To the residents of: Necker Island Staff Housing

When Sue was scheduled to pick me up from the dock, she walked right up to me.

“How did you know it was me?”
“You’re the only white girl here.”

I lived in a lot of places in the British Virgin Islands, and it seemed like none of them had addresses. I was given a flip phone along with my job, and I was assured that the boat with the toilet paper usually showed up on time. I had two suitcases, no return ticket, and a ride to the resort where I would be working. I was a plant out of soil, roots dangling in the open air.

In college, I sang in an a cappella group called the Loreleis. We did a lot of neat things: we sang at Yankee Stadium, we sang for Billy Crystal and the governor, we were interviewed for a book that was later turned into a movie called Pitch Perfect, but perhaps the best thing we did for my own growth was take a spring break tour in the BVI. And if your mind doesn’t immediately think, ah yes the people of the Virgin Islands yearn for vocal covers of today’s hits, then you would be right. But one of the girl’s godfather’s ran a boutique housing rental operation down there, and one of the other girls knew some boys who captained a ship, and that is more than enough serendipity to send 16 young women to the islands.

One night while on land, we had dinner with said godfather, and I sat next to him. I asked him about how he came to be the manager (owner? Still unclear) of the small resort, and then, if he had any openings. He laughed, appreciated my forthrightness, and after the trip was over, I sent him a thank you email and my resume. Two months later I graduated and flew to Tortola. I was moving to Virgin Gorda to be the Special Projects Coordinator to Nail Bay.

Nail Bay is not a resort, but a collection of very different homes with very different owners who, in 2008, shared a tennis court, a pool, a restaurant, and a team renting those homes out. This was right before Airbnb was founded, and many, many years before the ubiquitous popularity of such services. You could find a place on Vrbo then, but if the option to have a human manage your rental was available, most people took it.

My job at Nail Bay was quite literally anything the godfather wanted, and his first request was that I stay in every room on every property at the resort for quality testing. Having come from the near squalor of vodka soaked floors, this was not only a significant upgrade, but a significant challenge. Any room was a good room! I mean yeah my man, it’s a king-sized bed looking out over the Caribbean Sea and the pool boy from Baraka Point is staying in it with me—quality assured!

But I did my due diligence. Was it easy to find the towels? Did all the lightswitches work? Could I find my way around outside at night? Was it clear which was the dipping pool and which was the sunning pool? Was it clear I was getting paid for this?

A few palm trees will do a lot of good to a person’s mental health, but I was not doing well, and the people of Virgin Gorda would not stop commenting on it.

“White girl got spots. You work too much, girl.” “Ya blinding me girl, you need some sun. Has he got you locked up in dere?” “You do not look well. Dat is not a good place.” At this point in my life, at the cheek plumped age of 22, I had not yet exercised much choice. I grew up where my parents raised me, went to school where I got in, chose the major that was available to me, and took the one adult job I was offered. That I would ever leave what everyone agreed were very lucky circumstances was not occurring to me. It did not occur to me when he insisted I keep my figure for the guests. It did not occur to me when I was spending 10+ hours in a 10x12 room underneath a tennis court every day. It did not occur to me when he threw a stapler at me while the Caribbean breeze slapped palm fronds at the door. Instead, it occurred to me at the sound of suckling—as he licked every individual finger after every individual chicken wing for 30 minutes straight. I told him I was quitting.

My first quit was refused. He would do better. I would do better. But better didn’t come for either of us, and the next time he found himself flying overseas, he also found an email from me resigning. And he was not pleased. He threatened to have me removed from the islands and gave me two days to leave the grounds.

And that is how I found myself on the ground floor of a wooden pavilion house on the water of Leverick Bay, saved by a few of the boys from Necker Island. The open air haven functioned as staff housing for people whose beauty and ease were only outranked by the guests they served. And they offered to tuck me and my luggage into the damp, unused basement. The glass sliding doors opened to an overgrown pathway out to a rotted dock, and they did not close. There were no sheets on the bed, no curtains on the shower, and no privacy save for the canopy of trees. Upstairs, Pauric and Kiain and their friends would pass around joints, someone idly strumming the guitar, the fan above them circling lazy with humidity.

On the bare mattress, I writhed with giggles, with unabated freedom, with a choice I made on instinct and sunscreen. No phone, no laptop, no lease, no job, and nothing ahead but open ocean. Under the laughter above, I would tiptoe across the broken boards of the sinking dock to dangle my feet into the clear, lapping water. Across the small bay, music always drifted, the same songs welcoming the same tourists night after night, starting the movie over, another chance.

Every once in a while, a houseplant will do something you did not know it capable of doing. A red succulent will turn green. Another will send a stalk straight up, flowering, and then never again. An aerial root will not only appear, but grow into a different room. I did not know what making an entirely self-serving choice would do to my constitution. I pruned everything, and waited in the wet heat of an equatorial sun.

It was 2009, and there was no Instagram, no TikTok, no voicenotes, and no desperate need to document anything at all. There was just a ferry schedule and a time when everyone got off work, when all you wore was a swimsuit and a sweatshirt. I started doing buoy laps to get over my fear of open water. I started taking gigs singing on pianos at bars, Tom Cruising my way into tips and drinks. I was ship hopping and picking mushrooms and tripping at full moon parties. I was whacking tennis balls on Necker and shooting guns on Moskito. I was kiteboarding and scuba diving and windsurfing halfway to Anegada. I was diving off the side of the Willy T only to come up for an interview. I was taking night dinghies with celebrities, doing shots off of their camera-ready abs, and I cut my own bangs with a knife.

I slept in sail bags, on benches, and woke repeatedly with trampoline netting stamped into my skin. I crashed in the sheetless basement, a few welcoming beds, and on the occasional beach when the timing was off or maybe it was on, because I slept just fine. Every morning, my sunbleached hair wrapped around itself in curls from the spray of salt. My skin glowed, the spots were gone, and I was in love with a captain. I was growing so freely I didn’t notice what else was.

“Girl, you seem happy. Whatchu been drinking, uhn?” “Ay, someone’s finally seen the sun. Welcome to the Caribbean.” “There she is. There she is!”

I did not bloom in the king bed with the ocean view, but in a wet basement with a flag retired from the stern of the Princess Chloe. Some plants are epiphytes—they don’t need soil at all. They attach to trees, to rocks, to whatever’s there. They pull moisture from the air. They grow without a pot. And in the changing wind, I grew on whatever I could grab. I didn’t live in the staff house or the sail bag or the boat. I lived on Virgin Gorda. The island was the house. The ocean was the walls. The conditions weren’t in any room—they were the humidity, the salt, and the bloom of petals around the setting sun.

Read the rest of the series:

• A brick ranch in a college town - #212

• A farmhouse in rural Ohio - #211

• Growing conditions - #210

Tune in to the SEASON FINALE!! of . We’ll be back in September to talk all things life and writing.

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To the residents of: a house of bricks on Cotton Street

My freshman year I called my best friend crying. Everyone is wearing the same shoes and the same jeans. Rainbows and Sevens. I had never been to the South before. I didn’t know how well it could present as a place of collective agreement—on shoes, on manners, on how a girl should carry herself through a weekend.

It was 2007, and I was not carrying myself well.

There were six of us in 503 Cotton. I wasn’t there the day the girls picked rooms, and it turns out I didn’t need to be. They all agreed to give me the biggest room anyway. “On the condition you keep all your stuff in your room, and not in the common area.” I hadn’t realized this was a problem.

A few of us had lived together before, in the Mill Creek apartments. I have few memories of Mill Creek. That year, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger at East End Martini Bar. It doesn’t exist anymore. The place where a man made the choice to slip something into my drink so he could hold me down in an alley is now Time Out, the grease pile of nights turning to dawn.

When I was assaulted, I got away, but when the police found me, I couldn’t tell the difference between him and my assailant, so when he touched me, I touched him back. I touched him with my fists and my fury. And if you make it out of that alive, you make it out as a felon.

