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The Natural Order of Things

It’s been so so so so so sooooooo long since I wrote here, actually nearly a year, which feels so shameful. But I’ve been working hard to break into magazine work and (to my delight) have kind of done it – at least, a little bit.

But I miss this space so much, and really I miss being creative for no reason at all other than to create. And I’ve been reading a load of great writing lately which always makes me feel like, “Hey…I wanna do that!”

It’s spring in Asheville, which really means that absolutely everything is exploding with new life. Last week, evidently, was the week in this country that the most birds are active in their migratory patterns, so the bird watching is out of sight. We have two (!!) different bear families tromping through our back yard this year: one mom of three yearlings (we saw those same cubs as teeny tinies last year), and another, younger mom of two little cubs. The bear sound is distinctive and my ears are trained for it now: squirrels and birds throw off whatever the equivalent of an audio misnomer is as they loudly flit around the bamboo forest floor, but bears sound slower, more intentional, and heavier-footed as little twigs snap under their weight. More ominous in the best way.

There’s a house finch who’s tunneled her cylindrical nest into my geraniums, just outside and to the left of my back door. Her five brand-new baby birds, who were eggs just a few days ago, are now blind little downy squeak-balls hollerin’ for their mama. She’s very judicious about when she goes over. She won’t approach the nest if anyone is watching her. She’ll flit from perch to perch so she can always see it, but if she sees me trying to sneak a peak (no matter how still I am, and please feel free to laugh at the mental image of me trying really hard not to move or make eye contact with a bird), she waits until I am safely behind glass to make her move. I still have yet to see her feed them, but I can hear when she’s there because the chorus of five little bird heads announces her comings and goings.

This morning, there was a lone duck swimming across the surface of an otherwise perfectly still lake, fresh after a rain storm, with grey clouds hanging around the mountain peaks in the distance. Glassy surface except for the little triangular ripple from behind one creature making waves, the evidence of its movement spanning wider and wider the farther back I looked.

There are bright red cardinals – the younger, the brighter – learning how to position their frills just right to attract a mate.

And the flowers, good GRIEF. After the unseasonably cold temperatures late into the year froze off the completely ethereal cherry blossoms, I was feeling nervous about what we’d get. But the roses, the snapdragons, the TULIPS standing up at attention, the billion different shades and hues (somebody teach me the difference between those one day, k?) of green, my mom’s peony garden which is, as you can imagine, just plain stupid in its beauty. The little petals that look like torn crepe paper, the dahlias and honeysuckle and lilac…I knew none of these flowers except for the obvious ones before moving here because nature really just Wasn’t My Thing. What a dummy. Thank God for learning.

My hydrangeas were impacted by that pesky freeze I mentioned a second ago and despite my very tender care of them over the last two years, I was forced to cut them all the way back to their stumps this year. There probably won’t be any flowers, but I’m encouraged to see that they’re producing big, lush, green leaves anyway. Sometimes I go talk to them and tell them they’re doing a great job.

There are so many metaphors in here about new life in a weary world, but the world is, in fact, too weary sometimes to make those connections. My husband would say that means that this one’s “just for us,” which is something he says when we’re witnessing a moment we wish we had a camera to capture, but don’t have one handy. It also reminds me of the song Rosie’s requesting most often right now, Just Around The River Bend from Pocahontas, which begins: “What I love most about rivers is, you can’t step in the same river twice: the water’s always changing, always flowing.”

There’s some metaphor about cutting back for new growth; something about mis-hearing something and something else magical happening instead; something about the exquisite essence of the profoundly temporary; something about protection and watching and waiting; something about trusting and singing. Something about blooming. Something about dying. Something about not having anything to record it and just doing it anyway. Just to do it.

Just for us.

And Just Like That, Season 1 Concludes

Boyyyy, what a lightning rod of a series this turned out to be! So much to say.

