That happy news I mentioned? Pregnancy. We began talking about another child when Felix was not but 4 months old. We had two embryos banked, both females, waiting to be awoken from their frozen slumber when the time was right. Their names were #2 and #13. We couldn’t transfer one until I was finished breastfeeding and that didn’t happen until Felix was 16 months. Soon after he was weaned we began the process - birth control, then meds to prep the uterus, monitoring to check the lining and finally, an embryo transfer. It was so different from the time we transferred Felix, when each day was a countdown and each moment an obsessive and fearful hope for the future. This time I went alone, barely scrambling childcare in time, distracted by my daily duties.
I also went in with major ambivalence. It took me a while to articulate this thought - I don’t want to be pregnant again, I don’t want to breastfeed again, I don’t want to raise a newborn again, but I am excited for the future of our family. I boasted to anybody who asked that I didn’t really care if it worked or didn’t, that our family is complete as it is. A little part of me even kind of hoped it wouldn’t work. I was proud of myself for being so chill, so blasé, so whatever. I was gripped with apathy.
So embryo #2 was transferred into me and the wait ensued. I took a pregnancy test far too early and it came back negative. I knew it would, it was only 3 days post transfer, but even so the result disappointed me. The disappointment surprised me. Maybe I really did want this. My husband and I talked about names, rarely agreeing until the name Ramona came up. Ramona means “wise protector”. We both loved it. Shortly after, I got a clue in my crossword “Cleary’s beloved character ___ Quimby". Ramona! A sign. More signs followed. A few days later there it was, a positive pee stick, positive blood work, steadily climbing HCG levels, and we rejoiced. Her name was Ramona Fern, a name, a daughter, a sister, an idea, a completion. She’d be due the day after my birthday, just how we planned it. She’d be two years and two months younger than her brother, just how we planned it. I told everybody - my family, acquaintances, far away friends - seeing no need to keep it to myself, despite how early it was. I’m excited. And besides, if it doesn’t work out, there’s no need for me to keep that to myself either, I reasoned. But why wouldn’t it work out? It’s a genetically tested embryo, she’s already implanted, my body has done this before.
Best laid plans, right?
We had our first ultrasound on Thursday and I went in more nervous than I expected to be. Danny and I took a few quiet moments in the car to press our foreheads together, to feel the assurance of each others’ presence. And then, just as sure as the pines are ever green, there she was, heart beat flashing like a disco ball. 111 bpm. The doctor took a picture and wrote “Hi Mom! Hi Dad! Here I am!”. Such relief! “Ramona!” we bellowed while driving home. Ramona is on her way!
That night my mom and her boyfriend came over for dinner. We told them of the heartbeat and they told us they were getting married. Joyous news all around. As I walked up the stairs to put Felix to bed I felt a wetness. Not unusual. The doctor told me to expect spotting. “Brown or pink” she’d said. But no, this was bright red. For 20 agonizing minutes I lay in the dark with Felix, unable to examine myself further, unable to Google. Once he was in a deep slumber I snuck away and checked again. More blood. I called for Danny. We didn’t know what to do so we kept going about our night and then I checked again. A big clot. Okay, I’m miscarrying. We examined it. It’s loose oval shape resembled the gestational sack we’d seen on the screen. This must be it, this must be her. I texted my friend Rachel “She’s gone.” Just like that. I can’t remember what prompted me to call the emergency line at the clinic, but the doctor on call gave us hope that this may just be bleeding from the subchorionic hemorrhage they spotted in the ultrasound. They’ll recheck in the morning. Reassured, I got back in bed.