Defendant is found guilty of felony assault on a law enforcement officer. Sentenced to 200 hours community service, completion of a drug and alcohol education program, participation in a victims/offenders panel, and a written letter of apology to the arresting officer. The court will consider expungement upon satisfactory completion of all conditions.

I spent most of that year dissociated, waiting for the bruises to fade.

But Cotton Street I remember. Or at least most of it.

I remember our friends, the cast of characters that became our people. Carl punched through the wall in the basement one day, just for fun, I think. One of the Tylers outstripped a stripper we hired. The other would crawl into bed with us, dishing about our various foibles. On the mornings without class we would curl up in each other’s beds with blistering hangovers, petting each other’s hair, lovingly refixing the doors to their hinges. The room in the back right of the house, that was the first place I tried cocaine. I had resisted all of college, and then spring semester, senior year, I figured eh, who fucking cares. We held ragers with door bouncers and cash donations. We slapped each other in the face as shot chasers. The only boy I’d loved in that state had already graduated, and I was unencumbered in every direction.

Not that I’d been terribly encumbered before. Having been mostly ignored in high school, I spent these years drunk both on Barnett’s and the new found power of being popular.

When you’re looking at the house from the street, that window on the left—I remember when the baseball went through it into Emma’s* room. None of us ever went into her room, but now there was glass all over it. Amidst the shards of glass we found the journal entries. We had to call her parents that week, and I don’t think she ever called us friends again. But when you’re trying to keep someone alive, you stop caring what they call you.

Even then, amidst all the jungle juice and varied visitors, we had our lines in the sand. We were delinquents, and we destroyed the house, but that’s what some houses are for. Harboring. Holding the people who are on their way somewhere else, keeping them alive until they figure out where.

That spring, our student body president, Eve Carson, was murdered. I remember the camera stills from the CCTV above the ATM. I remember the classmate who had to ID the body, and how they described it. I remember thinking, “Eve? But Eve was good?” Good in a way I didn’t see myself. I could still feel myself pinned to the concrete of the alley, wondering why I got to live and she didn’t. It was right before spring break, and we weren’t sure we could stomach going. We went. We had already paid.

I had a professor that semester—copywriting—who told us that nowhere we wanted to work gave a shit about our GPAs. He was right, at least about advertising. I had changed my major from archeology, to business, and then to journalism, all looking for something that felt akin to opportunity. And the opportunities I liked seemed to revere a kind of delinquency. I was a felon, after all. Flatironed blonde hair, push-up Victorias’ Secret bra, low slung cargo pants, and a record.

When it came time for resumes, I included my rapsheet more than my GPA. If you’re gonna pick me, really pick me. I’d been perfect in high school, and I was not willing to be perfect in the confines of that brick house. I was not willing to be perfect when other people were more than willing to be murderers and rapists. When the rule of law could find a girl beaten and dirty and put her in a cell.

College, at its best, is meant to be a nursery. You are shipped off from your home, lined up with other plants, and watered on a timer, all of you hoping to land a future home where the conditions are just right. Some plants thrive in this setting. They’ve got the best location in the greenhouse, and every customer fawns over their big leaves, their slender trunks. But not every position in the greenhouse is good. Not every greenhouse can tend to every plant. There was water, there was light, but I couldn’t find a way to flower under fluorescents. Any time I heard a siren, my leaves curled.

Sometime in that final year of school with my community service complete and my mental health in shambles, I bought a bike. The tires went flat after the first week, and I never rode it again. It sat scrapped in the backyard for the rest of the year, tires soft, going nowhere. I think about that bike sometimes. How easy the fix was. How it didn’t even occur to me to just buy a pump. Fifteen years later, I was on the cover of Bicycling Magazine. But it was too early then. You don’t maintain things in a place you never plan to stay. Not bikes, not GPAs, not yourself.

By the time I left, ten bags of clothes followed me out to Goodwill. The girls had been right. I kept pouring all the wrong fertilizers on myself—clothes, boys, drugs—hoping something would take. I kept trying to leaf and to bloom blind to the darkness I was in.

That house held me closer than I deserved—a grow light left on through the night, making sure I woke up and woke up and woke up. Even with holes in the wall and jungle juice on the floors and nightmares playing on repeat, I woke up. That house kept me, even when I was never going to keep it.

I was always leaving. I knew it freshman year, when I called home crying about the sandals. I knew it junior year, when my sometimes boyfriend took a job in another southern state and I understood instantly I would never follow. I had never had any intention of following. I wasn’t in North Carolina to keep it. I was there to leave.

Tune in to the SEASON FINALE!! of . We’ll be back in September to talk all things life and writing.

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To the residents of: my childhood home

This was always a house of hiding places. For a child in search of escape—from a town, a state, a feeling—there need to be hiding places, and this house had them. Maybe you’re familiar:

There is the back of the bulkhead over the stairs. This nook (I can only assume) was always and will always be a linen closet jammed full of sheets and pillowcases and extra blankets for when the power invariably goes out. No one likes to pay for infrastructure, and the storms keep coming. But I would find myself in the sanctified dark of softness, the house spinning around me, protected. I was a small child in that house, but I was more akin to a pufferfish—knowing from first steps when to blow myself up and when to blow myself out, to deflate and disappear through the coral stretches of banisters, hallways, and closets.

When you walk into the house from the front porch (did you know my dad built that porch?) you can proceed straight up the stairs, or turn to your right to weave back into the house. But, you could, if you wanted, turn left into the sitting room. The formal living room. The room where we had uncomfortable furniture and melancholic paintings and an upright piano. I could play Christmas songs, but only with my right hand. I can still feel the rhythm of my right hand, stepping key by key to Joy to the World like crossing a creek, stone by stone. But most days, the piano sat silent. And if you sat silent in that room, no one could see you. They could walk straight from the kitchen to the stairs, that room in full view, and you would disappear into it.

Do you know the huge tree out back? They might all be huge now, but this one sits up the small hill off the back of the porch, and we had a tree house in it. My dad built one floor, then a second floor, and then one weekend when my mom was out of town, he built a third floor. It was impossibly high up, with boards nailed akimbo into the spreading trunks. From certain angles, behind certain branches, you could disappear into the bounty of the leaves. You could be somewhere else, as I often was.

Out in the pasture, in the open field of prairie and grass, there was one rather large bush, set into the landscape by itself. And if you approached it from the North, you would find a space to enter it. The bush grew like a water fountain, spouting from the center, branches and stems shooting up from the center to arch and cascade around the roots in a circle. Within that arch, you could go inside. I would take my Halloween pail and hang it inside the bush like a cauldron, mixing various plants and dirt, hoping a spell could hide me, protect me, outside the confines of the bush.

At the top of the stairs, to the left was my brother’s room. It’s funny to think of a house you spent 16 years in, and realize there was a room you entered fewer than 10 times. When I try to picture it, the position of the windows shift in my mind. Even my memory pulls me back out into the hallway. The little room across from it used to be the computer room. That’s what we called it then: the computer room. You crossed a threshold into a world of Limewire downloads and “asl?” chats, a world of theft and lies and possibilities. It’s strange to think now, but I actually met my first boyfriend in a chatroom. Last name Piccorillo. Is Chesterland still so Italian? When I google him now, he is nowhere to be found. Sometimes I’ll think of the boys I had crushes on in 1998, in 2002, and I’ll turn to the internet, and I can’t find any of them. But there I am, unhidden.

If you keep going down the hall, you’ll pass the bathroom, and the bulkhead closet, and my room will be on the left, tucked next to the garage with a window that goes out onto the porch roof. Did you know the walls used to be red and orange? The ceiling used to be a deep blue, growing lighter and lighter at the center, like you were underwater looking up at the sun. That’s how I painted it. That’s how I felt. I had a boombox then, a stereo so large it would need a duffle bag to be carried around, and I would record my favorite songs on cassettes when the radio played them. CDs came out when I lived in that room: my first was No Doubt Tragic Kingdom. I’m just a girl, living in captivity.

