An off-trail timeline

On arriving late, and inhabiting the life I was taught to fear

Sage and me at our Forager Wildlife Summer Solstice Retreat

Dear friends,

Some teenagers go to prom, sleepovers, high school dances, play wild with drinking games, experimental drugs, or exploratory sex. Some do as they’re told, work hard, advance their education and their status. Some work hard in the sun, or in food service, supporting their families, helping them survive. Some live inside apocalyptic cults, preparing for the end of the world, reading the forest the way other children watch television.

For years, I mourned the girl I might have been, had things been otherwise. Sometimes I imagine her laughing, playing, sharing secrets. I wonder who I might have become with a softer beginning.

But there are no mile markers in the forest, and out here, we’re free to arrive late to anything that still calls us, living on an off-trail timeline.

When I was young, I learned the roles of good mother, good wife, good professor, good neighbor, gathering titles and responsibilities around myself like stones, hoping they would make me safe.

My mother was thirty-three when my siblings and I carved the word Mother out of wood and painted it for her birthday, trying to make something solid enough to hold the idea of her.

When I turned thirty-three, I had four children in school, a tenured professorship and a long-term marriage. But I didn’t know who I was. A man I loved gave me a copy of Jitterbug Perfume for my birthday, and inside, he wrote something that made me feel like a woman for the first time.

My twin daughters are now thirty-four.

When I was that age, identity felt like something I had to build so solidly that no one could knock it down.

Now I understand identity as something alive, thriving on invisible forces of growth and change.

I think of myself as a creature growing new antlers each season. They’re tender at first, vulnerable, covered in velvet and blood. Then they harden, and help me clear branches and defend myself as I move through the forest. Eventually I shed them and I begin again, and again, and again.

Aging has given me the ability to trust my animal body and to appreciate my strong legs, my experienced hands, and the weathered skin that has carried children, hunger, grief, pleasure, and decades of becoming.

let’s stay close to what’s alive,
m

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Yoga at the Maloof – Fridays at 10 a.m. Yoga on Tap at Claremont Craft Ales – 2nd & 4th Sundays, 11:30 a.m. Crestline Hot Yoga - Tuesdays at 9:00 a.m.

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If you’re new here…

I’m Michelle, a writer, teacher, and lifelong forager shaped by the mountains of California. I grew up in an apocalyptic cult, where I learned to survive from the land, distrust the world beyond it, and listen closely for what lives beneath the surface.

Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, a Kirkus-starred memoir, tells the story of leaving one community and finding another.

Today, my work explores how attention, creative practice, embodiment, and the living world help us become more fully alive. Through this newsletter, retreats, workshops, and seasonal communities, I invite others into that practice.

For the Secret Garden cohort:

What helps you return to your specific art practice commitment each day, especially when resistance is loud?

What small ritual could make showing up easier this week?

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