Reader,
¿May I still call you cariño? I miss the flavor of Spanish on my tongue.
I began writing this newsletter just a few days after arriving home from two months in Panamá and Colombia, and the ease at which I’ve dropped back into life on the Olympic Peninsula is equal parts comforting and bizarre.
I’m threading a bit of a liminal line—playing Pedro Navaja as I prepare sockeye salmon for dinner; wearing vibrant beadwork beneath an oversized turtleneck.
Two weekends ago, I was dancing salsa in the street as locals handed me shots of rum and slapped cowbells until the early morning. I was positively euphoric in my red lipstick, sweat-soaked dress, and gold hoops—having one of the liveliest and most spectacular nights of my life.
Fast forward, and I spent half a paycheck at Costco, Home Depot, and the Safeway gas station. I’m preparing to file my taxes on a Friday night. I’ve worn Carharts, rain boots, and a thrifted wool sweater for three days in a row.
Let me be clear—I absolutely cherish where I get to call home, and I absolutely love this life I’ve chosen. I’m especially reminded of that when I return from a long stint away. More on that later.
When I first returned home in a sleep-deprived blur, I made a commitment to make no commitments. No plans, no to-do lists. To move slowly, embrace stillness, and carve out dedicated space to consciously integrate all of the teachings and reflections from my intense few months of travel.
Essentially—to live the opposite of how I’ve spent the last two months away from home.
That is—to let my life balance itself out by living on the opposite end of the extreme.
This is a wonderful theory. Early Springtime is even having a little giggle at it.
I do not return home this time of year by accident. The energy of Early Spring carries a sacred buzz that can crack open even the hardest of hearts. Every bud—a promise and a portal.
Early Spring is gentle; timid too. The new growth is soft and supple; tendrils tender.
Yet within its quiet emergence, this sweet season roars with courage. To break the silence of winter. To flash color against the gray. To withstand the shifting winds and weather. To rise up beneath the dark layers of mulch and decay. To dare to declare, “Here I am.”
There is so much to listen to in the springtime, literally, and so much of it is saying, “I’m back.”
Me too, darling. Gratefully so.
I’ve been sitting on the front porch each morning listening to the birds as a way to help with my integration. And in a way, I believe we’re welcoming each other home. I realized the giant pile of pruned branches I left in the yard last fall has offered them shelter and protection. The buckets of bare root native shrubs that will soon go in the ground will provide a reliable food source for them for years to come. In return, they soften and sweeten my days, keep this garden ecosystem in check, and most of all—they help me sing.
I’m thinking about how
recently translated birdsong into a poem, narrated from the birds’ perspective:“Why stay in bed when you could be high-fiving the sunrise? Human awe is an endangered species. Do not let your astonishment go extinct. Go wild for the wildness of your being. Sing off key and call it a yet-to-be-invented note.” –
, The Birds Wrote Me a Poem
I’m thinking about how writer
articulates her relationship to place. How the abundance of birds she admired at her local wildlife refuge suddenly represented all of the threatened species and spaces that could be, and are already, lost. How her desire to preserve this space was tied to her own self-preservation:“...a life without other life didn’t seem worth living. To acknowledge that this space and everything in it was endangered meant that I, too, was endangered. The wildlife refuge was my refuge.
It’s a bit like falling in love—that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else’s, that you are no longer your own. But isn’t that closer to the truth, anyway? Our fates are linked to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them…this is more than just abstract understanding…or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings…this is an urgent, personal recognition……it’s a vital reminder that as a human, I am heir to this complexity—that I was born, not engineered.” –
, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
I am born back into the arms of the Peninsula’s beloved landscapes, and it feels like we’re embracing each other. I could cry at how good it feels to be bolstered by the life unfurling all around me, us emerging in tandem.
I could cry knowing so much of myself and my wellbeing is intertwined here, and from the vulnerability that comes with entering into a relationship of this intimacy. From realizing that here is there, there is everywhere. That preserving this place and preserving myself will never be close to enough to solve the scale of what’s before us. Yet sometimes it feels like that’s all I can do.
I’m spending a lot of time these days just standing and staring at the land in front of me. I feel supported by the sweetness of the budding blueberry branch, therefore I tend to it. My response is autonomic. Is it my slowly improving horticultural knowledge or my intuition that compels me to prune the apple trees, spend an afternoon lost in the sea of their branches? Do I pull the weeds so that the bulbs may emerge freely, or is that for something within myself?
The land tells me what I need, what we need, long before my mind can take the credit. It speaks in bud and branch and blade and bird, and my body follows the call.
Most of the time, I’m probably making a mistake. Spacing something too close, in too soggy of a spot. Starting something out of sequence. Spending too much time or money. I learn. I thank. I correct. Then I make a new mistake again. Though my hands may get it wrong, the land is always right in guiding me toward what it is I need. I’ll never stop being awestruck by this.
I’ve only been back a little while, and I am sucked into Springtime’s splendor already. That, and Venus in Pisces has me swooning over everything. That, and it feels like I’m the only creature trying to sit still in this season.
