Accordingly
Dear Starlight,
It’s raining. It’s been raining for days. The creek is gushing out the windows a stone’s throw from the cabin. Before, this rush of water scared me, signaling a possible flooding. The first time it rained and the water levels rose, my heart rate rose and I lay in bed listening for sounds of unmooring—imagining the cabin being lifted from its foundation and carried away. I tried to decide which maple tree I would grab.
But now, I just watch the rushing waters, raise my coffee cup to my mouth, and wonder if I should light the fire in the woodstove. One year ago today I couldn't have imagined writing you from here. This place wasn’t real yet.
The year had started with a gust. I knew something needed to change shape, though I had no idea what or how. I was running a full life that was becoming too heavy and ill fitting to keep upright. By May I was burnt out in ways I didn't have words for yet.
It’s been one year to the date (May 17th) that I first saw this dream cabin, the one I’m sitting in, flash before my eyes on my former Instagram feed (too many dreams flashing—not mine anymore).
That morning, I woke up exhausted and depleted, learning my mother-in-law passed that morning in Sicily. I woke up to a text from an old besty that he wouldn’t be going to our 30th high school reunion after all that weekend—and neither would I.
Too tired from too many things.
I didn’t wake up imagining that a year from then I would be writing you from where I am today.
(I just had to double check my phone to affirm this pileup of significance landed on this day last year, the 17th. Yup!)
Friends, I was so burnt out the weekend of May 17th, 2025.
Work was serving me shit-kicking-fucking stew again.
A philanthropist was baiting me with a high-stakes luncheon.
My high school reunion was stirring up abuse that hadn’t seen the light.
My husband was sitting vigil in Sicily for the most kind mother anyone could dream of.
My renters told me they were going to break their lease.
I woke up and cancelled everything I felt responsible to attend. Something I’m not practiced in: choosing what’s best for me, rest in this case.
My body was quivering in exhaustion and my mind was flagellating me for canceling plans. I went to the river’s edge, a sanctuary, and lay in the sun. I fell asleep as my heart settled into the warm earth beneath me, listening to the lapping waves.
Waking restored, I surprised myself by driving to the nursery and buying a rose bush. I remember looking at the golden roses in my truck, the golden-green field beyond them, and falling a little in love with myself for doing this instead of everything else I “should” be doing.
That evening, sitting in my kitchen with dinner in the oven, scrolling my attention away on my former Instagram, the cabin appeared on my screen. A beautiful fairytale dream—one I recognized.
A few years ago, a friend and I almost started a vast arts and farming venture. Toward the final inception stages, we did an exercise: imagine the most successful future we could. The kind where everything is resourced, flowing. What did that feel like? What were we doing?
I pictured myself in a tiny cabin with a deep bath, a woodstove, windows opening to rural quiet. My days were spacious and I wrote love letters that flew from the chimney to find hearts that needed them.
When I saw this image, I asked myself:
Do I really need to spend ten years building something great to arrive somewhere precious?
That question ended the venture as imagined but It began something else—I started writing small love letters. Sunday Circle.
So when I saw the cabin flashed before me, I recognized it.
Not just as beautiful.
As mine.
I google searched the address and discovered it was only 2.5 hours from my home in New York. Since I had cancelled everything for the weekend, I was suddenly free. I drove up the next day. Why not, right?
The only question I had was whether it was appropriate to tell my husband that my dream was appearing in the same breath as his mother’s last.
I decided it was not appropriate—but it was true.
And I chose true.
Something I’m not practiced in: choosing true vs. appropriate
The cabin was from a storybook. Small, triangular, dark red trim. A solar entryway with a brick floor. A piping hot wood stove. A Juliet balcony. Hugged in perennial gardens. A creek right out the door with a bridge into an enchanted forest. Hummingbirds in flight.
I knew it was right—for no reasonable reason.
I recognized the energy of YES.
The same YES I felt 25 years ago when I took a train from NYC to an unknown town called Hudson and walked into my Federal brick house at 25 years old. No plan. Just a feeling.
It felt like that again.
I called my mother on the drive home and told her I felt a YES cresting through me as I crossed the mountains, my chest expanding as if I was flying.
She said: I’ll fly out and see it with you.
And she did.
She helped me land the dream within 72 hours of it being listed. An accepted offer against all odds. Seven offers. Thousands of saves. Instagram viral.
Her becoming my house hero is its own alchemical story for another Sunday.
The first month of owning the cabin, did not feel like happy-ever-after, all I felt was agony.
A crushing wave of anxiety overtook me. I secretly measured the creek, convinced it was drying up. I watched the trees with hyper-vigilance, certain they would fall.
