Love

And why not
after you spit out the sour
fruit, swallowed the pit
by accident, or waited
ages for a ripening
that happened all
too quick

Why not,
even finding rot
in the pith
or softening edges 
of your chambers

Why not still open your hand?

○

For the second-timers in love. The third. Fourth. All at once in an open configuration. Again and again with the same person. Or with no person at all, but through the reverence of deep focus and communion with a task, a tree, a cause—congratulations on surrendering to such a weird wellspring of pain and pleasure.

Trees shook rain like sleep from their eyes but I still wanted to light the fire. Why? Mostly because I wanted to feel better in the face of uncertainty, both in terms of my own life and in the world at large. To take in what dispels the night and use it as a source of volition. And communion. Think of any campfire you’ve been to—when have you not felt better after bathing in its warm, muted glow, especially with other people around? But even lighting a candle on your own can be a potent source of comfort, a way to greet the luminous red-orange of your solitude trailed by the blue veil of your aloneness. If humanity itself has a life then fire is one of its animators.

One of my favorite students told me about burning the daljip (moon house), a Korean folk tradition on Jeju Island where she is from. It also occurs with regional differences across the country. On the first full moon of the lunar new year, people write their wishes on strips of paper, fasten them to structures made of dry grass, wood, and straw, and set them on fire. In the context of Jeju Island, this ritual is part of a wider fire festival that evolved from bangae, the practice of burning dry fields. The original purpose was to clear weeds and pests, as well as to enrich the soil. Calling in luck coincided with doing what had to be done so people could eat.

As we arranged dry wood, cardboard, and pinecones, I recalled the final lines of Karina Borowicz’s poem “September Tomatoes.”

My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village

as they pulled the flax. Songs so old

and so tied to the season that the very sound

seemed to turn the weather.

Songs that turn the weather are what we do (beyond or accompanying labor) to ease the passage, whether of time, of season, or of age. What I didn’t realize when I lit the fire was that I didn’t need to just “dispel the night” like I’d first thought. Instead, I sat in comfortable proximity to a blaze that would eventually extinguish itself, smoke spiraling upward into a dark sky as generative as my uncertainty. If everything were spelled out there would be no swing, no wiggle room to create. As unforgiving as uncertainty can feel, in that way it is also magnanimous.

Through the smoke I saw flickers of an eggshell moon.

⚪

Sources

• Korea’s Pastimes and Customs: A Social History By I-hwa

• Why Jeju Sets a Mountain on Fire: The Story Behind the Jeju Island Fire Festival

• Jeju Fire Festival: Korea’s Fiery Celebration of Renewal and Tradition

• Jeju Fire Festival

• “September Tomatoes”

If anyone would like to share further resources or knowledge about Jeongwol Daeboreum, feel free to comment. :)

Prettiest sunset I ever saw was from a dead car on the outskirts of São Paulo. We were on the way home from a week at the beach, which unfortunately I spent lashing out in the throes of post job-loss depression. The rise of AI didn’t just make me obsolete. It made me mean. But we’d been planning the trip for months, so I followed through. That ocean, endless and expansive as my family’s forgiveness, foamed at the mouth, letting us step out of its silver spume with cold, indifferent mercy, and in it I was as unwieldy as my anger. Only in hindsight can I marvel at the moonwake on the river. How it rippled over the imperfect convergence where freshwater fed salt, and boats came in tired from the vast and teeming darkness to dock for the night, their painted names barely legible but, chances are, bellowing the name of someone’s lover.

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When I ask for miracles I do so sardonically. I don’t think I will, or even should, get them. It’s a bore and a cheat—in stories, no one likes when a deus ex machina sweeps in and saves the day. But can’t a miracle also be mundane? If you’re at the end of your rope, try this: ask for enough space to open inside yourself that you find a way to go on.

I did. And then I asked to find something I could get behind and breathe life into.

So I looked for another job, summoning the same energy as when I waltzed into a newly-opened restaurant a few years back and talked myself into employment (despite having no prior experience). I served tables and folded pizza boxes until the place itself folded; the collapse of a culinary empire sealed in a letter from the IRS. This time, I had experience, but no places were hiring. I also got ghosted online. “Keep applying,” so says the mantra of a freelancer. I just needed to put myself out there, work hard, and surrender to the fucking flow of the universe. Or whatever.