A child doesn’t know what the perfect conditions are. She can only know something is off—a low hum she can’t locate, an itch, a persistent exclusion, a stack of Vogue magazines calling to her from the corner. She doesn’t think I need different conditions. She thinks I need to be smaller. I need to be somewhere else.

When I think of that house now, I think of how I never stopped growing in it—even with all the corners I kept tucking myself into. The linen closet fit me at six. The sitting room fit me at nine. The treehouse fit me until I could see past the property line. The bush in the pasture fit me until spells stopped working. And my room—my underwater room with its window onto the porch roof—fit me until I realized the window opened.

I climbed out that window. I have to assume you know this, because the roof is right there, and it is obvious, and I was not the first teenager to live in a room with a window. From the roof I could look out over the front lawn to the street below, the forest beyond. Everything I wanted was out there, down the drive, to the left, to the right.

By sixteen I had a car, a 1995 Mustang in fire engine red with black racing stripes. A hiding place that moved. I would drive out to 306, to 422, to 90, to see how far I could get and still make it back by curfew. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was measuring. How much room did I have. How far could a root reach before it hit the wall of the pot. Every week the math got a little better. Every week I got a little farther out.

I lived in that house from two to eighteen. Sixteen years of growing in one container, each inch marked on the inside of the closet between the kitchen and the family room. Everything about me got bigger except the zip code.

I joke that Ohio is a great place to raise kids if you want them to leave, but my parents left too. Sold the house, moved to Idaho. So it wasn’t just me. The house grew all of us into the same thing: people who were ready to go. When you’re a kid, you deal with the nursery you’re in. You grow until you crack the pot.

I cracked mine at 18.

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When we bought our home, we inherited several large flora. A 25-year-old monstera, several 100-lb aloes, a hoya carnosa woven into the fireplace. The former caretaker left one instruction: water once a week. So we did. We watered on Sundays, fertilized in spring, pruned what yellowed, rarely re-potted. The plants grew anyway. New leaves unfurled, vines reached, cacti plumped. The house made us look more attentive than we were.

And maybe if we were different people or if we’d flipped the house, that would have been the end of it. Water once a week, keep ‘em alive, let me be more house dressing than dependent. But we are the custodial type, and even in the chorus of green, we started to have a feel for who was singing and who was merely mouthing along.

A lot of houseplants do fine in mediocre conditions. Give them good enough light and good enough water and they’ll produce a few new leaves. Life carries on. But as Ben and I fell under the spell of the easy plants, we started collecting harder ones. The tradescantia nanouk with its constantly crackling leaves. The spindly hibiscus that refused to bush out. The corn plant in its never-yellowing, never-growing silence. Alive, yeah. But is that it?

When we think about what makes a plant grow, we think of soil, light, water. If you’re really in it, you think about drainage, humidity, fertilizer, pot size, the hours of direct sun through a particular window. Every plant needs the same things. None of them need it in the same proportion. A cactus and a monstera both want water, but not on the same schedule. Both want light, but not at the same strength. Too much of what saves one will rot another.

For much of my life, I couldn’t understand the people around me. Roommates perfectly at ease in the apartments where I was going out of my mind. Friends who were happy in cities I couldn’t last a year in. Youth granted me some ignorance: it seemed plausible that either I wanted too much or they wanted so little. So “want” became the framework. The question of home became a question of desire. Where did I want to be? What kind of life did I want? And what did I believe a new address, for the umpteenth time, could solve?

I have lived in at least fifteen places. Childhood homes, college apartments, island staff housing, D.C. rowhouses, New York walk-ups, borrowed rooms, rooms I loved, rooms I’d rather forget. In most of them I produced a few new leaves. I made friends, did good work, fed myself, paid rent. And in most of them, eventually, I yellowed.

I am not a plant that holds a steady green. When the conditions are wrong, I am difficult. I am a vine in need of something to wrap myself around. In the wrong conditions, I can’t reach anything. In the right ones, I grow like ivy.

I want to know why some of them made me more alive and others made me harder to reach.

In the wild, once a Monstera deliciosa hits maturity, it flowers continuously throughout the year. The monstera deliciosa that looms some 20 feet wide over our kitchen is 30 years old and has never flowered. Every year we get new leaves, new roots, new shade over the hall. It has never flowered. But you seemed so happy? But you’re doing so well?

For fifteen addresses I couldn’t read the conditions I was living in. I knew only that I wasn’t rooting, and I blamed myself, or the city, or the job, or the people asleep beside me. I can read those conditions now. So this summer I’m going back, one Sunday at a time, to every place that grew me or failed to—to find out what was actually in the soil.

Thanks for sticking around while I recovered

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I was mapping out an entire essay series on a May Reset. What if I tried a new skincare routine? Or a closet purge? I could do a new weight-lifting program. Half-marathon training. What about a renovation? Or some experimental spa treatments? No, a garden revamp. A project to reintroduce beavers to part of the canyon. A new summer series. Weaning. Weaning. WEANING. I threw so much spaghetti at the wall we could’ve eaten dinner for a week.

In reading her piece, I was reminded how wrong-headed overhauls can be. Throwing yourself into too many new habits often leads to a crash rather than a charismatic emergence of a better you. I could sense my practical side trying to approach me like a wild animal. Maybe… just one of these… less documented… I bristled. I sneered. I gave a full lip curl at conversations that hadn’t even happened. Don’t tell me I’ve done enough! Don’t tell me to be gentle!

I’ve been feeling desperate. Suffocated and bored and plateaued and siphoned. The usual advice here is to go get yourself a coffee, take an afternoon to yourself. But I could drown myself in chai and there would still be this itch. It’s in my bones. It’s in the wind. It makes me want to crawl out of my skin and be born again as only my sixteen-year-old self could see me: hot and mysterious and capable of greatness if she could just get out of Ohio.

But I did get out of Ohio, and this itch doesn’t care. This itch is a slump. I’m two years postpartum, still breastfeeding, and I am reeling.

Two weeks ago I was marooned under a juniper tree in the desert, nauseated every time I moved, the vertigo making the horizon unreliable. This week, with the vertigo finally passed, I am marooned only by the feelings. People say you lose your identity in parenthood, that you transform into something else. I don’t feel that. I feel like someone knocked me out in the jungle and I woke up in the zoo.

Vertigo is a disagreement between your body and the world about where the ground is. In fact, my vertigo tends to argue there is no ground, only the relentless spinning akin to the worst decisions of your life. And while the physical vertigo lasted only some 10 days, the feeling of lacking ground has persisted longer. I am a paddling dog being held in the air, going nowhere.

Krisserin could smell it on me. She said so in last week’s episode. You need to do some clearing, she said. Some spellwork. And I forgot the clearing for the spellwork immediately. More doing. More burning. More printouts and pickups and putdowns. The vertigo was not an impetus but a symptom—brought on by desire to feel something different, to upend entirely.

When Ben and I were driving home from the desert, we saw smoke. Like a rain cloud emerging from the soil, climbing up and up into the rafters of the sky—and with it, everything in its path. We were driving straight toward it. But we are well worn in fire country. I took out the Watch Duty app before curiosity could spoil into concern, and there it was: 1,200 acres of controlled burn. A protection.

Spellwork.

In the past I’ve written about taking your own personal mud season: allowing yourself a time when you know things will be dirty, and to just wait til the season passes to clean. It’s Sisyphean not to. And as I hammered out ideas for this newsletter and ideas for a reset and ideas for May, and quite literally all of them were bad, it occurred to me that I didn’t need more of anything, but I needed a moment to need less. I needed to clear some ground.

No itch in the bones is resolved entirely by taking a break. But a break helps.

When we drove past the burn, it was hard to believe they were going for 1200 acres. I grew up on 5 acres and even that felt sprawling. But it’s a patch in the wilderness. It’s a blink. And I think I needed to see something burn on purpose—something that felt huge and risky to a small animal like me but is nothing in the broader view of a burning summer—before I could get some perspective.

In a controlled burn, you never see the work itself. You see the edges, the smoke, the dark column rising and razing. You see what surrounds it, and what comes after. The burn does its work out of sight, and what it leaves behind—cleared ground, released nutrients, the conditions for what grows next—well that part doesn’t get an audience.

