As the car swung around a series of blind curves slowly climbing into the foothills, my heart was pounding in my chest. The GPS chimed in to announce that, in one thousand feet, my destination would be on the right. I started to cry. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. What if it was all wrong? What if it was terrible? What if I had fucked absolutely everything?

I had been staying at a bad-luck motel in town for several days actively avoiding this moment. I had made every excuse under the sun about things that needed doing before I could make my first trip out to my new property. I had to get a phone that would work in this country. I needed to focus on getting a car to replace the rental before the reservation ran out. I needed to get the electric turned on first, and find a plumber who could get the water up and running. I had to, um… wash my hair.

It had taken so much to get here. Years of planning and making, and then saving, money. Months of negotiations and inspections and consultations with a real estate lawyer. Countless middle-of-the-night phone calls from the other side of the globe with my bank and the real estate agent. But I had done it. I had bought a house in cash over the internet from seven thousand miles away. I had gotten me and my three animals and a paltry portion of all of my earthly possessions onto a plane and to Toronto, and then across the border to a small village just outside of the Adirondack Park.

And now it was the moment of truth. What the fuck had I actually done?

It wasn’t the first of these moments I’d ever had in my life. I climbed out of a shitty black minivan onto the street in front of a college campus in Brooklyn, where I had never set foot in my life. I had deplaned in Incheon to announcements in a language I didn’t speak to find a man holding a sign with my name on it outside customs. I had gotten married not once, but twice, in front of a judge at a courthouse almost on a whim. (Oh, y’all have never heard about my first marriage have you? That’s a story for another time.) I had unlocked the door to a dilapidated, moldy commercial space in a rundown neighborhood in Seoul that was officially leased in my name with nothing but a bucket and a mop in hand.

Contemplating what the fuck I had actually done was kind of my specialty. But it felt different this time. There was a lot more on the line. And I wasn’t young anymore. Approaching forty, I could feel the tank on my fuel for adventure getting close to empty. I had been through so much, and I was tired. I wasn’t trying for the next big unknown. I was trying to, finally, come home.

The car pulled around the final blind curve, and the little red cabin came into view. We pulled into the gravel drive, and I sat for a moment trying to catch my breath. Charlie tapped his feet impatiently on the seat beside me. I wiped my tears, took a deep breath and opened the car door. I was home.

Since that moment, what has unfolded has been nothing short of a relentless love affair. I arrived in June, when the grass was high and the foxglove and irises were in full bloom. I fell hard and fast, lying under her trees down by the rushing creek in the dappled sunlight for hours. There were hiccups, of course. The moisture in the basement from having the sump pump cut off for three years caused the breaker box to completely give up the ghost, and I spent a week reading by candlelight and bathing in creek water. The mice, at first, were relentless, until my beautiful huntress Vera brought them to heel. There were the old, moldy carpets and the leak in the kitchen and all of the doors that wouldn’t close properly.

But the days lasted forever, and the land slowly revealed her charms, keeping me under her spell. Wild strawberries, raspberry patches and the ancient apple tree near the road. Summer was one brilliant surprise after another, as I ventured further and further out from the house. The deer down by the creek in the mornings. The woodchuck under the lean-to with her babies. Little fox tracks in the mud around the woodshed after a rain. There was the work shed in the clearing full of old farrier tools and buckets and buckets of horseshoes. And the gentle afternoon creaking of the balsam fir trees and maples in the otherwise silent woods.

The onset of fall carried with it the most incredible display of colors I’ve ever seen in my life. Even now, three autumns deep, it still takes my breath away. And then came winter.

She took it easy on me, that first year. Made me think I had it all under control. But this past winter, I saw her true face for the first time. Five feet of standing snow on the ground (and on the roof) that stuck around for several months. The dog and I were relegated to a small, narrow tunnel leading from the front door to the woodshed out back that I re-dug every couple of days, until a neighbor took pity (mostly, I think, on my dog) and came with his tractor to plow a small yardish patch. I spent hours every day shoveling snow, stacking wood and tending the fire. One night, I sat up on the sofa wrapped in blankets and watched the temperature outside creep down to -18 degrees Fahrenheit, as the wind roared through the woods and whipped around the house. But the house held.