And then a miracle came knocking at my door. Call it kismet, call it coincidence, or call it the neighborhood grapevine bearing fruit—whatever it was, she changed my life. Her name is Mayita. She came to see if I wanted a job.

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The tree was tall and rotting. I passed it every morning on my walk, greeted the surucuá nesting in its boughs, and once hung a painting on a thick piece of bark curling from the trunk. Every day, the tree leaned a shade further away from the path. I didn’t think much about it until the first summer storm rolled through.

When the winds picked up and the old tree fell, it brought down a revelation hidden in its crown. Up there in the blue-green overstory of rain and cloud forests, leaf litter and other organic debris accumulates over decades. Or centuries. What decomposes in branch crooks and crevices turns into a home for those who know how to make one. Bacteria, fungi, insects, worms, birds, and epiphytes dwell in these engulfing mats of matter, commonly called canopy soil. There are entire gardens hidden to the eyes of those of us on the ground. Lushness suspended. Some things belong to earth and sky.

We filled a bag and forgot about it. The storms passed, as they do, and another year flew by. The surucuá called from other trees. I wore a new path around where the old one used to be. November—it was time to get planting. The day I resolved to start, a heavy spring rain dampened my plan to go down to the mounds of rich dark soil near the banana grove. From there I could lug buckets full of soil back up to my makeshift plant nursery. Enough to get started. There are far more ideal and fail-safe ways to sow seeds, but sometimes it’s better to use what’s at hand than do nothing at all.

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Rain treads through the trees 
with little green footsteps, through 
the brown and the nests 
and the lightning that could bring 
it all down. Step off the path

if you stay. Stemflow
on a deerskin trunk brings food
from the canopy.
Everyone swoons and disrobes
in the wind. Step off the path

and crunch leaf litter 
underfoot. If your mind leaps
and boils, tell it to
the open air. The green rain.
We are water protecting

and destroying it-
self. Help me gather leaves to
mulch the bed. Our dreams
will smell damp with petrichor. 
The bed frame was a tree once.

Honeybear, know when
to hunt, when to hibernate.
Go into the cracks
of your mourning. I’ll meet you
at the inner horizon.

—Thanks for reading. :) This poem was originally published in my collection Raw Wing.

It was Sunday, so I went stone-thieving again. The rain had scrubbed everything clean, washing away the fine, loose soil that topped the unpaved road, leaving it bare-boned. The city had yet to fix it. Jagged gullies where the rain knifed its way down could spin your wheels if you weren’t careful driving through. These were the water paths I wanted to follow.

Nowhere to be and no one to answer to—my kind of day. The plan was to collect rocks, stones, broken tile, road glass (like sea glass but not), and other bits and bobs to make a mosaic in my kitchen. The original idea came from a storm. Windhowl, so loud it woke me up, tore through the trees one night and left chaos in its wake. I often spiral in situations like this. But sometimes, disarray, whether human, elemental, or circumstantial, offers a moment of quiet. A bargain: if I live through this, I will make something. The making can be internal, subjective, or intangible. This time around, it would be physical and slow. I resolved to represent the wind in my home as a mosaic.

As with any project, you brainstorm then draft. A storm brews outside and you open your mind to receive the currents of muse, deferring judgment until you see what kind of shape the structure’s in. The problem I encountered early on involved solidification. How do you design wind? How do you imitate its forms, suggestions, and impressions with other materials? Can you do it with the density of rock and stone? At the foot of these questions I knelt on a still-wet road.

As usual, I was unprepared despite having prepared. My two plastic bags ripped open while I sought out rocks, careful not to pick up dried dog turds (which unfortunately resembled the stormy gray rocks I coveted most). Above in the trees, the monkeys swung about before lingering, making sure to display their buttholes in full glory. I did not return the favor. They watched me, a fool, dropping stones from my bags like moonfat dripping down the night’s chin. I paused to clap mosquitos out of existence and consider my options.

Weighed down with rocks in my pockets and buoyed by blue glass cupped carefully in my palms, I trekked back home to outline an idea. The crushed stone, tile, and glass melange I stole from the road now had to be configured to trace the wind.

