new ear, new see
Last night, when I decided to finally turn the key and open the door into the tiny home of this tinyletter account that I created and immediately abandoned, funnily enough, exactly 2 years ago, my mind raced and a cold, nervous sweat crept up my back. I've had so very many ideas for essays in the past few months, but I never wrote any of them down, confident I would just *know* how to mentally return to the idea when the time came, as though I had left crumbs in the idea's wake to follow back on a rainy day when I had time in front of the computer. I lay awake kicking myself because I couldn't recall a single recent premise idea I'd had, though I'm teaching myself to have confidence that better ones will come, that ideas can regenerate faster than our cells, even. We get entirely new skin every 3 weeks. And it only takes 4 days for our colon cells to turn over! What hope! What cellular hope!
Did I need a theme to this tinyletter? Are you slightly worried I decided on the colon? My dearest Victoria's phenomenal tinyletter is specifically comprised of wonderful essays about swimming pools. There is a comforting singularity in that, but unfortunately anything that denotes "focus" is not my personal style, and so this tinyletter will likely more often than not have little varied digestible worlds inside it - personal essays, notes from my travels filming Islands Without Cars, probably usually a link to a recipe I've been bowled over by in the last days, maybe a song for you to listen to while you go about your day, probably a lot of writing about motherhood, a new and continuously unfolding civilization to me.
I want this to feel like a friend wrote you a love letter in the middle of your day, but more than that, I want an impetus to write again. I haven't sat and written for the deadline-less sake of writing in many, many months. It will take a discipline that I feel has atrophied in me, or perhaps was never there. I'm homebound with a newborn again, my gorgeous little 6-week old foster daughter, and she naps for long, quiet stretches, which I aim to use for writing, reading more books (aiming for 2 a month!), and yes, back to my newest hobby, baking again. Once Rowan turned a year old and started walking it became impossible to spend long hours baking because he amassed an innate and ceaseless compulsion to explore/destroy ("child-proofing" is a myth).
So maybe there is a theme afterall ~ taking charge of my own mutability, all our mutability. An addict I once knew used to insist -- used to BOAST -- that people can't change, and despite youthful naiveté I knew then his assertion was really just in defense of maintaining his addictions. If we are who we are and that's it, then we don't ever have to work at the gloriously difficult endeavor of transmutation. I want to watch myself stretch and grow this year, reach beyond what I'm comfortable with, work harder, be braver, know more, help more impactfully. I also want to stop googling my foster daughter's biological mother, for the sake of my own emotional salubrity.
À propos of nothing (welcome to my personal style!), I cannot recommend this coffee cake recipe highly enough. It is a vegan recipe but I had the most tasty results when I used vegan butter yet substituted with dairy for all the other ingredients (and yogurt in lieu of sour cream). I've made it twice in the past 48 hours and essentially ate the entire thing myself both times despite plying Rowan with pieces when he asks for "coohk-eez." Unfortunately for me, he is almost always satisfied with one bite. That, I cannot understand.
Thanks for reading. Really, I mean it. You're helping me change.