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I’m toying with the idea that people are beings who live and die every moment, and any sense of continuity between moments is similar to the way our eyes smooth out what we see through a combination of physical and perceptual processes, such as saccades.

Memory persists to some degree between these deaths and births, though imperfectly and sometimes as complete fabrications that allow this or that narrative to earn its wings so it can soar across momentary lifetimes in order to either free us or whisk us away to ruin.

I don’t mean bodily birth or bodily death. I mean birth and death of self and of the worlds available to the self at any given time.

I don’t expect anyone other than Matt Jasper to understand this or see anything of value in it. What this means, for me, is that I can only take people as they are in the moment—a moment that’s passed before I can even perceive it. It’s the best I can do.

We are flame and ash, flame and ash. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday or who we will be tomorrow. These are fictions. Even time is a fiction.

You are a person doing a thing in a place. I’ll meet you there to the best of my ability. Tomorrow, same. The day after that, same.

Is this nonsense? Maybe. Certainly. What isn’t.

My husband says the use of AI is inevitable. He tells me he uses it all day at work. It’s built into coding platforms now. It’s getting really smart really fast, he says. It can figure out context even when no context is provided.

It’s a requirement for software developers to use it. They’re all using it. Prompt engineering, he calls it.

But he’s using it as someone who knows how to think, not as someone who’s never learned to think, I say. What about those who never learn to form an argument, do their own research, make their own discoveries and assertions?

He doesn’t seem concerned. I worry that I’m losing him, that we’re shifting like tectonic plates only faster: me into the organic and him into the artificial.

He tells me to use AI, to give it a try. Have it write a poem for you, he says. You’d be surprised what it can come up with.

He doesn’t understand. I don’t care what AI can come up with where creativity and expression are concerned. I care what I come up with, what moves through me and what I’m moving through.

We grind past one another as we continue in our respective directions. I spend the rest of the day in bed alone, like a birdless island in a forgotten past.

My husband says the use of AI is inevitable. He tells me he uses it all day at work. It’s built into coding platforms now. It’s getting really smart really fast, he says. It can figure out context even when no context is provided.

It’s a requirement for software developers to use it. They’re all using it. Prompt engineering, he calls it.

But he’s using it as someone who knows how to think, not as someone who’s never learned to think, I say. What about those who never learn to form an argument, do their own research, make their own discoveries and assertions?

He doesn’t seem concerned. I worry that I’m losing him, that we’re shifting like tectonic plates only faster: me into the organic and him into the artificial.

He tells me to use AI, to give it a try. Have it write a poem for you, he says. You’d be surprised what it can come up with.

He doesn’t understand. I don’t care what AI can come up with where creativity and expression are concerned. I care what I come up with, what moves through me and what I’m moving through.

We grind past one another as we continue in our respective directions. I spend the rest of the day in bed alone, like a birdless island in a forgotten past.

Family trauma is passed down genetically and epigenetically, through family stories and family preoccupations, through family experiences, through details like tones and inflections and mannerisms, through what’s focused on and what’s omitted, through place and what place means and has meant to the family, through hand-me-down memories, through objects and their cultural contexts—what they are and what they represent. And more.

Trauma isn’t the only thing passed down in these ways. Beliefs, values, biases, violences, and more move from one generation to another in this manner. We are haunted. The ghosts are inside us. The shadows, as Jung would say. Long shadows. Dark shadows. Shadows inside of shadows. But also light. Light, too.

We are intergenerational beings. Our becoming grows out of pasts we never lived but that we know, ones that lie beyond language and personal memory. We feel this. We struggle to understand it. We can lose ourselves to and in it. This is eternity, the feeling of eternity, of ongoingness, of neverendingness. Our neverending family and what it’s experienced, what it’s done. The hand we raise that is the father’s hand, the grandfather’s hand, the great grandfather’s hand. What we do. How we move. The who what where when why of us. What we’re from. What we’re for.

And what we’re against, up against, not only now but in those layered pasts. What we want and need to break free from. Those histories that riddle us like lead ammunition that can kill us quickly and also kill us slowly. Those wounds. Those poisons.

It’s been rainy and dark here for days, and I love it, but I always find myself feeling low in this kind of weather, which is pretty much how I felt one-hundred percent of the time when I lived in Seattle. To get motivated today, I had to come up with a project that would raise my dopamine levels enough to make getting out of bed worth it.

The first thing I tried was organizing all the nuts we just bought from Costco in large mason jars. That was exciting and all, but I needed something bigger, something more substantial. So I removed everything—including the furniture—from my writing and weaving room, did a deep clean of the carpet and walls, and placed the furniture back in the room in a different configuration, one I’m really excited about.

And because that still wasn’t quite enough, I organized all my books by subject, then arranged them by the author’s last name. This was thrilling. THRILLING. I’ve always arranged my books by height, which is only a little less ridiculous than sorting them by color. The particular part of me, let’s call her Particular Dana, likes the orderliness of books arranged from tallest to shortest or, in special situations, from shortest to tallest, but it was getting really hard to find what I was looking for. Turns out, I have duplicate copies of several poetry collections for this very reason. I’ve known my system was a failure for a long time, but I’m a creature of habit, and this undertaking seemed like too much work and too much change all at once—a combination that could lead to overwhelm, as the pop-psychology folks say.

I’m digging my books this way. Each row looks a bit like a cityscape, which is as close to a city as I’ll get these days. Plus, my two desks are now back to back and floating in the middle of the room. One side is for writing, and the other side is for weaving. Both desks can be raised or lowered, which is also thrilling.

I am winning this dreary day. Winning against whom? Myself. Against myself, namely the part of me that wanted to stay in bed and not even look across the creek to marvel at all the puffafuff clouds that have pulled off the biggest magic trick ever, which is making the world’s largest laccolith disappear entirely.