Summer Dispatch #3

Keeping all those things I love

Greetings all, 

My last dispatch to you, my final farewell to this past summer, which although not officially ended, in all matters of the heart, left with a flourish. Summer is the season when I most feel like myself. I don’t doubt my place in the world. I can stare at my toes peeping out of my sandals without disgust and instead celebrate their place in my life. An eternal summer raised me and now that full seasons timestamp my year, I wait for it like a capitalist with an appreciating investment, eyes gleaming and hands wringing.  Spending my summer unbound keeps me sane for the rest of the year where I very much feel bound by the expectations of others, society, and the universe. To see summer slowly back out, to write September in my journal, a small piece of me mourns that security that summer provides. I relish instability and irregularity for how comforting it makes routine in comparison. Without all those things I love, I chafe under routine and I’m more likely to destabilize in other ways. 

My favorite museum exhibit this summer was easily the Beatrix Potter exhibit at the Morgan Library. Obviously, I love critters. And Beatrix Potter is a great source of inspiration for me. This is just one page of her many notes from her youth that were shown at the exhibit.

Fall is beautiful and it’s setting up camp, but before then, I wanted to show you some of the things that I loved most about summer. Those small pieces of the season that are ripe with sweetness, dripping with abundance, wide open with ease. The moments when I can take a full breath of air and not feel my lungs constrict. It’s imperative to orient ourselves with the earth in a way. We slow down in the fall and winter, hibernate in a sense, and pare down our lives alongside the trees that shed their leaves. We unearth our passions in the spring and summer, unfurling the parts of ourselves we shield in parallel to the blooms and waters. I’m learning to do this every year. It’s imperative to orient ourselves to the earth in a way that we may rewild ourselves.

There is a room in the historic house at Quinta Mazatlan in McAllen, Texas dedicated to Mexican folk art. It’s filled with talavera and trinkets and milagro hearts and I love it. I took so many photos, telling myself it would serve as tattoo inspiration, but I don’t even know how to pick out specifics.

Part of a rewilding process is coming to terms with unsavory and nasty bits of life that I prefer to bleach or alter in my purview. It's an essentially colonized practice to take something so honestly itself and muddle and transform it into something beneficial and profitable to oneself. I feel like this happens with autumn occasionally. Fall is a decaying and dying season, it's beautiful in that, but I feel like it's often forgotten that fall is centered around the death of summer and the barrenness to come in winter. The pixels on the oak tree outside my window turn yellow and orange and break and fall onto the sidewalk, leaving empty space in the air. At the same time, I understand it's not a permanent death but instead a cyclical death and rebirth situation, and even when our environment seems to fracture and decay, there are so many beings growing anew in just that time. Mushrooms, for example, require this decay and I love them with my whole heart. Maybe in that way, summer is a cheap man’s cornucopia. It’s hard to miss that abundance. At least in the parts of the country that experience deep winters, where summer is not a decaying and dying season. 

Another moment for the trail runs in Massachusetts, which I’ll never get over. I’m not used to lush forests and hidden reflective pools, and even if I walked by them daily I don’t think I’d take them for granted.

Summer is a beacon of escapism, it promises that all the ugly, depressing parts of the year will be blasted away by sunshine and endless smiling. Maybe it is because I’m American, and most American children grow up idolizing summer as a time of no responsibility, no school, and infinite fun. It’s fitting that a lot of my conversations this summer were rooted in escapism, and what it means to be stuck in something that we know doesn’t fit us most of the time.

LA was the ultimate escape this summer. This sunset felt like the culmination of it.

I talked with friends about the (re)surgence of tradwives and what it means that such a large portion of women feel deeply disengaged and disillusioned with the current state of living afforded to us, but rather than investing in changing the societal structures to be new and improved, many revert to a romanticized ideal of a simpler life. They lean into escapism, never willingly facing the realities of 21st-century, self-defined womanhood straight on – Both the tradwives themselves and those who consume the social media content they create. 

I could get really writer-ly about this and say something about how I feel exactly like this image. A floating head in a nearly indistinguishable, excessive space. I won’t.

I read a lot of Sarah J. Maas this summer, nearly finishing up the Throne of Glass series. This is my take on escapism, the classic approach of reading fantasy lit as a departure from my everyday life. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: SJM is not the height of literature, but she can do the bare minimum I require of a book, which is to engage the reader in some way. It's a cheap escapism, a compartmentalization of unhappiness, an easy out from facing what I deeply dislike about my immediate reality and requiring little action on my part. 

I think back on seeing this alcove off of the bike trail in Cape Cod often. With all the momentum of biking, to stop and catch my breath here, it’s emblematic of what I wish I had everday.

I watched friends have pained conversations with themselves about when the right time to leave a relationship is. Whether it's reason enough to want more for themselves than they’re being sold. Whether the need to put space and time between you and another person, or place, or even idea is the fatal sign that it’s time to part ways, or if it’s just giving more time to come to terms with it. If you need to escape something, is that thing still worth keeping in your life?

I’ve said so much about having a CSA (community-supported agriculture) membership. But volunteering on the last Saturday of August was the closest I’d ever felt to our neighborhood. And we got the biggest green cabbage ever, that I still don’t know what to do with.

Even travel is a part of escapism, a very literal escape from the confines of mundanity. And like many my age, I’m afflicted with that worming urge to ponder what my life would be like if I lived in the place I was visiting. Would I like to drive down that street with the big oaks? Would I get annoyed with sweating on the way to work? How would I find friends here, are there run clubs and decent yoga studios? I wonder if moving would change my life so drastically that all the parts of myself that I’m uncomfortable with would be left behind in the old place, and in the new place I’d start as a fresh hatchling with no baggage in sight. 

The New York Botanical Garden makes our Brooklyn Botanic Garden look so quaint. Its size doesn’t detract from its beauty in any way. Funny enough, the garden theme was Alice in Wonderland. Very fitting!

I thought everyone had this bubbling urge inside themselves to flee the country and start over again, that everyone would leap at the opportunity to change their circumstances if it meant leaving weird feelings behind. Maybe this is how people who trick out their F-150s feel, like who wouldn’t want to lift their truck 6 inches, put LED lights underneath, take off the muffler, and slap a punisher sticker on the back window. That urge to flee, that lust for escapism is probably a symptom of something else I should get checked. A warped, demented sense of masculinity and ego, or perhaps the long overdue task of self-reflection on why I feel the need to run rather than heal at the source. 

Leonora Carrington’s And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953, Museum of Modern Art, NY. Maybe I’m drawn to this for the same reason that I keep returning to the desire to run away.

Summer is good to me. It always has been. It’s indulgent and abundant and vanquishes doubt. Because summer is such a departure from mundanity for me, when it starts to ebb, I am filled with uncertainty and the worry that a deep-set routine will breed instability in myself. September’s arrived and I’m cringing, hesitantly treading into patterns and testing for what I can withstand until the next liberating upheaval. 

In truth, as summer is leaving, I can’t wait for it to come back again. Until my next great summer!

Yours truly,

Cali

*Regularly scheduled Crit and general writings should (hopefully) resume in the coming weeks.*