Like any good lover, she can be challenging. But she remains stunningly beautiful and rewarding throughout. There is a pair of ravens who also call the property home, and every single day, without fail, when I dragged myself outside to shovel, they would come out from the woods and circle overhead, croaking out gentle encouragement until I went back inside.

And summer came back, eventually. For better or for worse.

What got me thinking about all of this was when Hozier’s “Work Song” came on this morning while I was washing up. I heard this song for the first time just a couple of weeks after I moved here, and I realized this morning that I don’t associate the song — a rather intense love song — with a person. Instead, when I hear it, I think about this place.

When I arrived here, neither one of us were in great shape. This property had sat abandoned for three years, weathering the seasons without anyone to look after her. She was — and in a lot of ways, still is — in rough shape. I wasn’t doing much better. I was exhausted, worn down, traumatized and only just barely beginning to heal. But slowly, we have been working on each other. She has held me through so many dark nights, nursing me back to health. And every day when I leave to go to my backbreaking, feet busting job in town, I think about how it will all be worth it in the end. I’ll pour it back into her, until she reaches her full potential. Because I can already feel her pulling me up to meet mine.

When Hozier sings:

When my time comes around,
Lay me gently in the cold, dark earth.
No grave could hold my body down.
I’ll crawl home to her.

I think of no one but her. In fact, it’s her earth I think about, and what a peaceful sleep that would be. They’ll have to carry me out of here someday. That’s the only way I’m leaving.

Greetings, fellow humans. That’s how I’m feeling this morning. Like I’ve been plonked onto Earth without my consent. My work schedule has been such the past couple of weeks that, were I to type it all out for you, I reckon you’d struggle to believe me. But I won’t type it all out for you, because no one should have to deal with that who isn’t being paid to. Even the pay isn’t really making it worth it, at the moment.

But I’m trying not to let too much time go past between these little missives this time around, because I think we all know I have a bad habit of slipping into internet-related obscurity for several years at a time, without even trying.

I want to do a big post laying out The Plan, as such, but I’m not in the headspace for it this morning, and I only have about an hour before I have to — you guessed it — get ready to go to work.

The title of this particular post is tentative. I haven’t hashed through exactly what I want to say about it, but it has been on my mind the past few weeks. It was said to me a few weeks ago by a man who, shockingly, I’m no longer speaking to. About a week after that, I had a conversation with another man about the indignity of ICE’s treatment of their fellow human beings, only for him to turn around and tell me that he felt “great” about Adriana Smith being kept on life support until her baby could be delivered. I asked that question on purpose. I ask men a lot of questions on purpose, these days.

Part of healing from longterm narcissistic abuse is retreating into isolation to rebuild your relationship with yourself and get your head back on straight. But you can’t stay in isolation forever, and your healing isn’t truly complete until it’s been tested. But reemerging back out into the world is for the absolute birds, in a lot of ways.

I feel like I have new eyes, and definitely new ears, and I no longer have the option to override too many red flags. And the red flags are fucking everywhere.

My last post was all about the importance of building community at this particular moment, above all else, but the truth is, I’m struggling to find my own balance with that. And not just with men, although they are the lowest hanging fruit, for obvious reasons. But there were several important relationships with women in my life that I had to sever, as well, once I realized there were tendencies I had in forming relationships that had spanned decades and infiltrated all areas of my life that needed to be dealt with.

Is it overcorrection? Will it always be like this? I don’t know.

My gut is telling me to hold the line and trust the process. And when I start to overthink it a little too much. I reference the people in my life who serve as touchstones in this regard. The ones who have never once made me feel like I may have to move away from them to feel healthy. They exist, and I know they’ll be with me for life. There must be more of them out there, somewhere.