An hour later, feeling my pad full, I stood up to go to the bathroom and whoosh, a gush. A large, wet softness fell out of me. Another step and another whoosh. “Oh my god” I gasped and Danny came running. Clots, cups worth. Very clearly my uterus was emptying itself. This is what I think it is. I showered, returned to bed, barely slept and bled all night. I dreamed I was in a multi-level shopping center, bleeding through my pants and desperately searching for a doctor. Finally I was in a hospital bed, surrounded by my grandmother’s elderly women friends, and an old woman doctor came in and declared me “still pregnant!” without examining me. “What? No!” I protested, “you have to check!”. “You’re pregnant!”, she yelled, “and you owe all of these women an apology!” In another restless dream I was soaking through pads and tampons on a white bed and dream Danny meanly said “you’re a fucking tick!”. Humiliated and confused, I demanded a divorce. (This is not a reflection of my marriage in the least. My brain was mirroring my stress back to me in terrible ways).
When we awoke early yesterday morning sobs poured out of me. A deep, wailing ache took over and Danny held me as it worked its way through. We entered the clinic later, just one day after seeing our girl’s flickering heart, both grasping at a faint shred of hope that maybe she had survived the trauma of the night before. No such luck. “I’m sorry” the same doctor said. She sat across from us, looked me directly in the eye and compassionately promised this was not my fault. Tears welled up. I needed to hear that more than I knew.
In the afternoon I picked up my guitar for the first time since before Felix was born. I crooned sad Roger Miller and Townes Van Zandt songs which felt an appropriate avenue for my tangled emotions. Felix objected, insisted I sing him Wheels on the Bus instead. Later, I drank a glass of tequila in the garden. I watched my boy excitedly try to touch the bees who were busy collecting pollen from the aster. Danny dug a hole beneath the honeysuckle and we buried a piece of my miscarriage. We held hands and pressed our foreheads together. Just then, my neighbor over the fence began playing “Right in Time” by Lucinda Williams.
Now I find myself wallowing in humility. How cavalier I was to tell everybody, how deceitful was my apathy. Why did I convince myself I didn’t care? How could I have not foreseen the depth of my desire? Not anticipated how much it’s going to suck to tell the moms at the playground? Not because it should be hidden, but because it actually hurts? I think I must have been shielding myself from the possibility of this moment. My nonchalance was proportional to the truth of my longing.
We got some really happy news which we commemorated by going to my secret pawpaw foraging spot and collected about 25 pounds worth of these soft little beauties. By the time we got home they had all mashed together in the bag and created a drippy mess (note to self: collect them flat somehow?) so I spent hours that night peeling the skin, processing the pulp and setting the seeds aside. A few days later I met up with my garden club gals and made them a pawpaw pudding. It was delicious! The consistency of pumpkin pie but with that distinctive pawpaw flavor - kind of banana/mango-y.
I went dormant. With the most earnest of intentions and fervor to write, I began this blog as I was beginning grad school, where I intended to use my talents in writing and photography to carve out a little niche for myself among the naturalist-minded artists of the world. I felt a responsibility to understand the mechanisms of environmental degradation so that I could effectively translate it, so that those translations would create a stir in somebody else’s heart. I am still compelled to this because it’s something I can offer, but the enthusiasm for creation retreated inward when the pandemic hit. Priorities shifted. We were living in Crown Heights where the orthodox community flouted safety guidelines. I was panicking daily at the idea of Danny’s asthmatic lungs succumbing to the mysterious deadly virus and Trump was threatening to red zone New York, so we left. Moving to Danny’s hometown in Maryland was never the plan, but weeks in an airbnb became “why don’t we see what’s for rent here?” and well, we just stayed. I graduated over zoom. We started trying to get pregnant. Art took a backseat.
Fast forward 3 years. I’m writing this from the garden sanctuary I built in the backyard of a townhouse in a big but small enough town. We rented this house because I was led here by a rabbit. No lie. I was out jogging one day and stopped in front of a house that had a For Rent sign. Suddenly, a rabbit appeared. It hopped over to my shoe, sniffed it, and kept hopping down the sidewalk before it cut into a yard. I followed it and the house it turned at also had a For Rent sign. That’s the house we live in.
the backyard, June, 2020
the garden, May, 2023
We bought an old fishing cabin with a one-acre pond in the Catskills in 2021. Turns out, mortgage rates were at an all-time low, which is feeling pretty good from my seat here in 2023. The property is a stunning place with tall white pines reflected on the glassy surface of the pond like a painting. We’re building a home there, but it’s not ready to move into yet.
