Unhinged Is The New Black

Now Let's Go Talk To The Lettuce

I live in the middle of the woods with my husband and my dog.

I call him my husband to get the point across, but we aren’t actually married. For better or for worse, the idea of tying the knot has never made a lick of sense to either of us. We are best friends and lovers and we’ve made our promises.

When we argue, we default to thick Russian accents. He’s better at it, which is infuriating. And also kind of hot. And also infuriating.

We trust each other, but don’t particularly trust the government, and so we remain officially unobligated, and perpetually choosing.

Our cottage is small but has everything we need: a wood stove for heat, a gas oven for cooking, a warm bed, running water from both a spring and a well. There’s solar power, a generator. Oh yeah—and a Starlink.

Because we’re not savages.

We’re surrounded on all sides by towering Doug fir, tan oak, and madrone. In the summer, we wake to the shrieking of blue jays. In the winter, the crows take over, cawing incessantly. I have learned to caw back, a skill I’ve been honing for years. My dog, Scooter, absolutely loathes it.

Next to our cottage is the garden.

It’s where I grow food, flowers, and medicine. This year, despite the world being on the edge of collapse (I say this tongue in cheek- as the world has both never and always been on the edge of collapse), I’ve decided to grow less food and more flowers. I’m not sorry about it. Even if it all goes straight to Hades tomorrow- still not sorry.

There is nothing more satisfying than hauling armloads of stupidly beautiful blossoms into my little cottage and making stupidly beautiful bouquets for the people I love. And if I die of starvation tomorrow, at least I’ll go out in a reverie of delicate perfume and soft petals.

My soul will be at peace.

In any case—even with my impractical homages to beauty—there’s still enough to feed a village in that garden. It’s too much, and I don’t always find time to gift it to neighbors or ferry it to the food bank. So, in the hottest months of summer, I load the lopsided old wheelbarrow with lettuce, basketball-sized beets, zucchini—whatever I can’t use—roll it out to a shady spot in the woods, and leave it in a pile.

“Here you go!” I’ll scream into the thick of the forest. “Now stop breaking in!”

I’m talking to the deer.
The raccoons.
The rabbits.
The bear.

I know they’re hungry.

But they’re also greedy, have no impulse control, and I’m tired of patching the damn fence. The pile is always gone by morning.

Since starting the Wildlife Welfare Program, garden breaches have dropped by at least fifty percent. And, folks—that’s not nothing.

There’s another garden about half a mile down the hill. A hand-painted sign on the gate that dubs it The Pearly Gates. Someone else carved this little piece of heaven into the hillside decades ago, but now it’s mine to tend.

I like to imagine the name was an inside joke between moustache-twirling outlaws, because it was built over some bodies that needed hiding. This is the kind of dark mischief my mind gets up to sometimes, and I don’t know why.

Fine, that’s a lie. I do know why.

It’s because I’m addicted to true crime. I’m not especially proud of this. Pretty much every guru out there advises against this sort of indulgence.

It’s low vibrational. It’s poison for the psyche. Yada, yada.

I actually agree with them, and I’ve toyed with the idea of quitting. But, honestly? Sometimes it’s the only way I can fall asleep.

I blame Dad for this, him and his never-ending, absolutely terrifying bedtime story saga called The Upper Room, which was probably wildly inappropriate for a five-year old. (I loved it.)

Truth is, nothing relaxes me more than a three-hour interrogation of some upstanding citizen who also happens to be a serial killer.

In the Pearly Gates, there are four enormous raised beds, a lilac tree, and a giant fig. In the past, when I’ve been a good steward of the land, this garden has been a paradise—teeming with soft, succulent greens, fantasy-caliber tomatoes, and a bona fide aura that makes your soul exhale and notice how quiet it is. Perfectly manicured, strangely holy.

This year? Not so much.

And, of course- it’s my fault.

I finally convinced the owners that spraying the weeds was an unnecessary harm. “I’d be happy to pull them,” I offered, imagining it was the sort of thing one could knock out over the weekend.

But damn it if the woods don’t want the garden back now.

Nature is on the warpath.

It. Just. Never. Stops.

And these aren’t normal weeds, either. Little redwood saplings, asshole grass that shoots seeds at you when you touch it (I have to wear safety goggles), and prehistoric spiky things that can literally draw blood.