I had been hoping to watch myself change. To document the process, essay it into meaning, overhaul it into reality through the pressure of visibility. But creativity doesn’t burn like that. It burns from the inside, out of view, while you are doing something else.

So I’m taking May off. Not as a reset, but as a controlled burn.

I love to refill the well, but I think this time, I need to let the sediment settle in the water. I won’t make it clear by doing more—I’ll leave it alone long enough for the work to happen out of sight.

I’ll be back in June.

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The Field Work

I have to tell you something.

The other day I got myself a very big cookie as a treat. It’s a gluten-free peanut butter cookie and I don’t care much that it’s gluten-free, only that it’s peanut butter. I drove it home from town, took it into the house, sat down on the couch with my book and placed the cookie on the makeshift coffee table constructed of two milk crates and a flat piece of wood. As I read, I took bites from the cookie, picking it up, putting it down and every time I placed the cookie down it crumbled a bit more. By the end of several chapters and the end of one very big cookie, the piece of wood was covered in crumbs.

And do you know what I did?

I blew those crumbs straight out into the room.

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Of course, there are others. These are just the dogs on our side of town, split by the avalanche field. On the other side, I know the two old huskies passed. That’s 10. I know the old lover makes 11. I know a few dogs who have left. I know two puppies who have joined. I know on our side that new faces appeared in those years too: Dash, Chego, Joey, Freddie, Lupe, Misty, Coco, Cody, and of course, Jibs.

I know the town, and I know it through the dogs.

I know which ones roam and which ones stick close. Which ones will come barreling up the trail and which will hang back, waiting for permission. I know who lives where because certain dogs are always on certain porches, or cutting across the same stretches of road, or appearing just at the bend where the trees thin out. I know who’s new because a dog shows up that doesn’t yet understand how things work.

People come into focus this way. You piece them together through the animals they keep, the way they move through the landscape, the way their dogs move through you. You meet someone because your dog stops to greet theirs, or more often, because your dog is explaining something about turf, about size, about time. You stand there longer than you would have. You learn a dog’s name, and eventually you learn a person’s name, but in the beginning, the dog is enough. The dog is the introduction. The next time you pass each other, there is a thread to pick up. There is a chin to scratch.

Dogs make strangers legible. They create continuity.

Before Woods, before this version of the house, Cooper was one of the ways I moved through this place. People knew me through him. He ran ahead on the trail, introduced me before I arrived, lingered after I left. There are people here who still don’t know my name, but knew his.

We lost Cooper when I was growing Woods. He died nestled between my and Ben’s legs on the floor of what is now Woods’s room. I offered his soul refuge in my belly, letting him know if a little part of him would like to stay, Woods was not yet fully baked. There was room, and a part of him could seep in, if he wanted, just to keep an eye on things.

Now, Woods asks to see videos of Cooper. Cooper running on a pier, gone in a fire. Cooper panting in the old Nissan Frontier, gone to someone else. Cooper splayed in bed with Snoots, gone to disease. Cooper playing with Reggie and Nash and Jazzy. Gone, gone, gone.

For Woods, Cooper isn’t gone in the way he is for me. For him, Cooper is still showing up—on a screen, in a stuffed animal replica, in a small profile avatar we tap to get into YouTube. “Cooper!” he yells. “Bye Cooper,” he says, as we navigate into the app.

In the woods here, there is a dilapidated cabin with a wood-burning bathtub and an old sewing machine collapsed on the floor. Just outside, down a path, there is a gravestone with handwritten plaque, and the writing is gone now too. But you could still read it when we first arrived. For Henrietta.

I never knew Henrietta, never knew her keeper, never knew anyone who knew either of them, but I knew Henrietta lived in the woods and I knew her person placed ceramic angels over her grave and I knew they buried her where she loved to be. I say hi to her, Woods says hi to Cooper, and we navigate this valley as much through absence as we do through presence.

When Cooper first moved into this town, he carried a message about his people. He was friendly and open. He respected the trails and the norms. He was tougher than he looked, and certainly a bit stranger too. He said he’d stick around, you just had to wait and see.

Jibs says something different. He can’t tell a silhouette—barks like a German Shepherd until you’re right up close and he can verify who you are. He’ll stretch as far forward as he can for a treat from a new hand but will run away as soon as he gets it. He’ll go right into the forest’s edge with the roaming dogs but abandon them if they cross the creek. When he loves you, really loves you, and he sees your dog, he’ll run right past ‘em to check if you’re home too. He’s also a thief—he waits for the big dogs to leave, then tears into their yards for their toys at warp speed. You’ll see him sprinting down the dirt back to our house, toy as big as him clutched in his jaw.

The dogs here are not just a census, but a story. They are a bounding tale of old-timers and new-comers, chasing cars and kids and skiers and runners into and out of a hemmed in valley. They will tell you who roams free and who sticks to routine; who keeps things neat and who keeps neat things. And they will tell you, right from the wag, who’s a little feral.

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The Field Work

I have watched, in the last month, no fewer than a dozen reels about rejection. And not sad ones. No, this rejection is aspirational. A woman in athleisure telling me to collect a thousand no’s. Another one about being so magnetic you’re repulsive—the idea being that your specificity will repel the wrong people and irresistibly draw the right ones. A 90-day audit to hard launch a new self. A soft era giving way to a feral era giving way to your own personal eras tour.

This is my whole algorithm right now, which tells you how deep my personal repulsion has gone.

Deliberately courting the hard thing does work. The rejection, the awkwardness, the room you might not feel welcome in—that mechanism is almost always real, but this current packaging is a trap.

Stick with me for a moment: in the third century BC, Mithridates VI, King of Pontus, became so paranoid about being poisoned (a reasonable fear, given that his father had been poisoned and his mother was almost certainly involved) that he began ingesting small amounts of poison every day. Arsenic, hemlock, etc. The goal was immunity through exposure. By the time his enemies finally tried to kill him—by poison, lucky him!—the doses that would have killed anyone else barely registered. He had, through deliberate and systematic introduction of the thing he feared, made himself harder to destroy.

A perhaps less sinister version lives in bone biology. Did you know that martial artists spend years repeatedly kicking and whapping their shins against wooden posts and heavy bags? The point is that when you stress a bone correctly—injuring it just enough but not too much—it develops microfractures, heals, and rebuilds denser and stronger than before. It hurts, but it’s survivable, and it quite literally changes what they’re made of.

Our nervous systems work the same way. Repeated exposure to the things we fear—in doses we can survive—recalibrates our threat response over time simply because we have actual evidence now, filed somewhere below conscious thought, that we survived it. The fracture happened. It healed. We are denser for it.

This is what the thousand rejections girlies are onto. The mechanism is real.

But of course the internet finds a way to ruin it.

When you document the 1000 rejections, post the awkward ask, build a series around your own desensitization—you’re not building tolerance for rejection. You’re building an audience for your tolerance-building, which quietly reintroduces the social stakes you were trying to dissolve. You’re still measuring response rate. You’ve just rebranded the harvest.

But that’s the creator’s problem. Here’s ours.

Read more

As I write this on my phone, W3 is nursing himself to sleep in my lap. We’re nestled under a juniper tree below a bluff of crags, surrounded by climbers. I have to look away from the screen every few words.

Friends and neighbors of ours lent us their van for the weekend, and I was looking forward to an easy weekend of camping. I am holding the hope. So many people say it is your choice whether you allow children to change your life or if you choose to bring them along to the life you would have been living. W3 is having a nice time in the desert. He is digging in the sand and throwing rocks and yelling things like, “sleeping in a van!”

I am similarly yelling things—about how frustrated I am, how infuriating it is to not be able to take a moment of rest when the world is spinning because my absence makes the world spin for someone else. I try my best to live my life with a child the same way I would have lived it without a child. But there are some realities.