the pond in June
The biggest, wildest, most beautiful thing that’s happened was that we had a child. His name is Felix. His name means lucky, which suits him, and not just because he was born on the thirteenth minute of St. Patrick’s Day. He is big-eyed with a broad smile and a sweetness that would tank the most cynical of hearts. He’s approaching 18 months old and it is only now that I feel like I can sit and write about the complex miracle of motherhood. It has walloped me. It’s an ever-changing bigness that has shifted my identity in that I am either fully consumed and comfortable as mother and/or finding other parts of me brushing up against mother that the delineations between Hope and mother are so blurry that even the Hope that is separate from Felix is just that - Hope separate from child, not just Hope. That probably makes no sense. It’s just that the lines are not clear and there is no such thing as compartmentalizing “runner” “gardener” “friend” anymore because now I am a gardener who is a mother, a friend who is a mother, etc. Anyway, he is wonderful. He is everything I hoped for and I really hoped for this child. We conceived him via IVF, which was a fog of stress and emotion that took a long time but now looking back feels like a blip compared to the onslaught of vigilance, patience, resolve and exhaustion it requires to raise a baby. I am his primary caregiver and fell quickly into an attachment style of parenting. For the first year of his life I barely left his side. Breastfeeding is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done but was so richly rewarding, also. Now that he’s weaned and walks and has opinions I am feeling my love for him exploding through the seams of my heart. There is a difference between a reliant, immobile baby (as delicious as that is) and a toddler who chooses you, a small boy who runs to hug your legs while screaming “Mama!”, who asks you to pick him up so that he can burrow into your arms, who volunteers kisses with his rich, sweet umami breath simply because he loves you. It is heaven to me, being his mom.
Felix at 2 months
Felix at 9 months
Felix at 16 months
So that’s life in the smallest of nutshells. This is me trying to return to writing. A blog post a week. I can do this, right?
As shelter-in-place orders took effect across the country in March, trends in consumer activity have been closely monitored. Among the bestselling items these days are spirits like tequila and gin, with sales jumping 75 percent compared to last year. While Americans stock up on liquor, certain bats are being blamed as one source of the virus behind COVID-19. Few praise other bats for their role in producing the tequila that makes one of the most popular, do-it-yourself cocktails - the margarita.
On hot summer evenings in the 1990s, my parents, homemade margaritas in hand, would walk us over to check the status of a neighbor’s garden. In the small, isolated desert communities surrounding Big Bend National Park in far west Texas where I grew up, a neighbor’s blooming agave, or “century plant”, was an occasion. Because everybody’s yard contained at least one agave, witnessing a bloom was always a certainty.
Century plants grow wild all over southwest Texas. The leaves of the plants can be broader than a large man’s hand and five feet tall, taking up a plot ten feet across. Their name is a misnomer. They live for seven to fifty years, not a hundred. But they only bloom once, right at the end of their lives, and their bloom is so dazzling and precious that, as children, the fable was that it happened only once in a hundred years. Hence, “century plant”. When the plant is ready to flower, an asparagus-looking dagger with the diameter of a telephone pole emerges from its center. As the stalk reaches an astonishing thirty feet tall, it unfurls its branches laden with bright yellow blossoms, a dazzling display to marvel at against the backdrop of a dusty town and endless sky.
A Mexican long-nosed bat. Photo by Steve Buchmann.
No creature appreciates those blossoms more than the Mexican long-nosed bat. While many bats feed on insects, the Mexican long-nosed bat’s diet consists exclusively of agave pollen and nectar. I knew a colony of females and their young roosted deep in a cave in the national park, coming out to feed when the agave flowers opened at night. I knew the margaritas clinking around in my parents’ to-go cups had a relationship to the plant we admired. What I didn’t understand was that the bats, the agaves, and the margaritas were intrinsically linked. Other than the occasional misguided bat flying through an open window at night, I rarely saw them.
