Issue #176: How (and Why) I'm Building a Life Around "Enoughness"

All flourishing is mutual.

🎥 ‘Babygirl,’ in theaters: As the C.E.O. of a robotics company, Romy (played by Nicole Kidman) has built her life and career on being nearly as regimented as her products—until she enters into a whirlwind sub-dom relationship with her intern (Harris Dickinson) that puts everything at risk. I had almost as fun discussing the questions around power and sexuality it poses as I did watching it.

📚 Bright Objects by Ruby Todd: There is so much to love in this brilliant debut novel, centered on a small town’s reaction to a once-in-a-lifetime comet. Sylvia, a 30-something widow, plans to kill herself on the night the comet arrives, as chaos and intrigue swirls around the astronomical event: a Heaven’s Gate-like cult develops, Sylvia strikes up a romance with an astronomer, and the shady events around the hit-and-run that killed her husband begin to come to light.

🍫 Caputo’s Wild Juruá Chocolate Bar: This chocolate bar was quite possibly my favorite Christmas gift this year. A collaboration with Luisa Abram, it uses a rare and wild cacao from the Brazilian Amazon, while supporting its preservation. I was truly blown-away by its flavor (so much so that I listened to this podcast on it), which is rich and layered, developing from freshly baked sour dough to hints of rose, backed by a pretty sweet mission.

I recorded myself (and a little behind-the-scenes context) reading the full post, available to paid subscribers. I hope it makes engaging with this post or reading it on your commute a little easier. Let’s get to it…

On the first day of the new year, I woke early and took Toast for a walk in a park with a roughly two-mile loop that’s lined with snowberries this time of year. It was early enough that few people were out, so I let him off-leash, allowing us each the space to wander at our preferred paces (mine being brisk, but steady; his being zoomies, with pauses to eat grass).

As we made our way around the perimeter of the park, I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer read her most recent book, The Serviceberry. In it, she begins by detailing the experience of filling a pail with the book’s namesake, grown by her neighbors. The berries along my trail, ghost-white and inedible except to birds, provided a visual contrast to her own delicious, wine-purple clusters. Tossing a handful into her mouth, she writes, “I can almost feel my mitochondria doing a happy dance.”

Issue #124: How to Wake Up to Your Life

The berries, and her neighbors’ kindness, fills her with a sense of gratitude that she feels compelled to pay forward, sharing her harvest with friends. “If our first response to the receipt of gifts is gratitude,” she writes, “then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return.” On my way home from my walk with Toast, I stopped into Powell’s and bought a copy of Robin’s book so I could more easily transcribe her words into my journal, an appropriate first entry for the new year.

Last year, I dedicated almost all of my time and energy to my own projects, both professional and personal. I worked through grief, employed practices that ground me to the present moment, received treatment for my PMDD, and took care of my body. I used my book advance to travel the world and create a nest that supports me and all the things I love to do—cook, exercise, host, read, and journal after an early morning walk. In many ways, I feel about last year the same way Kimmerer does about the berries, overflowing with nourishment and wanting to share it.