six

hard wood grows slowly

In spite of the turmoil, moving to the homestead was a dream come true for me. The land is priceless. Our outhouse had a better view than any mansion I have visited. My grandfather put the land in a trust, with guidelines for how the property was to be preserved into perpetuity. It can never be sold off or split up, though he allocated five-acre plots to each of his children on the homestead. All eight of them still sit on a family board and run the homestead as a group.

I felt blessed to have the serenity and beauty of the homestead to counter the darkness in my home life. Green meadows ripe with timothy bluegrass that gently rolled into the glassy gray waters of Kachemak Bay. Mountains like the Alps that climbed from the water right into the heavens just six miles across the bay, and glaciers that crashed back into their liquid self. Nature became my church, and as oppressive and tangled as life was inside the four walls of the saddle barn, nature was ever more expansive, pristine, and nurturing. Nature was the bosom that held me, gave me a safe place and received my tears. She heard my laughter and my cry. My horse and I could escape that dark house and we would run so fast I felt drunk beneath the midnight sun, sleeping in the mountains by a stream until my heart mended enough to go back home. Nature was also my greatest teacher. To this day I calibrate my inner life to what I have observed in nature, and one of the most significant lessons it has taught me is that hard wood grows slowly. I know, not the flashiest phrase, but a profound one. I watched soft wooded trees shoot up in the spring and rot only a few years later. The harder woods became friends of mine. I played in their branches, told them my secrets, and confessed my sins to them for years.

There was a lone spruce tree, enormous, that we called the Pegas Tree. The family fable was that my grandmother Ruth had left her true love Pegas behind in Europe because he could not procure the visa he needed for life in a new land. My grandmother felt so strongly about escaping the war and having kids in a free country that she decided to leave and marry Yule and start a new life. Pegas came to visit, and the family story goes that they spent hours sitting beneath that idyllic tree. I have no idea if it’s true, but it was romantic to think about, although my main reason for being there was the fact that it was beautiful. I would daydream for hours, staring up through those thick branches, the weak sun sifting through in a kaleidoscope of yellow, blue, green, and white. I felt like a princess in a tower overlooking the most beautiful of kingdoms. I would lay on my back and give all my tears to the earth and let myself be held by her. Being starved for love, I played a game where I visualized love pouring out of every rock, I imagined love streaming into my heart from every leaf of every tree, I imagined the oxygen that left the branch of each tree entering the branches of my lungs, and then my breath leaving my body and entering the trees again. I imagined love from every salt cell in the sea, and from the glaciers with their heavy slow bodies, and from the birds that cried in the distance. And I felt truly loved there. I felt nurtured. I told nature all my secrets and all my dreams and I let the hard stone support me like a father and the soft soil nurture me like a mother. I wanted to be like that tree. I didn’t want to grow more brittle with time, like my dad seemed to be doing. I wanted to become . . . what was the opposite of brittle? Strong? Not exactly. Big? No, that wasn’t quite it. As I looked at the roots digging deeply, spreading out, forming an interconnected base, I saw the hard wood as dense fiber, woven tightly, and that’s when it struck me: the strongest things bend. The opposite of brittle was bending.

Great survivors have the ability to yield, adapt, give. This stopped me in my tracks. My life was not teaching me to yield, it was teaching me to cover up, protect, harden. I felt a panic. Hardening was the opposite of yielding. I walked home deep in thought and wrote in my book, things that don’t bend break. This lyric has stayed with me my whole life, reincarnated in many songs. It made such an impression on my soul. Once I began to be punished for seemingly being alive, I knew it was no longer safe to be honest about who I was with the people closest to me. I showed the world and my family one face. Outwardly, I made myself as small and dull as possible. But inwardly, I was limitless and expansive, and my words on paper became the rings of my inner tree. The rings of stress and distress were there in black and white, but a feeling of calm came over me when I wrote about what I was learning from studying nature. Slow growth meant thoughtful growth. Thoughtful growth meant conscious choices. It was a ladder of thought that pulled me up over the years until I arrived at one of the mottos I try to live by: hard wood grows slowly.

If I wanted to grow strong and last, and not be brittle or broken easily, I had a duty to make decisions that were not just good in the moment but good for long-term growth. I would not let myself drink or do drugs because that was a quick fix to escape an uncomfortable feeling. The better thing was to get to the root of what I was feeling. It meant solutions had to be the right ones for long-term happiness—there were no shortcuts. I could not use drugs to numb, I could not use anorexia or bulimia to lose weight, and it also meant not using cynicism to cover my real feelings of anxiety or vulnerability. In a world of cool, casual, hip, and snarky, I knew if I indulged in these feelings, I would sink to the bottom of my life like a stone. I had to respond to my life with vulnerability, sensitivity, and honesty, because they were my only real defenses in this dangerous endeavor called surviving life. I vowed to try to remember to take the time to grow slowly. To take the time to make notes and study. To stay in my body even when I was in pain. I have summoned this motto repeatedly in my life—later, it helped me handle my agoraphobia, crippling fear, and anxiety while I was homeless. It helped me have the courage to lose weight the right way even when the press dubbed me “the fat Renée Zellweger” at age twenty-two, and with countless other decisions that shaped not just the kind of artist but, more important, the kind of human I would become, as well as the kind of longevity I would have. It helped give me permission to discover and actively create who I was, not who I felt pressured to be.