The Mexican long-nosed bat has a single, migratory population that spends its winters mating in one particular cave, Cueva del Diablo, in the central Mexican state of Morelos. This is the only time of year that males and females congregate. When the young are strong enough to fly in the spring, they begin the journey northward with their mothers, following the “nectar corridor” of blooming agave into northern Mexico and the southern United States while the males stay behind in Morelos. As the females and their young consume the nectar, they also inadvertently eat and transport the plant’s pollen on their fur, making the bats a vital pollinator of the agaves. The agaves provide the food necessary for the bats to survive their migration and, in turn, the bats distribute the agave’s pollen, ensuring its survival. It’s a tale of symbiosis as old as time.
Enter tequila. Tequila is to the state of Jalisco, Mexico as Champagne is to the province Champagne, France - if it’s not from there, it’s not the real thing. In the 16th century, the Indigenous wisdom of the agave mixed with the innovation of the Spaniards created a distillation process that produced the powerful spirit we drink today. For centuries, the plant was cultivated and sold as family-owned brands. Today, most well-known tequilas are owned and distributed by large multinational corporations.
As the agave prepares to flower, it concentrates its sugars in its center, or piña. If left untouched, this sugar would eventually be sent up its stalk and into its flowers for the bats to feed on. For tequila producers, however, the optimal time to harvest is when the sugar is still in the piña. By not allowing the plant to flower and sexually reproduce on its own, growers instead rely on fields of agave clones, an efficient method for quality control and precise timing, but also a sometimes disastrous technique due to the lack of genetic diversity. Because the plants are all copies of themselves, they are susceptible to the same dangers like pests or disease. These monocultures have the most devastating consequences, though, for the bats.
By far the biggest tequila market is the United States, buying up 80 percent of exports. American demand for tequila has grown 158 percent since 2002. At the beginning of April, the president of the National Tequila Regulatory Chamber, Rodolfo González, quelled worries that tequila production would slow or stop because of the coronavirus. González, a tequila distiller himself, predicted growth rates between 4 to 5 percent in the tequila sector despite the pandemic.
To keep up with demand, producers rely solely on vast fields of cloned agaves, eradicating wild agave species and harvesting the clones before they are able to flower. If the bats can’t find and eat the nectar, they die. As of their last assessment in 2015 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Mexican long-nosed bats are considered endangered. In the last ten years alone their population has declined by over 50 percent.
Rodrigo Medellín. Photo by Anand Varma.
Mexican ecologist and biologist Rodrigo Medellín, affectionately referred to by many as “The Bat Man”, foresaw the calamity awaiting both the bats and the tequila industry decades ago. He knew a productive and resistant field of agaves required genetic diversity via pollination that only the bats could provide, and that the bats needed agaves to flower to avoid extinction. For years he has implored growers and buyers to consider the connection between the bats and agaves, advocating for allowing a fraction of the crops to bloom and be pollinated. In 2010, the Tequila Interchange Project was formed to encourage sustainable practices in the tequila industry, and in 2014, Dr. Medellín partnered with them to form the Bat Friendly Tequila and Mezcal Project, “an alliance of producers, scientists, and bartenders that advocates the preservation of traditional agave farming, naturally pollinated agave, and other sustainable, environmentally friendly practices.”
For the towns and cities of the American southwest that prize their neighborhood century plants, and for all Americans perfecting their margarita-making skills as they ride out the lockdown, sourcing and supporting bat-friendly tequilas is imperative to ensuring the resiliency of the tequila market, the livelihoods of the bats, and the continuous bloom of the agaves. Bat Friendly contains lists of brands that meet this sustainable criteria. We can ask our local liquor suppliers to stock bat-friendly tequilas, and perhaps occasionally donate what we would spend on our pre-pandemic cocktails to this initiative. The stunning bloom of the century plant is more than a display for us to admire. It’s a symbol of thousands of years of coevolution between bats and agaves. The next time you sip tequila, let it be a reminder of our responsibility to protect this fragile relationship.
