A Letter From The Editor

The truth is, I am not a maker. Not in the traditional sense. In fact, I’m not even that good with my hands. I’ve never had the patience for it. I move too quickly. And I’m often lost in my head - most likely because I can travel the fastest there.

Over the last decade, my family and I actively chose to seek out and make a life in more rural, less populated places. You’d think that this would have brought us closer to the earth, the present, the physical space around us, all of that. In many ways, it did. We learned a lot about our capabilities and our limits and developed a deeper understanding of the elements. We found joy in unexpected places and were humbled repeatedly by our humanness.

But also, and relatively often (and especially with the pandemic) we still found ourselves attempting to flee the moment. To be anywhere but here, and with anyone but ourselves. There is a sentiment that always stuck with me from an interview I conducted with a shop owner for a local publication during our first year of giving rural living a try. Having moved from Los Angeles to a desert community of less than a thousand, she echoed the sentiment of leaving it all behind for a more simple life. “But,” she said, “You take your life with you, wherever you go. I mean, you can’t escape yourself.”

This has stuck with me all these years, especially as I found myself subconsciously complicating what was supposed to be an attempt to ‘get back to basics.’ A change in my surroundings wasn’t what I had been after, it turns out, but rather, a redesign of my relationship with it.

Humans. as a whole, have a tumultuous relationship with the here and now. It’s as though we can never really convince ourselves that right now is actually the best place to be. I really believe that, as a whole, we want to be present. But in this day and age, I no longer believe it is our natural instinct. I could spend forever waxing on and on as to why But aside from unlearning some bad habits, there’s only so much to be gained from this.

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hat I mean the world of tangibility, has been mostly limited to its consumption. And while we as a culture place the most emphasis on this aspect, it’s really only a very small part of humankind’s true relationship to the material world.

But lately - I’ve been drawn to the tangible with an insatiated pang - you know, the kind you get when your body knows it’s missing critical nutrients. Like when you’ve been eating junk food all week and you could just really go for some good, solid greens. In part, I think this is because we’re about to leave a space where physical distance required immaterial ways to connect. This urge to spend time cultivating my relationship with the material world is, in part, a self correction. It is a personal self correction, but also part of a larger, more universal one. As the world enters a Meta