1/5 - hello from the new year!!!

nature writing / brain dump / this is longer than i intended...

hiii friends and loved ones and newcomers!!! veryyyy excited to resurrect my substack because i am STARTING A WEEKLY NEWSLETTER!!! inspired by many but most notably a sweet new nyc friend who writes over at sue’s news. granted - my follow through when it comes to bloglike activities is not the strongest…but even if i only stick to this for a month i’ll be proud. as of rn this will drop every sunday evening! as a reflection on events/thoughts from the previous week. much love and see you around <3

Happy new year!!! It’s been a little over a week since I left Brooklyn, and my landing so far has been surprisingly smooth and easy, almost too uneventful to be remembered. No airport mishaps; my bass made it safely across the country; I didn’t even journal on the five hour flight (unprecedented, weird) despite not having a seat back screen. I spent my first 48 hours here within the extreme quiet of my parents’ house, only leaving once to go for a walk (amazing. 10/10. more on that later). Despite my anxiety about the stretch of wide-open days following my arrival, time has been moving fast - I didn’t even see anyone other than my parents until day 5 of being here?? and my time off from work is quickly coming to an end.

Unless you count my 5-week winter breaks in college, I haven’t spent a winter in the PNW since high school. Being back at this time of year feels strange and also normal? I can see so many familiar plants and trees from my 2nd-floor bedroom window - cedars, hemlocks, ferns, alders, salmonberries, cottonwoods, all draped in moss and glistening with the perpetual drizzle of these winter months. The stillness feels surreal after being in New York for so long - I feel like I’m underwater at a pool party, waiting for the moment my head will break the surface and be met again with noise, voices, laughter, music.

But this time, I’m here for (at least) 3 months. A short time and a long time - not nearly enough to settle into any new routines, but hopefully long enough that I’ll get a sense of whether I want to fully return. When I moved to NYC in 2022, I didn’t think I’d ever live in my parents’ house again (GUYS I JUST SAW A BOBCAT FROM MY WINDOW ??????)…

hello???

…but I’m back in my childhood bedroom - and if being in WA is like being underwater, my parents’ house is a sensory deprivation chamber. For nearly all hours of the day, my family retreats into separate rooms, everyone doing their own thing behind closed doors. We come together for meals but not much more. I miss the background noise of the city, cars and sirens and loud music and the trains and people shouting to one another and the constant reminder that lives are being lived all around you.

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I spend the first two full days here cleaning - somehow I donate sooo much stuff every time I get home, but I still ended up with five or six bags of clothes and books this time around - but on day 3, I drive five minutes down the road to the blueberry farm, aka my favorite place to walk, think, cry, reflect, decompress, etc. This greenspace - a few acres of blueberry bushes and woods surrounding a pond - has seen me through so many seasons of my life. Sometimes when I’m here, I walk laps around the pond; other times, I follow the greenbelt trail to a bigger lake nearby, passing several small farms and community gardens on the way. At this time of year, the path around the pond is flooded and wet, so I half-circle the water and then double back to enter the woods.

The second I exit the car, I drop into the present, into wonder, in a way I rarely experience in the city. The air smells so rich and damp, all the scents of the earth activated by rain. Beneath a thick cloud layer, I can only guess where the sun may be, but it doesn’t matter because the light seems to come from everywhere. I marvel at even the smallest things: buttercup leaves poking out of puddles of flooded lawn, the gentle give of the gravel path under my feet, the familiar three-note call of redwing blackbirds. The landscape seems so vividly and impossibly saturated - bright greens of wet grass; purplish red of bare blueberry branches; woody yellows of dogwood trees; nuanced violets and grays as the sky, multidimensional and layered, shifts with the wind. Even a bruise on my knuckle looks unrealistically bright.

I’m laughing and giddy, charmed by every small observation and encounter. Reaching the flooded section of trail, I spend many minutes watching ducks and geese float a few inches over the gravel, nibbling at grasses and communicating with the occasional quiet quack.

I’m especially captivated by texture on this day, pausing to take phone pictures of anything and everything that catches my eye. (Something I don’t do as much as I’d like in NY - I’m always in the middle of a busy sidewalk or running late or unable to frame a photo without including a stranger’s face.) Here, nothing is too boring or mundane to evade observation - I’m just as delighted by a tangle of dead grasses as I am by the luminous orange of a jelly fungus. My camera roll quickly fills with photos of mosses, leaves, water, tree bark.

shapes! colors! textures!

Frequenting a place over the years also brings the excitement of reading changes in the landscape - I note that my favorite patch of nettles has died back for the winter, the eagles’ nest in the old douglas fir is gone. One one section of trail, I remember seeing a young hawthorn tree in the past, but I don’t give it much thought until I’m returning the same way, and I stop to look at some mushrooms that catch my eye - and there is hawthorn, standing bare and spiny right next to the mushrooms. I am moved almost to tears by this small coincidence.