The wind hinges between the physical and metaphysical, the actual and the abstract, capricious power to be feared and sustaining power to be revered. You can measure its presence through anemometers for speed and vanes for direction, or through its impact on surrounding objects. In meteorology, airflows from different directions either converge (meet) or diverge (spread), patterns that can induce vertical motion and play a vital role in shaping weather systems. A living entity to ancient peoples, the wind now feels to me like a reminder of our own complexities, particularly when we move, meet, and part ways under various kinds of pressure. From the wavering line of being emerges another state of becoming.

What better place to put all this than the kitchen, the most concentrated site of mundane magic in the house? I set to work outlining. Chalk didn’t work, charcoal wouldn’t stick, and I didn’t want to waste my precious (and expensive) paints. So I used the only other thing we had on-hand: lime plaster. A word of the wise to all my fellow uncoordinated makers: do not juggle your phone, paper design plan, and DIY plaster pot made of a cut plastic bottle. Furthermore, do not do this while wearing baggy gloves and perching on a broken brick. I have news for you: the plaster will fall.

Fall it did. Because lime is alkaline, it often does not sting immediately. I laughed (in shock) in the face of a delayed-onset chemical burn. My husband shouted at me to strip and get in the shower. I told him if he wanted me to do that, he’d have to ask nicely. He yelled again. Upon removing my clothes I body-scanned and found that it had somehow gotten…let’s just say in nether regions where you really don’t want it to.

The garden and back porch got a deep wash; no burns left their mark. I was scarred but in that way that makes you feel more alive. The initial design went up on the wall, and in the coming days and weeks, my solid Aeolian elements nestled in cement that grew as we worked the layers on. All the while, I studied the wind, this thing that enters, escapes, and emanates from our bodies, that spirals in forces stronger than human thought, that disperses and unsettles as much as it carries and shapes. I found in the soft side of stone a graspable side of wind. Which is to say that you can do things backward, discover a means of getting on through what seems like an end, and allow your own spiraling to take you somewhere.

The first time I felt part of my husband’s family was when I lopped a tree that had taken root dangerously close to our house. They told me that it reached its height in the time my husband was away making money in the States. Six months of growth in a hungry forest stretched the sapling taller than my 173 centimeters. With everyone too busy to take on the job, I quietly grabbed a machete and went to work.

In this family, the primary values are productivity, shared labor, and mutual support. My husband and his six siblings each possess a relentless work ethic that stems from their mother, who finished raising them when her husband died. I can only describe Zizi as a force of nature. Spry in her late seventies, she puts me to shame when it comes to homemaking. When I arrived in Brazil and into the bagunça of making a collective homestead, everyone welcomed me with open arms. They demanded nothing I wasn’t willing to give. But I still felt the need to earn my keep. As someone who is slow to leap into action, it took some adjusting. I’m more prone to spending free moments dreaming, reading, painting, or walking than seeking out further tasks to accomplish.

At the time, the only houses standing on our property belonged to my mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Unbeknownst to Zizi, a large chunk of the money that paid for building her house came from my husband trimming marijuana under the table. Think of any odd job; he has probably done it. In this case, he reconfigured the truth when he spoke to his family due to the criminalization of marijuana. He told his mother he was arranging flowers.

I judged him for it, believing that prosocial lying is still lying, hence harmful. But the more time I spend with Zizi, the longer I am away from my family of origin, and the more I chameleonize to live in another culture, the less certain I am of anything. What do I know of the things people do to go on, to ease the lives of their loved ones? I painted a portrait of Zizi watering her husband’s garden and feeding the chickens, taking care of what is around her. As is her way. A mother who in her mind’s eye saw a son fighting tooth and nail to live in another country, at times sleeping in stranger’s homes or on the street. Hardening his mettle, working working to come home one day. Everything brightened by beacons of kindness.

What really do I know? I who joined a family by felling a tree.

This reflection has been brewing for a long time, but the final pieces came together when I read Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays.” I echoed his lines, “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

I had on the wrong shoes to clean the bush. My sister-in-law immediately sent me back to change, which is how I ended up wearing the Cobra Boots. Large and sleek, they reminded me of seals on my feet. But a sunsoak on the beach was just another animal dream in the darkness of the jungle, where a misstep without the boots’ protection can be fatal. Over 27,000 snake bites are reported every year in Brazil, and I’m not foolish enough to think I would be an exception.