I found every reason I had made a dangerous mistake.
And I told no one.
I didn’t even want to stay there. I hesitated to furnish it. Maybe I should just rent it out?
I didn’t believe I was allowed to have something like this, too good to be true. Not real. Not safe. Not for me.
The year had already begun with me saying on repeat: I just want space.
One day I asked myself what I meant.
Did I mean a cleaner calendar because that’s all I saw in my mind when I said I wanted space?
Or something else?
A picture came to me: me from years before at a writing residency, in an oversized blue rain poncho wandering the woods of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. The smell of petrichor. Rain on my cheeks. An upturned tree revealing Edna’s buried trash—gin and whiskey bottles, a leather woman’s shoe, and a horseshoe. I pocketed pieces like an amateur archaeologist and later made ink from collected acorns and wrote incantations.
This is what I meant when I said I wanted space:
poetry, wandering, solitude, discovery, magic, making, nature, being in joy and wonder.
So I chose something from the list and gave myself a week to wander and wonder.
Everything felt tender. Almost painful underfoot. I walked in the woods and felt held and lost at the same time, losing time sitting and watching light move around and through me. I heard the mountain say it liked being hidden sometimes with the help of the clouds. I saw a little girl in a mudpuddle and dew drop reflections and wondered: who is she?
She seemed to appear wherever I loved being.
When the week ended, I returned back into my every day life—and nothing worked as well. Every system failed. Every attempt to restart just blew another spark plug.
By May 17th, my life felt like a broken chariot, described colloquially as a Humpty.
In my life I have built four artist studios. And each time, once they were ready, I didn’t like the way I felt in them, I felt bad taking up that much space, I gave them away for more appropriate uses—guest houses, community spaces, galleries.
I did not let myself inhabit what I made.
I felt this pattern meeting me again with the Vermont cabin.
So I gave myself a new directive:
Stay in it. Even if it’s uncomfortable.
Stay for one year.
Then decide.
Something I’m not practiced in: letting myself have more.
This was excruciating. Each time I left for Vermont, a belief met me at the door: You are selfish. You are irresponsible. You are crazy.
I needed permission. My husband’s. Someone’s. No one gave me permission because no one recognized what I needed that I couldn’t name yet—my wild nature.
Often, I didn’t go.
But when I didn’t go, something in me began to tear. Rage. Grief.
A voice: DO NOT BETRAY ME AGAIN!
So I went even though I felt bad—like I was a bad person.
I drove north.
Felt my breath lengthen with the altitude and my chest tighten with anxiety simultaneously. Arrived alone in the dark. Carried in bundles of wood. Cut my hands all over. Splinters wedged into the tip, skin torn off somehow.
And cried. And cried. And cried.
I called my sister and mocked myself for buying a cabin to cry in.
Something I’m not practiced in: being gentle with myself.
The cabin also reminded me of a buried teenage dream. One I had almost forgotten but had cast when I was my son’s current age. That someday, after walking the way of the world, I would find my way to a cabin in the woods. A place of safety. A place to be held.
Then, I, a young girl full of power and pain, empty of trust for anyone including myself, said: Now I’m going to go out there. Go hard. Fuck shit up. Make something of myself — prove my worth to all these worthless jokers! They’ll see. They’ll see me, and then maybe…set me free…to finally be me.
All I ever really wanted was to find my place. Where I could be held but not held back.
This year this cabin has held me.
And I have let it.
Something I’m not practiced in but starting to practice: being held.
This morning I woke and looked out at the trees, the early light moving through and touching my face, the creek rushing.
And I heard myself say: I want to be known. I want to be loved. I want to be free.
Today is the anniversary of that.
The dream of becoming true—becoming true. Of inhabiting myself not appropriately but truly. Not permissioned by others but according1 to me, it feels like the beginning of freedom.
*Accord: I woke from a dream this morning shouting: ACCORD! (yup?!?) I looked it up and was surprised that it’s roots are in the heart. To be in accord means heart to heart. It can mean something given or something aligned with. Historically it also could mean to reconcile. Interestingly, I also make perfume and an accord means the harmony of two essences combined to be one new thing. The word chord stems from accord as well—and it is a string of musical notes because the heart and mind had been imagined as one musical instrument,a felt emotion from the heart, and an animal gut string. So when we say according to ourselves we are saying we are in alignment with our hearts—we choose freely, and in harmony.
Yes! Beam watercolors! And your cabin is dreamy!
Sigh. You’ve given me vicarious peace from the telling of your year’s journey. And an incentive to listen even more closely to what I personally require. Happy May 17🙏🏽❤️