The first of which is that I am some 50 feet away from all the people I came here with because I needed a flat spot to sit down and maintain my balance and nap the child. I can hear them, encouraging each other, cheering each other on as they attempt to climb the face of an entire landscape. I can hear the soft murmuring of the child in my lap. I can hear the wind whipping past us as I bend over atop him to protect him from it.

I close my eyes and imagine for a moment that the cheers are for me. “You did it!” they yell. “You made a child and kept your identity and preserved all your projects and are in the desert alone on the ground nursing your child! You did it!”

I am rocking him back-and-forth in my lap. I am rocking back-and-forth in my head.

It’s strange that in entering the pantheon of

Motherhood, one of the most attended clubs in the world, that you often find yourself isolated—bent and speaking in the tongue of one. In that way, it is more like church: every problem different and yet all the same, someone babbling, get up kneel down get up kneel down. I am trying not to preach, but the crumbs of zucchini bread are falling on my child’s forehead like a blessing.

The second reality of course is that I want them to be 50 feet away. I want to be on the flat spot where his tiny feet can run and stomp, where the dog can curl up by my legs, both long since fallen asleep. The dog, my legs, the baby, all of it. Because of course I don’t want to talk about the vertigo or his nap schedule or whether I climb or not. Even in the desert, even as a mom, I want to be writing.

And I am—under a juniper tree in the shade of a bluff with a dog and a baby and a loaf of bread. I am hunched and dizzy and bitter and dusty and I am writing, hope still fresh on my tongue.

The Field Work

Sunday is family day at our house. Since Ben is a woodworker and I am a writer, and Woods only goes to dayca…

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That’s what we say around here, around these times—the restaurants, the shops, the locals. Mud season, we call it, with a collective itching to escape it. The roads are soft and the trails impassable. Spring break comes and breaks everything. The lifts are still, the streets are empty, and my nervous system peeks around the door to find there’s nothing there but wind and dust. I square my shoulders, shaking off the civilization that kept them rounded.

In ’s piece “She Felt the Sacred” he writes about the Canada goose—how the brain shuffles the commonness of their honks to the subconscious, and how he is trying to retrain that reflex, to remove geese from the layer of traffic and house hums and enjoy them for the neighbors they are. He’s reminded of Mary Oliver, specifically “Wild Geese”.

“Wild Geese” is often recognized for its most quoted line, “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” but it is, also, about geese:

“Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.”

Reading La Tray, reading Oliver, I felt a pilot light snap to ignition.

I grew up with Canada geese. They were everywhere—parks, parking lots, the margins of any murky bottomed pond. Common and loud and entirely indifferent to us, leaving behind the evidence of their indifference in generous quantities across every sweep of grass. I learned early to watch where I stepped. That careful, mincing tiptoe across the grass—eyes down, weight distributed, trying not to touch what the geese had left behind. I was not thinking about the geese when I tiptoed. I was thinking about my shoes.

But thinking about our shoes is a choice.

The elk are back. Some stragglers wintered low and lean for a weak winter, but they are joined by the herd now, moving through the upper meadows like the minute hand, back again in the safe windows of hunting seasons. The magpies have proliferated, flashing iridescent blue-black through the pines, flitting just overhead with sticks in their beaks like eager puppies, building their nests. The Steller’s jays have returned too—the juncos, the chickadees, the red-tailed hawks. And fresh grass is tamped in the night by the drag of fresher cut lumber, fresh cut by teeth.

No one is here.

What we mean, of course, is that we are not here. And this is the tell, the exposed seam in our thinking: that when humans leave a place, the place becomes vacant. That our presence is the thing that animates the world, and our absence is a kind of darkness. This is such a complete inversion of the actual order of things that it’s almost charming. What a grandiose species we are, stomping around with our big stick of divinity. We have built a worldview so thoroughly centered on ourselves that we named part of the calendar after our absence.

I will say: not everyone operates under this delusion. Some of my neighbors seem to have intuited, despite my drudgery for the browns and grays of April, that off-season is somehow my season—that I will be here, reliably, in the mud. I’ve been hunted down to dog sit, to water someone’s plants, to get mail. It is a recognition of something I wasn’t quite aware of while I too dreamed of jetsetting to somewhere warm, green, and bonethawingly humid. I need some cajoling to go outside in the season we call off.

Woods, for his part, has never needed convincing. He is the one at the door. Since he could stand, he has been the one at the door, ready before I’ve finished retrieving his boots, his hat, his mud pants, his gloves, his sunglasses, his jacket, and whatever other layer I need to stash for the unpredictable skies. And there he is, scanning it, whatever piece of sky is visible from the threshold, a sailor finally at sea.

Have you considered going outside and crawling? To be at the height of 30 some inches to see how different the world you hold now is from the one you learned on?

This week he led me out to the hawks on the thermals—or the thermals led him to the hawks. Who knows what vibes toddlers ride on. Later, I pointed out the ravens returning to their spot on the corner, where the churned soil from hastened snowplows sits ripe for the picking. And then, on our evening stroll to throw rocks, in the wet dark soil beneath the leaf litter where the last snow had given way: the first worm of the season.

I’ve always found worms grotesque. Some deep, pre-rational aversion to their smell, the muscular wetness of them. I grew up in Ohio, and I still recoil remembering summer afternoons after the storms broke, stepping outside to find our driveway covered in them. Hundreds of worms on the steaming asphalt, reeking of fish and pennies and dirt. I would tiptoe to the car, a riverdance through a mine field of faceless writhing. For most of my life, a worm was something to be avoided.

And yet there I was, holding one on my finger.

I don’t know what moved my hand, but it was something older than my aversion—some animal certainty that Woods needed to see this, that my job in that moment was to show him the world was safe and worth touching. I held it out to him, this hapless, helpless piece of prey, wriggling on my finger, and spoke to him with the veneer of wide-eyed delight. And somewhere in those minutes, the veneer turned to varnish, locking the delight into place.

A worm’s nightmare, incidentally, is to be witnessed—because being witnessed is almost always the last thing that happens before being eaten. This worm had the misfortune of an audience with someone who had never once in her life voluntarily touched a worm, so lucky him, the odds were briefly in his favor. Luckier still, Woods is my child. He eyed it with skepticism and concern before stating with his characteristic economy: Put it back.

I did. I tucked it carefully beneath a series of leaves, explaining to my ground-level audience how birds eat worms, and worms eat microorganisms, and yadda yadda yadda circle of life. And while I could feel his attention waning, I could feel my own shifting. The soft animal of my body, loving what it loves.

There’s a concept in Alexander Technique—a somatic practice concerned with unlearning the habitual tensions we carry in our bodies—called faulty sensory appreciation. (Which I learned about here from .) The idea is that chronic tension distorts your perception so completely that wrong begins to feel right. Rigid posture feels like good posture. Relaxed uprightness feels strange, like playing a Sim. You stop questioning the poorer position because the position has become, as far as your body is concerned, simply the truth.

We do this with the world. The orientation gets handed down—sometimes directly, sometimes dressed as decorum, as goodness, as the right way to be a person. Take your shoes off. Keep clean. That’s gross. The name of the animal disappearing before the meat even reaches our plates, the distance engineered into the word itself. Every children’s book is quick to point out cows and pigs. None of them say beef or pork. What it all amounts to, in a hundred different registers, is don’t bring the outside in. Keep it there. Keep yourself here. The boundary between you and the world is the point. We absorbed this so young and so completely that we stopped experiencing it as instruction and started experiencing it as reality.

This is faulty sensory appreciation at its most complete. The separation doesn’t feel taught. It feels like the truth of things. It feels like good posture.

Some people don’t teach this. I am trying, in a house made of fallen trees and cascading plants, to be one of them. The outside isn’t something to be kept out. What I return to, bird by bird here and worm by worm out there, is that we are not separate from what’s out there. We are the outside. But people forget, are helped to forget, and with every new acre of pavement, are given fewer and fewer chances to remember.

I am not immune to tiptoeing, to flinching at a spider on my arm, to the hairs on my neck standing when I smell bear. I grew up dancing around the goose droppings on the summer lawn. Around the worms on the driveway, trying not to touch what the world had put in my path. Always the same impulse: to preserve myself. To stay clean. To deny how much of me was made from outside.