My situation is uniquely extra, having left a marriage and lost basically all of my family in one way or another, and having moved to an entirely new place to start all over again. But I know a lot of us are dealing with these issues right now. Things are emerging from the darkness that are making it difficult for many people to hide who they truly are, deep down, and I know I’m not the only one who is looking around and feeling forced to reevaluate.

I don’t have any answers. Just lots and lots of questions. But one thing I do know is that we are not alone. And for now, that may have to be enough.

Love y’all.

Speaking to a group of approximately 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in 1967, Harvard University clinical psychologist and all-around era-appropriately questionable human being Timothy Leary unleashed a phrase that would become the mantra of a generation — “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Leary elaborated on the phrase in his autobiography nearly two decades later:

Turn on meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end.

Tune in meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives.

Drop out suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. Drop Out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.

Dropping out became the part that would filter into popular usage, and it is still making the rounds today. Circulating through homesteading circles here in the North Country, I’ve heard it used often, even now, six decades later. Drop out of society. Drop out of the rat race. Drop out of capitalism. These are some of the goals people in these circles are aiming for.

But the thing is, Leary revised the phrase just a few weeks later at the Houseboat Summit with Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts and Gary Snyder:

I would agree to change the slogan to ‘Drop out. Turn on. Drop in.'

This came in response to what he felt was a misunderstanding of his original intent. From his autobiography:

Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean “get stoned and abandon all constructive activity".

In grasping on to only the last part of the sequence, many people had abandoned the first two steps. Leary’s revisal of the phrase was not a revisal of his thoughts on the matter — it was a clarification for those who had skipped over the first part.

This past week, I’ve been a little disheartened to see liberal and, to a much lesser extent (it has to be said), leftist folks immediately fold like a bunch of lawn chairs. Liberals especially. Especially the liberals.

Watch what you say online. Buy a notebook and keep your true thoughts there. We’re cooked. It’s over.

No, my darlings. It has just begun.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Fascism relies on you pre-complying. It relies on fear and making an example out of the few, so that the many put themselves in line without the regime having to lift a finger. Don’t put yourself in line. Do not pre-comply.

Instead, take a deep breath and good look around. We are far from cooked. It’s just getting a little toasty.

The bigger practice of dropping out is what I’ve mostly returned to talk about. That’s the self-reliance bit, where you don’t have to worry about getting fired, because you can take care of yourself.

But you cannot do this alone. You need others. And that’s where dropping in comes into play.

Boycotts are extremely effective, and we need to keep calling our representatives. All of those things that social media is telling you are important are, in fact, very important. But it can feel Sisyphean, at times. We need to be drops in an ocean in this way, but if you want to feel like more of a ripple or even a wave, there are ways to do that, as well. And that is truly going to be the backbone of the resistance — digging into place and finding out where you are needed in your own community.

The very first thing I would recommend is tuning in (see what I did there?) to your local NPR station. These folks have lost a ton of federal funding under this administration, and that’s not on accident. Not only will a couple of hours a week of listening to your local NPR programming help keep you up to date on local politics in the least painful way possible, but these folks will help keep you informed about local clothing and food drives, volunteer initiatives and town halls where you can show up and make a difference on real, local issues.

They also cover local art-related events and showcase local people who are doing useful, practical things, and these will often be people you can get in touch with directly. Need a butcher to help make it a reasonable ambition for you to raise your own pigs? There may be one interviewed on the local Saturday morning show. Want to know where you can go this weekend to support local artists? There should be a local events roundup somewhere within the programming. NPR is a powerful tool for knowing what’s going on around you and finding a way to connect with people offline within your local community.

The next thing you can do is search out these resources directly. See if you can find a local farmer’s coop, a market coop, an artists collective, or a crafting guild. Search for local food pantries and soup kitchens. Find out what churches around you are committed to resisting the ugliness of this regime, even if you are not religious. The good ones won’t care. They will welcome your engagement regardless.

Mutual Aid Hub is a good resource for finding community organizations that are committed to increasing local cooperative support, but often it’s more effective to search Facebook for whatever groups you can find specific to your location, as well. Some of the folks doing this work, especially in rural areas, aren’t always using the same kind of phrasing you may be used to from leftist circles online, but they are walking the walk rather than talking the talk and may be hiding under a local community page on Facebook that at first seems unrelated.

