December 20, 2023
I’m going to the MoMa, and I’m thinking about when we lost touch with nature. I’m contemplating selling everything I own and buying a small house made of stones in the mountains somewhere. One room, with a bed, a hearth, a sink, a table, and a chair. I’ll garden a patch of land; I’m pretty sure potatoes can grow anywhere, so I’ll always have a taste of home. I’ll get a goat or a sheep for milk and fur—I suppose the sheep, then. I’ll collect water from the stream nearby, and one afternoon, a stray will walk up to my house. I’ll feed it gently, and every day it’ll come a little bit closer until he, I, and the sheep are family.
We’ll get up with the sun each morning and watch does nibble on frozen grass. We’ll spend our time sowing the soil, walking each corner of the mountain until we can roam it in our sleep, waving to the few strangers walking about, and humming the song that will have made its way through our memories that day. We’ll fall asleep reading Night Circus' and 'Le Petit Prince' for the 100th time. I’ll have rebound the books myself, adding handwritten pages for the ones that fell apart.
There’s nothing we can’t fix when life is that simple.