At 8:30am, my phone pinged. There are six of us on a text chain about local mountain lions, road closures, and which house we’re walking to for afternoon beers. This morning, there was an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway somewhere between Malibu and Santa Monica delaying commuters by a whopping two hours. I texted an old coworker with the details, knowing she would be caught in the traffic.

After all, that’s what I did: took a U-turn on my entire career. It’s been two months since my sayonara to Silicon Beach, two months since I set an alarm, two months since traffic mattered, two months since I’ve seen anyone I used to see every day. Two months is enough time to really change a life, to wreak havoc on built routines, to do such corporeal things as redecorate the house, write a screenplay, and travel at least some of the world. 

I have done none of that.

But I have slept deeply. I have slept on the couch with a book and a coffee and the best of unmet intentions, I have slept in the sun from one high tide to another, I have slept so still in my hammock birds have covered me in seed and feathers. And while my body recovers, my mind and my self concoct world after world in my dreams to see if I made the right decision. 

This self-imposed slowness has taken me to mental places I’m uncomfortable with. I’m standing at a train station just seeing the time-of-arrival tick later and later, more concerned with the timeline than the destination. At 2:30pm every day, I pace the house, unsure how to relax or what relaxing even is. Maybe it’s that I’m Type 3, or an ENFP, or a Capricorn, or just the daughter of people who processed problems by mowing the lawn and mucking the stalls. Problems were just periods of getting the chores done. 

When I did wake up and take myself somewhere, I went to the jungle of Belize outside of San Ignacio. I wanted to see some toucans and have some revelations. Saw five of the former, had none of the latter. One week in the jungle is a blip in the two months I’ve spent sleeping and pacing in the high chaparral of the southern California coast, exchanging one dense menagerie for a wetter one some 2800 miles southeast. What I’m saying is: it didn’t make a difference. I’m not alone in expecting a lot out of a vacation, but it should have been more obvious that waking up in an open-aired casita with no air-conditioning in Belize to see new birds is not all that different from waking up in an open-aired cabin with no air-conditioning in California to see the same old birds. 

There was one adventure in Belize though that stands out. Prior to the trip, I came down with a summer flu debilitating enough to make me question going at all. But in a fog of Xanax, NyQuil, and hand sanitizer, I wrapped my face with a scarf and got on an airplane because there was a cave I wanted to see: Actun Tunichil Muknal. I was on a lot of medication by the time I finally got to the cave. Several years ago now, cameras were banned from the cave. It’s an ancient Mayan cave, and you start the trip by fording three river crossings, pulling yourself across the current by ropes. When you finish hiking to the cave, you swim in to it. “Just make sure you stay to the right,” they say. You climb through crevices, watch night creatures flutter above and scurry past your feet, you step in to cool pools of water long underground, chin up, gently paddling to other rocks. And you keep going until you’re deep in the cave, deeper than feels natural, deeper than feels human. There’s no sunlight, the air feels wet and cold. You bend around immense boulders held in space and time, small and ancient voices in your head begging them not to crush you. The ceilings start to open and you can tell by the sound — your library voice, childlike and thoughtful of the reverence, all of a sudden emerging from the crawlspaces to a high ceiling you can’t see until you look straight up with your headlamp, with wonder, a room of absolute stone. And then you begin to climb.

A careful foot there, make sure to turn there, and now push yourself to here, and a few more thoughtful steps and hand-holds, and then, like emerging from underwater, like the first time you saw a building burn, like that moment you first brushed fingertips with that person you could never have, you enter a pitch-black cathedral of breathless awe, pillars of connected stalactites and stalagmites along the perimeter. You’re afraid to speak in the kingdom of what came before you. You’re afraid to step in their footsteps. You’re afraid and in love and overwhelmed in the damp and black night. And when you’re done being humbled by the vastness, the darkness, the times-before-us-ness, you look down to see who was there before you. Skeletons lay in tact on the floor, unaffected by centuries of changing fashions, modes of transportation, and parenting styles, only further calcified into crystals over time. This is when your guide (one of only 22 in the nation of Belize) puts on his painter’s cap. 

“Imagine that you truly believe this cave is the entrance to the underworld,” he begins. “You are knowingly entering the underworld, swimming into it with a torch held above your head. The water glows aqua, and you don’t have the science to know why. To you, it’s magic. You are not preceded by decades of archeologists. You don’t know the cave ends five miles in. You don’t sign any waivers. You just have faith. And you’ve probably taken hallucinogens. You’re probably hungry. And you’re a mile into crawling and swimming and climbing through this cave and come upon this natural cathedral in the underworld you pray to.”

