Not a true hermit

It’s been a long summer in Argentina.

There have been three distinct family vacations to three of the many areas of the country — Patagonia in the far south! Lakes and mountains. Cordoba in the Northwest! Rivers and Foothills. Miramar in the Central West. The beach. (If you are surprised, I will remind you now that Argentina is a third the size of the USA.) And all these trips came on the pre-Holiday heels of a December two-week jaunt to California.

(me, exhausted; nobody is going to take this family picture)

It’s been… a lot. So much so that I opted out of the beach excursion this week, with the true excuse to my children that beaches don’t like me, unless in winter, and then they love me, and I them.

In its place, I stayed in my home. Alone.

Now, although being a mother of very loud kids who live inside my home perhaps makes the starkness of being alone most notable, you do not have to be a mother to delight in being alone in your own home. My own mother, for example, who hasn’t had actual children living full-time in her house for decades still loves when she gets to be totally alone in her own home to “do my things” when my dad takes off to go backpacking.

So, that was me. Alone. Mostly.

There were interruptions. There has been an awful heat wave, and so the red alert days of 105 degree Fahrenheit have created energy issues for a country whose grid is on the fritz. (Thank you to the former presidents, who spent two decades subsidizing the costs of the grid so much that there was no money to make necessary repairs.) An electrician came and went and came again. The water guy arrived. So did the pool guy and the guy to pick up the broken washing machine. Several others were in and out for the grateful things that make a life.

But mostly, I was alone.

And being alone, and bored, and wanting my loud family back, provoked me to scratch the barrel of the things I’d been wanting to do for so long. And so, I did things! So many unproductive things! So many amazingly, unproductive things I have compiled in a list!

Things I read:

For starters, I read four books, two of which I finished, and one of which won’t be finished for 12 more weeks, if all goes well.

• The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity: The last time I did the Artist’s Way was in 2020, which was the first time, and I made it through 8 of the 12 weeks before I went on a long trip to the USA for the November elections and never picked it up again. This time, I aim to finish, and so I bought the actual book about it to help me along. A crash course for newbies? Write three pages, longhand, every morning, to get the gunk out and soar higher in your life. Last time I used The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal, which has abbreviated instructions in it, but I’m already feeling that doing it with the real book is better. (PS: The reason I am doing this at all is because

  Kirsten Powers
  started doing it, and can’t stop telling me about it. See her discussion of it, and Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, here.)

• The Poisonwood Bible: Ever heard of it? That is a joke. I pray to God you haven’t not heard of Barbara Kingsolver’s classic. I haven’t read it in 25 years and am loving being back with the Price family of misguided missionaries in the Congo in 1960 when shit is about to hit the fan.

• Un instante en la oscuridad. It’s hard to write about how much I loved this brand-new, multi-prize winning book since it’s not in English yet, and it doesn’t look like Gemma Urraka’s first book is either (I just got that on Kindle). If you do happen to read Spanish, it’s a fabulous story about a Spanish writer who goes to an isolated cabin for a month to work on her next book, only to find a famous North American writer already there. Loved, loved, loved and really hopeful for an English translation to come out soon. More on the book here (in Spanish) and you can find Gemma, a former Rolling Stones writer who now works at Warner Brothers, here. Oh, I also did this thing with Gemma that I do with all my favorite authors where I find them on Twitter Twitter, still Twitter and write and tell them how much I loved the book. Turns out she also loved one of my other favorite books, Mothers Don’t, which I’ve talked about here before. She even read it in not only the original Spanish but also in euskara (the Basque language)!

• I’m not going to mention the final novel, which is also not yet translated in English, because despite a beautiful cover and an impressive author and a delightful use of footnotes I don’t really know what I think yet? I may have hated it? I have no whiteout.

When it came time to not read, and to make my eyes sorta of loll themselves in another direction, I watched things.

Things I watched:

1. Nyad, which everyone should watch, if you didn’t, when it came out on Netflix in November! Wow! I did not realize this was nominated for an Oscar! I did not realize it would be so great and have such amazing music, as well! I fell into a deep hole afterwards, looking up all the ways Jodie Foster learned to act like Coach Bonnie (by being friends in real life and watching sports together) and how many of the tiny details were true.

2. True Detective, Season 4: To be clear, I didn’t technically watch it this week because it comes out on Sundays, but since we’re talking Jodie Foster I am LOVING this season. I also fangirled for this great article, which clarified that this season was not just inspired by the Dyatlov Pass incident (a personal obsession - try this New Yorker for an overview), but also by the strange case of the The Mary Celeste, a ship abandoned in 1872.

3. The Traitors USA, Season 2 (on Peacock): If you’re one of those people who “doesn’t like reality TV” then a) are we friends?, and b) you have now found your gateway drug! Scotland, castles, fine clothing, a human game of Mafia replete with the amazingly dressed Alan Cummings (below). Don’t tell my kids I watched the latest episode (another lie; I lie to them), since I said I’d wait for them (don’t worry, I will act surprised at all the right moments).

When the watching was done, I went on the internet to wrap myself up in some cozy internet rabbit holes.

For example, I ended up reading the reviews of a book about a hermit, which I debated (I still debate) buying. The reviews were mixed. E Abdul, for example, gives it three stars, but reluctantly.

Other Things I Found on the Internet:

• The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave: Beatriz Flamini liked to be alone so much that she decided to live underground—and pursue a world record. The experience was grueling and surreal.

• I was an exhibit in a gallery…for a month

• Octavia Butler on Creativity, the Generative Power of Our Obsessions, and How We Become Who We Are

Butler’s sentiment is only magnified by knowing that the word desire derives from the Latin for “without a star,” radiating a longing for direction. It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming.

When they came home, and they started yelling for things they should not have, and we all gathered around as a family (except for the non-compliant one) to watch the 8 minute Bluey episode that is climbing the charts of IMDB as one of the best episodes of television of all time, all felt right with the world.

Heart,

Claire