Hindsight changes everything. Our capacity to reflect back on and rearrange our past, to put things that already happened in new perspective, is one of our most powerful and creative human tools.
We can rewrite our experiences with with more depth, color, and complexity (as many times as we want). In fact, doing so is a critical part of savoring and getting more value out of the ordinary and extraordinary moments of our lives.
I’ve been doing a lot of this recently as I try to make sense of the events of 2025 that led me to where I sit today… in a new home with a new set of challenges and adventures ahead.
For most of 2025 I felt stuck and unable to make decisions. I had this sense that starting anything new would be a complete waste of time.
Now, looking back, with the creative benefit of hindsight, what felt like stagnation reads more like meaningful distraction, pause, and preparation for the unseen undercurrents shifting the ground beneath me.
Sante Fe
In spring, Matt booked us a trip to Sante Fe for a few days of art-filled exploration and to quench his thirst for the desert. Frankly, I was a reluctant travel companion because I thought I’d had a lifetime fill of desert between growing up in Southern California and year in Egypt. Turned out, I was wrong.
Walking around, gazing out across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, that landscape infused inspiration, like creative blood, into my soul. The brittle, yet still lush, vegetative carpet running to the stark, sparse ridgeline and radiantly blue sky makes for an inviting backdrop for any artistic medium.
Being there, in that expanse of open dessert and majestic skylines, reminded me that some of the most creatively fertile periods in life came just after my dry spells.
From canvases to al fresco surfaces, along scaled serpentine sculpture walls, in a bowling alley turned immersive art experience, and across the contours of an alien space craft precariously perched outside a cute cafe — the enchanting evidence of imagination at play abounds all over Sante Fe.
In gardens, where water is scarce, playful whirligigs and carefully curated contouring terrace and swale designs catch the sun, water, and spirit of this magical place. They lure you in with grand entrances and artistic interludes and encourage you to stay with comfy seating and interesting art installations that fuel conversation and contemplation.
As Georgia O’Keeffe said:
“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”
And Sante Fe is a place where the landscape and the artistic efforts of others act as conduit for this kind of emphatic selectivity in pursuit of meaning.
As Matt and I strolled the streets, museums, botanical gardens, parks, preserves, and hot springs, discovering the literary, culinary, and craft cocktail culture, my creativity reservoir ballooned, making me feel lighter and less burdened than I had for a long time.
Life felt enchanting again. As if to affirm the idea, the day after I penned that word “enchanting” in my journal, Matt and I spent an evening in an independent bookstore in Sante Fe participating in a group conversation with Brooke Williams, author of Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-enchantment.
After seeing so many paintings and art installations I expected to return home and unpack and process our trip through color and canvas. Instead, the trip (which ended on a high note with a sunrise balloon ride) led me back to the earth.
The Garden
After our trip, I went straight into the garden, to dig into the earth, and begin meaningfully distracting myself there.
Manipulating and rearranging that space with renewed creativity, reminded me we are all rooted, just as plants are to our present conditions and resources.
Being rooted, though, doesn’t make us stuck. It can make us more connected, tapped in, and able to receive the unseen energy of life more readily.
Earlier this year, I felt rooted in uncertainty. There were too many things up in the air, too much still to be determined to choose a path forward. And so I focused on using resources we already had to alter my immediate surroundings to gain fresh perspective.
Moving pavers, pots, and portable seating from one part of the garden to another added interest and gave me a new place to ruminate, with Woody and my goats as close by companions.
The “Archoretum”
I also began sculpting, shaping, and encouraging a new creative vision using a mix of living and human-made materials.
These arches, arbors, espaliered trunks, branches, and thickened vines became gateways leading to a collection of short sensory stories, written on the landscape. A new scent, a spot to sit, or a tasty tale told around every curve and corner. My own secret garden revealing itself to me anew each day.
Outside the Archoretum, my years of planting for flowering and fascinating foliage finally paid off in an incredible unfolding both fresh and patinaed blooms and lushy leaf displays. I focused on experiencing the landscape as if it were a painting being layered in by an invisible hand. I spent countless hours admiring the details, the careful placement, and subtle edits and rearrangements that happened from day to day.
The pond area required some taming of the underbrush. A few hours of careful briar removal transformed it back into a pleasant place for reflection. I relocated a table near the edge and spent many quiet mornings admiring the arched sourwood, turned semicircle when mirrored on the pond below. It made me think of Hades and Persephone and thoughts of the unseen underworld and all that we can’t know.
Kittens
We also welcomed four new kittens to our farm. It wasn’t planned. But they needed us and we needed them. They have been a daily source of joy and inspiration (and occasional exasperation as they started doing flying jujitsu and indoor gardening).
City Visit
I also got to make a trip to DC for work. I had tons of fun with my colleagues. And of course, I enjoyed the culinary scene…
Amid all these lovely experiences and creative adventures, there was an under currant of uncertainty and worry and the sensation that things were about to dramatically change.
My step dad had started calling me to ask me to look up things on the internet for my mom. For example, could I find a solitaire game with large buttons so she could play when she was alone?
This was new for us because we are both uncomfortable talking on the phone. It quickly became apparent that the requests were a ruse. He really wanted to talk about his declining health, his worry that he couldn’t care for my mom, and he wanted assurances that I would take care of her when he couldn’t. I told him the same thing every time — I would take care of him and my mom whenever he was ready to let me. And he always asked me not to tell my mom he called.
In March, after he had a bad fall that led to a medivac ride, he finally agreed it was time for him and my mom to move closer to us. I began looking for a house for them and couldn’t find anything that met his criteria. Then, he was hospitalized again.
The plan changed from a house for my parents near us, to a house that would allow my parents to live with us, while still giving them independence.
A week after we went under contract for a house that met Steve’s exact requirements (for heaven on earth), my mom called. Steve was in kidney failure and it was time for hospice. I raced to Missouri and 4 days later he was gone.
Steve never got to see the house I picked for us in the flesh. Yet sometimes, I step out on the patio and look across to the back door of the garage — the garage he told me was a must-have so he could tinker and escape his anxiety and memories of trauma. I almost see him standing there in the door frame, looking across the mountains wearing his rare and radiant smirk — the one we only got to see once in a while, in those all too precious, playful moments when he forgot his pain.
Leave a Reply