Dandelion Diaries…. Newsletter from A Garden Weed

(Do you like that title? I was playing with the idea of a better personal brand for my online life updates.)

I wrote this on September 15th, 2024. Why didn’t I post it? Not sure. Maybe I meant to say more. It’s outdated but was an honest mental snapshot of a moment. Hope you enjoy.

1. On Being a “Digital Nomad” and Ungrounded

The nomad journey first took me to Mexico, and that was amazing. But it was lonely when I dropped out of my structured San Francisco life. I think I needed more community than I had — more digital nomad community, that is. I had Movement community but not work community. I didn’t invest enough in my work community, and maybe that’s why I didn’t last, ultimately. We truly can’t do it alone — we need community. We need to be together with it. That’s what makes it worth it.

So I miss my co-workers, even if I don’t miss San Francisco. Even if I’m scared of San Francisco. I’m scared of it because it’s full of wealthy people and inequality, and there are more men than women, and the standard masculine model that I see walking around is not appealing to me. It’s like the people have forgotten how to be people together. It’s all about individualism and lifestyle design, and there’s absolutely no feeling of healthy, sustainable community – except in the grassroots, where they hold each other together because somehow, somehow, SOME PEOPLE are still living as though love is in charge. I don’t know who they are. I don’t see them in my daily life, only in odd places like airplanes where we are set aside momentarily from it all.

I guess that means I wasn’t spending time in the right places. Wasn’t volunteering enough. Was too insulated in with the have’s, away from the have-not’s.

What was her name, the woman I met? Belen. I hope she forgives me for sharing her first name, if I ever post this & she ever sees it. She’s well dressed and from Mexico and smiling at me deeply from the seat next to me on the airplane from Portland to SFO. I was probably scowling and listening to a podcast about Hypothalamic Amenorrhea, the condition I am trying to heal from. Belen told me how she went back for her college degree when her kids were in high school, and showed them how valuable school is! She’s a counselor of some kind. She told me about a garden she volunteers with, that gives people home-grown food. Anyone who needs it! You just go, and they give it to you. Belen tells me I should apply for California food aid since I don’t have income right now – to help make my savings last longer. I’m scared to do it because I have a lot of money in savings and it feels selfish to ask for help. “That’s what it’s there for,” she told me. Maybe I should go back and try, then, anyway.

Now I feel like I’m a failed nomad. Something like a bum. I never bought a van. I never really traveled freely. I like being in one place, actually. Maybe I don’t care about travel anymore. It’s like a romantic idea that I had in my youth, but now all I care about is finding a community with staying power, and giving myself to it. I want to be a mom, I want to be a wife, I want to have children. Really, really basic things, yet they feel so out of reach. I’m in a swirl of culture now, and a lot of it is not encouraging people to organize into families anymore — just to become a part of the productivity machine and to take pride in that.

I’m turning away from liberalism more and more now. I am a free modern woman who has the education and ability to have a career and make my own way in the world, and I am absolutely trapped by that while feeling that I cannot access what really matters to me. I care more (trigger warning to strongly independent women) about being a wife to the right man than playing the shark’s game out in the world. I wish I could go back and be an artist instead of an engineer. I’ve tried to start learning, now, and it feels too late.

Then again, they say “it’s never too late” and they might be right. For everything except motherhood, which requires optimal fertility!

Forever-home is a longing of my heart, even while in a nomadic chapter… I can be friends with anyone, anywhere, but my heart dreams of finding Home in a community that cares for its young and its elderly. I want to be a part of that care.

2. Reflections on What Family Means to Me Now

“Friends will come and go, but family is forever.”

I remember hearing this as a child enough that it stuck with me, and for good reason. Maybe it was my dad who said it.

This year I’ve fallen back on family quite a bit. When I grew tired and homesick after 4 months in Mexico – when I no longer had a job and a home, and I didn’t know who I wanted to be next, and I didn’t have it in me to strike out alone for longer – I went back to my family.

I have a love-hate relationship with them that I am trying to steer more towards Love. I used to push to distinguish myself from my family, to show myself as different and somehow better. Like I didn’t want to associate myself with the more challenging parts of my own legacy.

And some things were frankly painful to live with, in my family space. When I left home for college after high school, I was basically sprinting out the door, eager to get distance.

But wisdom comes with time, and as I’ve grown and matured into my adulthood I’ve come to see the ways I’ve taken family for granted – and just how much I’ve needed that “home base” to be there, for me to be able to venture out.

My family is complex. I could write about our dynamics for a whole book.

I feel good about giving real time and energy to my relationship with my mom this summer.

I feel good about being a part of the family this summer in a deeper and more regular way. The kind of depth that comes from being around enough for the little things. Being okay with visits not feeling “exciting”, but regular and regulating.

Family, and home, is like a garden bed. Things are always growing in that space. A light turned on recently for me, and I started being more of a conscious caretaker of that soil. As a kid, I was just receiving the caretaking of others. And at some point, when I wasn’t receiving the care I needed, I tried to run away. Now I’m realizing that as an adult, I get to play my own part in this shared soil. I could run away… but my roots are still here. So it’s more interesting to me to care for the whole garden bed, to make a place that’s good for all of us… and a place that I can bring new life into one day. A partner and future children, if I’m so blessed.

I’ll always come back to family. I do want to have my own life out in the world beyond my family of origin. And I do want to join into another family. And… I’ll always, forever, keep coming back here.