Hello for the first time in a year and a half! As my daughter, Aya, approaches her second birthday and I take steps back into the world outside the baby-toddler bubble, I’ve been missing the feeling of regularly sharing my writing. Inspired by the many creative mothers in my life (and Camille T. Dungy’s Soil, which I am reading right now), I’m challenging myself to use this newsletter to send brief dispatches from early motherhood (though not necessarily all about motherhood), ideally written with a scrap of time and not polished too much.
A special welcome to those of you who are here because you took a journaling workshop with me at the Japanese American National Museum or Nellita’s Craft! I’ll use this newsletter to share future workshops I offer in person or online. For now, I’ll share a journaling prompt at the end of each newsletter. If you try them, I’d love to hear how they worked for you.
Much gratitude to you all.
I have never been good with plants, but Aya loves them, so this spring, we started a balcony garden. We have mint, salvia, snapdragon, an orange star flower (a surprisingly hardy Trader Joe’s find), and a handful of succulents, which we go out to check together every day.
Whenever I work on the plants, Aya wants to participate. “Shovel?” she says, reaching out to take it from me. “Gloves? Baby gloves?” (As in, do you have gloves for me too?) When I deadheaded the snapdragon, she took the dried flowers out of the pot where I’d deposited them and carefully placed them back into the plant. When I plucked the splotched leaves infected by a fungus called rust, she plucked healthy leaves and flowers off the neighboring plants, faster than I could stop her.
As we garden together, I’m trying to cultivate within myself more tolerance to dirt and bugs, experimentation and failure — not just tolerance, but celebration. As I introduce Aya to the world, I encounter myself, the traits I’m proud of and the ones I’m not, including the halting perfectionism of a child who was afraid ever to be wrong, bad, or conspicuous in any way.
At her age, Aya doesn’t need to be taught not to be a perfectionist or to celebrate dirt and bugs. I only need to encourage what comes naturally to her as she scoops soil from pot to pot and crouches down to watch an ant, wide open to the world.
Journaling prompt:
What would you like to cultivate within yourself and your life? Try drawing each intention as a plant and use its leaves to explore its different facets.