A LETTER FROM THE PAST
A LETTER FROM THE PAST
Reaching out across lost time. More transitions.
I realized it has been two months since my last newsletter. I’ve sat down multiple times, written something, and decided not to send it out. Daunted by the task of capturing the many transitions that have occurred since my last letter, I decided to live them before sharing them. Reading through this old draft of a newsletter today, I don’t know why I didn’t share it weeks ago.
I have left another place and started something new. While this was written in the past, I’m going to share it now. Most all of it rings true even though the ‘today’ is now weeks in the past and I’ve included some more recent news.
Today, more than the previous days, has been filled with the distinct buzzing of big fuzzy bumblebees. This is a great sound, not because it’s pleasant to the ears, although I don’t mind it, but because it’s the sound of pollination, of a present bee population here to do the pollinating. New wildflowers are popping up everyday. I don’t know most of their names as I stop to get a close look at the mechanisms of their beauty. Symmetry and inviting crevices I can only describe as sexy, which is really exactly what they are.
After two weeks of communications and negotiations and explanations, I worked my first two days with the farming team. These two days have turned out to be a third of all the time I will get to spend down ranch in the fields because I’m leaving California. This reality makes me mourn for a moment, the loss of a non-existent version of my internship where my knees ached from weeding, and my hands calloused against the thistles, and I ate fresh harvested carrots and heads of butter lettuce every day. But as time moves and the moments I always knew would be temporary do, inevitably, end, I can’t help but think of the thousands of miles I’ve traveled in the last year and how all those miles seem to make this next move inevitable.
I didn’t expect those two days in the greenhouse and fields to make me so happy. We did simple repetitive tasks. Filling trays with soil, I transplanted baby basils, cucumbers, and squash varieties with a food podcast playing in the background. I was left alone in between beds of shallots, uprooting mustard, thistle, and a flowering carrot until my legs were vaguely shaky. I felt like, for the first time since arriving, I had truly passed a day here at Hidden Villa. I had felt the entire day pass. Each time I saw the hills they were stunning. I smelled shade in the breeze as it carried cool air that’d been hanging under the tree canopy. I felt again, as I have many times as I feel the end coming, the impossibility of entirety—of exhausting every version of an experience.
I had someone once, who hurt me dearly, say pain is a gift. When I began to understand that the pain I felt when they were far from me wasn’t that at all, but actually was the pain of allowing someone’s truth to overshadow my own, I began to distinguish between the many different kinds of pain with a finer comb.
I still believe that, in some ways, he was right. There is a pure pain, which is what I am feeling now. This pure pain comes when no one has done anything particularly wrong and yet good things are disappearing, ending, transforming, and with them comes the impossibility of having everything I could imagine wanting in these moments. It is the inability to watch good things evolve into deeper and more beautiful things because I am pursuing different kinds of beauty somewhere else. The pain of being too curious, loving too much, and being unable to multiply myself and leave one in each place I’ve loved.
I drove to Half Moon Bay today for no particular reason besides the ocean is here and I’m trying to be a sponge. Farming and leaving can produce very similar effects. Both demand presence. This gives me hope, because while I’ve realized I seek experiences that make it easier to feel the fullness of a day passing, I am growing tired of leaving. I am looking for other ways to battle the complacency that creeps in once I’ve grown comfortable with a place and a routine.
I think about this when I’m trying to make learning about ticks and aquifers fun for the 10-12 year olds I teach on Fridays. I have a hard time keeping learning fun for myself sometimes and now I am seeing how making learning engaging for others is a skill, a whole world, in and of itself. All skills are vast worlds of their own. This is another source of suffering.
There is not enough time in this life to inhabit all the worlds I could ever want to know, and choosing which ones to commit myself to has left me paralyzed more than once. But I feel things changing.
I am leaving California to head back to the Midwest. Not because I am on a pilgrimage back to my home town like I was when I left Seattle, but because in Michigan there’s an artist residency that has offered me a job in the kitchen. I’ll be working the summer and fall season at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI.
The two weeks I spent there as a student in 2018 were possibly the last time I made art that I felt truly connected to and, not like inspiration and an artistic practice are waiting for me there, but the opportunity to live and work in a creative community in the woods doing what I’ve wanted to do for so long and never given myself a chance to pursue (cooking) feels perfect to me right now. And it feels like every mile I’ve driven in the last year, every feeling I have felt without witnesses, has made this return to the Midwest inevitable.
I’m in Michigan now, looking out at the lagoon, country music is playing in the glass studio nearby and people are discussing events in the meadow. I’m thinking about the road trip I took with my mom back to Chicago, a big project I’ve taken on, and the eternity that has been this first week at Ox-Bow. All of that will have to wait for another letter (which hopefully will not take another two months) but I have a studio now and don’t know quite what to do with it so maybe I’ll use my time in there to write to you all.
Thank you for reading. I hope these warming weeks are filled with sunshine and refreshing bevs and friends on porches.
For the Record:
Books I’ve read recently(ish)
If Beale Street Could Talk & Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (amazing)
Educated by Tara Westover (possibly one of my favorite memoirs ever)
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong (sadly had to return it before finishing but I WILL finish it!)
A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham (a sometimes shockingly honest memoir about gender and transition and the absurdity of having a body)
That’s all I can remember for now :) I’m always taking book recs if you’ve got any.