what I'm doing now

November, 2024:
Of course I think about leaving the country - I spent nearly 20 years living outside the US prior to 2015, so the possibility of doing so again is never far from my mind. I think about Jordan, which I wrote about after a very short visit, where there could be excellent cultural and relief/volunteer opportunities, as well as a chance to immerse in Arabic and really learn. I’ve been plugging away at Duolingo and some old Teach Yourself recordings, in an effort to improve and also just to hear and affirm this language with a depth and intricate wisdom that has so many iterations across the globe, and which has been relegated in the US mindset to negative associations. I won’t write the negative, misleading words, because repetition gives them weight. Instead, I listen to music and poetry from the Levant, and explore the small ways I can discover what Arabic has to teach me now, with my limited capacity.

Sunrise at Salt Creek Campground - S’Klallam and Chimacum and Coast Salish ancestral lands.

And elsewhere there are several weavers I would love to sit near and learn from for weeks or months, in Laos, in Mexico, in Japan… 

Japanese maple in my friend and neighbor’s garden.

And I understand the outrageous privilege and freedom of movement these possibilities attest to, which is another aspect of my reluctance to just go somewhere else. I found a piece I wrote in 2020 about travel, and have added it here because the reflections are still true.

Heart of the Hills Campground, Olympic National Park

Heart of the Hills Campground, Olympic National Park

The main thing is though - all the images here are things I’ve seen during the second week of November, when I took off camping alone - here with my own senses, not far from where I’m actually permitted to live, to own a house that is not currently being bombed or flooded or set aflame…. I have the grace of this natural world around me, willing at every moment to interact and teach, and so I only need to remember to listen and be available to it, and since this is my greatest benefit in life right now, it feels like a responsibility, one that I take seriously and with joy and gratitude.

(you can stop reading here if you’d like to end on that note)

Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park

Now: All of that was written in November, soon after the photos were taken, and it has taken me a while to catch up. In the meantime, I self-published a book of poems whose title conveys the topic: Breathing Rubble Dust. Some of these poems have been published on this blog or the poetry page already, all of them written between October 2023 and February 2024, which is already so long ago.

Book cover: Breathing Rubble Dust, Tracy Hudson

Back cover: Poems for and from occupied lands

I know the poems are heavy and hard to read. They are for me, too. Because they reflect my waking awareness that a rogue nation is slaughtering innocents on a daily basis with the full support of my own country and an utter lack of impunity, despite worldwide efforts at condemnation.

How can this not be heavy? Given that my experience as mere helpless observer pales in comparison with anyone who lives there or has family being relentlessly and unpredictably targeted and bombed, their lives set aflame….. this reality is my breath, blood and bones, it’s part of my own body and yours as well, whether you realize it or not. This human collective, this earth’s skin in which we live together - each drop of poison affects the whole.

The gap between my posts is me trying to summon the sense that it is worth it, that I have anything to say that can matter. At the same time, the message and purpose of printing these poems is that our individual and collective creative voices matter, that we mustn’t stop speaking about how we are all affected by the reverberations of what happens in the world.

At the moment, I’m distributing these chapbooks personally. Contact me or comment if you’d like to know more, acquire a copy, or help spread them around. 

Update: the books are also available through this site, as a fundraiser, and through Camas Books & Infoshop.

flowers, thoughts, carrying on

Time goes by so fast, the photos I wanted to share are already two months old. But I can walk you back through some springtime blossoms that are long gone now - it fits with the theme of life being fleeting, change inherent, and so forth. That’s all we’ve got. An indigenous woman I admire recently posted that sometimes “summoning up the energy to be positive and educational and shit is just beyond me.” When you’re looking at how things have gone down in the past, leading to what’s happening now, it often feels that way to me, too. Case in point: I dug around for my pretty flower photos, knowing they might just be escapist prettiness, and behold the field of Camas above. Which is a single acre of restored native prairie, salvaged from the entrance to a golf course. It used to be most of the land between this hill and the qatáy lagoon, qatáy being the name of the S’Klallam village that was located in what is now Port Townsend. (The lagoon and prairie are spelled Kah Tai in promotional literature - notably when you look up the qatáy spelling, you see that the village was burned in 1871. Even how we spell things changes the history that people see.) I read somewhere that much of the Willamette Valley in Oregon was also covered in this type of prairie, prior to colonization. Anyway, this is the Camas, a flower with edible bulb that was a staple of life for the people - and as Robin Wall Kimmerer notes in some of her essays, the foraging of the people encouraged the growth of the flowers, in a cycle of reciprocal sustenance.

The other pretty flowers came to me from a local farm’s weekly share. It was such a cold, wet spring that the vegetables were late, but the tulips just kept blooming, and we got them four weeks in a row. I had never really gotten the infatuation with tulips, seeing them pop up all tall and bright, then drop their petals. But this year, I actually went to the Skagit Valley tulip festival, since my mom was visiting, and we walked through staggering fields of tulips in bloom and whoa. Then the little bouquets in my home from the farm share showed me how tulips can look like silk, how they have depth and impossible symmetry, and now I’m full of respect.

I also got to pick the colors - purple tulips getting wild as they open

Tulips almost dancing in their bunch of five.

I’m otherwise immersed in Alexis Pauline Gumbs, reading her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, kind of on repeat. It’s the kind of thing you read, and you need to read it slow so you can feel it, and sometimes you need to read parts out loud to yourself or to friends. And then you need to read it again, and go back and find that thing. So I’ve been living with it for months now - but I’m not actually ready to share any excerpts or reflections. I will say that her Stardust and Salt program has also been a part of my life, a stimulation to engage in daily creative practice. Which I was sort of doing, but started a whole new thing thanks to the beautiful words and thoughts and encouragement and love emanating from this awe-inspiring woman. Wow.

Wool warp and weft, above my lap of linen

I also keep weaving, some cloth that will be cloth, that I can use to sew a garment, is the idea. Same yarn, warp and weft (unusual for me), from the deep ancestral stash of my friend Ann. It is weaving up soooo nicely, and I’m eager to see how it snugs up with a good wet finish. But I have many yards to go yet - I made a long warp this time. And I keep getting called outside by birds and green and tree friends.

Also retro - trilliums were in bloom back in early May.

Really just making an effort to be here with some content that is wholesome, loving, full of curiosity and respect, and possibly encouraging to others. On that note, I’ve got a Hafiz poem for you. And one more thing I’ve been doing is watching Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls. It’s related to all of this, believe it or not. What the beautiful Big Girls are giving me is joyful resistance, an assertion of life and love that does not look like what we're typically offered as the ideal. They're blasting open our indoctrination with every episode of the show, to assert the beauty of real, messy, confused, hopeful, determined, struggling people. The things they say to me about bodies and movement and dance and love are very similar to the poem below, and thus it intertwines, and I’m thankful.

(Poem by Daniel Ladinsky, in the guise of rendering Hafiz into English, but after reading this article, I won’t call it Hafiz… nevertheless beautiful.)

Because of Our Wisdom

In many parts of this world water is 

Scarce and precious.

People sometimes have to walk 

A great distance

Then carry heavy jugs upon their 

Heads.

Because of our wisdom, we will travel

Far for love.

All movement is a sign of 

Thirst.

Most speaking really says,

“I am hungry to know you.”

Every desire of your body is holy;

Every desire of your body is

Holy.

Dear one, 

Why wait until you are dying

To discover that divine 

Truth?