And finally, consider being the one to take the reins. Think about starting a group chat with people you know locally who are having the same kinds of concerns right now. Introduce them to each other and have them loop in others from their own circles. Start a free exchange, were instead of letting bags of stuff sit in a garage for year waiting to be taken to the Goodwill, everyone posts the stuff they don’t need in the group chat to see if anyone else can use it. Swap garden veggies and food, when you’ve made too much. Encourage folks to message when they need a ride to a doctor’s appointment or someone to help them change a tire or someone to watch their kids while they go to a job interview.

All of these things will help you feel less afraid. Less powerless. Less like you have to shut up online to not put yourself and your family at risk. When you know you have a community standing behind you who will be there to support you if you fall, you will not be so eager to comply ahead of time in order to stay afloat in a situation that’s already tenuous for so many in this country. And the good you can offer in return will help you remember that you are in control. That we are in control. And there are more of us than there are of them.

Dear, all y’all,

Boy, am I rusty. It took me approximately 27 minutes to get my laptop to boot up properly, because I haven’t touched it since back in February when I did my taxes. I’m just glad it still works.

I’m sat here in my little cabin with fogged-up windows. We had our first frost last night, and every time I step out on the porch, it seems more leaves have turned over to burning hues of yellow, orange and red. It’s been a busy summer, and I now find myself in the crushing last sprint to the finish line that is fall in the North Country. I’m not alone. Everyone is frantically stacking wood, cleaning stoves, replacing tires and filling old buckets with salt. Deadheading flowers and putting gardens to bed for the long winter sleep.

If I have to go through this, I’m glad it will be here.

I didn’t really know where I was coming when I left Korea. I knew as much as could be told to me by a survey and an inspection and photos about my house and my land, but about the larger sense of place, I had very little idea. But I’ve landed in a place full of makers, people who are used to taking care of themselves and each other. And I have been a sponge, just drinking it all in.

The last two years have been full of chainsaws and circular saws, the names of new plants and animals. Learning bird calls. Learning the landscape. Learning how to navigate the independent lumber yard. Filling my phone with the numbers of woodsmen and chimney sweeps and that one retired guy who just knows a bit about everything. The farmer’s market coop. The quilter’s guild. People who sell flowers and tomatoes and eggs and raspberry bushes. Painting and staining and learning to use a sewing machine and a weed whacker, and having my first truly epic wood pile collapse. Learning not to panic when the brakes lock up on ice, or the car begins to slide, or the road has completely disappeared in a white-out, and all you can do is creep forward inch by inch and trust that, eventually, you will make it to the safety of home.

I’ve run out of wood in the dead of winter and had the well pump run dry in the heat of summer. I’ve learned how to get my oil changed, pay property taxes, apply for health insurance. I’ve learned how to be an adult in my own native country.

So, no. I haven’t touched my laptop. And I’m a little rusty. But it’s time, now.

I’m figuring out how to set up a little group chat here on Substack where you all will be able to open topics and discuss. Anything Meta is suspect at this point, so we are gonna bypass that. For now, I have to leave for work. But I will be back soon. And then we are going to really get started.

Love y’all. Stay safe.

I’ve had a really bad month. Not in any real, practical way. I just go hit by a wall of something… something thick and black and difficult to drag myself through. I can’t tell if it was worse than usual, or if it was the same as it has been for the past however many years, and part of me has just already adjusted to not having to do that on a daily basis. Either way, it was rough. I have my days every now and then, but this was more than two weeks of unrelenting down and dark. I kept waking up every day expecting it to be over, and it just wasn’t. 

There’s stuff you pack away when you’re in the midst of crisis. You focus on the basics of survival, and anything that isn’t an immediate threat gets shoved way to the back to be dealt with later. I suspect this is that stuff coming back around to the front. Over all, it’s a good thing, I think. But it’s not pleasant. 