And I am still tiptoeing. But I am watching where I step for different reasons now—not to protect myself from the world, but to protect the world from the carelessness of my passing through it.

No one is here, I whisper to the worm, laying the last leaf down.

No one is here, I say to the magpie, who is more verbose than the child at my side.

No one is here, I say to the toddler, eyes scanning the horizon.

And up in the clean blue air, we are heading home again.

If this essay landed somewhere in your body, the Rewilding Spring Almanac is where to take it next. It's a field guide to the season — not a productivity system, not a vision board exercise, but an honest inventory of what's alive in you right now and what it would take to grow it.

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The Field Work

I texted three people this week.

“Headed to the playground if anyone wants to join”

Two said no. One said nothing.

A few years ago, this would have landed as confirmation: Congratulations! You have no friends! It would have become another small case file added to the folder I kept on myself—and other people. This time, I didn’t notice the rejections until I got home. I sent the text, stashed the phone in my pocket, and walked out the door with the toddler. We were going to the playground either way.

The lack of company no longer read as an indictment. Its proof was of something else: I had three people to text.

That sounds small, and it is. It’s a small wonder!

It’s a small wonder to have three people who’ve sat at your table, to know their kids’ names and their local frustrations. When my kid is working on a benchmark, I know theirs are too. And when I wanted company at a local playground in the blaring sun on a random windy afternoon, I had a list of actual humans I could reach toward.

Three is actually an accomplishment in itself now. In the last thirty years, Americans’ average number of close friends has been cut in half. In 1990, only 3% of people said they had no close friends. Now it’s 12%. The percentage of Americans with ten or more close friends has fallen by nearly two-thirds. We are, collectively, running out of people to text. Which means having people to text—even people who say no, even people who are always busy, always traveling, always out—is not a given. It’s work.

We tend to measure social success by response rate. Did they come? Did it work? Did the thing happen? This is a bit of an RSVP fallacy—the belief that the reach only counts if someone shows up. But that’s measuring the harvest without giving yourself credit for tending the soil, planting the seeds, watering the crops.

The problem is that most of what we do socially now is the equivalent of industrial farming—fast, high-yield, extractive.

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Most of what I write here lives on the side of seeing—naming patterns, noticing what’s happening, putting language to things that are otherwise hard to articulate. I love that shit. It’s a relief to be able to see yourself accurately, to name something and feel it click into place. But it’s not always enough.

Think about a houseplant that’s dying from insufficient light—the way it goes pale and leggy, reaching desperately toward whatever window it can find. They call it etiolating. God that’s a beautiful word for pallid desperation. You can see exactly what’s wrong. You can name it, explain it, diagram it, and that plant will keep straining toward the window all the same, because it’s responding to conditions, not to your diagnosis. The only thing that actually changes its direction is moving the plant or changing the light.

I’ve been feeling that acutely with my novel. I can see the pattern clearly—where I get stuck, how I avoid, what I tell myself about it. I could teach a seminar on my own avoidance. And still, I wake up and do it anyway.

I added fertilizer. I tracked water levels. I tried scheduling, accountability, “just let it be bad” (lol)—all of it careful tending of a plant I never actually moved.

We all know insight and change are not the same thing, and yet it’s very easy to live as if they are—to believe that if you can just understand something well enough, you’ll naturally start doing it differently. But watch what actually changes things in the world, and it’s never understanding. A river doesn’t reroute itself because it finally grasps hydrology. Elk don’t return to a valley because someone explained the benefits. They return because the wolves came back, and the wolves changed the movement patterns, and the movement changed the grazing, and the grazing changed what grew, and what grew changed the riverbanks—and twenty years later, the river itself had moved. That process has a name: a trophic cascade. It works entirely without comprehension.

Change in living systems doesn’t come from insight. It comes from something altering the conditions—a new constraint introduced, a pressure shifted, a small interaction changed in ways that compound over time into something unrecognizable from the outside.

I know this because I accidentally did it. I started taking my Tuesday mornings to the library instead of working at home—not as a strategy, just because I needed to get away from the toddler. Even at my stealthiest, not a floorboard aware of me, he could tell I was in the loft. But at the library? Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling books? It not only changed my environment, it changed what I thought I was doing in that time. I wrote! And not because I finally understood myself. Because I’d moved the plant.

You are a living system. Which means you get to experience the full irony: you can see the pattern, explain the pattern, hand someone else the language for the pattern, and still wake up inside it the following Tuesday doing exactly what you did before unless something in the conditions shifts first.

Seeing isn’t nothing. A lot of people don’t see much. These Sunday essays will always live there—widening the aperture, helping me and maybe you recognize what’s actually happening, giving language to things that have been shapeless and therefore impossible to work with. That is something I love and cherish and keep.

But language alone doesn’t move the plant. So the question worth sitting with this Sunday isn’t what you can see about yourself—I’d guess you can see quite a bit. It’s where you’ve been fertilizing, tracking, tending, and forecasting without ever actually moving.

That’s why this past Wednesday, I tried something new—and made it free so you could see it.

It’s called Field Work. It starts the same way these essays usually do: something observed, something named. This week it’s about the particular feeling of being slightly off from wherever you are—not broken, not in the wrong place, just a little out of phase with the room. I wrote about fence posts. About what it means to function perfectly well inside an arrangement you don’t quite match.

But the point of Field Work isn’t just to observe—it’s to move the plant. To move toward something you can actually do with it—a constraint to hold, a small shift to try, a way of changing the conditions you’re operating inside rather than just understanding them better. Not a system. Not optimized. More like: here is a wolf to reintroduce, and here is roughly where to place it.

These pieces won’t feel like breakthroughs (I mean, unless I’m really firing.) They’ll feel like a Wednesday, that suddenly feels a little more like a Thursday, which is one day closer to Friday. But that’s kind of the point—small adjustments, tried and returned to, until you look up and realize the riverbanks have shifted.

Each edition also comes with a Tarot pull, because what is a card draw if not a prompt to see something you were already circling? I am not practicing all this noticing and naturing to not also practice a little witchcraft.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, Wednesdays are for you. I’m also happy to comp for any Shangrilogs-evangelists who can’t quite afford it. You just let me know, and I’ll let you know everything else. I mean, what are we here for if not for each other? It’s always easier to move plants when there’s an extra set of hands.

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The Field Work

I swung the pastries out the window, slowing the car to a halt as the truck drove by. He braked, and we reversed toward each other, dust lifting around the tires as he took the bag from my hand, mouthing I love you. I smiled, and we both carried on. No other cars on the dirt road. No one but us, some croissants, and a bleary-eyed toddler heading out for a nap drive.

When I think about living somewhere small, I think of days like that. I started in the library, chatting with the people I know working there. I went to the coffee shop, and found an extra pastry in my bag. I stopped by the counter to say hi to a couple people I knew. I sat with some dogs I knew outside while I never even saw their owners. And I timed my drive back home so I could catch Ben on the dirt road as he was heading out, ready to sling my gift through open windows. It’s a life built out of small recognitions, repeated often enough that they begin to feel to buoy you. You feel less like you are clinging to the sweater and more like you are woven into it.

And still—Ben and I have been saying how much we feel like aliens here. Like we belong to the place—the landscape, the logs, the cold—but we’re not sure how to belong to the people. It’s a strange split, to feel so clearly of a place physically and still uncertain of your position within it socially.

Haven’t you always felt that way, though? he asked.

In some ways. In DC and Boulder and Idaho, yes. In New York, in LA, on the islands, less, though still there. In those sprawling places more ripe with visitors than anyone else, I felt like an alien surrounded by aliens; it was hard to find people from my planet, but I got the idea that most people felt that way, and in that, we could cling to one another.

Of course, I wasn’t looking for someone from Chesterland, Ohio. I never felt like I made sense there either. That’s why I left, though I still hold on to certain aliens.

