When Everything is New

Growing up in a very creatively nurturing environment, I always knew I could safely share my feelings, my aspirations and my art without feeling judged. My Mom and Dad, though separated, always encouraged me to pursue my interests in theatre, in art, and in all of the school subjects I felt drawn to. (Never math or science, sadly.) I was never pressured to be a doctor, to run for office, or to be Valedictorian. My Dad wished I would have kept learning how to play guitar, but he never made me feel less than because of it. My Mom drove me to all of my play practices from the age of 7, and everyone in my life showed up to see me on stage. My world was full of instruments and journals, songbooks and underlined scripts. I was introduced to this world at birth because both of my parents are musicians. The sounds in both of my parents' houses were of The Grateful Dead, Ani Difranco, Sam Cooke, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Blind Melon, and The Cure. Road Trips with my Dad consisted of playing the ‘who sings this song?’ game. Mom and I practiced our harmonies as we sat on our living room floor drinking our favorite tea.

Though surrounded by all of that creativity and love which I will be endlessly grateful for, I was never taught how to build a fire, how to ski, how to read a map, or really anything that had to do with the outdoors. I didn’t even learn how to ride a bike until I was 11. Not because they didn’t try, but because I was never interested. My Mom and Stepdad took my friend and I camping in Virginia Beach in the middle of July once. It was well over 90 degrees but felt even hotter because of the heavy, unpleasantly sticky air. My best friend Jessie was a camping expert, having a Swiss Dad who took his three kids to the woods regularly. She knew how to chop wood with an axe and how to pitch a tent. When we went to bed that night, us in our tent and my Mom and Stepdad in the next one, I wrapped myself up in my flannel sleeping bag. I started to sweat but I wouldn’t even put an arm out. I was scared of spiders. I was scared of any and all creatures that could get to me in that tent. Jessie told me over and over again to take the sleeping bag off but I started hyperventilating and crying instead. My Mom and I slept in the car that night. I woke up ashamed and wished so much that I could have been brave like Jessie.

I’m not sure where this intense fear of the outdoors came from, I truly don’t. There were no life altering experiences as a baby, no animal scares or stories about being mauled by a bear or bitten by a spider. When my parents were together and we lived in Northern California, they took me camping and hiking. I have this photo of me standing outside of our green tent, with two year old messy hair and my hands holding onto a bagel. That photo is the only one I had of me camping until I was 22. That’s the age I started learning how to live alongside nature, the age I started getting my hands dirty with earth and the age when I realized everything was new.

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I arrived in the countryside of Normandy with my giant backpack handed down from my Aunt who had traveled Europe with it too. It was most likely not tightened properly, and neither were my hiking boots. I had signed up to be a volunteer baker at a vegetarian B&B and though it didn’t quite end up being as I thought it would be, it was the beginning of everything for me. It is where I started to learn about “le terroir”, or local land. I tasted Calvados made from the apples grown in the backyard, and I ate vegetables and fruits from the garden. I had never done that before! I had cooked with vegetables from the gardens at my University a few years before that, and I had been eating organic, local produce for most of my life, thanks to my Mom, but I had never been able to see the garden through the window as I tasted its gifts. I weeded plant beds for the first time there. I heard the chickens in the morning when I woke up. I picked flowers to arrange on a cake I baked. I started to notice the sunsets more, and the way everything smelled after a long, hard rain.

After a month, circumstances and instincts brought me to a place called Newbold House. My then boyfriend and I hopped off of the bus into a tiny foreign town in the very North of Scotland and walked through it asking people where Newbold was. They pointed, and we walked, suitcases in hand, bags on our backs. A nice couple ended up picking us up and dropping us off at the entrance of the driveway. There was a wooden sign tucked into the bushes that said “Newbold House.” I remember the way it smelled, rhododendrons arching in as if they were trying to reach their leaves around us. After a few minutes of walking, the house came into view and I was in awe. It was an actual mansion, red brick with a glass greenhouse attached to the side, huge windows with billowy curtains in every direction. Flowers and trees were everywhere in full bloom, and the sun was hot but the air cool.

I spent over a year there. (Sidenote: the importance of the relationships and experiences I had at Newbold deserve their own story and it isn’t this one, so I will write about that another time. Here and now, I will keep it focused.) In that year, I figured out that living with nature is something ingrained in me unknowingly and that all I needed was an environment to bring it out into the light.

The garden was enormous and vibrant with its own character and a magnificent array of vegetables, flowers, fruits and herbs. Apple trees lined the walls, greenhouses held curling tomato and courgette vines, bushes were full of red and black currants, roses and calendula were bright and beautiful. You could smell the lavender, thyme, chives and chamomile as you walked past the herb garden. When I first arrived, I could barely identify any of it. I didn’t know that rhubarbs grew such huge leaves, or that there were different varieties of beets. As we toured the garden on our second day, it was like a foreign land, just like in a storybook or some hip blog on Pinterest I had seen about being off the grid. But this was real.

Within the first few weeks, I was planting beets and harvesting vegetables for the kitchen, bringing produce of all colors to the head chef, Turiya. As I started to help her in the kitchen, I would bring a small basket outside and cut edible flowers for her to decorate the food with. I took walks around the property without shoes on so that I could feel the grass. I found the woods behind our house and went out in the evenings by myself. I took the bus and walked to my favorite beach in the entire world, Findhorn Bay. I would sit there for hours, feeling the heavy wind and smelling the salt and the yellow flowered bushes I still don’t know the name of. These are the moments that come to mind when I hear the words “discovery” or “freedom.” The world became bigger and more magical than it had ever been because I felt like I was finally a part of it. I wasn’t trying to separate outside from myself anymore, I wanted it to be closer.