From time to time we clean around the jungle growing by the house. This helps with ventilation, an important factor in places with mosquitos and mold. The work is no joke: manually creating airflow with a machete is a perfectly acceptable way to get buff. And the Cobra Boots are a must if you want to do it safely. But I had a thought that stopped me in my tracks. For a moment, I didn’t want the boots. I wanted the snakes to find me. And I chose to get curious about this.

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The snake I’m told to look out for is the Bothrops jararaca. Agile, adaptive, and capable of camouflage, the jararaca is a highly venomous viper responsible for most of the snake bites that occur in Brazil. The specific epithet is derived from the Tupi words yarará and ca, meaning “large snake.” In addition to this epithet, I would give this creature the literary epithet of “honey-venom” due to the groundbreaking role that its venom played in the treatment of hypertension, kidney protection, and heart failure. Captopril, the first ACE inhibitor, was synthesized based on the structure of a peptide found in jararaca venom. Though myself weary of pharmaceutical products, I still see the poetry in this, and I am interested in the line or relationship between harm and health. How can medicine be derived from a toxin? How can we make honey from the venom in our lives?

As we worked, I thought about a story my mother-in-law told me, one that she heard in Bahia. In a house on a roça, a woman wondered why her baby would not stop crying. Every night, half-asleep, she nursed the child but still he grew thin and weak. One night, her husband made a fire to scorch away the darkness. To his horror, he discovered the reason for their suffering: a snake had made its home in their bed, drinking the mother’s milk and leaving its tail in the child’s mouth to suckle.

In the daylight, (in my practical and logical reasoning), I wear the boots because like any being hardwired to survive, I fear pain and death. But in the realm of metaphor, I want the snakes to find me. Not as a death wish, but as a desire to encounter creatures so capable of inspiring both revulsion and fascination. Depending on which mythological framework or story, snakes are associated with evil or with rebirth, renewal, and immortality. As far as I’m concerned, snakes have their own inscrutable lives, which I respect. From them I’ve learned to love the ground and know the world through my belly. Uncoiling my need to control everything helps me traverse the profound uncertainties of life.

Beneath a dense canopy at twilight, what I really want to meet is my fear itself. Off come the heavy boots; the forest floor is wet and fragrant with decay. The trees lose their leaves to let the light through, the snakes rub against rocks and logs to molt, and don’t I, too, shed my skin?

Sweet tea to sleep through the night and wake to spread tart jam on buttery toast—this was my tiny dream that took me through the week, through all the evening work to homemake these treats. We started years ago from seedlings. The nectarines came to fruition three years later, as did the flies that left their larvae inside. Harmless but unappealing protein. I spent hours carving them out. The chamomile was simpler. All I needed was a straw hat to block the sun and a bowl to hold the blooms.

The trouble started with my urge to economize. I put the two in the dehydrator at a heat best suited for the flower—novice mistake number one. The chamomile sipped the nectarine’s moisture, extending the drying time at too low a temperature. A night and half a day later, I composted most of the first fruit batch in fear of bacterial growth. Live and learn. When I could pinch the little suns and their surrounding clouds crumbled apart, I knew the chamomile was done. Bitter honey and green apple aroma in the jar.

The bruised and overripe fruits of the second batch turned black in the dehydrator. I removed them. The rest shrank slightly but didn’t dry. That’s when we discovered my novice (and more consequential) mistake number two: I underpowered the device. There wasn’t enough juice to reach the drying window. Where I live, you can fry a machine by plugging it into the wrong outlet. On the flip side, too little voltage can slowly cause damage. Luckily the dehydrator whirred to life without hesitation when we fixed my error. Through trial and error, (mostly error), I learned the hard way to give things the correct energy.

Since I gave my days to nectarine and chamomile over the weekend, Sunday night arrived with a reckoning: the rest of the garden still needed watering. A few weeks with little rain had wilted the borderline hardy plants and brittled the leaves of the most parched. I’d been so excited, steeped in projects of pruning, harvesting, cleaning, dehydrating, and jamming, that I’d neglected the rest.