Some people seem to land in places that fit them, more or less, without much effort. The place reflects them back. The social rules are legible to them. They know how to enter and where to stand, what jokes to say to the room and which to save for later. And then there are the rest of us, who carry a more persistent orientation that is easy to overlook because it’s so familiar: the sense that we are slightly off from wherever we are.

It’s subtle enough that you can live inside it for years without naming it, but it shapes behavior all the same. You hesitate a beat too long before speaking. You wait to be invited rather than assuming you’re included. You look for confirmation that you belong before you act like you do. Over time, it becomes easy to treat the feeling as diagnostic: that you haven’t quite found the right place yet, that the task is to keep searching until something finally clicks.

But I think there’s something else that is less satisfying and more useful. That feeling might not be a reliable signal about the environment at all. It might be a signal instead of how you move through the world. And if that’s the case, it won’t resolve when you finally arrive somewhere better suited to you, because it was never pointing to the place in the first place.

Imagine, for a moment, you are a log. A thin but sturdy log of about six feet. Someone hammers you into the ground lengthwise to be a fence post. Functionally, this works. You hold the line. The fence stands.

At first glance, everything around you appears consistent—a row of posts, pretty evenly spaced, doing what posts do. It’s reasonable to assume you’re one of many like you. You’re a fence now. Hurray!

But then you look more closely.

Some of the posts are milled—cut, squared, standardized. Some are pressure-treated. Some are metal stakes. Some are older, worn down in ways you’re not. A few are slightly irregular, like you, but shaped differently.

On the first storm, you're soaking up the rain, bloating with glee, until you look around and realize everyone else is letting the water drip off them. Uh oh, ha ha, I wasn't…. never mind… nothing weird to see here.

Nothing about this changes the basic fact that the fence is working. You are doing the job you were put there to do. And yet, once you start noticing differences, feeling strange mixtures of fear and shame and desperation, it becomes difficult not to treat them as meaningful. You start to assume the feeling of being out of place must be telling you something—that you’re in the wrong configuration, or that you don’t quite belong in this particular arrangement.

But the fence doesn’t require you to match the others in order to function as one of them. The feeling isn’t a reliable guide to whether you fit. It’s just a feeling.

If you take that seriously, then the work shifts. It becomes less about finding the environment that produces the feeling of belonging, and more about questioning the rule that the feeling has to come first.

So for the next five days, try removing that rule. Move through your life as if belonging is not something you need to wait to feel before you participate. This doesn’t require you to become a different person, or to override genuine misalignment where it exists. It simply asks you to stop treating the absence of the feeling as evidence that you shouldn’t act.

Maybe you find yourself being the one to wave first, even if you’re not sure they’ll recognize you. Maybe you start a conversation without being certain it will land. You might let yourself be known in small, specific ways without waiting for confirmation that it’s welcome. None of this guarantees that you will feel at home, and some interactions will be awkward or go nowhere. Some places genuinely won’t fit, and no amount of effort will change that.

But that uncertainty was already there. The difference is that you’re no longer letting the feeling call the shots.

In its place, something else gets to accumulate. Not the sudden clarity of this is my place, but the slower construction of familiarity through repeated contact, through small exchanges, through moments that don’t look like belonging in isolation but, over time, begin to form it.

The threads are already there. A hello at the counter. An extra pastry in the bag. A dog tied to a bench, deciding to lie across your feet. You don’t notice the weaving as it happens, only that one day, you’re held a little more easily inside it.

The Prompts

A little field work for the week—one to share, one to sit with:

For the comments:
Where in your life do you already have small recognitions—places or moments where people know you, even a little? Where could you?

For you:
Where are you currently waiting to feel like you belong before you participate? What would it look like, this week, to act as if you already do—without forcing it, just removing the hesitation?

The Cards

What is influencing my sense of belonging right now?

I pulled The Star. The Star, on its surface, symbolizes hope, faith, purpose, renewal, and spirituality. But The Star also comes immediately after The Tower. I think when we see The Star, it can give this vibe of “everything is abundant and aligned” but it’s often more like the relief after a storm passes. The birds are out, the water is flowing, but girl lost all her clothes. She is relieved, but she’s still recovering.

In terms of answering the question, it’s saying, “you’re still here, you’re still open, you’re still participating in something larger.” There’s a kind of willingness to it, to keep participating, to keep offering something of yourself, without a lot of immediate confirmation coming back.

It can feel a little exposed (she is naked after all). It can feel a little solitary, like you’re standing under a wide sky without much cover.

That doesn’t mean you’re outside of anything. It just means you’re still orienting.

How could I think about belonging differently?

For this, we got the Knight of Wands, which is almost the opposite posture. Movement, initiation, heat, less waiting to understand, more stepping into something and letting the understanding come after. It doesn’t ask whether you belong before you act. It assumes motion is how you find out.

This turns the willingness into being willing to go first. Willing to be a little early, a little off, a little too much, and let the world respond.

You might not feel settled. You might still feel like you’re orienting, like you’re not quite placed yet. And the shift isn’t to resolve that before you move. It’s to let movement be the thing that changes your relationship to it.

Look up, yes. But then go.

Thanks for being here for this session of Field Work. I really enjoyed this new format, and I hope you did too. I’d love to hear how you felt.

If you’re yearning to churn some self soil this season, get The Spring Almanac. It’s is a self-led field guide for deciding who you want to become—and actually staying with it.

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I am a hope, a harbinger not of death but amidst it. I am a beacon in the mud that something is growing, that something lost can still be found. I am early and just in time and I will weather the frost should it come. I am stepped carefully around, inspected, and admired. I am alone in my beauty, waiting to be joined in the light.

I am a breath caught. I am a last minute dodge, a star through the clouds. But there I am, in the snow bitten leaves, in the dirt and the dust, yellow. I am only for the cautious, for the curious, for the kind. I am no bigger than a spider, no bolder than a vole. But I am here, tilted to the sun.

I am for the rare. I am something to long for and something to expect, even when I am right there. I am as tall as I will ever be under the giants above. I see the shadows come, blocking the sun, and I feel my petals ache until the shadows are gone.

To some, I am nothing. There is a dirt path in a dirt wood, the monochrome of a winter passed and a spring not yet arrived. There is somewhere to be. There is nothing here to stop for.

I am in this frame. I promise you.

There are shapes that pass above me. Their shadows cross and go. They are weather and I am ground, opening and closing to the sun.

But sometimes, the light changes differently, without flitting or swaying, and something with edges dims me and holds.

And then,

breathes.

I know this breath. I take it the way I take the rain, the way I take the light, because it is good, and I am made for it, and it gives me something I can give back.

And then she is close, closer still, as close as the birds that I feed, the bees that I keep.

And I am startling then.

And so, I think, is she.

If you’re tired of walking past what matters, I made something for this season. The Spring Almanac is a self-guided field guide for deciding what to grow—and actually staying with it.

Come closer.

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The extremely rad was on this week, and it’s an absolute banger. Be a stand-up literary citizen and pre-order her new book Alan Opts Out.

Two cats back at the vet this week. Link needs to go back on the higher dose of steroids. The lower dose meant his unusual butt growth came back. On the higher dose (or any dose really) he risks developing diabetes. He’ll be three this May. The higher dose means he gains more weight. But it also means he doesn’t leak cystic fluid and can go to the bathroom normally. So he gets to be a little plump pancake on a high dose of steroids. One pill during morning chores. One pill while we make dinner. One elaborate video for cat-sitters. One very long text to neighbors any time we decide to leave town on a whim. One canister of Churu always in the pantry.

Finn, turning 13 in August, likely has some variation of irritable bowel syndrome. There are no physical symptoms aside from weight loss. So they want him on a new food. But the food he’s been on since January is the food that got him to stop peeing all over the house. We’ve been asked to experiment, but I am tired of experimenting with Finn ruining our shoes.

Such is the life of four pets. Such will be the life of the many, many pets I want.

Driving home from the vet, with Link curled up in the car seat and Finn locked into a hard-case carrier because he’s prone to fear-driven pee, I felt frustrated. I felt overwhelmed. I felt like any adjustments to pet care in the direction of “more work” would mean Ben wouldn’t tolerate us getting another cat.