Through many changes in relationships to others and mostly with myself, I made the decision to stay at Newbold on my own, and to this day, it is the best decision I have ever made. I wasn’t afraid of getting bugs on me, wasn’t afraid of being outside in the dark, and I certainly wasn’t afraid of getting lost in the forest. I went camping on the beach with friends and we cooked dirty potatoes in tin foil and ate them with our hands. I went skinny dipping into the ocean nearly every week, just because it made me feel alive. I made the choice to move from the house into a yurt outside and I built a fire each night in my wood stove to keep warm when it was cold. (There were a few large spider situations in the yurt that I wasn’t too excited about, but I got over it much quicker than I would have in the past.) I learned what herbs were good for what, that candied beets are the most beautiful vegetable in the world, and that apples taste better when you pick them right from the tree. Newbold House is where my heart grew 5 sizes bigger. I became curious again, like a little kid discovering how to climb a tree for the first time. I started going on hikes by choice instead of feeling like I had to impress the people I was with. I WANTED to spend as much time outside, whether it was painting on the front steps of my yurt or sitting underneath the huge oak tree, hands clutching a mug full of tea, chatting with my friends.

(First three photos taken by Kevin Lee Curtis)

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I met my now husband at Newbold, and that is where the most recent part of my outdoor discovering started. Florian, or Flo as we all like to call him, is a French man shaped out of the wilderness. He always says he has two loves- me and his mountains. From the very beginning, he challenged me. The first night we hung out, he led me through the forest using his phone to light the way. I walked behind him, twisting my ankles on the tangled roots but continuing on without saying a word because at that point, I wasn’t scared of the woods anymore, but I also wasn’t used to walking in the dark. On my birthday, he took me on a surprise trip to the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland. We stayed in a cabin at a wild hostel, with a wood fire stove and an outdoor shower. We went into a natural hot tub surrounded by trees. We drank my favorite beer and enjoyed the feeling of being hot and cold at the same time, the skin not submerged in water feeling the icy temperatures of the Scottish winter.

Our next trip was to the Highlands, in a little port town called Ullapool. We hitchhiked to a nature reserve and hiked up the mountain. I was slow and couldn’t help wondering if he thought so too, but I kept going until I couldn’t. He finished the last part of the climb by running up the rocky trail. I sat on the bench and looked at the ocean as the sun started to set, and I remember thinking “what was life like before this?” On the same trip, we hitchhiked some more and found a field of wild sheep and jack rabbits that led to a nearly abandoned beach. I didn’t swim that time but instead watched him as he walked slowly into the water, breathing with his eyes closed and this look of pure bliss on his face. That was one of my favorite days.

I visited him in France for the first time in the Spring after we met, and I got to see where he grew up. The countryside of France isn’t what Flo thinks of as his heart’s home, but I loved picking raspberries and stinging nettle out of the garden and watching the hills roll along the road when we drove. The first time I kayaked was there with him, on a mellow and small river near his hometown. I was nervous as I stepped onto the boat, but after a few minutes of rowing, I didn’t want to stop. We slept outside on the porch there, waking up to bird songs and bees buzzing, the sunlight shining into our eyes as we smiled sleepily and hugged each other.

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Since then, my life has been a series of new experience after new experience, a series of self discoveries and deeper connections with everything around me. For my birthday last year, Flo and his Dad bought me a bike. I was scared to ride it, and still am a little bit. But one day, we rode nearly 30 miles. I was so proud of myself, I can still remember the feeling of pulling into the driveway and smiling so big my cheeks felt like they were going to fall off. Flo taught me how to belay a climbing rope so he could climb the rocks outside. I tried a few times too. He even persuaded me to try something called via ferrata, a type of climbing path where you use small metal steps and are clipped onto a wire, usually through canyons. I didn’t want to do it, at all. I was so scared, but I knew I would regret it if I didn’t. I probably cried about 10 times during the course, but I finished it and cried again, with proud tears instead of fearful tears. I used to make fun of runners but now I’m enjoying slowly introducing it into my ventures outside. We bought a van and converted it into a little home, and going outside at night to pee isn’t super pleasant, but it doesn’t terrify me like when I was younger.

So often, self criticism has stopped me from pursuing things I’m interested in, and fear is the major culprit. Whether it is fear of failing or fear of being judged, it all stems from something that has done nothing but hold me back. The panic I used to feel about going into the woods by myself was unbelievable. I couldn’t fall asleep when I was a kid unless my Mom checked my room for bugs. I would make up excuses so that I didn’t have to go hiking or waterfall jumping with my friends. When I think about those times, it makes me incredibly sad for my younger self. I was scared to discover things that were unknown to me, and I wish I could tell that little girl to be brave.

Now that my world is more eclectic, I get to feel joy in a way that I never thought would be possible for me. I still revel in the comfortability of a down comforter and drinking a big cup of coffee while I write or paint. I sleep in and I bake cakes and I listen to music at least 80% of my day. But I also jump into cold rivers and love to eat rice cooked on a propane camping stove. I go on walks and runs by myself and dream about having an herb garden and going on a backpacking trip with my husband. I am still not a natural born outdoor girl, but I sure as hell am learning to say ‘yes’ to the things that used to scare me. I have read so many books and watched so many movies about how going out of our comfort zones is the only place we grow. I always thought it was BS, and that I was perfectly happy in my room full of poetry and records, but the joke’s on me! I have grown more in the past three years than in my entire life, and that is solely because I learned that taking the risks that make your heart beat fast and brow-line sweat are probably the experiences that are going to bring you the brightest smiles and belly laughs of your life.

“FIND OUT WHAT YOU’RE AFRAID OF AND GO LIVE THERE.”

-Chuck Palahniuk