The fireflies and I flirted in the thick darkness. I unwound the hose, turning my headlamp on low to court the beetles and their bioluminescence. Ours is a patchwork garden that makes use of sun, space, and amended soil pockets on the land, so watering means winding my way around the place. The weekend had already been rife with mistakes, so I was careful not to commit more. To encourage outward root growth, I watered the fruit trees at the drip line (the outer edge of their canopies). That’s where the feeder roots lie. If the leaf mulch I’d left earlier that week had blown too close, I cleaned around the trunks. We would not run out of water mid-soak because I turned on the pump to draw from the well. Yes, all was well. I abandoned myself to the task.

In Brazil there’s a popular saying, “se fosse uma cobra,” for when you miss the obvious. It translates to “if it were a snake,” insinuating that whatever you missed is close enough to bite you.

Down the stairs, past the atemoia bursting off their branches, I stopped to inspect the ciriguela tree post-prune. It wasn’t the season for it, but my husband recently gave a little haircut to help things along. While checking for possible leafcutter ant activity on the tree, I nearly stepped on it before I saw it: a red, black, and white river. Limbless undulation the colors of the cobra-coral, among the most venomous snakes in Brazil.

No good looking up if you’ll miss the biting ground.

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Raw Wing traces what happens when a homebody uproots—when both home and the body must stretch to hold new horizons. These poems dwell in the saudade of emigration: flight taken without vision, what sinks under the skin of memory, landscapes like a bruise you press until tender. Each poem unveils new dimensions of loss and renewal.

Poetry, art, and writing were lifelines when I moved to a different country. And when I felt like a stranger to my own life, these acts gave me a deeper place to go. They are my wilderness and my path. In lieu of a typical Substack post this month, I’m going to share two poems from the collection, which you can purchase here.

How to Rewild Yourself in a City

Circulate blood through vessels, 
belly shakes through people, 
dreams like good fire 
in the underbrush. Shrug off 
the stiff postures of constant comfort. 
Open your throat. Look in all directions, 
even if pollution washes out the sky 
or dims the stars. Gather sustenance 
in the seams. Forage the fruit of your fair labor.

There are built environments around, within, 
and between. If you can't find the green 
in urban space, remember the cosmos already grows 
a chorus of hues
inside you.


Bitter

I've gotten used to loneliness beneath
the tongue; no way to sing an ache in key

with birds too busy building nests in nooks
and crannies to see the rotting trunk. Sky-

ward, the branches write their sorrow through smoke:
crooked green tomes tell of the burning. Spring

came late this year. Too little rain to wash
the air cerulean. But still the shrubs

peek out of sun-split ground, soft like ever-
green boldo, leaves as acrid as the smoke,

and bitterness becomes the medicine.

Thank you for making it this far! To read more, you can acquire Raw Wing here. All support is deeply appreciated.

I’ll start with the boring and the obvious: habits and routines craft something the shape of a life. Even a propensity toward sudden erratic turnings is a habit of sorts, one that streamlines chaos. Like making a bed in bedlam. On the other hand, rigid routines can imprison as much as they provide structure. I would know. I used to be so attached to my routines that even a slight deviation felt like a personal affront. But when I got married, I chose to locate myself in a shared future with someone way more mellow. My husband, the reed in the wind. Strong, flexible, and rooted. Our current lives bend toward a dream of finishing our handmade house and devoting more time to our garden.

When Alaska swallowed him this past summer, the farsickness lodged in my gut. He went there to work, building roads and cabins while I stayed in Los Angeles at the mercy of occasional sketchy reception to hear from him. Our routine was the crackle of these conversations. Green with desire. The long gaps between. Until the realities of our shifting planet intervened.

A magnitude 7.3 earthquake and subsequent tsunami warning sobered my dreaming. According to the United States Geological Survey, “an earthquake is caused by a sudden slip on a fault when stress overcomes friction, releasing energy in waves.” I would’ve given anything to feel it, to be together in and through it, to have our own faults suddenly slip past one another and release again.

Refreshing my browser for updates and researching earthquakes could only mask the anxiety for so long. Eventually, I had to confront what I would do if something happened to my husband. A slim chance but there all the same. This might sound like catastrophizing, but it was a good question. Routines make and unmake us. I was so caught up in mine that it left little room for considering other possibilities.