I think anyone who’s being honest, even the most rabid fan (and I’m among that group) has to admit that the quality of the first season* was a mixed bag. But before we start, I want to take just a minute to say something about criticizing art:

The ability to put something out into the world – music, writing, acting, performance of any kid – requires a pretty high level of bravery. It’s not nothing to take something that does not exist and then make it exist with your body, your voice, your brain. That’s not to say that art should be exempt from criticism, but it is to say that we as a culture have the ability to opine so freely and immediately, to create such negative discourse about the smallest thing, that we often sound like ungrateful children. “They really just ruined everything.” “They should have never come back.” “This album is horrible.” “I hated it.” I’ve found myself saying some of this stuff over the course of the last decade, but I’m trying in my old age to take a bit of a kinder, softer approach to receiving and processing OTHER PEOPLE’S ART. Does that sound dramatic, with the all caps? Good! Somebody (or in this case, a lot of somebodys) created something to put into the the world to make life less dreary and more livable. The least we can do is treat that offering with some kindness. We can be thoughtful, critical, even, but we don’t have to be quite so flippant and cavalier about how we hurriedly dismiss something other people worked for months or years to make.

Okay. So with that said.

There were highs and there were lows . I think my biggest joys came when I got to see the characters be truly joyful themselves: the laughter, the ribbing each other, Charlotte (brought forth by the wonderful Kristin Davis) doing tennis/Torah portions/tampon work, THE. CLOTHES., the evolution of what it means to be a woman, the conversations that the show started about authenticity (whether in regard to aging, sexuality, gender identification, parenting), getting to see amazing little meals for the eyes, like the vestibule of Carrie’s brownstone (!!!!).

And it feels strange to type this out, but I didn’t really miss Samantha. I think it’s kind of impossible for me to separate Samantha from Kim Cattrall, who was horribly unkind to my dear SJP in a very public way. If I try to do that, I can admit that maybe there were elements missing that Samantha would’ve brought: unapologetic brassiness, boldness, sex appeal…okay, now that I’m really sitting down to think about it, maybe I did miss her after all. Not in a way that kept me from enjoying the show, but…yeah. Hmm. That’s new.

I heard lots of feedback from people who found the show to be “too woke,” as though this series was attempting to correct or overcompensate for the sins that Sex and the City’s lily-white and largely straight, cis-gendered cast committed in the 90’s and early 00’s. And yes, we did get a fair amount of lots of different things: Rose’s transition to Rock, Miranda’s exploration of her sexual orientation, the entire character of Che Diaz (more on that in a minute). But something one of the writers said really stuck out to me and has re-framed that: this is New York City, y’all. Of course, in 2022, there would be tons of conversations about and interactions with folks whose lifestyles never would’ve been spotlighted in the original run of the show. It’s a different world! And the center of that world, in the most progressive sense, would naturally be NYC. So I’m giving them some grace there.

I’m also much more keen to give the writers space and time to show us different storylines because, as I recently discovered, *there’s going to be a second season. For about the first half of this season’s run, I had no idea there would be a second one, and I was super frustrated that so much precious time was being devoted to anyone but our three girls who we’d been missing. Knowing we have more time made me exhale and really get excited to spend more time with people like Nya, Seema, and LTW.

But then, there were storylines that didn’t make sense to me. Why did we spend so much time focusing on Brady’s sex life, for example, only for that to completely drop out of the season by episode four? How am I supposed to feel anything but a little sorry for Brady when his mom admitted over lunch with Nya that whether being a parent is worth the hype “depends on the day,” then sent him off backpacking so she could explore her new relationship on the opposite coast? Are we supposed to love Che or hate them?? (That’s a real question because I still have no idea. Sara Ramirez is so amazing and this character is soooo…something.) The show felt aimless and confused about its tone sometimes, when storylines that could’ve been amazing capsule episodes (like the amazing downstairs-neighbor Lisette who provided Carrie with a mirror of her younger years) bled weirdly into other episodes and then fizzled out with nowhere to go. Miranda’s drinking, noticed by Charlotte, dismissed by Carrie, and bad enough for Miranda to be blackout Amazon-ordering, was as easy to get rid of as Miranda deciding to cold-turkey kick the habit and was never spoken of again. Carrie’s entire hip surgery and plastic surgery consultation (though it did give us a screamingly funny painkiller induced “high-Carrie” podcast appearance) seemed like filler plot. Kristin Davis carried the entire comedic weight of the season on her back, excepting a couple of insane and brilliant SJP moments, though everyone seemed to be kind of…well, mean to Charlotte this season. Why did we spend so much time focusing on people like Nya’s mother-in-law, Big’s assistant? These are the frustrating questions that come from no one (seemingly) having put notecards on the wall at the beginning of a season. With no road map, you end up with a lot of dead ends.

