A Quiet Substackiversary

In which a humanist briefly ponders the theory of relativity, human suffering, and escape rooms

Dear Friends,

So there I was late last spring, chugging along with my weekly posts on books and hope, when Albert Einstein dropped by.

Aha! Hallucination! That explains her abrupt and long silence.

Okay, okay, it was only his theory of relativity that curled in at the back door, slunk twice around the kitchen island, and timebent its way up the spiral stairs to find me fluffing pillows on the guest bed — because that’s the kind of spacious leisure we have around here. We take time to fluff the pillows.

Did you know that spacetime could travel up spiral stairs?

Both up and down, as it turns out, faster than a falling cat toy.

Anyhow, there I was softly humming Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in my usual state of domestic abstraction when that prankster, gravity, seized my house, spun it around a few times, and dropped it right down on top of me (figuratively speaking).

Who knows how long I lay there under that house like the Wicked Witch of the East, nothing showing but my striped socks? I peered out from under a bit of broken foundation to read a large clock through a neighbor’s window. 3:52, it said.

And said.

And said.

The hands were as stuck as I was.

Me? No, but close enough. A scene from Bloomland in Oz, on display through April 6 at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario, in case you’re in that area. Photo by Theresa Forte, from her article about the show for The Standard of St. Catherines, Ontario.

I began to feel some urgency about my to-do list.

Could I dictate my next Substack post into my patented Dick Tracy Smarter than Smartwatch, I wondered? Drat. I had neglected to put it on before I started fluffing pillows.

So there I was, pinned while the seasons turned.

Proof that I was everywhere … all at once! Winter scene by Yours Truly.

Well, it turned out that my sentient house was willing to let me up for select reasons, like tending to repairs, replacing worn-out furniture, or ferrying my children hither and yon. It even let me up to go to work.

The adversary and I had a nice long time to come to an understanding. It turned out that the house was jealous of you, dear friends. It wanted the attention I had been giving to my writing here and to you. So it cooked up a little whirlwind, sucked me into a vortex of timelessness, and held me fast.

My house became an Escape Room, and I found myself not particularly gifted at this 21st-century novelty.

And yet if I am here with you, have I escaped?

Sealed shut but lovely. Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Not exactly.

In one of those periodic heaves of this potent structure, fortunately my laptop slid within my grasp. I sneak this post to you, unsure how the house may upbraid me or whether another case of the timebends will give me, to borrow the best word from Mark Twain, the fantods.

Whatever the consequence, it is worth it to send this message out to you. If I’m lucky, my captor will sleep long enough for me to reply to comments.

I miss you, newsletter friends. I miss our humor, our chats, our impromptu poetry. I miss that sense that all is right with the world because a post has ambled to a just-right finish, or because we find each other in the Substack parlor for a chat. Of course, none of this diminishes how much is terribly wrong with the world. It’s just that both are true, and both truths appear to be everywhere, all at once.

There is a glorious dizziness when a small gathering of people holds up a small lamp in this vast universe. Our hands so close together, holding that one common and worthy object, we almost hear each other’s breath. We take confidence from each other.

Who let confidence into the room?!

No one can say. It is alpha and omega: hope eternal.

Despite the news of the world, and in the midst of it as usual, loose words whirl up and hang in the enchanted air.

What if every atom in the universe was born with just one valence called hope?

*

Don’t worry about me, please, if the gaps between my posts are long. Family, work, and home are sometimes enough to claim me for long stretches. Even when you don’t hear from me, I am grateful to know every day that we are in this together.

I haven’t forgotten about books, or hope.

Oh hooray, we have a little time left for our main theme!

Quickly, before the house awakens, I must tell you about the latest book that gives me hope.

I noticed Elizabeth Weingarten’s How to Fall in Love with Questions (2025) among last year’s new arrivals at the public library. Like many titles I bring home, this one never quite rose to the top of my reading pile, but it was trickster enough to disappear in our domestic maelstrom so long that I eventually paid the library for a replacement.

Skeptic, do you doubt that the trickster-book enlisted the prankster-house as a co-conspirator?! I do not.

But this is how I know that the house is not really my adversary after all: once it was paid for and mine, the book appeared without explanation or apology (in a place where I had certainly looked for it) and became my winter companion.

The premise is simple. Tormented by doubts in her personal life, journalist Weingarten sets out to discover how people manage to live with uncertainty. Life is a question with no answers, she finds, and the trick is to make peace with that. She gathers stories, considers divorce, tries spiritual remedies, and eventually writes this book, which winds its way from astrology to Zen koans via the Himalayas, paraplegia, and other adventures.

“People could sit with any kind of difficulty,” the author discovers, “if they knew they were not alone in their suffering” (156).

*

You knew this already, but it bears repeating, doesn’t it?

Any kind of difficulty . . . not alone . . . .

*

Had I been writing regularly, we’d have had a party for my third anniversary on Substack a couple of weeks ago — like the Five-Word Reading Party for my first anniversary and the Hope Library we created for my second.

Pinned under the house (which by now you may have guessed is a metaphor for all the obligations of a person situated as I am), Time feels quite unreal. One is simply where one is, doing what needs to be done.

This state of affairs may or may not be a “difficulty,” but it’s encouraging to know that this newsletter community is just a few keyboard strokes away. Our time together remains precious to me, even when you don’t hear from me often.

I have plans for this newsletter still, though there’s no danger of my missives crowding your inbox any time soon, and paid subscriptions are “Suspended indefinitely.” You do not need to change a thing to receive my — what? — Monthly? Quarterly? Irregular? messages on books and hope.

As you can tell, Whimsy is a close companion these days. She keeps me laughing. I hope she also lightens the load for you.

In case you haven’t seen her lately, this entire message is how I launch her toward you with love.

You will know her by her wild socks.

No house can pin her down.

XOXO,

Tara