The phone call came as I walked through a park. He was alright: not a scratch, not even disarray in the pantry. We laughed in mundane relief and talked about what would’ve happened to our vision if he died. A house unfinished. A garden left to riot. A brutal undoing of a difficult undertaking. I found out that I would have gone back to Brazil and tried to carry on the work as best I could. And through rupture continue writing about the intricate, useless, and delightful structure of my life.

Talk to your elders grown silver-

sprung and tempered. Ask them

to peel back their years.

So begins my favorite poem I wrote this summer, one about my indomitable father-in-law—a seasoned and cantankerous man if ever there was one. (You can read more about him in “Toothless: The Growers and the Grifters,” published here on this Substack). From attending community college to volunteering with a food recovery organization to entering a new family, I have always instinctually nurtured intergenerational relationships. Even when there is some dissonance, the chorus of different timescapes sounds fuller and richer with the timbre of different ages in the mix.

A few weeks ago I had the immense pleasure of attending Doña Carmen Dinos’ 102nd birthday party. Her daughter, my friend Mayita, invited me to what would be the event of the season at the assisted living facility where Carmen resides. Mayita—a visionary artist, singer, and landscape designer—prepared a concert to celebrate her mother’s life. Balloon-strewn, the room filled to the gills with partygoers. Some ladies dressed to the nines in their finest silk and jewels. The men dapper in collared shirts. Others came more casually dressed but equally ready to enjoy the music and cakes. Fruit tart and tres leches. Tangy and sweet.

There’s a pervasive assumption that aging equates only to a rigidity of the self and fragility of the body. That people calcify as they passively get old. But I have friends who bloomed, who ripened as they grew older. Playwright and Jungian analyst Florida Scott-Maxwell writes that “when you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.” I’m interested in this fierceness, and in what it means to age well.

I’ll start with storyness. We are primed to think in narrative terms, make meaning, and seek resonance. In other words, we are storied beings. I’m blessed to have friends (of all ages) who are generous in sharing and in asking. I turn to them as often as I do to the luminous silence that comes with solitude.

At the party, I sat in the front row right next to Carmen. She happily held court as guests lavished her with compliments. To wield charm, quips, and anecdotes with such ease at 102 is to challenge the singular narrative of decline associated with having more years behind than ahead. There are more possibilities for any given person, for a given day or a given hour. I think I live for those possibilities.

The paisley on Carmen’s dress looked like a garden of curling vines and blossoms, a motif that also appeared in Mayita’s songs. Between greeting her guests, Carmen and I chatted about gardens, parties, and social life at the facility. Someone gifted her a hand fan. At the chaperoned dances of her youth in Puerto Rico, fans were an extension of a woman’s body: a way to speak one’s longing or distaste. Carmen showed me how she once twirled, drew, rested, tapped, snapped, and stirred the air to convey her feelings. Another language of love.

I’m not sure when or if I’ll see Carmen again. That’s the pain and blessing of living in two different places. A continent away, my life stretches to hold other relationships, encounters, and meanings, concentrated by the impermanence we all share. Everything thrown into relief by unavoidable and imminent departures.

They swarmed after the first spring rain, nuptial flight beneath a butterscotch sun. Only the reproductive ants (known as alates) have wings, and they clouded the humid air with earth pigments: burnt sienna and umber, rust, peat. It was a day of collective emergence. Atta leafcutter societies do not signal to one another, yet they act in synchronicity: their bodies reading rainfall, humidity, and temperature as the language for species survival. Across the forests and red clay roads where I live, underground chambers pulsed with soft urgency. The nests sighed. Again and again, releasing the alates in waves to satiate predators long enough to give the rest of the population a fighting chance. Or a loving chance: the whole purpose is to mate.

My husband and I hurried with plastic bottles to catch the fallen angels before they burrowed. It has never stirred me to handle plastic—a crude and absent presence—but I was grateful to repurpose the bottles. Holding a half-filled bottle teeming with ants to eye level, I took a brief break to watch my husband speed-gather the alates. I saw him through the clear plastic and through the amber translucence of wings that detach by design. It hit me then how our actions would reverberate into the future, into the ground, and into our garden. A single queen can lay tens of thousands of eggs per day. On average she will live for eight to fifteen years. How many millions of daughters (and less sons) would she bring into the world? How many nests did we prevent? The prelude to these answers crawled in the bottles we lined by the chicken coop.

