Talking about the weather used to be the safest subject on the planet. It was essentially the everydayness that was in itself, comforting. But now, our dailiness has been upended and disrupted as we live in a culture that is afraid of the weather. Weather has many meanings now, referring to our external circumstances, our internal emotional lives, as well as the actual weather.

My dailiness has the constancy of getting up with my husband, putting on the same tee shirt, a dog walk. But there is also the craziness all around, like people arguing about whether to wear a mask during a pandemic, just for starters. Then I start thinking about the weather?…..and whether this or that? And what will I have to weather today?

Jenny Offill has written about Weather, in her latest book of the same name. Her protagonist is a librarian who has a side gig answering letters that come in to a podcast called Hell and High Water, hosted by her former mentor. In these times you get both, Hell and High Water, and no need to worry about having to choose. But mostly what she captures is the spirituality of dailiness, our interconnections and entanglements with people and other species even without being intentional about it.

At the end of the book, Offill refers the reader to obligatorynoteofhope.com, a site with hints for daily living through hard times. Each is drawn from a different book. But the commonality of her book and the site is that dailiness contains the ecstatic, and the ordinariness of a day can be sublime.

Here is a sampling of a few of the Tips from the site:

Tip #44 RESTORE THE KINGDOM

In a myth or a fairy tale one doesn’t restore the kingdom by passivity, nor can it be done by force. It can’t be done by logic or thought. So how can it be done?

Monsters and dangerous tasks seem to be part of it. Courage and terror and failure or what seems like failure, and then hopelessness and the approach of death convincingly. The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it’s there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn’t dead.

–Lynda Barry, What It IS

Tip #3 OBSERVE THE WEATHER

Our perfunctory observations on what kind of day it is, are perhaps not idle. Perhaps we have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, and to know how the sky is grey, paler in the south, with patches of blue in the southwest, with snow on the ground, and the thermometer at 18, and cold wind making your ears ache. I have a real need to know these things because I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place, and a day in which I have not shared truly in all this is no day at all.

–Thomas Merton, The Collected Journals

Tip #36 BEWARE SELF-DECEPTION

Everybody had a ready-made phrase: ‘That cannot last long.’ But I remembered a conversation with my publisher in Leningrad on my short trip to Russia. He had been telling me how rich he had once been, what beautiful paintings he had owned, and I asked him why he had not left Russia immediately on the outbreak of the revolution as so many others had done. ‘Ah,’ he answered, ‘who would have believed that such a thing could last longer than a fortnight?’ It was the self deception that we practice because of our reluctance to abandon our accustomed life.

–Stefan Zweig, The World Yesterday

Tip#32 INTRODUCE YOURSELF

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last.

–Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Tip #4 GIVE PRESENTS

There was no water, no gas, no heat, no electricity. No glass in the windows. But we were very sociable and friendly at that time. We looked after each other. One time a neighbor made me a little pie for my birthday, not baked, and gave it to me wrapped up with a string.

–Alma Alic, Bosnian War Survivor

Tip #45 MAKE WISHES FOR THE NEW YEAR

May the new one bring us good fortune, a safe deliverance from this anxious time and all good things to those we love so far away.

–Ernest Shackleton, Collected Letters

Be Well,

Marlene

*Photograph by Hans Laping, @hansdork