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Coming back always feels like such a weird collapsing of time and space. Visiting these places I used to frequent, cleaning my room and rediscovering buried memories (I found a USB drive from like 7th grade that had a copy of my 2012 NaNoWriMo attempt, which unfortunately is a password protected word doc I can’t get into. devastating). 24 hours into being back, I miss NY unbearably; another 24 hours and it feels like I’ve never left Washington.

Thankfully, things have been relatively stable with my parents so far. I got scared earlier this year when both a mudang and an astrologer told me not to return yet (back when I was thinking to commit to a full move), to give it more time - both citing possible turbulence with family. I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that my Saturn, the planet ruling/representing restrictions, blockages, challenges, etc, is NOT in my 5th house (creativity, self-expression) but rather my 4th house (the home, the family, the mother ….) which explains a lot and also really sets the scene for Saturn entering Aries in May of this year. Who else fearing their Saturn return 😍 (calculator if u aren’t sure…context for saturn return if u aren’t familiar)

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lmao ok actually speedrunning the rest of this because i have had some random stomach sickness the past few days and have been bedridden AND am also not sure i can set a precedent for this gratuitous level of detail. so, big takeaways:

• been hooked on this babehoven album and the last few words of the last song, repeated in a classic sweeping indie finale, are “you’re my brother, you’re my family, you are everything to me.” i listened to this driving home from my brother’s house on nye, the first time we’ve genuinely shared social space maybe…ever?? and cried so hard. i’m finally feeling hopeful about us having a relationship as adults :,))))

• i am so so hyper conscious of the level of privilege/insulation it is to have a remote job and get to fuck around and be like “what do i want?” and move cross country again. feeling existential in itself, knowing i have the freedom and means to choose between alternate futures for myself, is an immense luxury. i’m hoping this wayfinding brings me closer to some long-term commitments - figuring out where i want to be, how my time/energy/resources are best spent - while continuing to contribute what i can along the way.

• really committing to learning japanese this year feels like a big priority. i’m hoping to visit again this fall (maybe this will become a regular fall trip every 2 years?) and reallyyyy want to be able to hear my grandma tell all her stories without my mom there to translate/mediate.

• also - trying to do the artist’s way for real this year!!!! anyone else starting this week?? feeling my inner artist reemerging with all this alone time and the timing feels right :,) this morning i came across a tiktok talking about how doechii did the artist’s way 5 years ago and posted a week by week digital diary about her journey on youtube :0 wild bc she just happened to pick up a copy someone had put out on the sidewalk? (in brooklyn!) and clearly she is soooo tapped into her creativity and connected to herself as an artist. not planning to ascend to doechii levels of artistry LOL but hoping i’ll emerge with some new insights after the 12 weeks!

• i think trying to figure out whether and when to return to WA burnt out my decision making. i agonized over sticking to lowercase vs capitalizing sentences….clearly haven’t made up my mind

• thought i saw a high school ex (unconfirmed, could just be delulu) at the japanese grocery, jumpscared me so bad i dissociated the entire rest of the time i was in there….standing by a pile of discount soba staring down the back of his quilted jacket until it disappeared into the frozen fish aisle…

also some 2024 favs to close out the year:

• albums i had on repeat in december were AAA (HYUKOH, 落日飛車 / sunset rollercoaster) and mind palace music (@), i didn’t listen to a ton of new music this year and stayed mostly in indie/folky land (top 5 songs were all adrianne lenker……) so pls hit me with any and all recs outside of that realm <3

• read some good fiction this year - favs were probably giovanni’s room, demon copperhead, a psalm for the wild-built, the poppy war trilogy, and everything for everyone: an oral history of the new york commune 2052-2072

• and nonfiction! loved heaven is a place on earth, how far the light reaches, in the dream house

• re: books, this year i think i’m going to start migrating from goodreads over to storygraph - u can follow me there @triplesag ! i love goodreads but trying to escape the jeffbezosverse

• also started using letterloop this past fall to keep in touch w a group of long distance friends and rly loving it <3 would recommend!!!

and finally, a small question for u

• favorite book/album/movie of the year? or other piece of media that u rly enjoyed / impacted you? comment below or text meee

YAY ok that’s all thank u for reading!!!! looking back over this…..i will def not be spending nearly as much time on this in following weeks LOL so i hope u have not been deterred by this lengthy first post! big hugs and if you’re reading this i miss u!

- ayana xo

bonus: me in my childhood bedroom in 2022 pre-nyc vs me in my nyc bedroom in 2024 pre-returning LOL