There are things that have happened over the past year that I still haven’t spoken about, mostly because at some point it started to feel like a joke. I’m not trying to be the Bad News Bears of cabincore Instagram. Suffice it to say, some shit went down when my brother visited me at the end of last year. Stuff that, for me at least, was related to his reaction to me leaving my abusive marriage. He likes podcasts by men about men. He is a man who was raised by my father. Y’all can take a few guesses and probably be right about most of it. Although I doubt you’d be able to guess the degree. The stripes I took on account of being the woman in the situation were shocking, to be honest. And there’s a raw pain there that I still can’t look fully in the face. 

Then my grandmother passed away just a few months before I could make it home to see her again. And when she did, my last remaining elder, my aunt, made some unbelievably dark choices. 

I worked hard to get back here for a lot of reasons, but the reason why I chose here rather than anywhere else in the world was because here is where my family is. But now I’m back here, and that family has evaporated like morning mist on a warm afternoon. Here I am, once again. Alone for the holidays. Alone for the whole year. After everything.

And the thing I can’t bring myself to even hardly say out loud is, after what I went through? Shouldn’t there have been a family here fighting for me to get back home? Shouldn’t they be waiting to welcome me back and help me heal? But for the family I come from, those kind of expectations were never on the table. The best I can hope for is to not be lashed out at for no reason. Neutral. That’s my best case scenario. 

Does this all sound whiny? That’s why I haven’t talked about it. Because that’s what I hear when I go to speak it. But I don’t feel sorry for myself, most of the time. I just have some facts that I have to deal with. These are just facts. And I’m sick to death of not speaking them because they might make me look weak. So here, I’m speaking it. 

So I’m alone. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about being alone these past six months. And the thing is, alone is not the worst thing that you can be. 

If you keep up with my daily shenanigans over on Instagram, then you’ll know I’ve been spending a lot of time dealing with my wood stove this month. It’s been an interesting metaphor, trying to keep the psychological cold and dark away, while spending a good portion of my days battling the very same in the physical realm. As I sat by the stove one morning last week, nursing the kindling to a flame and waiting to see if my logs would catch, I started thinking about what it means to be a tender of the hearth. 

I knew, intellectually, before I came here how important the hearth fire was in the past. But having it as my primary source of heat since the weather has turned, and learning through experience how much work and attention goes into maintaining that fire, has brought that home on a whole other level. And I don’t even use my fire for cooking or providing most of my light during these blink-and-you’ll-miss-it days, when the sun does a short, murky circuit along the rim of the sky before sinking below the horizon mere hours after it rose. 

Hearth tenders, of course, are women. And there’s no more potent symbol of the unpaid and undervalued labor that women have traditionally done within the family and the community, than tending the hearth. Keep the home fires burning is what women are said to do when the men go off to hunt or wage war. It conjures images of women huddled by the fireside, occasionally stirring at coals with an iron poker or tossing a log on while idly waiting for the men to return from the real work. The hearth fire is started early in the morning, by freezing-cold hands rendered invisible by the extra hours of sleep gained by the members of the household who don’t have to creep out of bed in the icy predawn air to tend the hearth. It is anything but idle labor. It is dirty, dangerous, monotonous and never-ending. It keeps you tied to the home, obligated and un-championed. No victorious return parades for the hearth tenders. And yet, the household, and the community, would crumble in a matter of days without this work.

So, as I sat by the fire on that morning last week, surrounded by the mental darkness that had descended around me, I thought about the hearth tenders in my own line. All the unthanked women who survived in order for me to be here. 

On the train back to Seoul, after what happened with my brother happened, I said to him: You say I need a man to protect me, but where exactly am I supposed to get this man? Father, husband, brother. I have all three. And what good has it done me? What am I supposed to do when the best I can hope for is to be told I should accept it? When these men who are supposed to protect me are the ones who hurt me instead? 