It wasn’t Sex and the City, and it wasn’t even And Just Like That for a while. It was somewhere in between, laced with a little melancholia and muddy writing. For example, several choices that were made on the show I didn’t understand until I listened to the companion podcast run by the writing team – and it’s never a good sign when listening to a podcast is a requirement to understand what you’re watching. The writers admitted that they didn’t have an end in mind when they began writing, and oh, how I wish they had: any anchor might have better edited those loose ends and wasted time into meaningful plot with less wandering around. It made the beautiful moments really beautiful (Carrie in that sherbet confection on the bridge in Paris, HELLO, GORGEOUS), but mostly felt like we stumbled into them by accident.

And yet.

Being reconnected with a group of people who I’ve found friendship in for decades, seeing them trot around in their fabulous, daring garb and be themselves, watching them support and love each other, seeing their faces and bodies age…this show was A GIFT. I turned it on each Thursday while my children were in nap/quiet time on the big TV. Not a laptop, not my phone – I wanted the sacrament of watching this show to have my full attention. I put my phone in the kitchen. I got out my heating pad (which I love to sit on while watching TV because I’m 33 and this is what I do now). Sometimes I even poured myself a coffee or a cold drink – in a glass!! – to enjoy. It was an actively reverent experience – ritualistic, even – for me to be afforded the opportunity to spend time with these people again, to love them, to listen to them, to watch them live. There is no more formative character or person for me in the pop culture universe than Carrie Bradshaw/SJP, and so for all its blemishes, AJLT was a treasure. The mere fact that these now-six women (Parker, Nixon, Davis, Pittman, Parker, Sarita Chaudhury), all of whom are in their fifties, are starring in an incredibly expensive show about sex, friendship, frivolity and seriousness, death and drinking and dating? Beautiful. Impactful. Daring. Delightful. Something that makes scores of women happy is often something that the world at large enjoys taking the wind out of by deeming it frivolous or “basic.” This was deemed worth of millions of dollars and prime billing on HBO.

There were so many moments of brilliance. “What are you going to do all day, sit in a studio and laugh?” being a direct echo of Miranda’s scathing question to Carrie pre-Petrovsky-Paris-departure, “What are you going to do all day, eat croissant?” The idea that your friends are the real gut-checks. The concept of growth and change being something we all have to reckon with inside ourselves, and the big-t Truth that is this: we are dynamic, we’re all trying, and the people who love you most will cheer you on as you roll the dice over and over again on yourself.

With all its critiques and flaws and triumphs, Season 1 left us with more questions than answers. But I couldn’t help but wonder…in the game of life, sometimes, isn’t it just enough to play?

Things I'm Taking to 2022

One of my happiest moments in 2021, as baby sea turtles made their way toward the water on a Nicaraguan beach. Smiling so hard my neck is about to explode.

I used to write a post at the end of each year reflecting. I got away from that for a long time, and I’d love to go back and share a few things (some silly, some not-so-silly) that I learned in the year 2021 and will be taking with me into 2022. Even though, you know, we’re basically halfway through January. This is life in a pandemic, people! Time is an illusion!

