Provision

For the past couple of weeks, I have been enjoying a quietude in the countryside (how Tolstoy) with a small group of people, some friends and some strangers, after probably the busiest year of my life. I tend to function best when I am a little too busy, but this year called my own bluff; another essay for another time.

My days here are winding down, and consequently the farm at which I am staying requires some TLC before our departure. Yesterday, we spent the afternoon heavily weeding the garden and preparing it for winter: hacking away at wildly overgrown lavender, harvesting the final tomatoes, pitching the refuse down the hill so it could return as something else in the spring.

I am not particularly good at gardening, but I enjoy it, largely because it is just so obvious in its metaphors and application. Everything needs to die so it can live; everything needs to disappear at certain parts of the year so it can bloom. I cannot multitask through pruning a plant; I cannot speed read the harvesting of a cherry tomato. Each task requires simple, sustained attention, and its execution reveals an immediately beneficial result. As I plucked my tiny handfuls of basil, cherry tomatoes, grapes, the wind at my back, I remembered one of my favorite lines from one translation of Rilke’s The Man Watching: “What we choose to fight is so tiny / What fights with us is so great.”

While here, I allowed myself to bring one book, The Antidote, my favorite novel of the year by far. It’s a deliciously inventive fictionalization of a Very Real 6 week period of the Dust Bowl, during which one of the worst dust storms of the period (Black Sunday) occurred, followed by a flood. The characters and many of the circumstances are made up (and boy oh boy are they worth the read), but the stark reality of what living during the period was like is not. Though I hate to give anything away, one of the bits of magical realism that is an important theme of the book is that after Black Sunday, everyone in the fictional farming town of Uz, Nebraska, loses their crop, except one farmer, whose field is a mysterious oasis of abundance, sustained by something no one understands. The farmer repeatedly wakes up in the middle of the night and stares out at his plenty, embarrassed by its existence, fearful of its departure.

I have not meditated on much this year, but one thing I keep returning to is this idea of provision, the relationship between myself and the materials and objects that sustain and delight me, that augment and inform my days (which I wrote about earlier this year). I have never been more interested in the utility of what I have, nor the understanding that utility can also include simply bringing enjoyment.

I love the holidays, and frankly, one of the reasons I love them is that everything is on sale. I love to comb gift guides, compare reviews, check in on high ticket items that have been on my list for a while but that I wait to make the plunge on until I am absolutely certain. I make no bones about admitting to liking Stuff. I love it! And I am perhaps more drawn to a desire to possess material goods than the average person.

And yet, to my own surprise, this year I am so baldly aware that I have more than enough, and always have (and more than likely, always will). I check my inbox in the morning, see 50+ new emails every day announcing the particular goods that I am interested in enough to have signed up for a subscription to hear more about them, and when I read them, I don’t feel that they are spreading joy or foreshadowing delight; I feel that they are spreading panic. There are items I genuinely need and would genuinely benefit from the deals that are currently available to obtain them, but I feel if not apathetic, then downright averse to participating. What is it I actually need?

I don’t need anything. I will always want things, creature that I am, but I do have everything I need. I’m sure I will still buy more stuff around this time of year than I do during the other 10 months (because I also very much enjoy buying gifts for other people), but with each passing year, I am trying to bear in mind longevity and maximum enjoyment as metrics. Most of what I enjoy (corny! it’s happening!) are the people that I love, watching/making movies, reading/writing, and then talking about those things with said people I love. No money required! (Except for my AMC Stubs membership, which will be pried out of my cold dead hands when I shuffle off this mortal coil despite it not being a physical object).

There are many people not in this position; so many people without basic necessities, living in their version of a long unending Black Sunday even though we are in 2025 where in 5 minutes everyone’s material needs could be met by a handful of people (who would barely register the financial “loss”). Part and parcel with my meditation on provision has been, duh, I can’t make every bad thing go away, and I cannot create provision for everyone in need. But I can do small things faithfully (that over time, with good soil, grow into bigger things), and bearing in mind that something that costs me time, money, whatever, to help someone else, doesn’t really cost me.

Some things I do that directly benefit someone else that theoretically are “inconvenient” that I share in the spirit of I-used-to-not-do-this-thing-and-now-I-do-and-know-it-benefits-someone-else-and-also-benefits-my-soul:

• Donating blood (I will never shut up about this and made not 1 but 2 film projects about it this year). If you live in the Midwest, I highly recommend Versiti; the Red Cross is also a wonderful resource. Libraries and educational campuses often have regular blood drives as well!

• I made a little note about this on Substack recently, but when I find out that a new book has come out, either by a friend or an author I like, I immediately check my library’s catalog to see if they carry said book. If they don’t, I put in a request that the library orders it. So easy! Feels amazing!

• Prioritizing farmer’s markets over chain stores. Even though re: my creaturely disposition I would exclusively shop at Erewhon if I could, I have spent much of this year purchasing at least 50% of my food from 2 of my local farmer’s markets. We all know why this is beneficial; I finally took the dive after a long time simply wishing to do so.

• I have gotten downright profligate with liking/engaging things online, especially when they relate to art or a business. A filmmaker I know has a new movie out? Costs me nothing to write a Letterboxd review. Someone wrote an essay on here that yes, I read and enjoyed? Liked and likely restacked, baby! We all know that the Internet is an algorithmic wasteland that runs on engagement. I’m already here! I don’t need to watch a reel about what I need to do to reverse my aging in order to be loved! Let me use my time in the wasteland engaging the art of those I love or have a crush on!

• This is a little less cut and dry, but when someone asks me to do something for them (anything from “Can you read this and tell me what you think?” to “Can you bring me that glass of water?”, I try to do it right away, and if I’m not able to, I try to give them an accurate estimate of when I can do said thing, as opposed to when I wish I could. Am currently working on graduating to saying when I can’t do something.

Some people I know who are making stuff that I genuinely recommend you purchasing or checking out (re: item number 3 in the above list; don’t want to/aren’t able to buy something? Subscribing + interaction is free and meaningful!):

• My friend started this jewelry business from scratch and I love everything; I own 2 of the rings and rarely have taken them off since purchasing.

• My friend Amy’s books (of poetry and how to sew), which are gorgeous. She also writes zines about motherhood, and I am not a mother, but you bet when I am I will be placing my order.

• The work happening over at Circling Studios, which is about how artists of all kinds of disciplines interact with their physical objects.

• A.A. Kostas sends out physical copies of some of his work to subscribers; he’s creative, prolific, and what better mail to receive than an original piece of writing?

• My own book, which I can confirm, is good!

I will likely be examining my own relationship to money and physical objects for the rest of my life (a privilege all its own, not having to live in fear of whether my food and shelter will ultimately be provided, but being able to think about it). If this is the sort of thing that preoccupies you as well (“What we choose to fight is so tiny…!”), I’d love to talk about it with you.

And now, back to my final chores on the farm. As I winter this year, I hope to be like the soil, going underground in a way that I don’t quite understand, but whose visitation I know is necessary. Have you read Wintering? It’s free from your library. Okay, enough! To the soil!