It’s a good thing I actually love pulling weeds. Like, really love it.

When I first discovered this about myself, I thought it made me special and weird. But any time I admit this proclivity out loud, people always nod in total agreement. Let it be known: pulling weeds is a pretty common kink.

It’s meditative. Repetitive. A bit addicting. Like a primitive video game.

A couple years ago, when I was really struggling with my mind, I used to squat down in the garden and imagine that every weed I pulled was an unnecessary thought.

Thistle? My bank account balance.
Wild lettuce? The way my jeans seem to be getting smaller.
Hollyhock? That one conversation I keep replaying from 2015.

One by one, I’d chuck the intruders from my mind until I became a very tabula rasa.

But this year, it’s… different.

Pulling weeds has become—well—tricky.

Turns out, opening up the communication field with plants (more on this later) is the cat’s pajamas until you have to start yanking things out of the ground. Turns out, they’d prefer not to be picked. Most of them are perfectly happy exactly where they are. They have roots. Families. Opinions.

So here I am now, painfully aware that I’m taking what suddenly seems to be sentient life—often just for the sake of order or aesthetics. And well, it’s made the whole thing feel a little aggressive. Colonial, even.

And, sure. I could just numb out, throw on a True Crime podcast during the slaughter, but lately I’ve been forcing myself to be present with what I’m actually doing.

If I’m going on a murderous rampage in the garden, I should at least have the decency to look my victims in the face and hear their last words as I launch them across the rainbow bridge.

It’s the neighborly thing to do.

Presence. Such a slippery mistress. Such a tough little nut. Even for me, living waaaay out here in the woods, away from all you wackos. (This is a joke, in case you were wondering. Because I am Queen Wacko, and my husband is the king.)

The main beef I have with presence:

The question of whether I’m present or not INTERRUPTS THE FUCKING PRESENCE.

I’ll find myself on the edge of some miraculous vista, eyes bulging like a kid trying to move a pencil with her mind.

Must. Appreciate.

That’s when the plucky panic sets in. Wheels spinning over whether I’m actually in the moment or just pretending. Desperate for totally authentic awe to drop like an anvil on my crown chakra.

When it doesn’t, I feel like an absolute fraud.

In the last year or so, I gave up on being enlightened (another lie) and stumbled into something different. Something….er…unorthodox. And it’s weirder than anything I’ve said yet, so brace yourselves.

I’m not quite sure when it started. One day, I just started talking to everything. And I mean: everything.

Not just the flowers and the lizards and the snakes. (That’s baseline behavior.) I’m talking to the kilim rug in my studio. To the kitchen windowsill. To the heavy cream while it executes sexy little pirouettes in my coffee.

Actually. Now that I think about it, I do know when this started. It was in the studio, when I took the advice from my mentor— “Ask the painting what it wants,”—literally, and started talking to the canvas. To the piles of paint. To my tools. Eventually, it just sort of stuck.

And dang, y’all. If it isn’t fucking fun. It feels deliciously unhinged and feral and playful.

What I wasn’t expecting was how things would get weird. How, when I started to do this, everything started to feel…alive. Animated. Aware. Like I’d been watching the world through a dirty windshield, and didn’t even notice. Suddenly, the vase full of dried lavender started to look downright pneumatic. The vacuum, a vision.

I started looking more closely. Noticing more.

Things became so alive that at some point, I realized—I was waiting for them to respond. And that’s when I started listening.

And that’s when the world started talking back. Not in actual words,
but in essence. Quiet transmissions. Little flashes of knowing.

For example:

The wind? It just loves to make things move. So I let it move me. Out in the tall grass, I’d raise my arms and sway with it, just for fun. Just to say hello.

The toads buried beneath the sunflowers? They go bananas for cold, misty showers. So I’d show up every morning with the hose, and wait for their blissful faces to peak out from beneath the soil.

The lettuce told me she preferred coco coir to the straw I’d been using—the straw was too “pokey”— and when I conceded, she gave me the best heads I’ve ever tasted.

I started to just…know. When to wait. When to take action. When to rest. How to care.

Then, things got weirder.

