I'm Italy Mone, and this is The Slowdown.

It's raining outside right now, green everywhere, violets and buttercups coming up, ivy already

strangling the fence, rickily jones is playing on the speaker in the house, and my dog is drinking

water in time with the baseline so that she seems to be making music too.

We are learning now about the atrocities in Ukraine, and I'm both reading the news and

avoiding the news.

There are small animals moving under the hackberries, and I can see them from the window, chipmunks

and squirrels.

I'm telling you this all at once because that is how it is happening, all at once, the

war, the climate crisis, the robins pulling worms up in the rain.

It never ceases to astound me, this life, the vastness, the unbearable human violence,

and then the small things too, the petals dropping right now from the neighbor's cherry

trees sticking to the fence line, piling up in the drainage ditch, the drops of rain hanging

huge and with intention on the leafless branches of the Japanese maple.

How can I bear this beauty and also bear the weight of this moment in our human tragedy?

I don't know, but I know I've dedicated my life to trying to figure it out, or at least

trying to do it, trying to live with both, with all of it.

I do know this, when I'm most at a loss, most untethered, I look at the natural world to

anything that is still continuing, still living, that will go on without us, and I find some

sort of equanimity in that.

It doesn't feel like an answer or a fixed point, it feels like life.

That's what's going on outside the window now, life, mine, and the worlds.

...