Americans are being duped out of clean drinking water by the Trump administration’s repetitive farmer-centric rhetoric. A year ago last December, Andrew Wheeler, the soon-to-be confirmed Acting EPA Administrator, stood on a small stage in the Wilson County Exposition Center in Lebanon, Tennessee and addressed a gathered crowd of four hundred farmers and ranchers. Flanked by two John Deere tractors and an American flag, Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, in his dressed down slacks and top-button-undone man-of-the-people look, announced the proposal of a redefinition. The Waters of the United States, as defined by the Obama Administration’s Clean Water Rule in 2015, is “particularly egregious”, Wheeler explained, “as landowners have told me it impedes the use of their own land and stifles productivity.” Although Wheeler failed to announce just what the new definition would be, he nonetheless was met with applause from an audience made up of not only seasoned farmers but also many insignia-donning Future Farmers of America youth, for whom he later posed for group photos, currently displayed on the EPA’s website.
Andrew Wheeler with FFA youth in Lebanon, Tennessee
It’s no mistake that Wheeler made his announcement at a small Tennessee farming community expo center, just as it was no mistake when Trump, 10 months earlier, signed an executive order, surrounded by farmers, to begin the rollback of the Clean Water Rule after making a televised statement that bemoaned the rule on behalf of “farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers all across our land,” claiming, without evidence, that the EPA was “putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands” and “regulations and permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if they were a major industrial polluter.” He went on to feign disbelief that the Clean Water Rule was intent on going after homebuilders who dared to fill in a puddle, “just a puddle” on their lot.
It’s good optics for the Trump administration to surround themselves with farmers considering the long-standing regard Americans have for farming, a wholesome symbol of hard and honest work. Were Trump to surround himself with the true beneficiaries of the rollback - oil and gas executives and land developers, or if Wheeler had substituted his tractor props for oil derricks - perhaps stripping away protections of clean drinking water for one-third of the nation’s population would be less popular. Especially considering the Clean Water Rule not only preserved but broadened exemptions for agriculture, including a specific exemption for those pesky puddles.
The 2015 Clean Water Rule was a response to concerns over lack of clarity as to which water bodies fell under the 1972 Clean Water Act. It took four years of scientific analysis and over a million public comments to conclude that streams and wetlands have a significant hydrological and ecological connection to navigable and interstate waters. According to the analysis, 117 million people rely on drinking water from sources protected under the implementation of the rule, or about 1 in 3 Americans.
When the Trump administration formalized the rollback of the Clean Water Rule, they also released a far-less publicized 300-page financial analysis whose contents flagrantly conflict with the insistence that their motivation is the poor, overregulated, underappreciated farmer. Of the 248,688 permits granted between 2011 and 2015 to applicants whose work would deposit dirt or other fill into protected wetlands and streams, only 8 of those per year were from farmers. The majority of the applicants were from developers and extractive industries like oil, gas and mining.
One such wetland that has been stripped of its federal protection is in Bristol Bay, Alaska. In 2014, the EPA vetoed a permit placed by Pebble Partnership, a mining company, to extract deposits of gold and copper in the headwaters of Bristol Bay at a site known as Pebble Mine. Bristol Bay is the largest salmon fishery in the world. The proposed mine would destroy 94 salmon streams and 5,350 acres of wetlands, leaving an open pit larger than the island of Manhattan. It does not take much digging to discover that Mr. Wheeler, Trump’s pick to lead the agency that is supposed to protect our environment, is a lawyer whose former law firm represented Pebble Partnership.
It’s projects like Pebble Mine that are the real reason the current administration announced the repeal of the Clean Water Rule within six weeks of taking office. The average American farmer, who Trump claimed “wept in gratitude” when he forced the rollback, will in fact suffer alongside the rest of the country when our drinking water is tainted with pollutants, flooding increases, and critical wildlife habitats disappear because our streams and wetlands are irreplaceably destroyed for temporary, unsustainable gain.
