Returning to LA now, having gone raccoon mode in New York and Northern California for over a month. Sleeping on couches and in tents, utilizing what’s available and taking the best offers: Raccoons depend on what’s seasonal, what’s given to them, and scavenge for the rest. Their road map is impromptu, and their only compass is instinct.
The Recipe:
What’s seasonal
What’s given to you
Scavenge for the rest
Some people might overgeneralize this as just being POOR which maybe I am but I don’t often feel it. The feeling of Poorness, requiring more comparison than arguably any other feeling, is an event triggered by something outside of oneself. I made $700 cash the whole month I was in New York and didn't even spend it all, but I didn’t feel poor. The only time I felt the event of poorness was when I couldn’t afford to go to the Walk-In clinic for an eye infection.
Looking at Prada shoes will always make me feel poor (fashion, my Achilles heel). But the endless desire for luxury items is a beast that could never be satisfied anyway, I know, and so why fixate my life on something that brings me suffering? 1 in 3 people in the world don’t even have access to clean drinking water. My friends, how can we say we’re poor? We’re the 1% of the world. I slept on friends’ couches for a month, so what? I appreciated them.
Sponge cake, from Bingham
Kernels, from Braden
Oysters, from Brad
Dinner plate from Lygia & Steve’s wedding.
And so life’s pretty good. I’m thinking about this passage in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes,
“In the old times, when people’s lives were so directly tied to the land, it was easy to know the world as gift. When fall came, the skies would darken with flocks of geese, honking “Here we are.” It reminds the people of the Creation story, when the geese come to save Skywoman. The people are hungry, winter is coming, and the geese fill the marshes with food. It is a gift and the people receive it with thanksgiving, love, and respect.
But when the food does not come from a flock in the sky, when you don’t feel the warm feathers cool in your hand and know that a life has been given for yours, when there is no gratitude in return — that food may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full. Something is broken when the food comes on a styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.
How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers— the living world could not bear our weight— but even in a market economy, can we behave “as if” the living world were a gift?”
Incredible
When Kimmerer describes a modern meal as “not a gift [but] a theft” I know what she means. Ironically I also think an actual theft can oftentimes be a gift. For instance when I woke up in a dirty wet tent outside of Yosemite, I wanted coffee and so went to a nearby resort lodge. They had a Bountiful Buffet for all those being lodged. I’m positive it was more appreciated as a gift to me than anyone else there.
This is peak raccoon mode. Living like a raccoon inherently means appreciating every meal due to its spontaneity and unsureness if it’ll ever happen again. Many of my relationships formed in New York felt like this too - brief and deeply appreciated, picked up just to hold for a moment. Should I start talking about dating on here
Many raccoon mode meals also look like this,
Which makes every meal special every moment special you make
Ok finally raccoon mode means something seasonal. Like most creatures raccoons depend on the seasons in some way, and seasonal foods “tie us back to the land” like Kimmerer longs for. Here’s the best Carmel apple I’ve ever had:
because it wasn’t Carmel it was fudge :)
good luck dollies 😎
deeply brilliant