margins of a future field
I wrote this for myself. I still am. These words weren’t meant as wisdom so much as survival notes — reminders scrawled in the dirt to keep myself upright. I need them, still. I may always.
This isn’t a system. Systems end in binders and conferences, and I don’t have the patience for either. What I mean to do is leave scraps in the margins — the edges of the field where ambition thins out, where chickens tear up the neat rows, where potatoes volunteer in the compost pile.
These aren’t commandments. They’re closer to the things I jot on the back of a seed packet or mutter over a stubborn lump of clay: crooked, half-erased, obvious only once the season has already passed. Still, scraps outlast sermons.
Some things aren’t meant to be pushed that far. They’re like clay worked too long on the wheel: what once held promise slumps, exhausted, into collapse. Better to keep such things sacred than to spin them into oblivion.
Even though I don’t pray, work feels like prayer when I keep the rhythm. I forget that often. Out of rhythm, it’s just banging pots or pounding wet clay until it rips. I remember this too much.
I have to remember: put my body into the work, but not so deep that I scrape myself bare like soil stripped of topsoil. Burnout doesn’t regenerate, no matter how much compost you pile on after.
Publishing? It works better when I let it move like a tide: lunar, subtle, briny. The calendar rarely agrees, but the tide doesn’t check with me either.
Only teach what’s seeped all the way down into the marrow. Everything else is just borrowed lines, and borrowed lines don’t survive the weather.
And the garden — God, the garden out-teaches the internet every single time. Usually with fewer words and better jokes. But the garden does have a lot to say, all the time.
Urgency is basically kitchen scraps. Give it a season and it rots into something actually useful.
When my nervous system tightens, I have to close the gate. The weeds will still be there tomorrow. They always are.
Money isn’t evil. It’s just heavy — like a sack of feed I’ve carried too far without pausing. If I carry it out of rhythm, it will grind me down.
Love is heavy too, but differently. Love is a structure; relationship is soil. Both need tending, amendments, sometimes even fallow seasons.
Mystery behaves like a crock of ferment. It resists explanation until it’s ready.
Better to offer something small than explain it away. A basket of eggs is an offering.
If someone needs to find me, let it be by scent, not signal. The dogs understand this. They always find me in the night. Never market myself — I received this as mercy.
And when words fail — which they do, more and more often for me — plant. Beauty always out-teaches rhetoric.
I tell myself to write for the ones who’ll crawl through collapse with their souls still intact. They’ll need something to laugh at and to hold on their heart. Collapse itself doesn’t need debating — it’s just compost in disguise.
The body speaks before the mind consents. Always has. My mind still tries to argue, but the body wins. My greatest elder is my body.
Mornings are my seed bank.
Heavy truths, like well-worn tools, keep their strength only in silence—noise thins them out.
Days off with family are sacred, protect them fiercely. The schedule is already written: work by the moon, rest by the sun. Nature never asked for my approval.
That which can’t speak for itself — the only feedback loops worth trusting. Ignore plants and animals and watch the clever plans shrivel.
Wealth without rhythm corrodes faster than rust on a neglected shovel. A good tool, though, feels like a vow: it rests in the palm, always wanting to be there.
Knowledge should move like pollen: carried freely, but still traceable to its tree. Honoring the hive.
Margins are enough. I don’t need to finish the pattern — someone else will.
If I can’t laugh at my own notes, I’ve already built myself a prison. And I do laugh — often at the wrong times, but still.
And the last reminder, maybe the only one that matters: the future doesn’t care about my branding, or my precious five-year plans. The future only wants my compost.