One for the Road

A final field note for the season ending

This will be the last installment of Larkspur. For a while, at least.

I’ve been struggling to write this particular newsletter for nearly two months now, knowing what I wanted to say and lacking the heart to sit down and say it. But it felt wrong to close this collection without some sort of recognition of the ending. That has been, in my mind, one of the clearest themes of this newsletter, after all: endings. Letting things run their course. Accepting when they have. Coming full circle.

Writing this newsletter has been an incredibly meaningful experience. I started, because I wanted a place to talk about the things I loved, to document the life I was trying to live, to explore the things that seemed significant to me, without judgement. I wanted to lean in to interests that felt misunderstood and unproductive; I wanted to pay attention to coincidences that felt like directions; I wanted to write what I wanted to write, instead of what I felt I should. And in the course of my first six months of writing here, I gained something I’d desperately wanted for years: a sense of knowing who I really am.

When I started Larkspur, there was this clarity I had about what I wanted to write here, and I’ve had a similar clarity in the last month or so about not wanting to write here any more. This collection of field notes has served its purpose as an agent of radical change in my life. My life today, unlike my life two summers ago, needs no separate place online to exist without judgment. It’s a life in which I can be wholly myself at all times; it’s a life in which I know how to be myself at all times, thanks to this newsletter.

I’ll still be writing, of course. There are still things I want to say. This simply isn’t where I want to say them anymore. I’m feeling called to be offline, to be in this life without curating it for the internet. To handwrite pages and pages of journals. To read Revolutionary War histories my arms get tired holding up while I’m lying on the couch in my own, perfect living room. To spend time in person with friends, who are pursuing their own versions of meaningful and hands-on lives. To bake bread again, from my grandmother’s recipe book, kneading the dough on the chopping block that used to be in her kitchen. To sit on my freshly made bed in the sunshine of a Sunday afternoon, glowing between the half-open window blinds, and talk to the man I love. To walk on the first evening of spring at sunset, under a sky that is momentarily mauve and see the first sliver light after a new moon. To let go and open my hands to the next season.