I’ve spent the last few days on a slow, beautiful island that’s decidedly closed for the season. I’ve been craving some quiet writing time for a while now, and it turns out being on a cold, rainy beach is just the thing.
I’ve always loved the beach this time of year. I grew up about half an hour from the shore and spent most of my summers there, but I’ve never been crazy about hot sand and sunscreen. Going to the ocean in the spring months always felt strange, like we were showing up early for a party and catching our host unprepared. But lingering in the autumn felt like a natural denouement. Like sitting with a friend as they fell asleep.
It’s not sitting on the beach or going into the water I really love, anyway. That can be fun, but what really gets me is just being able to look at the ocean. The best time to do that is during a stormy late September, when the waves are roiling and the sand stretches out empty for miles.
There’s just something about looking at this place where we cannot live and knowing that it gave us life. I think about all the space exploration missions that hinge on finding some sign of liquid water and waves; of our collective excitement over Ganymede and Europa. A beautiful, powerful, inevitable signature of possibility.
I took the ferry out here on Yom Kippur. My Jewish practices are piecemeal and haphazard (the lore of my religious background is complex and ridiculous) but I realized that morning I’d neglected one of my favorite rituals. It’s called Tashlich, and it involves ceremonially shaking ones sins off into a moving body of water. I usually go to my favorite spot on the Hudson River waterfront near my apartment, which has a set of stairs down to a sidewalk that often gets completely submerged at high tide. I hold pebbles and think about the ways I’d like to be better in the future, and I say a few prayers, and I cast the old year away.
You’re technically supposed to get Tashlich done before Yom Kippur, but I’m technically only a patrilineal Jew, so if someone is out there doodling my name in the book of life I’m sure they’re used to all my bullshit by now. So on Yom Kippur, fully not fasting, I sat in the corner (of a ferry) and thought about what I’d done. I was in a body of water, after all. Later today I’ll probably go for a round two with my feet in the ocean. This last year has left plenty for me to want to shake off.
It’s not about walking on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting, etc. For me, the practice is something between a prayer and a Thanksgiving dinner and a New Year’s Resolution. It’s a moment to think about the ways I’ve come up short of my own expectations for myself, and a moment to be grateful for the many opportunities I’ll have to do better. The prayers don’t beg forgiveness; they remind us that the world is beautiful and the universe is awe-inspiring and we are imperfect, but get to keep going anyway. There’s also some great stuff in there about not trusting powerful individuals to protect you and trusting that your enemies are probably somewhere having a really bad time, which is fun.
Even though I’m not currently very observant, Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe marking the new year has always made more sense to me than kicking things off on January 1. It feels right to mark the end of one thing and the beginning of another as the seasons are changing. We’re about to enter the celebration of the last harvests, literally reaping the fruits of our labor throughout the year just passed. Now things will slow down and nature will encourage our bodies to rest, giving us time to sow new plans.
I hope to spend a lot of this year the way I started it: Looking at beautiful things, feeling overwhelmed with gratitude, taking lots of naps, answering few emails, and writing really fucked up ghost stories in the rain. Hope to have more to share with y’all soon.
Rachel’s Recs
Read: Plain Bad Heroines, which was so sumptuously gothic and gay I can’t stop thinking about it
Buy: This “working on my bog body” t-shirt I made just for you
Engage: With my content on TikTok, a place I am trying to make myself get excited about making content for again, because what if I don’t have a ~platform~ anymore and no one ever lets me write another book?
Eat: A donut. Any kind of donut. I just think you’d probably enjoy one.