This is Not Neat, Never Small’s first FIELD NOTE — part of a series of snippets, meanderings, and moments from my life.
I publish longer-form pieces of writing every other week; in between, these Field Notes offer something lighter. Something more immanent, perhaps — a little less polished, a little more present.
Some are anchored to visuals; others riff on a flicker of reflection or a fragment from the journey. My intention is simply this: to share something worth your time at least once a week.
The length will vary. The tone will shift. And the format will evolve with this space.
Last week, I made a war room in a café corner.
Or at least, that’s what it felt like.
I spent all day squirreled away in there, writing and revising an essay about resurrection and reentry and a yam that grew wild in my absence. It was the first long-form piece I offered up on my Substack, and I was fine-tuning more furiously than a violinist about to play the Chaconne in front of their ex, their therapist, and God.
Which — to be clear — is not to suggest my writing is even worthy of the same metaphysical zip code as Bach’s masterwork. Brahms said the Chaconne would have driven him out of his mind had he conceived it; I just had a yam and a deadline. But for my partner’s birthday, I did take him to see Hilary Hahn play at the Seattle Symphony a few days ago — so yeah, Bach is on the brain.
A week after publishing, I still oscillate between hesitating pride and rampant imposter syndrome about Mother of Dragons. But, for better or worse, it poured out of me — and as it often goes with creative flow, it wasn’t an emptying; it was immersion. The process pulled me under. Food was forgotten. Posture crumbled. The contents of my laptop screen imprinted on my eyeballs.
Seven hours later, I left in a haze, feeling vaguely like my brain had been turned inside out and blended with cotton. Almost light-headed. A little scorched.
An exhausting yet addictive sensation for a reemerging creative.
Afterwards, the first intuitive step towards recovery was — literally — steps.
I made my way slowly around the Green Lake trail before gathering about a pound of food from the cold bar at PCC (I know, I know — say you’re a Pacific Northwesterner without saying it): eggs, chickpeas, beets, pasta, pickled things. Then I searched, semi-determined and picnic blanket in hand, for a stretch of grass not already in use by the local geese or their, ahem, fertilizer.
I settled on my blanket with a book — more for companionship than story — my pound of food, and a brain still buzzing with heat and static. I didn’t know what kind of trees I was under at the time. I’d chosen the spot, tucked into a soft bend of the trail, because the light felt warm, the trunks felt safe, the water was sparkling, and the daises were smiling.
I relished that cold dinner. I contemplated my book, found months prior in a tiny bookstore in a tiny town on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. I let my overworked thoughts tumble through everything and nothing, and tried to feel my body more than my mind. I lay on my back and watched the needles of those trees tangle with the sunshine and cradle the sky.
Idly curious, I looked them up.
Dawn redwoods.
And then, I learned the story of how the dawn redwood — Metasequoia glyptostroboides; a cousin of the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) and Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) — had been believed to be extinct for over five million years.
Apparently, the trees missed the memo.
In 1941, a grove was found deep in a valley in remote China. One scientist wrote: “It is indeed a most unexpected event… a genus hitherto known only as fossil.” Elmer Merrill of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum called them “a gift from nature’s antiquity.” With that discovery, the redwood subfamily (Sequoioideae) jumped from just two surviving members to three overnight. (And fun fact: unlike their evergreen kin, the dawns are the lone deciduous redwood, meaning they shed their needles every winter). Because of this, dawn redwoods are called living fossils — and they’re not the only ones.
One of the occupants of my garden, a juvenile gingko (Gingko biloba), also bears the moniker. Ginkgos, with fossil records dating back 270 million years, were long thought extinct – preserved only in Chinese and Japanese temple gardens. The gingko and the dawn redwood are botanical siblings in survival, both with ancient lineages and histories of near-erasure. And true to the resurrection spirit, my ginkgo at home is sprouting again — another prehistoric survivor quietly rewriting its own extinction.
As for the dawn redwoods: thanks to conservation efforts, they quietly thrive in pockets of the world, including this grove on the northeastern edge of Green Lake. A deciduous conifer. A tree that forgot it was extinct.
Of course I ended up there.
I wrote about resurrection last week — of my garden, of myself — and then I inadvertently rested beneath beings that had lived the same kind of story.
There’s something about these ancient trees — the redwoods, the ginkgos — that makes you feel like the world has held on to a few secrets. That not everything has yet been lost, logged, or looted.
And the redwoods, with their resurrection story, might just be worthy of standing beside the Chaconne.
My writing, meanwhile? Just a student. Lingering in the shadows of the back row.
Learning to listen. Learning to hear.
CODA🎵
And because the world can’t help itself:
It’s Friday now. I meant to publish this yesterday, but instead, my partner and I were in a diner in downtown Spokane at 1am — the kind of gritty, glowing place you don’t find in the big cities. Laminate tables. Red pendant lights swinging from single wires. People who give a shit.
There’s a peculiar magic that arrives once the city’s pulse slows. A vague bewilderment, a strange buoyancy. We were dazed from the cross-state haul, sure — but unmistakably happy, sipping that honeyed unreality that only shows up after midnight.
Our waitress walked up with a ginkgo leaf tattooed on her forearm.
Of all the things to carry across the mountains.
Of all the things to recognize in the middle of the night.
Bet you're right about the world having secrets not yet revealed. Fun read.
"There’s something about these ancient trees — the redwoods, the ginkgos — that makes you feel like the world has held on to a few secrets. That not everything has yet been lost, logged, or looted."