Digesting 2022
Digesting 2022
Reflections On Tonight's Wolf Moon
A year ago today, during a pandemic surge, I had my first online book event with friend and amazing landscape designer, Lily Kwong. United Plant Savers — a plant conservation organization whose work I admire and have been involved with for years — hosted. I was nervous. Not about the event really, but about putting my book, Awakening Artemis and myself (as a new author) out into the world. I was afraid of revealing so much of myself, that I would be judged for it, misunderstood, trolled, or that people in my family would be upset with me. I was afraid the writing wasn’t ‘good enough’ or that I would get bad reviews. Plus, some edits hadn’t made it into the final print and I, a recovering perfectionist, had a hard time digesting that.
I wrote the bulk of the book in 2020 in lockdown and solitude in the Scottish Highlands. Poring through old journals, countless notes about plant medicine and my own journey of healing, I wrote, unedited. I dug deep and I asked myself: What is in service of the story?
While I did get a little discomforting feedback from family, most of my fears never materialized. Instead, I received countless messages about the ways in which Awakening Artemis made people feel seen, ‘that it was written for them’ and inspired them to connect more deeply with themselves and the natural world. I am deeply grateful to all of you who take the time to write to me. Thank you. It means so much and often makes my day when the book, commercially, didn’t feel quite like a success.
2022 was a whirlwind of a year. It was the year I emerged as an author and began to learn, slowly, what that was and wasn’t. I left Brooklyn at the end of 2021, and by 2022 I was no longer a resident of New York City, my home-base for over 25 years. In 2022, I fell more deeply in love with the man I now live with. We traveled together, moved way too many times, ‘slept’ in way too many beds. We hiked through many woods, wildcrafted and dried more reishi mushroom than I have ever seen. I tried to reimagine my business that relied on intimate in-person experiences in nature and get it back on track after the fallout of the pandemic. I started and turned in the draft of my second book. And my beloved partner and I became co-stewards of 268+ acres in Western Massachusetts. I’ve been trying to encapsulate the year for a while now and every time I try, it makes my head spin.
Now, here I am in 2023, trying to let it all settle.
My mom, sister and I have a tradition of making vision boards at the start of each year. Mine never turn out like stereotypical vision boards but they do help me meditate on my intentions and visualize the path ahead. Mine ‘vision board’ is pictured above. It includes cabins nestled in the woods (we hope to build a low impact house and a few camping platforms on the land), humans hiking (I want to be active outdoors year round), and plants and animals who are well fed and thriving. We had a handful of magazines this time so I did my best.
Tonight is a full wolf mooon, marking the time of year when hungry wolves can be heard howling in the night to rally their packs for cold winter hunting or — in this early part of their mating season — to find a mate. This is a good night for us to howl too, literally and figuratively, for what we hunger or lust for.