In the myth of Castor and Pollux, the Divine Twins – better known as Gemini — one was fully mortal and the other half-god. When the mortal one was killed, the other begged his father, Zeus, to return him to life. Zeus agreed, but death demanded a price, as it always does: They could stay together, but they’d spend half of every year in the underworld.

To me, this is what it feels like to be a writer. Each piece leads me deep into the unconscious to recover the gems I need to survive. Writing is both the thing that pulls me under and the thing that pulls me out again.

When I started my Substack project, my ambition was to put out a newsletter as regularly as my farm delivers harvest-share boxes to members. I thought I could keep it light and fun, inspired by the romance of early-stage farm life. I quickly found that any thread I pulled on would take me somewhere challenging and require a lot of time to process into something others could consume. The name of a tomato, the consistency of cucumbers, the stubbornness of a blackberry root – these subjects have led me into complex histories, both collective and personal.

This project is teaching me how to get beyond my symbols and projects and listen to what the land and the plants are actually trying to teach me. The process feels chaotic and sometimes destabilizing, especially when I enter the portions of my essays that blend in memoir. Sometimes I don’t understand why things belong together until the very end.

I have found that it helps to anchor myself on the surface of reality in a material way. Usually there’s an altar of some kind, or at least an object that grounds me – a root, a seed, a stone. Lately, I find myself making collages that give the work a color palette, some pre-verbal presence on this plane. Somehow this helps.

Most essays require me to consume something. It is not enough to study or to read or to make my offerings. I must also hold the thing I am writing about in my hands, take it into my mouth, inhale its scent somehow. For example, right now, I’m writing about bison, so I had to eat some. It came in a package labeled “Ancestral Blend,” which included ground-up pieces of heart and liver. I ate an ancestry. It holds me accountable. So now, even the little recipe that appears at the end of the newsletter is a reflection of a deeper truth, a portal into myth and mystery, and an invitation to connect across time.

Anyway, that’s everything I can tell you about my process. Mostly it’s about how to stay alive while doing the work of writing – which is something I also have to do to stay alive, so it’s all kind of the same thing.