Hello friends,
It’s been a month since I celebrated another year around the sun on 4/28 (Taurus sun, Capricorn rising)
My birthday gift to myself: “The Story You Have to Tell” — a 3-day writing weekend workshop at the Kripalu Yoga Retreat center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, taught by THE Cheryl Strayed1, author of Wild2, a memoir of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail while grieving the death of her mother.
I drove a rented cinnamon Kia Soul (R.I.P. Kia) from Brooklyn to the Berkshires, driving backwards in time into bucolic rural New England, rolling green hills, faded red barnyards, organic eggs for sale in damp half-dozen cartons in the coolers of the local gas stations- on the honor system, but now you can pay by QR code.
5 years before almost to the day, Wild traveled with me on a solo cross-country road trip in 2019, the last year of my 30s. This trip had no compass, except west, and an animal instinct to go to the desert and hide, or maybe die.
Testing myself, questioning myself, returning to self: east to west, west to east, sunrises and sunsets reversing horizons in the rear view mirror.
Pacifica, CA
May 2019
When I returned from that road trip — a 6-week experiment that turned into 6 months of improvised life on the road — the pandemic hit.
The next 4 years would be a transformation and a reckoning of my world.
I didn’t know it yet, but the breakdown would be my breakthrough.
Now, at 44, finally brave enough.
(Also Cheryl tapped me to read my story in front of hundreds of strangers — exactly the band-aid I was looking to rip.)
Reading
Scarcity Brain: retraining my brain to repair & repurpose.
Watching
Oppenheimer. (B+) Saw the Barbie without the -heimer, so dedicated an evening to getting lost in the intense 3+ hour Christopher Nolan fever dream about the atomic bomb. Very intense, required multiple snack breaks. At the end, I felt just as blinded by the light, just like the scientists in Los Alamos, NM, of the naïveté of a world without war.
Listening
TikTok said it’s a new era of “Yeehaw slay” and I can’t get it out of my head 🤠
Dolly Parton + Fleetweed Mac: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLnQXjr3/
Rhiannon cover: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLnQpU2W/
Dope Stuff for Your Desk
All-time favorite: Pilot V-Ball Roller Pens, 0.5 and 0.7 (for that slightly thicker glide) - just $2.25 a pop at the McNally Jackson in Rockefeller Center.
Last weekend, in the second soulful journey of the month, we gathered the queer coven in the Catskills and welcomed another elder millennial into the realm of the fourth decade with all attendant rituals and leztivities. As the birthday girl requested, it was a verdant lakeside cottage on wild land with Grey Gardens/Dorian Grey vibes and a fully functioning farm next door with a symphony of goats, roosters, bulls, pigs, cows, chickens, sheep and all manner of creatures tending the landing and cultivating the land and enjoying the land and the fruits of their labor.
Truly, in our gardening era. 👩🏻🌾
What’s growing in your garden? What journeys are you on?
Til next time-
“Strayed” - she made up her own last name! fictional name is destiny!
Also adapted into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon as “an unlikeable woman”