1. Put your car in neutral before you throw on your parking brake. This tip is brought to you by TikTok, which I joined this summer after much hemming and hawing and have enjoyed IMMENSELY since. Anyway, most of us put our car in park, then put on our parking brake. The logic here is that by putting your car in neutral first, you’re allowing the parking brake to do all the work it’s supposed to - next time you do this, try it both ways. When you put it in neutral first, you’ll notice that when you put it in park, the car doesn’t lurch forward at all. That’s because all the weight is in the right place! MIND. BLOWN.

2. Putting berries in mason jars makes them last longer. It just does. Try it.

3. Deconstructing your childhood faith makes for a really beautiful new version. I’m still a Christian, don’t get me wrong. But from where I’m sitting, the vast majority of churches seem to have lost the thread (many of them United Methodist, so please don’t hear me casting stones without looking inward). I haven’t given up on church (I am loathe to ever give up on anything, to my sometimes-detriment), but I’ve realized more and more that the true work of being a Christian involves work on yourself - not in an “I’d like to sin less” kind of way, but more of an “I am going to be kind to myself and treat myself with radical compassion and patience in order to do the same to everyone in my life,” way. I know this sounds kind of basic, but the execution of this simple idea is seemingly impossible to teach on a large scale. So often get lost in the dogma that we end up teaching our children more about the proverbial “to do list” of Christianity than we do about how to honor others by improving yourself. In a departure from Bible Belt theology, I think being able to be gentle with myself and not beat myself up about everything allows me to extend the same grace to other people: to not hold a grudge, to be slower to anger, and to be more truly gracious when I feel disappointed. Put another way: if I am unrelenting with myself, raking myself over the coals or holding myself to an impossible standard, how would it be possible for me not to do the same with others? So much of Christianity today is teaching people to look inward and hate what they see (and, therefore, look into the world and hate it, too); the simple idea of God’s unconditional love suggests we’re supposed to look inward and love ourselves. Not because we don’t need improvement or because we haven’t made mistakes, but because we are worthy of love just the way we are. Rather than thinking of that as prideful, beginning to approach it as humble seems like the right move. To accept, to be present, and to detach yourself from judgment – that’s what love looks like, even before the improvements begin. Real, radical love and acceptance feel like they’re right at the heart of the truest Christianity I’ve ever seen practiced.

4. Hard right turn: If you have even a slightly hooded eye, do your winged eyeliner in only the corner of your eye. Not all the way across the top. BAM.

5. Saying, “No.” I’m not a “No is a complete sentence,” type of girl, mostly because that seems rude as hell to me, but I know what the sentiment is behind that idea: you don’t need to justify yourself. I don’t know if it’s being in my thirties or what, but I am so much more comfortable saying that I can’t make things happen. Whether it’s a work request or a hangout with friends and family, if it’ll cause me stress to make it happen, I try to find another place for it on my calendar (or just skip it altogether). This extends to finally having the gumption to excuse myself for some alone time on big holiday visits with family (which I never did before lest I seem rude).

6. If you type “docs.new” into your search bar, Google Docs will open a new Doc for you. Same goes for Sheets. I went baby viral with this tip earlier this year, so I felt like I needed to include it.

7. Slugging is what cool girls do now, apparently. It’s when you apply a thin layer of Aquaphor or Vaseline to your face after you use moisturizer in order to set the product and create a barrier for it to be absorbed. It’s now the last step in my skincare routine. It makes me feel like a very shiny, luxurious bitch, I’ll tell you what.

8. When my thoughts start spinning out of control, I have a catchphrase! If I find myself having accidentally swum down a cerebral wormhole of doom, I’ve started to notice, stop myself, and say OUT LOUD, “Wow, look what my brain is doing!” Okay, so for example: if I called a friend and they didn’t call back for a few days. if I caught myself thinking, “Ugh she probably doesn’t want to call and is kind of avoiding calling because it’s a chore to call me back,” I’d say, “Look what my brain is doing!” out loud. This helps with two things: one, it separates me from the thoughts, training myself to remember that I am not my thoughts and that that’s completely baseless anxiety; two, it does that without judgment. It’s so easy to say, “UGH I’m doing it again.” But just noticing it in a neutral way is so much more helpful and kinder for me.