I’ve only recently realized how encumbered I am by weighted space when I go out running. It’s not just when I run, but running is the best example, because I’m alone, I’m moving quickly, my senses are heightened, maybe peaked, hyper aware of my surroundings. My sight is drawn to flits of movement, reflections of light, pops of color, shapes delineated into outlines of the animals I’m looking for. On good days it’s just me there. I don’t mean just me in the park, although that does happen sometimes and there’s nothing quite like having a giant meadow in the middle of Brooklyn to yourself on a Tuesday morning. I mean it’s just me, fully present, an organism among organisms. But oftentimes I’m not alone. I hold so much space for my living ghosts. I run around and come across a sycamore grove, or a heron, or a patch of purple aster, and I stop and I appreciate it and I also show them, my ghosts. I say “Look at how beautiful this is. Do you understand me better now that you know what arrests me? Now that you’ve run this path in my steps?” I’m always showing her, my ghost, always showing her my adopted city, my adopted land, always showing her the trails I’ve cut through this giant metropolis and the secrets I’ve uncovered. I take her to the house that planted a yellow rose bush in front of a yellow wall, or I take her to Mozart’s bust tucked into the maple trees. Every time I show her, I prove I have a place in this world, my own version of a city she’s incapable of seeing unless I show her. And my ghost, when she lets me show her, she gets it. She gets me. And with that understanding, the doors to the possibilities of our love fling open and there I stand, endorphins ignited, arms wrapped tightly around the ghost of a friend who isn’t there.
And it’s only just dawned on me how long I’ve been doing this. I found a section of the park that floored me with its beauty, and I came upon it just as I was mulling over how long its been since she’s returned my letters, and in that moment the real life friend met the ghost and the real person subsumed her ghost and I finally realized not only how alone I am, but how long I’ve been carrying around this space, the space that belongs to the ghost.
Relationships are stories we tell ourselves. My relationships give me anchor points and help me craft an identity that I’m always grasping to illustrate. My friends, my husband, they give me an outline, and I fill it in with my responses to the world. There is a certain density, though, that comes with a one-sided story. And it’s not a matter of right and wrong, however much my sharp-tongued little ego wants it to be. Its the problem of holding space for a figment, for an idea, for a tortured desire, for insert-her-name-here. And now that I know that’s what I’m doing, I want to know how to let that space go.
Googling is no use. Even the term “holding space” is so mired in therapy lingo jingo that I’m almost annoyed it’s the single metaphor that makes the most sense. The space I’ve been holding is for a real person that I love, so the bulleted bullshit tip lists like “7 Sure Signs It’s Time to End a Friendship” can’t guide me through this conundrum. The closest concept my brain can devise is funerary. I’m grieving the loss of my idea of what this friendship was. And what do we do at funerals? Pour one out, remark on the good times, make a fire. So maybe I’ll have a funeral, I don’t know.
the meadow on a Tuesday morning
Excerpt from Rilke’s letter to a Young Poet, Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Videos recorded in 2013
The day we got legally married we ended up at one of our favorite little restaurants in our neighborhood which is where we took these photos of each other. I had forgotten we’d made these documents and now am so so grateful I carried my camera with me that day.
I love flowers. Most people do, I know. But I really really love flowers. It’s always been this way, or at least I have many memories of picking bouquets of wildflowers to bring home to my mother, recognizing early on the delight their beauty brings. It wasn’t until about 6 years ago that I began to find myself almost disabled by the sight of a beautiful flower. I’d see a fluffy, light pink vining rose dangling over a fence on my way to work and be stopped in my tracks, followed by 20 shots of it on my camera phone, desperately trying to photograph the essence of this unfuckingbelievable natural wonder that is a flower. I curbed my enthusiasm around others many times for fear of sounding, I don’t know, extremely basic? Like of course flowers are cool, they’re flowers! But then why I am crippled with love for them?? The only place it felt totally safe to nerd out was on trips to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, taking as much time as I wanted to gaze and sniff and touch the delicate petals.