That, and the muscle memory of returning to life on the Olympic Peninsula is strong. That, and only a few people know what my last few months have actually been like. (Even fewer really ask.) That, and the fact that not a single establishment has played salsa or cumbia has me asking:
But…what about…the trip? How did nearly four months of travel become reduced to the blink of an eye? What about my plan to balance out the extreme motion of my life? What will I lose if I just…keep going?
Again, I am guided by
:“In collecting my thoughts for this book, I spent countless hours in Bay Area parks….I am speaking literally when I say that without those places, this book would not exist. I went to them not just to escape the landscape of productivity, but to collect different observations that could never have been mine otherwise. If you have enjoyed reading this, then in some senses, you have enjoyed those places too.”– Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
I’m reminded to loosen my grip on the structure of my trip’s integration. That integration is application and application is practice and practice is repetition and one needs the material of ordinary life upon which to work, over and over again. I’m reminded that all of the places to which I’ve offered my attention have offered themselves back to me through the vehicle of my cells. I can relax knowing that Colombia—its rhythms, its flavors, its waters—are now embodied memory.
My strategy of “doing nothing” to create space to retroactively absorb my trip was founded in a false definition of “nothing” as “absence.” What if “doing nothing” is actually just a shift from one framework of productivity to a different one? To one where presence—the capacity to be completely inside of your current experience—is actually nothing, and therefore everything.
In other words:
Heeding my yard’s call,
in Early Spring.
Reframing “nothing” as “presence” reminds me of Emmanuel Vaughn Lee and Gordon Hempton’s definition of silence not as the absence of noise, but rather the presence of place:
“Every place has a sound…the first birdsong of spring, the shifting tide reminding us of the celestial ballet…all of these experiences connect us back to the land…
Silence is the poetics of space, what it means to be in a place…Silence isn’t the absence of something, of the presence of everything…
When I speak of silence, I mean silence from noise pollution of modern life. Sounds that have nothing to do with the natural acoustic system. Silence is the presence of time undisturbed.” – Gordon Hempton, acoustic ecologist, Sanctuaries of Silence
Again, my strategy, was falsely rooted in absence, falsely rooted in something specific that I needed to do or a condition that I needed to create when in reality, it’s all perfectly available just as it is right now. Just as I am right now.
Again, Springtime saves the day. Singing.
In its characteristically subtle yet audacious way, Springtime has successfully dissolved my commitment to stillness and completely reframed my view of silence. By meeting it in its true rhythm (and thus, my own), reflections are, unsurprisingly, emerging.
I find it no equinoctial coincidence that they revolve around balance.
I’ll share one I’m pondering, which is why I’m so drawn toward Latin America, why I’ve gone there nearly every year for the last 10 years, and why it’s so easy for me to make peace with the often rambunctious energy that lives there considering the contrast of my current life.
How can I be so unphased by multiple speakers blasting polyrhythmic music when I live in one of the quietest settings in the world? Why am I cool as a cucumber amidst a total lack of order, when my life at home depends on my immaculately managed Google Calendar?
Is what brought me to Colombia my body’s autonomic response to balance out my quiet rural existence? To bring heat to the cold, vibrancy to the gray? To find the edges of my life’s reliability and relative ease?
Was it to bring me to another region of the world where the glaciers also flow into the sea, a tropical version of my temperate home, to help me understand what it really means to find resonance, and residence? To experience through my body the interconnectedness of it all, and feel what we are doing to one another. To feel the impacts of my country’s influence. To amplify the contours of my privileges and identities, and what it means to represent a nation with my body, and not embody it.
Not unlike how I’m lulled into the arms of the apple trees, I am but a supple, simple subject to greater forces at work. Sometimes that force is my own subconscious. Sometimes it’s Source. Sometimes it’s the soil. I know I’m just responding to what I think I’m being asked to do, dancing with control while a far greater intelligence waves its wand high up above. No, below. No—within.
All this to say:
May we listen as our way back in,
no matter where we have gone,
no matter how long.
May the poetics of place
bring us back into balance
without us controlling the beat.
May the layers of the echo
reverberate through the imaginary lines
of separateness between us.
May I always be
exactly where I am.
A portion of all paid subscriptions goes to Mother Nation, and the remainder directly funds my continued education.
• Email: izabellazucker@gmail.com
Last month’s REPRISE offered a breathwork practice, a journaling prompt on hope, facts about coconuts, and resources and conversations to move deeper into this world. Accessible to all paid subscribers.
“Do I pull the weeds so that the bulbs may emerge freely, or is that for something within myself?” This sentence reminded me of the time I joined a community garden soon after the passing of my dad. The garden bed I was given, and asked to try growing carrots in, was filled with rocks. Day after day, I would spend an hour or two turning soil with a large shovel, and throwing the upturned rocks of all sizes and shapes into the nearby wild rose bushes………..Do I remove hundreds of rocks from the soil in the garden bed so the carrots may grow long and straight, or is that for this grieving body of mine?
Izzy--so beautiful! And so much resonated. I spent a lot of time writing with Spring last year but this year it seems it's all I can do to try and find time to sit still and gawk at it in wonder and amazement. I hope to get back to my stack eventually but I'll be logging in to read yours in the meantime!
xx, Monica
--I hope I'll get the occasion to learn more about your time in Colombia. I'm considering a visit there in the next year or so.