One morning, rinsing out my coffee cup, I looked up from the sink to see the windowsill, gleaming in high definition. Without thinking, I chirped, “Well, hello there!” out loud, surprising myself. And realizing—in that very moment—that I was no longer talking to the windowsill, nor to the vase of wilting flowers atop it.

I was talking to reality itself.
An entity of its own.
A pulsing, living thing.

So when I’m at the Pearly Gates, on my hands and knees, cajoling the weeds out of the ground, what’s happening is a full-blown conversation.

They’ve made homes, they’ve set roots, they’ve claimed their place. And here I come, again, ruining everything, just when they’re about to make seeds.

I’m arguing with them. This is my garden. You’re trespassing.

I’m making excuses. I didn’t spray you. I let you live this long.

I’m softening the blow. Maybe you’ll come back as something that can run away from me.

I’m apologizing. I’m sorry, baby. I know.

After hours—and I mean hours—of this, the exchange melts into mutual understanding. Every weed I tug out of the ground, I’m sending on its way with love, blessing it. The act becomes one fluid, seamless task. A rhythm, a trance. And maybe it’s delusion, but I swear they start to come up easier.

At some point I notice a chill in the air, the light changing. An ache in my bones. It’s time to go home.

I straighten up. Slowly, creaking.

My eyes, strained from hours of staring at gravel,
rise to meet the world—and I freeze.

The garden beds spill over with giant ranunculus in full bloom. Baby pink, magenta, cream. The late sun spills over their petals, illuminating them from within. Beyond the garden walls, the Doug fir and madrone are backlit by sky, molten gold pouring through the branches, flooding the meadow below.

I gape. The world is singing.

Gah. I know. I know.

I’m doing the thing you’re not supposed to do in writing—trying to eff the ineffable.

The truth is, there’s no way to tell you how gobsmackingly, painfully beautiful that moment was. There just aren’t words in the English language that can hold what it looked like.

But I can tell you what it felt like.
Because that’s what blew my mind.

I’m hit with a wave of pleasure so intense, I can’t even identify it as pleasure at first. It feels like nausea. Intense, knee-buckling, run-to-the-nearest-bathroom nausea.

Like I’ve just devoured fifty thousand calories of the richest, densest, most godlike cheesecake on the planet— and cannot take one more bite. But every time I look at the flowers, the trees, the light— they keep forcing me to eat more.

I keel over, brace myself against the garden bed, breathe through my nose, and stare back down at the gravel, almost scared to look up.

But I can’t help myself. I look up.

Boom. Another wave. Oneness.

Its delicious and confusing and I love it and I don’t know what to do with it.

And, eventually, it subsides.
The current lets me go.
I can move again.

The flowers are just flowers.
The trees go back to being trees.

On the walk home up the hill, I’m racking my brain, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. The feeling is familiar, but I can’t place it.

I know I’ve felt it before. But when?

Hours later, while I’m deep in the process of burning scrambled eggs and destroying my kitchen, it hits me:

Four summers ago. Silent darkness. Five grams of mushrooms.

Same feeling. Swear to God.

Then I think about Bernini’s sculpture, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

And I think—that’s it.
That’s what it was.

Ecstasy.

Not the drug. The state.

And the fact that it arrived on a day when I’d whole-heartedly devoted myself to the lowly weeds—

well, it felt like confirmation.

Like the Field whispering: This is the way.

And no—I’m not telling you this to brag.

But yes, I do feel special, and I’m actively wrestling with that. With the spiritual smugness that rises up in me sometimes. The smugness that thinks maybe I finally figured it out.

Thing is, I’m not special. I’m flawed. With vices and trauma and a hundred Moby Dicks swimming in my psyche at all times.

And because of that, I usually keep this stuff to myself.

But, this is just… my life.
And here we are.

And maybe, I don’t know—
maybe I’m onto something.
With talking to the rug.
And showering the frogs.
And slowing everything the fuck down.

Maybe there’s something in this.

And maybe—just maybe—someone out there,
surrounded by a pile of self-help books that didn’t help,
and healing gadgets they quietly resent,
might read this and think:

Huh.
Maybe I’ll try talking to the lettuce.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably my tribe, or more than a little confused.

Either way, you’re welcome here. Please do subscribe.

Thanks for being here, folks.