hustle and flow

Hustle and flow. I’ve moved to a small farming town half way around the world to be closer to my daughter, son-in-law and 15 month old granddaughter. Richard and I have rented a house a short 30 minute drive to the organic farm my daughter and her husband started 15 years ago, five acres that is both the source of their income as well as their ongoing grounding in the natural world…a fast running creek cold and deep enough to swim in, bees, fruit trees, chickens, 90 foot rows of broccoli, three kinds of kale, beets, carrots, Asian greens, kohlrabi, green and red lettuce, medicinal herbs and flowers, all humming an ecstatic hymn to life and abundance.

The population of the town I now live in: 2,200.

The population of the city I left: approx 90,000.

Richard and I walk to town almost every day. We are becoming a familiar sight. The Americans. Why did you leave? the locals want to know, and I’m fine talking about wanting to be closer to our family. Grandparents moving to help raise the next generation is what they understand.

What I don’t say is I left because life had begun moving too fast for me. Too much traffic, my occasional road rage, too many second and third homes sitting empty except for brief holiday visits from Texas, California, New York, from wherever money swarms like flies at a picnic, while the homeless crowded together on street medians with signs asking for anything I could spare.

Too many appointments for acupuncture to relieve a nameless stress that was trashing my digestion. Too many fancy clothes with too few places I could afford to wear them.

Too much hustle.

How do you like it here? they ask, and I always say, I love it.

There’s one main street, three restaurants, two coffee shops, a bakery, a small grocery store, an even smaller health food store, two banks. A newspaper/magazine/greeting card store, and the equivalent of a Dollar Store where everything costs at least three dollars. A pharmacy, two butchers, a hardware store. It’s a wicked uphill back to our rental after we’ve walked to town, which I figure more than adequately compensates for the gym I wasn’t using that often because it was too far to drive to town.

We are strangers in a strange land. Every interaction leaves an impression. People remember us. Have I been patient enough when a woman I would never have talked to in my previous life wants to stand on the sidewalk and tell me the history of her dairy farm? Probably not. Like anyone born and raised in New York City, my fuse is short for long, rambling conversations, but I’m trying to stand still and breathe. Because she’s been here 45 years and knows everyone, really, everyone, and news travels fast. And because it turns out she’s smart as a whip and gives me a quick lesson on the impact of Trump’s tariffs.

Am I shocked by how expensive things are? Fourteen dollars for two cappuccinos with oat milk? Definitely. Was I impatient with the waitress or barista? Holy hell, I hope not but this is a huge learning curve for me.

I’ve stopped coloring my hair. I’ve stopped weighing myself. I’ve cancelled Netflix.There is a rhythm to daily life here that fills me with joy. Black birds on a foggy morning white sky. Magpies eating from Richard’s outstretched hand. I am becoming. I’ve traded hustle for flow.

And so now I am also The American from the country that has the president that bombed Iran without the consent of Congress. A president that has set a daily quota for the number of people that must be swept off the streets like litter without due process and sent to prisons where stockholders profit from full occupancy.

I am no longer tucked safely inside a community where I lived for 35 years, where I raised my daughter, wrote books, tended to hospice patients, sat with the grieving. I am free floating here with nothing but my ability to stand still and listen, to quiet my judgements long enough to be surprised by a 98 year old woman in overalls with a PhD from America, impressive biceps and everything I need to know about moth proofing my woolens with Sunshine Soap.

What I know is this: I am practicing peace here in this small town, learning my manners all over again as a citizen of the world, slow enough to constantly pray for the families all over the Middle East cowering in shelters, living in fear of a war they did not consent to.

I am slow enough finally to walk with the horror of this recent war without the distractions of hustle. I am slow enough, finally, to treat every encounter as an opportunity for deepening the connections between us so that I might be welcomed by a land and a people that were brutally colonized, just as the ones I left before were, and the ones before that.

Inbreath and exhale. May we learn to live in peace with each other. May the children of war feel the comforting touch of the Divine Mother.

May we examine our own impulses towards violence in our speech and thoughts. May we forgive ourselves for all imagined sins and oversights so that we may be freed from the tyranny of self-doubt and self-harm into a radical belonging.

And may this radical way of belonging to each other intensify until the walls dividing us are torn down and there is no more us and them, there is only us, and we belong to each other in love.

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Read more of my stories in The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging available on Amazon.