Finn is purring in my lap as I write. He’ll die, eventually. So what’s a diet change? What’s a pill every night? Who cares? Life is made of these little chores. Of brushing your teeth and cramming laundry into the drawer, of shoveling the front steps and getting the oil changed. Most of these things are rhythmic. Some are tedious. There are a million things we have to do daily, weekly, monthly—why did this feel like a deep sigh instead of just a diet change?

I thought about another cat, the reasons I want one.

First, I do genuinely think that more animals just means more joy. More hearts in your life. More romps. More fun.

Second, we can! We own our house, I am making a good income, we can give someone not just a home, but a great home.

But third, I think I itch for a newness that feels good. Not a newness that feels like adjusting a cat’s diet. Not a newness like weaning a toddler from a tit that he loves. Not a newness like trying to make better habits or drink more water or improve anything.

We crave new things that feel like life expanding—but resist the exact same life when it shows up as maintenance. There’s the fantasy: more animals = more love, more life. And then there’s the reality: more animals = more systems, more care, more constraints.

I don’t just want another cat—I want the feeling of becoming someone whose life is fuller. Because it feels flat. Because it feels rote. Because because because. But fullness is logistics. And I am capable of that. I even thrive in that. I keep 80+ plants alive! What I am really craving is dopamine. And dopamine does not come from maintenance.

But I’ve been turning this over, and I think there are cracks in maintenance where dopamine can actually get in—just by making my brain encounter them differently.

Some of it is about uncertainty. Dopamine loves a little “what will happen?” and maintenance kills that because everything is known. Will Link take his medicine? Yes. Will Finn pee without his food? Well… I don’t know. Finn on a new food is actually a tiny experiment. Will he eat it? Will it work? Will we make it a full week without our front door smelling like cat piss? I can track that like a curious person instead of a tired one. Family phenology, if you will.

Some of it is about visibility. The whole trap of maintenance is that its goal is “nothing goes wrong,” so there’s no moment of noticing if I’ve succeeded. That has to be manufactured. Maybe I put a note on the counter: “DAYS WITHOUT CAT PISS: 1” The brain needs to see progress, nevermind that the progress is just holding the line.

Some of it is the time horizon. “I have to do this until they die” is a thought I have had followed by the thought “unless they get worse and then I’ll have to do this AND another chore”, which is not helpful. It needs to be about today’s pill. This week’s food. The next vet appointment. Dopamine needs a completable loop; and infinity (or 3-13 more years) doesn’t have one.

And some of it is just stacking. If I put on a podcast I love only during pet care, my brain will start to associate snouts and pill-pockets with something it actually wants. The Churu becomes a treat for everyone, not just the medicated ones, and suddenly I’m surrounded by snouts and it’s a little joyful instead of a little clinical.

The last thing is the most annoying to admit: there is something in just being the person who keeps this running. Ugh. It’s clearly not triumph, but I am a person who keeps 80+ plants alive. I do give four animals with varying needs extremely fulfilling lives (and bellies.) I am a person whose life contains not just a few things worth tending, but many many things.

The dopamine is not in the maintenance, but my life is.

And then maybe, somewhere along the way, I still get another cat. :)

If you’re tired of circling the same questions—what to focus on, what to change, what to let go of—The Spring Almanac gives you a way to actually decide, and then live inside that decision.

It’s a self-guided Rewilding. The same ecology, neuroscience, and patterning—just in a form you can move through at your own rhythm. Something to dig into. Something that churns the soil a little, turns things over, makes it possible for something new to actually take root.

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You might think: yes, that’s how you walk on a path—straight, on it. But you would be surprised how many people do not do this when doing this is at its most critical.

In mud season, the path is full of fallen trees, deep puddles, post-holing snow banks, slurry fields of indeterminate depth. And the whole point is to walk right through them.

This isn’t some kind of tenacity test (though, you could argue). It’s actually best practices. When you come to a snowy or muddy section of trail, you’ll often see a wreath of footprints fanning out around it—people sidestepping in an effort to keep their shoes clean and dry. Listen, I get it. I get it! But this is poor etiquette. It’s also cowardly, destructive, and denies your shoes the chance to show you if they belong here. But the real problem is that every detour erodes the landscape beside the trail. For those who want to give back to the wood as much as the wood gives to them, they practice walking in the center: in the slush, in the crunch, right up the middle.

The snow on the trail always melts last. Everything around it could be clear, bare ground, spring-hopeful—and there the snow would still be, packed stubbornly on the path itself. Like nature is saying, just one more moment to get my leaves in order before you come over!

Part of this is the result of foot traffic: all that compression turning the snow denser and more durable than what nature alone would make. She kneaded the dough fine the first time. Having countless others knead it has made it…rough. But the trail holds what it’s given.

There’s another reason though that doubles back on us. The trail is flat. Humans made it that way—cut and graded to be easier on our knees, friendlier to our stride. And on a slope, meltwater runs. On flat ground, it sits. The forest floor on either side, all that loose duff and root and decomposing leaf matter, conducts warmth up from the earth and drains the water away. The trail can do neither. The snow lingers longest on the very path we carved to make things easier.

Muck boots are not the best hiking shoes. They’re a bit loose, a bit clunky, and I could feel my narrow heel sliding up and down in the back with every step—my whole foot going up and down, up and down, post-holing through snow, inclining my boot to be more attached to the ground than to me. I found myself in six-inch-deep puddles. I found sticks of varying sizes accosting me from strange angles, jutting out from the hillside after being thrashed about by the wind. I found myself scrambling for purchase on icy pools, keen not to go down elbows-first, since my hands were occupied: one holding my phone to narrate all of this, the other holding my decaf coffee with two kinds of creamer, lactose-free half-and-half and oat caramel.

Ever the sensitive flower, I am.

This is the way of the mud and the mush. To become so sodden and sour as to come out sweet again. And so I did—sliding and lurching and sloshing, right up the middle, trying to be good for the trail, ever so slightly uncertain whether the trail was being good for me. I know it is, I whisper to myself. Enjoy your fucking walk, I grit through my teeth, I grit through my year, tasting only dirt and iron.

Days later, the deer leg appeared again on the front stoop, maybe an inch from the threshold. I opened the door to call for Jib, and he appeared with such velocity that I didn’t even notice how gracefully he’d dropped the leg mid-rocket as he hurled himself over it. The leg has appeared again and again, both last fall and this spring, emerging from melts and other dogs’ domains. It is a prize rallied about the town, and Jib knows his efforts to win it will be dashed again when he is forced to leave it outside.

But he relishes the challenge. He comes in so wracked that he collapses on the couch, dirt covering his belly, gashes along his narrow legs. Jibs who does not know slush or snow or mud or muck. Jibs who only knows bone.

God, can you imagine?

Or really, can you remember? Can you remember?

I have this memory from some indeterminate time in my childhood. It was summer and it was raining outside. It had been raining for hours because the grass was slick with the dirt it grew from. The whole yard was a slip-n-slide, begging for your knees and your hands, and I answered the call. The mud was thickest just around the perimeter of the house, and I remember army-crawling through it as I pretended to be a soldier in the trenches, dragging myself through the mud into battle. And all there was to do was to lick the splatter of dirt off my teeth and keep crawling. Dirt and iron. Muck and mire.

I don’t remember going inside. I don’t remember if I showered or took a bath or where I took my shoes off. All I remember was my elbows in the mud, my heart in the muck.

Just like the trails we build, we grade ourselves flat. We do this. We optimize and streamline and engineer out the slopes, and it works; it is easier on the knees, it is friendlier to the stride—but flat ground doesn’t drain. The hard things pool in the comfort we built for ourselves, sitting there, taking longer to melt than they ever would have on a hillside.

Somewhere in me is the kid with her elbows in the mud. Somewhere in me is the dog who only knows bone. But right now I can’t find either. So I keep walking, right up the middle.

The muck, the mire, and me.