the heat (I like it to be cold so that I can make myself warm under blankets) and I burrow under my down comforter with the dogs and curl into a little ball and let the dark swallow me. Once asleep I fall down, through the mattress, through the many layers of this darkness. The muscles in my face relax as I cartwheel backwards and forwards through time. I visit the house in my dreams, with its labyrinthine passageways where I wander, searching for something I have lost. I try, and fail, to navigate complex social situations. I’m being chased. Or my true love has died.

I love waking up when it’s still dark. You know that feeling of being young and staying up all night, into the wee hours where it felt mildly illegal to be awake? Or later, slightly less young, rousing yourself in the dark to walk across Death Valley before the heat comes on. In Alaska in the winter you can get that feeling at 8 am. I love waking to pitch blackness, turning on all the lamps, switching the kettle on, letting the dogs out to poop on the snow that glitters with moonlight. I take my tea and sit on the couch and wrap myself in blankets and patiently wait for the sunrise. The last hours before dawn have always been an enchanted time; in Alaska in winter you can live your whole life within them.

This early part of winter does wonders for my imagination. A few days ago I got to thinking about the shape of the universe. I think we perceive ourselves within space-time like a string of paper dolls, like this:

Each one of us is in a different position in the universe, either in space or time or both. That’s how our brain sees things. But that’s not how things really are. I thought of this because I was holding my old dog NikNik and singing a song to her that my mother sang to me when I was a baby. I realized in that moment that my mother and I were having the same experience, just in different parts of space-time. And this is true for all of our experiences; everything we think or feel. As the kids on tiktok say, “I don’t have a single original experience.” For thousands of years there have only been a few human stories, told over and over and over. We want to be loved. We’re afraid of death. (I think those are the two main ones.) Also- we want to be needed. We want to avoid pain. We want to win. We want to be seen and heard. We want to feel safe. Etc etc. So we experience ourselves as this string of paper dolls, all separate in space time, but really you can fold the first doll back on the one before it, because they both crave stability. You can fold those two back on the next one, because all three of them are afraid of becoming their parents. Those three can get folded back on the fourth doll because all four of them are experiencing an itchy sort of loneliness this week. Those four can join the fifth because they all have imposter syndrome. And on and on. Until all the paper dolls are folded back on each other and it’s just one thick paper doll having one singular experience, like this:

That is the true shape of the universe, I decided the other day. And I don’t know what it’s like to be an octopus or a beetle or a slime mold but I imagine the longings and experiences are similar so they’re in there too. All beings are in there. Everything is in there.

Walt Whitman says

Space and Time! Now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,

What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,

What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,

And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning

My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,

I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,

I am afoot with my vision…

…All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine.

I am the man. I suffer’d, I was there.

When I was twenty-six I was crashing at a friend’s house in Portland and I pulled Leaves of Grass off the bookshelf and opened it up and this bit about space and time was the first thing I saw. It rang true for me and also changed something in my brain, stuck with me always. Me and this poet, two paper dolls folded back on each other through space-time. And he too liked the time before dawn- thinking about space and time under the paling stars of the morning.

All of our experiences are timeless. All of our experiences are related. The experience of the Palestinians right now is timeless as well, unfortunately. The story of empire, the story of colonization. It can be hard to look directly at the situation if you live in the US because ours is an empire founded on genocide and ethnic cleansing as well. It’s like looking into a very uncomfortable mirror. And I know some people are afraid of speaking up because they don’t want people to be mad at them- that’s another thing that unites us, our fear of people being mad at us- and a handful of Zionists will definitely, definitely be mad at you, and they’ll regurgitate their tired talking points, but then they’ll go away (you can block them) and what’s left will be the people who are so relieved to hear that you care too. And maybe you feel awkward speaking up because almost a month has passed and you haven’t said anything. But these situations go on a long time, it’s a relay race of sorts- this is a great time to take the baton and start speaking up. And then you’ll get tired and someone else can take it. And that’s how we keep going.

You also might feel afraid to say the wrong thing. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. We all say the “wrong” thing all the time. We are just puny singular humans doing our best. It’s actually not important how we do or do not get the words right. What matters is the collective din of our voices. If you say something today and next week you feel like you could have said it better, you can say it different next week. “We are neither as terrible or as important as we think we are.” Speaking is cringe. Being perceived is cringe. We are cringe but we are free.

Sim Kern (instagram, tiktok) and Joshua P Hill and Fariha Róisín continue to write/speak so eloquently about all of this. And you can go watch genZ get radicalized on tiktok in real time. It reminds me of being radicalized at 19, when I first learned that crabitalism was a pyramid scheme, when I fell in with straight-edge anarchists who made zines about DIY abortion and sailing and put too much curry powder in everything and who were trying desperately to distance themselves from systems based on infinite growth.

from @paperbackparadise on instagram

We read Derrick Jensen (before he was transphobic) and I learned about the slave labor inherent in human “civilizations” and I cried a lot. (Sim Kern breaks this down really well in this video, quoting Cedric Robinson- “all capitalistic societies require a ghetto”.) Plot twist- we couldn’t actually distance ourselves from those systems because we were living in them and benefiting from them. That was humbling to realize. We tried to be “pure” though for a while and we all know how that ends. Later on I learned that integrating my shadow was much more conducive to growth than continuing to push it away. They say that admitting our own capacity for evil is the best way to avoid actually becoming evil.

All this is to say, I don’t have any answers. Thanks for speaking up, reading books and watching videos, talking to your friends and family. There was a cute pro-Palestine march in Anchorage the other day, like a few hundred people were there?! And maybe there’s a march where you are. Or a call to action. It can feel really good to be out in the world with other people who care, instead of just on screens. It can buoy us and help us keep going.  

My April Utah guided hikes are sold out! I’m so excited for them. I’m currently planning some summer trips in Alaska, so subscribe to this newsletter if you want to be the first to hear about those.

It is so extremely fun for me to get on a zoom call with someone and talk about something as knowable and tactile as a gear list, or what you might like to eat for breakfast while hiking. What a simple world, the one contained within a backpacking trip. I love it.

That’s all for now,
Carrot