And then, the guide moves his own torch — an industrial grade flash light — back and forth, pointing it at a rock feature jutting out. As he switches the light back and forth, the shadows behind the rock structure move and it’s unmistakable: the movement of the shadow is that of a crowned king plunging a spear into a man kneeling on the floor. For just that moment, you are Mayan, it hasn’t rained in months, your crops are dead, you’re deep in the underworld begging the gods for rain, and in your desperation asking what you can do for them, they paint you a picture of sacrifice against the wall with your own torch. You’re also on drugs. 

Revelations usually only come when we’re desperate for them. I didn’t have any in the cave that day, and I was mad about it. 

I thought of the Mayans, carefully crafting pots full of goods only to smash them on the floor in tribute to the gods. It didn’t work. So they brought bigger pots. They brought more goods. But whatever they broke, the drought didn’t. So they brought someone to sacrifice. And the skeletons say that maybe they broke the sacrifice’s spine first before potentially pulling their heart out, so the sacrifice could live just long enough to see the importance of what they’d offered. And then, time stamped in bone just a little bit later, there are the tiny femurs — the ultimate sacrifice as their people starved and prayed for rain. 

Like the keys always being the last place you looked, maybe rain will always follow the ultimate sacrifice, maybe revelations will always be easier to find in hotel rooms where desperation is high and familiarity is low, but it’s always just the weather, up there and in here, that dictates what happens. 

This was the summer of the shortest playlist I’ve made since 2009. Without the structure of work, New Music Friday and Discover Weekly became moments past. It feels embarrassingly capitalist to structure personal timestamps around Spotify playlists, but I can feel who I used to be when I listen to the playlists from each season. Fall 2012, all new friends. Spring 2014, crushing heartache. Winter 2015, redemption. Summer 2017, longing. Spring 2019, power. Without the hours spent sending emails on Monday and the hours spent reading documents on Friday, I didn’t have a church pew to celebrate new music. I was riding my bike for hours and hours to the sound of sports cars and scrub jays, forgoing music to try and hear the vibrations coming within, but I couldn’t hear anything. 

I woke up to that text at 8:30am because for the first time this summer, a marine layer clung to the canyon, dimming the light just enough to let me sleep as long as I liked. I opened the door to the deck to let the dampened air spill through the house, and when I felt the wetness on my skin, I felt Actun Tunichil Muknal in my bones. 

Two months of peace and quiet and sleep didn’t reveal anything to me. I slipped my laptop and my headphones into my bag, hopped into the truck, and drove to the cafe in Topanga town. I ordered a chai latte alongside a ham & cheese croissant, my favorite road-trip indulgences. It felt like I was in movement, and I wanted to intensify the feeling, buoy it. I pulled up Spotify and started a new playlist: Fall 2019. 

When we beg for revelations and rain, we’re never really asking for those things. No one wants rain that floods their fields, that drowns them in the river of too much. They want the rain that gives them a bountiful harvest. They’re not asking for a downpour, they’re asking for a well-fed family and a well-cared for future. We don’t ask for revelations for one sparkly, calcified thought. We ask for revelations because we want what comes after them: clarity and action. The revelations and the rain are just the symbols that, if we take care of our end of the bargain, we might get what we wanted all along.

This? This sleeping and waking and riding and sleeping again? This is the rain. I’m tending to my crop, knowing I have everything I need for the harvest ahead. 

All that’s left to do now is the work. 

—
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I wrote this piece listening to Honestly by TS Graye, Lady by Blake Rose, and Young And In Love by Ingrid Michaelson. 

A mi me gusta que me demuestren las cosas, porque con palabras somos todos buenos.

te conocí sin saber que te iba a querer tanto

“Cuando el mundo estaba acabándose nos aferramos al pasado porque es todo lo que creíamos que veríamos”

To Begin Again - Zayn x Ingrid

Ingrid Michaelson via Twitter x

TheTo Begin Again music video will premiere at 12am EST tonight!

2020 is long enough to revisit old favourite shows and go back to some favourite tracks. The Vampire Diaries has always been a never-dying cheap thrill, and the playlist is always a whole different mood. Can’t believe I missed this track as a teenager who was knee deep in that vampire-obsessed generation some years back.

“Let’s take a better look

Beyond a story book

And learn our souls are all we own

Before we turn to stone…”

this is what pure love sounds like - a playlist.