Easing In and Waiting Patiently
A new place to share thoughts on slow & simple living
We’ve reached the part of the summer where my garden has begun to look a bit scraggly. The enthusiasm and determination of spring has been supplanted by a waning of energy and an impatience for the heirloom tomatoes, bell peppers, and eggplants to finally ripen. The snap peas are fully spent, the few remaining strawberries have lost their petite delicacy. The weeds can sense my flagging efforts to defeat them and have redoubled their efforts, while the flies and yellowjackets and aphids are beginning to outnumber the honeybees and ladybugs.
But still, I garden. I don’t abandon my efforts, I simply keep plugging away. I harvest the lettuces and zucchini, and brainstorm yet another way to prepare them so my children might eat them. So far they will only accept slowly sautéed, so they are softened and glistening with olive oil, yet not overly charred or caramelized.
I also remember to extend daily gratitude that our Northern California summer has been relatively mild, compared to the previous six or so years. While the rest of the world burns and experiences crushing heat waves, we have escaped with a summer that feels like the Bay Area memories of my childhood— hot but not unbearable; foggy mornings coupled with brilliantly sunny afternoons, and respite with the fog again in the evenings. We look at the rest of the world with a profound knowledge of that overwhelming ecological despair, as our summers of recent memory have been deeply traumatizing. It is inevitable that we will have many more like them in the coming years. So for now, I soak up all the relative gentleness of this summer and feel the waves of gratitude reverberate through and out of my person.
This feels like an auspicious time to begin the regular publication of my long-planned newsletter. Originally conceived as a seasonal letter to my mailing list, its form has shape-shifted and remained rather nebulous for some time. Instead, I have focused my attention on my YouTube minifilms for this past year, which has proven surprisingly popular and rewarding. I first decided to produce them as a creative challenge for myself, and also a way to reach more people with my writing. There seem to be more viewers than readers in today’s hyper-connected social media-driven world, and I could probably fully commit to producing videos with more regularity and reach even more people.
But my thoughts resist this type of packaging sometimes; perhaps it is just that the heavy lifting of writing, preparing, staging, filming, editing, and publishing can be challenging while also running a household and homeschooling my two children. Maybe I just want a simpler way to share my thoughts, conversations, research, and musings with the world. And if I am being truly honest with myself, maybe I feel like I am not a “real” writer unless I publish things that people can actually read, instead of absorbing while watching a YouTube video. Some unpacking to do there, I think.
Additionally, I have come to love Substack. The communities that have sprung up around writers I admire have been deep and rich, offering a wealth of knowledge and solidarity within. They are places to see and be seen with a level of kindness not found in many other forums. Writers like Lisa Olivera, Anne Helen Petersen, Katherine May, and Meg Conley all have beautiful publications with supportive and insightful communities that I am thrilled to be even a tiny part of. This is deeply attractive to those of us coming from a world rife with internet trolls (YouTube, Instagram, et al.)
My goal is to publish weekly, and Sundays feel right. Maybe not the best from a marketing standpoint, but I can’t help myself. I love the mood on Sunday morning. For us, it usually involves a farmers market trip and a deep dive into a garden chore. I like feeling the freedom to browse through a stack of newsletters or pick up a new work of fiction. The possibilities of the week to come stretch ahead of me and I luxuriate in imagining what we will eat, what adventures we will take, what projects we might embark upon.
As of now, I imagine this will be a space to explore the topics I am most passionate about— things like gardening, cooking, books, home learning, sustainability, self-nurturing, and of course, destroying colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. You know, typical Slow & Simple Living Content. I love taking traditional, ancestral wisdom and applying it to our modern world, through a lens of our modern understandings of mental & emotional health. I think we can look to our ancestors for guidance on topics like community building, sustainability, and slower living, while not idealizing them or retreating into “trad” roles that diminish our personal agency and ignore the very necessary social justice work we collectively need to be undertaking.
If you are reading this in your e-mail inbox, that means you have previously subscribed to my newsletter via my website (which has shifted from Growing Homes to a more aligned The Ancestral Homekeeper) — thank you! You will continue to receive my letters weekly here in your inbox, unless you wish to unsubscribe. You can also hop over to the Substack app, which is a surprisingly pleasurable place on the interwebs. I so value your thoughts and opinions— please pop into the comments and let me know what you like or what you want to see more of from me. I hope this can be a place to share stories and recipes, poems and essays, joy and beauty. I hope you will enjoy taking a break from your day to be here with me. I love you.
