Waking up to more flowers (2024)

I just moved back to a small town in Southwestern Wisconsin. I lived here several years ago as a student in a program that’s a bit difficult to describe—we read things, planted things, talked to a lot of farmers, cooked together—I usually just refer to it as my era in the farm cult. That program shaped me profoundly, and now I’m returning for a year (not actually a cult… I just keep going back…) to be a resident, where I will be helping teach some of the curriculum while also working on my own research and writing. I’ve decided I’ll finally go off of lurk mode on Substack and start writing to think through some readings and long term projects I’ll be doing this year.

I love this part of this state, and this little town. It’s bizarre here, I’m remembering that as I get settled back. It’s walkable, first of all, something remarkable for any city in the United States, let alone a town in rural America. There’s a Dairy Queen, and also a fancy farm-to-table sit down restaurant. There are dairy farmers, 1960s hippies from San Francisco, young Amish families, high schoolers with cool hair, a breakfast spot owned by queers with tattoos, a Sports Bar. Walking down the Main Street, at times, feels like walking the line of the culture wars. I wonder if everyone gets along. It’s so beautiful here, I think it pacifies us a bit.

The area around this town is filled with valleys and rivers and pockets of maple tree forest. Weaving through the roads, the hills rise and fall, soft in some places, sharp and steep in others. It’s a place that people pass through and look up to find themselves still here, two decades later, with a homestead or a small business. It enchants. It got me—I returned to write a book inspired by a moment in history in this area.

This Substack will and won’t be about that. It’ll be the books and research I’m doing, I think, and, more than anything, it’ll be me wondering about land and our relationship to it. It’s the through link in anything I do, however disconnected my interests or readings seem at times, even to me.

I think about my own relationship to land a lot, and more broadly, relationships to land across this continent, in our current context and historical moment. It’s a question that’s been following me for most of my life—How do we connect to a place? How do we take care of a place? How do we love, like, deeply, genuinely love, a place? In our current rendition of climatic crisis, as people across the Global South and Indigenous populations have pointed to being only the latest of disasters wrought by the colonization of this continent and the globe, we all need to be answering these questions. First, for ourselves. Then, so we can support and embody the shifts required to take care of our world.

I first came to these questions, growing up, because I witnessed disconnect. The suburb I grew up in outside of Milwaukee was filled with people who were not very connected to place, who were not very connected to each other. But then there was my mother. She raised me to love Milwaukee, a city that has footprints of her family wherever we go—“Here’s where Grandma’s dad ran a bar, there was a separate entrance for women to enter back then,” my mom says, “Here’s where your Grandpa taught high school wood shop,” or, “Here’s where I used to play darts when I was your age,” and, “Here’s where Great-Grandma Julia raised Grandpa growing up.” Milwaukee was where my mom’s side of the family settled when they immigrated from the Austrian-Hungary Empire in the early 1900s, today’s northern border of Croatia. While a lot of our family has dispersed across the country and the globe, my mother has been firmly rooted here her whole life.

Every time my mother and I drive somewhere in this city, she avoids the highway that splits Milwaukee like a wound down its middle, and opts for the much more time consuming and much more beautiful drive along the lake. One of us always says, “Look how beautiful the lake is today.” It never ever gets old. Sometimes she’ll say, “Let’s turn here! I’ve never been this way before,” and I watch my mother, who has now spent nearly 60 years in this city, point out the window at interesting buildings or pretty houses like a child. In a world unrooted, my mother’s lifelong love for her city and the love she instilled in me for it has profoundly shaped my conceptions of home and of taking care of a place. And she will be the first to point out that this place is far from perfect. But behind news articles and statistics is a diverse and vibrant city filled with people making and remaking homes every day.She began these conversations for me.

This love for place poured over and manifested in other ways and other places—when we went camping in Wisconsin State Parks, or when our family roadtripped to my Grandma, my dad’s mother, in northern Michigan, or we drove out west. My family didn’t know much about ecology—I usually got a shrug when I asked for the name of a tree or a flower—but they loved walking and sitting, and these are the first skills one needs to notice the world. And that’s how I noticed a dandelion. I had picked one on my way to a cafe my senior year of high school, and as I sat in the coffee shop, I pulled yellow petals away from one another. I did what I still often do: a basic search in Wikipedia. I started reading about dandelions, and I suddenly realized that every little yellow petal I was pulling apart was actually its own flower. What I perceived to be one flower, was actually hundreds, each petal holding the potential to turn into its own plant.

As I headed to college, I surprised many, myself included, by studying Conservation Biology instead of Creative Writing. What I really was doing though was learning how to understand and see what the writer in me craved to explore. I wanted to wake up to more flowers. My classes in Conservation Biology deepened my ability to see and understand the world. Between semesters I returned to places I had frequented my whole life—the beach near my parents house, the river that winded to the west of us, my grandma’s in northern Michigan, and suddenly I could SEE the plants that grew there, I knew their names and noticed the differences between their leaves, the way certain trees grew up while others grew out. I extend my gratitude to what the discipline and the people in it have offered me in my ability to question and understand the ecological world around me.

And. There is a hole in Western Science that I kept stumbling upon, a place I would walk up to and find myself waiting, patiently at first, but I saw nothing and heard nothing. It was a place I could feel and see when I was outside, walking along the lake I loved near my first apartment, could hear in the voice of my TAs as they described how much they loved pine trees or in my lab mate as they explained why they studied ants. I felt it in songs too, art too, books too. But back in the classroom, and in the papers, there was a hole.

I’ve felt and seen that hole in many areas outside of Western Science. A hole, an emptiness, in the community I grew up in, in myself, in broader American society. Which has lead me to many different thinkers, artists, activists, theorists, all with their distinct, though interconnected analyses and understanding of that hole. A hole created by disconnection from land, from community, a hole created systematically by colonization and capitalism. Dozens of brilliant thinkers, hundreds of conversations with friends and family and strangers on the street, have brought me to this current conclusion: the work is to fill this hole in ways that rediscover and deepen our connection to the land and each other, which requires changes to our thinking, changes to our distribution of resources, changes to how we relate to one another. And, beautifully, thankfully, incredibly, there are endless inspirations for how this is being done.

I want to engage with those inspirations and ideas here. I want to write stories and essays that support humans and the world healing by exploring what it means to build genuine, deep, relationships to the land and one another. What brought you to the land you’re currently on? Who’s histories are you intertwined with? What needs to happen for all of us to be able to live deep, full lives, in these places? What needs to happen for the ecological world to be able to exist fully? My reading and writing will be answering that for me, in my life, with my particular background, in my particular places I call home. Maybe this writing will reach others, and be useful to you, or maybe you’re in need of someone else with different experiences and writings. I wish everyone the best on their journey, and for those who stick around, I’d love to hear how that relates or is different for you.

So here’s the start of my messy mapping to understand history and family and the ecological world and my relationship to land. Here’s to waking up to more flowers.