9. Re-examining routines. In early fall, I took a hard look at my morning routine and decided to make some changes that have significantly improved my day. You can read more about that here.

10. Gift withholding. Friends of mine hate this for obvious reasons, but I often withhold gifts from my kids. Not quite as harsh as it sounds: this was born from Mac’s birthday being on 12/15, a mere 10 days before Christmas. Our house was filled with gifts for a one-year-old who didn’t even know where his nose was! I started hoarding his gifts in the bottom corner of a closet in order to parcel them out throughout the year. He always gets all his gifts! Just not all at once. Blessedly, during lockdown, it proved to be a saving grace: we had a treasure trove of new toys. Our kids open everything, then we surreptitiously sneak a few into a closet. If they ask about them, the toys come right back out! If they don’t, we keep them back for a while.

11. Water your houseplants from the bottom. Seasoned gardeners are probably rolling their eyes at this one, but I just learned it and it changed my life. Take your houseplants out of their pretty containers and fill a dish with water, then place the plant in the dish and you can literally watch it drinking. !!!! It’s miraculous! And it keeps your plants from being over-watered or only watering-can-watered at the top, but not throughout.

12. Romanticize your life. This goes nicely with #9, but I have loved incorporating things that are there simply to make me happy into my life. Every day at 2:30ish, I make myself a fresh cup of hot coffee and enjoy it as my afternoon treat. It gives me a boost for my post-nap/quiet time stretch until bedtime, but also feels like a gift I’m giving myself. I’m trying to find more of those to sprinkle throughout my day. It makes me so much more grateful for every little luxury, no matter how small!

13. Not taking things so personally. Again, this probably is just a product of getting a little older, but I am really leaning into the idea that people’s reactions and responses almost never have anything to do with me. It’s a lesson that, when it clicks into place, is so freeing and magical. Was that person kind of an ass? Has nothing to do with me. I can love them anyway!

14. Dressing for women. (Most) men will never appreciate women’s fashion. I have officially stopped giving a shit if any male thinks I look crazy. I think I stopped caring a couple of years ago, but now I’m pouring my energy into putting together outfits that I and other women might think are cool. I saw a Tiktok that was like, “If I walk down the street and a middle school girl says I look cool, that’s the whole point.” Yes. THAT. Thank you, Sammi Jefcoate, for inspiring millions (#iykyk). Am I going to start dressing like a character in a Wes Anderson movie? Maybe. Maybe I will.

15. Stepping away to think. I am someone who often feels pressure to agree to things if I’m in person or on the phone with someone. I feel equipped to speak my mind or stick to my guns via email or text, but it’s harder for me when I feel I’m disappointing someone and I can hear it in their voice. I learned this lesson with some freelancing work I was being asked to do earlier this year, when a boss of mine was asking for more than I was able to give. I could feel my heart pounding and the urge to just say “Yes,” was bubbling up. So instead of making a decision on the spot, I said, “I really appreciate the question and I’d like to take some time to think about it. Let me get back to you within the hour!” That little getaway car slowed my heart rate, gave me a chance to step away, and allowed me the space to think through how I wanted to respond. When I called back, I was able to politely but firmly decline without worrying I’d accidentally backslide into “Yes” mode.

I know it’s corny and definitely unpopular, but I had a wonderful 2021 in so many ways. It was the year I worked for the first time (like, really WORKED, as in traded services for money) as a writer. I dyed my hair pink and learned to really enjoy something unconventional. I co-hosted one of the most fun Galentine’s parties ever. I got to watch my children grow and change in so many ways. Jordan and I launched a small business. I visited one of my very best friends in the world twice in Nicaragua and got to see so many other dear friends and family members. I had Thanksgiving with my family after missing last year. So much was beautiful, even when it was hard. Feeling very, very humble and grateful.

What about you?? Anything you learned in 2021 that you want to share with the class?