I sat by the fire that dark morning last week, and I thought about the hearth tenders in my line, their thankless work and the fathers, brothers and husbands they didn’t have the right to say no to. I felt alone, and the raw, unfettered bite of that was on me in full, but there are worse things than being alone. Sometimes being alone is the privilege. The right to tend your own hearth. To provide your own warmth, and not have it snuffed out by those who don’t appreciate its worth. To work, yes, tirelessly, yes, tediously, but at the very least on your own terms. To choose who sits by your fire, who is welcomed into the light of the home you have made. 

I am in the midst of learning for the first time about the power of my love. The absolute gift of it. To take it seriously as something that I have to offer others. Not an obligation or a burden, but something I should keep for myself if it’s not appreciated elsewhere. I made a promise then, to the women who got me here, and who had no choice, to never take it for granted that I have the right, now, to choose. And to honor their work and their sacrifices by making the absolute most of the opportunity they never had, to create a home and a life for myself, on my own terms. 

So, no turkey for me, this Thanksgiving. No stuffing or mashed potatoes or family squabbles or hugs. That’s alright. Because: no painful, lashing comments, unprovoked. No attacks on the core of who I am, when I am hurting no one. No feeling lesser than, misunderstood, unloved. No screaming in my face. No throwing things. I leave that all behind now, be it blood or water.

Instead, I woke up on Thanksgiving and started the fire. I headed to the kitchen and baked, for myself, a little pumpkin cake. I cut a slice and sat by the fire to eat it in quiet and peace. I put another slice on the mantle for all the women in my line who never even got to sit down at the table. We sat and ate together, in quiet and peace. And I tended my own hearth. I kept myself warm all day long. 

PUMPKIN SPICE CAKE

INGREDIENTS

CAKE:

• 200g AP flour

• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

• 3/4 teaspoon salt

• 1 tablespoon cinnamon

• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

• 1/4 teaspoon allspice

• 1/4 teaspoon clove

• 3/4 cup vegetable oil

• 3 eggs

• 100g dark brown sugar

• 100g white sugar

• 300g pumpkin purée

• 2 teaspoons vanilla

FROSTING:

• 9oz cream cheese

• 1/2 cup butter

• 3 cups powdered sugar

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

• nutmeg for dusting

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 350F (180C) and grease and line a 9”x13” baking tin. (Note: This recipe also works as cupcakes, and makes just shy of a dozen if you make your cupcakes as big as I do. Or it will make a two-layer 6-inch cake. You can double it for a two-layer 8-inch cake. You will just need more frosting for the layer cakes!)

2. Sift together all of the dry ingredients into a large bowl and set it aside. Add the eggs and the sugar to the mixing bowl and beat together until the mixture turns pale.

3. Add the oil and vanilla to the mixing bowl and beat again for another minute or two until the mixture is well combined.

4. Add the dry ingredients to the mixing bowl and beat on low just until all of the flour is incorporated.

5. Add the pumpkin purée to the mixing bowl and use a spatula to fold it in.

6. Pour the batter into the pan and bake until the cake is set in the middle and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean (about 35 minutes).

7. While the cake is cooling, mix the frosting. Add the cream cheese and butter to the mixing bowl and beat on high until the mixture is light and fluffy, about two to three minutes depending on the temperature of the ingredients.

8. Sift in the powdered sugar and continue to beat until you get the frosting to a consistency you like. About five minutes is usually good. Then add the vanilla and beat for another minute to incorporate.

9. When the cake is completely cool, frost the top and sprinkle the top with nutmeg to bring out the pumpkin spice flavor. Cut, serve and enjoy. Leftovers can be kept in the fridge for up to three days or frozen until your better judgment says so.

NOTE: For my folks in Korea who may not be able to easily get pumpkin purée, don’t sweat it. I made this exact recipe for my shop every fall using 단호박 instead. I just peeled the pumpkin and cut it into 1” pieces, roasted in the oven at 400F for about 40 minutes, and then put it in the food processor with a little water until I got an equivalent consistency. I won’t say how much water exactly, because that will depend on the nature of your specific pumpkin, but it was usually anywhere from a couple of tablespoons to half a cup. It’s very hard to mess up — trust me!