I mean come on
Thankfully, around the same time, my good friend Irene and her partner Matt decided to begin their own flower farm and I found in her a kindred spirit with whom being a flower freak was accepted and understood. Treadlight Farm grows exceptionally beautiful flowers. Irene’s eye for flower beauty is unmatched, in my opinion. Several times I’ve stood on their farm and felt completely cleansed by the same air and light that the blossoms were reacting to around me. Irene and Matt’s example of eschewing their school and career trajectories to become flower farmers has been a huge influence in bringing me into this next chapter.
Irene with poppies
On a recent run past the gates of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I was stopped dead by the sight of a light pink and green tulip with wavy edges. This is definitely the most beautiful tulip I’ve ever seen. I gawked a while, then ran off, returning to that question that’s been kicking around in my head for years - what is it about flowers?
Michael Pollan asked this question too in his book The Botany of Desire, saying “Let’s say we are born with such a predisposition - that humans, like bees, are drawn instinctively to flowers. It’s obvious what good it does bees to be born liking flowers, but what conceivable benefit could such a predilection offer people?” He goes on to cite evolutionary psychologists who say that our brains were developed via natural selection to be good foragers, and the presence of flowers is a reliable predictor of future food. “In time the moment of recognition - much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape - would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.”
Carl Safina takes it further, I think, by offering the emotional component inherent within us, and if within us, then also within other creatures. “Flowers’ appearance and fragrance’s only purpose is to attract pollinators (mainly insects, at that, hummingbirds and honeycreepers and specialized bats). There is scant utilitarian reason why humans should also find the sight of flowers and their perfume any more attractive than the sight of fallen leaves… As brains elaborated and proliferated from a bee’s pleasure in a field of flowers, to our inner fish, to a bird’s delight in dance, and to our own - have our brains retained or even reinvented aesthetics that arose in other lines of life? If so, our convergence with the insects is a mystery worthy of awe for the little elders at our feet and flitting among the flowers of our gardens. Regardless of who gets our thanks for the honor, there is no more wondrous fact than that we are kin, bee and bird of paradise - and great elephant - stardust, all.”
the tulip that stole my heart
Safina’s viewpoint breaks barriers for me because it’s difficult to comprehend that my personal, human emotional response to flowers is strictly human. If we can delight in the transfixing beauty of the natural world, then surely it’s not just specific to humans, but more so, humans acquired that emotion from a much older and more ancient ancestor. I love the thought of thinking of insects as elders. I will endeavor to remember this evolutionary gift the next time we cross paths.
Today is the day I have to make a decision about where I’ll go to grad school. I have two offers of admission - one from Stony Brook University and one from Columbia University. I thought by now, after a month of mulling it over, that a day like today wouldn’t exist, that I would have been happily settled into my decision, already letting my mind run wild with the possibilities of the program I knew was right for me. Instead I woke up with a tightness in my chest, a desperation for any kind of sign, an extreme sense of loneliness, a precarious burdensome weight pressing in on me. Fear. Fear, my closest friend this past year. It is only natural that fear has been my constant companion today.
In December 2017, I attended the wedding of my husband’s close friend. At the rehearsal dinner I took notice of the mother of the groom, Lenore, a woman who exuded grace and power just standing still. Later, exchanging pleasantries and small talk, I told her what I did for work and she said it sounded very interesting. Trusting a sense of candor between us, I told her that actually no, I was miserable at my job, and even more miserable at the thought of another job as a creative in New York City, but I had achieved a good salary and health care, and as a newlywed in her 30s beginning to think of starting a family, it was too late for me to start over entirely. (Fear presenting in the form of complacency.) At this, Lenore let out a laugh and a playful arm punch and assured me that it was never too late to start over, especially if I was unhappy. She herself had not gone to law school until she was 35, and had her first child a few years after that. A few weeks later, sleeplessly spinning through my thoughts, the weight of her words sunk in. In the middle of the night I hovered over my phone and typed in “the study of the relationship between plants and animals” and the word “Ecology” appeared. That’s it, I thought. That’s what I want to do.