~

The taste of peach lingered on my tongue hours after ants stripped bare the tree’s green. It wasn’t the first time. I’d gone to sleep after watering our small orchard and woken to find the foliage on some trees thinned and tattered; agony like that of a bad haircut. But time alone wouldn’t fill out the leaves. Other measures had to be taken. So out came the tape to ring around the trunk and line with glue (a temporary barrier). Up went the broom to sweep away the stragglers. We’d eaten the first and only peach the tree bore before scout ants ventured up the trunk. A small mouthful for each of us: sweet bursts of gold with a hint of tang. It’s likely that as I separated the stone from the flesh of the fruit, the initial scouts marked a trail with pheromones for worker ants to follow. From there, they would use their jaws like a chainsaw to cut leaf fragments and haul them back to their nests. Long green ribbons winding back underground.

I felt aggrieved, robbed of the redolent sweetness entitled to us. But that got boring after a while. So I looked into how the ants do their thing, that trick of dragging winter into spring by turning branches into bones. And that’s how I found myself reaching into the dream depths pulsing below.

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There are many ways to inhabit the in-between. In landscapes, in encounters and stages of life, liminality colors the place where solid expectations may slip into something else. Everyone—even those who apparently possess the iron grip of certainty—passes through these thresholds. Despite its ambiguity, there is a rich fecundity in the in-between worthy of study. Take ecotones, for example: the transitional areas between neighboring ecologies where species meet and integrate. The increased biodiversity possible in these zones suggests a thriving borne of tension. Estuaries, marshland, and the area between grassland and forest all nurture such diversity. However, frequent or intense disturbance may also heighten vulnerability.

For years now I’ve crisscrossed between two countries; my life feels made of sutures in the interstice. Each time I uproot I leave behind ripples and loose ends. Dying gardens. Boxes of books with spines uncracked. Friendships to tend to. As someone who can’t help but drag her heels in the mud of change, who often gets mired in small worries, I have to actively seek out other vantage points. Reminders that we are in a constant state of flux even if we can’t see it, shedding cells and selves in a nebulous becoming. One way is through the sublime: to immerse oneself in something vast (through nature or art). For an easy taste of the sublime I might fix my eyes on the horizon, the limit of visible range, that apparent line where sky meets earth or sea and which will always recede. Move toward it, and you will never touch a physical barrier. There is no arrival.

But where I live in Brazil it is hard to see the horizon. I live on land shaped like a bowl of forest. A living verdant songbook. And so I had to listen and attune to other places. Wind hush and water trickle bring you to a pond teeming with critters. Koi snaking orange and white through turbid water. A bullfrog nighttime chorus. Us when we swim. Like the other bodies of water in the neighborhood, this one is filled with the silt of stories that sink, settling in murky depths. When (or if) your feet touch the bottom, it gives.

For instance: I would’ve swum in the pond that one day if it weren’t for the dead dog. Hours passed as my father-in-law and I struggled to fish the bloated body out. Heavy air pressing in our lungs. First we tried with bamboo harvested from the grove around the corner. When that failed we enlisted my husband’s help with a rope and lasso method. Pond hours pass differently. We never discovered what happened, and had to bury our speculation with the dog.

Other local stories have surfaced. The brothers that set out for a night paddle on a big lake not far from us. How the billowing mist must have diffused the moonlight. How the black water swallowed the clink of their beer bottles before it swallowed them. Or the hearsay shape of them. Rumors of other drownings shroud our waters with fear, though I never know how much stock to put in these stories.

Despite the potential danger, I love the neighborhood ponds. I love how they blur lines between land, water, and sky. Between transience and connection. Tilapia surface in mirrored clouds, a liquid skyscape I enter with relish. Plumbing the cold depths with my toes might draw blood from grazing an unseen branch, or yield the soft brush of a passing fish. I feel much the same swimming in ponds as I do talking to another person when we are both exuberant. We spill into each other from a sense of overflow.

I have not swum in any ponds upon returning to Los Angeles. Parched, I looked for other bodies of water—and found them in the form of people. My friends and their immaculate murk. I’m just passing through, but already these encounters have seeped through my skin. This is another way to live beyond ourselves, in the in-between, in the blue of another person.

He’s a splendid bird. Named after a samba by Adoniran Barbosa (whose hoarse tones echo in Arnesto’s crow), this rooster is a true denizen of the day and the dust. Mornings find him on the bamboo post, his neck straining with the force of his call. Constant dust baths and preening restore his luster. When we toss kitchen scraps to the flock, Arnesto calls the hens over to eat their fill before him. Same goes for worms in the compost heap. Red-crowned and robed in chestnut and turquoise, he has strutted his way into the feelingscape of our land. Memory has topography, and Arnesto moves through mine.

Watching him, I’ve learned better how to look. And that was how I saw things I didn’t want to see.

It was the blood on their backs that did it.

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The cusp of winter. Inky darkness draining from the sky, and the last stars will wash out in the dawn. Until then I don fingerless gloves and clutch a little lantern to make my way up the loose dirt hill and through the mandioca lining the path. Bundled in layers against the cold, I walk to catch the first light.

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I taught my body clock to wake me at nearly the same time every morning, two minutes before a 5 a.m. alarm and an hour before the rooster crows (though I sleep like a stone through the night, I’ve been told that the rooster first crows at 3:30 a.m.). Before I knew the benefits of morning walks, I did it for poetic momentum. If nothing else, the ringing hush of dawn sinks below the surface of mundane tasks, work, and responsibilities I have to take care of later on. No matter how stressed I get, I remember the imprint that the day’s beginning has left in me.

On the road I turn off my light and walk by memory. There is the musky outline of the tall pine, which means the crack waiting to catch my foot is a step ahead. There are the two glowing eyes of the school bus approaching, which means it’s 5:45. The wayback marker is my neighbor’s bougainvillea. Its flowers pink and paper-thin, barely visible in the early hours.

Daily patterns and protocols grease the wheels and keep your spirits high. Occasionally breaking them does the same. For me, I can outwalk most disquiet before it sets in. These morning walks regulate the little almond in my brain that deals with anxiety and fear (otherwise known as the amygdala). The chickens need their corn and feed, clothes need hanging, and breakfast needs cooking. Why not cushion these tasks in extra golden minutes? Why not hold the dawn in awe, and let the morning make of me what it will?

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This time last year the lake was lined with litterfall and white down, and waterfowl flew through a hush crowning the pines. I raked needles on the path to the duck coop, listening between strokes to the wind straddle the line between music and noise. If I thought too hard about what I was doing, it felt like a useless endeavor—the next strong wind that kicked up would disarray the heap, and the needles are too acidic for garden mulch—but I gave myself to the rhythm of the task. It made everyone around me happy, too. The folks I live with were raised sweeping houses and yards alike, which is why they hated the white feathers littering the lake.

All our ducks seemed to be molting at once. They buried their faces in plumage and loosened tufts of feathers. Jarring red faces emerged. In a repeating and perplexing daydream of mine, a muscovy duck takes off his caruncle like a commedia dell’arte actor removing his mask in the dwindling high of a post-show blues.

This time last year I began sidestepping my own blues. Low spirits hang around most of my family members, but it was my first time dancing with them regularly. In the process of building our house, my husband and I bent our lives towards an imagined future, focusing all our energy and resources into a structure that didn’t exist yet. Slow and heavy work took its toll. My hair grew long but began to thin. I plucked strands off clothing and shook them outside in the wind.

One of the ducks eyed me with malice if I got too close. Fierce and broody, she pulled feathers from her breast to line her nest and hissed at onlookers, thieves, and potential intruders (read: us). I stepped by quietly and dutifully changed her drinking water. I did not rake nearby. Needles and leaves quilted the ground. Stray feathers like the aftermath of a child’s pillow fight.

It occurred to me that I could read my hair loss and the lattice of melancholy tightening around my chest in a different way. If I’m prone to brooding, then let that word encompass both its meanings. The broody duck pulled out her feathers, my hair fell out and glinted in the sun, and both of us moved toward building our nests.