me in the middle, age 7, assisting the entomologist Milton Sanderson with his discovery of the New Mexican “hot bug”
Fear presents itself in many ways. One of the ways it showed itself to me continuously this last year was through doubt. Fear made me doubt myself, my abilities, my support, my intelligence. I’m good at dreaming and scheming, and for months I researched and organized graduate school possibilities, talking Danny’s ear off about this or that program. But fear in the form of doubt kept me from reaching out to those program directors because I was certain I’d be laughed at or shot down, what with my zero background in science and a mediocre undergraduate transcript. It took six months after meeting Lenore to finally hit send on an email I’d been sitting on for two months addressed to the program director at Stony Brook. I was sure he would tell me to get real, to go get a second bachelors. But within a day I had an enthusiastic and encouraging reply, and at that moment I knew I was going to change my life in a drastic way. I immediately made a plan to quit my job and signed up for a GRE class.
This blog could be paragraph after paragraph of all of my encounters with fear this year. But what I mainly want to share is this - the biggest lesson I’ve learned this last transformative year is that fear is a teacher. Fear challenges you to ignore it, to push through it, to hold it close to you and step forward anyway. Fear shows you the life you have and tries to make it more attractive than the unknowable. But fear’s great secret is that it’s an illusion, a veil between you and the reward that lies beyond. If I had not pushed through dozens of big and small fears this year, I would not be sitting here with a very good problem to have - the choice between two fantastic environmental conservation programs. I would not have been accepted into the Ivy League.
This last year I outdid myself mainly by swatting away doubt like an annoying gnat. Doubt told me “you’re not a math person” when what was waiting for me was the highest grade in my algebra and trigonometry class. I even enjoyed it. Doubt wondered why I was even bothering applying to Columbia and told me to keep my expectations low. But here I am, a non-scientist, B-level student invited to join a prestigious science masters program.
the grade on my algebra/trig final
I was afraid It would come to this, that I would arrive at this moment without clarity, with the fear of making the wrong decision. But as I’ve spent the day methodically going over my pros and cons lists for the hundredth time, I’m reminded of fear’s intent - to challenge me, to make me push through it, to trust the unknowable, to trust myself. Fear in the form of regret would have me believe there is a right and wrong answer here, but just knowing its intent tells me the truth - either decision will come with its reward, and that reward is simply what I make of it.
In the fall I’ll join Stony Brook’s Masters of Marine Conservation and Policy program. It’s taken a hell of a lot of pride-swallowing to turn down Columbia, and I suspect my ego may be bruised for a while by the fact that I don’t get to go around patting myself on the back for being a student there. But that’s just fear doing its thing again, making me doubt my own worth for choosing what I know is best for me and my future.
Yesterday I went to Robert Moses beach. It was cold and windy, and the beach was empty except for a few bundled up beachcombers. I sat on the edge of the tidal line, staring out at the water, and reflected on what’s brought me to this point. It’s been the audacity to listen to the small voice inside me that tells me I’m going to live an adventurous and interesting life. I’ve been almost too embarrassed for too long to articulate that simple knowledge. But now here I sit, proud and true to myself, embarking on a journey that is entirely mine.
Sometimes it’s helpful to make a list.
Scary things I did this year:
Told a doctor about my anxiety/insomnia
Ran a half marathon
Wrote an email to the director of the Marine Conservation and Policy program at Stony Brook
Signed up for a GRE math class
Went to the second GRE math class after overcoming the tremendous self-doubt I felt after the first class
Took the GRE
Took the GRE again after the tremendous self-doubt I felt after the first test
Tracked down the head of the math department at my community college to beg for placement into Algebra & Trigonometry
Gave my notice to my job of 6 years
Gave my notice to my job again and actually quit this time
Emailed a therapist
Started therapy
Told a family member a painful secret
Asked another family member to go to counseling with me
Reevaluated my relationship with alcohol
Asked my biology professor out for coffee
Wrote to the director of the environmental science department at my college
Applied to an unpaid internship
Wrote to the chairman of the science department at my college
Wrote to the director of the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology Program at Columbia
Wrote to an esteemed ecologist
Wrote to an esteemed conservationist