This letter was published yesterday in 100 Days of Creative Resistance, a project organized by the writer Brian Gresko, who kindly invited me to contribute. It’s been wonderful receiving a missive from so many fantastic writers each morning; if you’re interested, I encourage you to sign up. Honored to have had the opportunity, and also grateful for the nudge back to newslettering here.

I live in a house with two enormous rhododendron bushes planted on its east face. One I can see from the kitchen window; the other from the living room. Here is how little I know: at the beginning of winter, after the leaves of all the other trees had dropped, I turned to my partner and asked, do you know if rhododendrons keep their leaves?

The answer is that they do. The other answer, which I learned from my neighbor, whom I met while we were both shoveling snow: you can tell if the temperature is below freezing by whether the leaves of the rhododendron are flat or curled. The tighter the curl, the colder the air. This morning the rhododendron leaves are curled tight as pencils. It’s thirteen degrees outside.

On my drive home from the temple there are at least a hundred forsythia bushes—if not a hundred, a thousand—each one in full bloom. They are live, bright flashes of yellow against brown and green, impossible to miss. The yellow blossoms erupt in yards, in gardens, in wild, scraggly patches on the side of the road, the branches arcing and unpruned. My eye tracks them helplessly. There is nothing else in the landscape so vivid and bright.

Every spring I notice a different flower, which, once noticed, I can’t stop seeing. One year it was cherries, another year tulips, another year magnolias. This year it’s forsythia. It seems to be everywhere, including my own backyard. A series of bushes, startlingly yellow, marches down the grassy slope behind the house we’re renting until June. I couldn’t tell you when they began to bloom, only that they’re blooming now. Their season is short: the flowers only bloom for about two weeks. Soon they’ll be replaced by tender green leaves.

For the last two days, my ears wouldn’t stop ringing. The atmospheric pressure here was heavy, the air waterlogged. I felt as though I were on my life’s longest plane ride. Today it finally rained, and the pressure lifted. I didn’t notice it as first, the way you don’t always notice an absence. Then I went outside and looked at the forsythia. Each flower has four deeply lobed petals—they’re long, slender; the flowers look like crosses, or x’s. In the rain, the flowers droop downward, like little bells. 

Content warning: brief mentions of suicide.

On the windowsill in my shower, ladybugs dive off the edge with a death wish. 

February, and it’s too cold for the hard-backed beetles to survive outside, so they’ve come indoors. They tend to cluster around the periphery of windows, where they’ve found their way in—they are in my office; in Ryan’s office; in the bathroom. When I draw aside the shower curtain and step in, still bleary-eyed, warm water raining down around my shoulders, I see them clinging to the tile sill that slopes down into the tub. There’s nothing for the ladybugs to eat in here, but they persist, crawling to the lip of the windowsill, then launching themselves over its edge. I cannot help but think of them as suicides. When they dive, I kneel down and pick them up with my hands, placing them back on the sill.

While I was home in December, I badgered my parents into telling me about the meaning of my Vietnamese name. My Vietnamese name is a variation of my mom’s; the first character is the same, but the second differs. I’ve always known what the first meant, but even my parents have admitted that the second half of my name is harder to explain. The second part of my name is Trang. I wanted to know what it was, what it meant.

It’s a manner of being, my dad explained. A kind of elegance. A nature you carry with you. That’s too abstract, I said. It’s hard to translate in English, he said. Why did you give me such a complicated name, I said. I say this more often than I would like, especially whenever I have to fill out any kind of government paperwork because my full name never fits. I was beginning to grumble. I was growing frustrated. It’s also, my dad said, a kind of flower.

Hoa trang, my mom said.

My heart leapt at this. That I could be a flower. That I already was, before knowing.

Happy New Year, and welcome back to Yield Guide.

A bit of housekeeping—I’ve recently switched platforms; this letter series is now hosted on Buttondown, which accounts for the slightly different look of these emails. If you’re a paid subscriber, you won’t have to do anything on your end, but let me know if there’s a hiccup and you get double-charged, or if your access to paywalled posts isn’t going through. For those of you new to this letter series, you can find the archives of Yield Guide at: buttondown.email/yieldguide. Thank you so much for continuing to read and support this project in slow looking.

A thing I love about living in the country is how near it has drawn me to the natural world. It’s impossible to ignore the way the seasons pass here. The change shows on the landscape, how the mountains go from massed dark green to red and gold to lacelike and airy in winter, nearly immaterial. In this season the sky looks larger, grayer; the exposed shape of the earth is more prominent without the lush verdance of spring and summer to fill it in. Bodies of water stand out in this starkness, seem to sparkle. Depending on the light they look both bright and dark. A pond has formed in the field where cows pasture across from my house. When I hike, I can see through the trees. 

For my birthday, my mother mailed me a package. Open it before it’s rotten, she wrote in a text message, knowing that I tend to delay receiving her gifts. Inside was a pair of earrings, a ziploc bag of rambutans, and two persimmons from the tree outside the house where I grew up. I knew they were from the tree because they were smaller than supermarket persimmons, and they weren’t yet ripe. Let’s take one to the city, Ryan said, it’ll be ready by then. We were going down for a five-day silent retreat. 

I sat for five days. Not doing much: cleaning the temple, arranging flowers for the altars, helping in the kitchen. Stretching during the breaks—long, luxurious, unknotting stretches, lining up my body with the banister of the stairs. Mostly I spent the retreat thinking, and trying not to think. At the end of the five days I felt soft, newborn, every feeling cold and luminous, like freshly fallen snow. 

When I peeled the persimmon with a knife, it came off in one piece. When I cut the persimmon open, I found there was one seed. Until that moment I had never seen a persimmon seed before, not that I can remember. I’ll try to sprout it, I said.

Ed. note: Here’s another letter coming later than scheduled—I had hoped to write this sooner, and then, and then. Thank you for your patience with me as I continue to learn from this project! Also, speaking of learning: I am hoping to migrate platforms and divest from Substack soon, while still continuing to write this series. If you have any suggestions around newsletter/subscription-based platforms, particularly those that incorporate payment methods, please let me know.

In the opening frames of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, an unexploded bomb—turned on its side and hollowed out—has been repurposed as a flower planter. Set in a rusty metal frame, the apparatus looks like one of Duchamp’s Readymades, the tapered nose of the ordnance a shape unmistakably meant for violence. Four yellow flowers spring from the body of the bomb. To my eye, as I revisit the photos I took when I saw the film three months ago at Nguyen’s show at the New Museum, the flowers look a bit like chrysanthemums.

They could be chrysanthemums; they could be marigolds. It’s hard to tell from the stills available online. Both species have yellow flowers; both are displayed during Tết, or Vietnamese New Year. Really I am using this as a way into writing about Nguyen’s film, which moved me deeply when I saw it, and which I am thinking about today.

Last week I bought a ceramic mug to make matcha in. I used to make a matcha latte most mornings when I lived in the city, mornings I spent at home. I made a ritual of it—scooping the powder, heating the water, whisking it together into a green froth. Adding oat milk, cleaning the bamboo whisk, restoring each object to its place. I liked how it made me deliberate, how I had to slow down for each step. I liked how I gradually wakened with the ritual, and then with the first sip I was awake.

I started drinking less in the summer of 2022; I started drinking not at all that December. Soon I will have gone a full year without alcohol.

There are many reasons why I started drinking less, but just one as to why I kept going, which was that even if I did not like myself any more or less without alcohol, when I didn’t drink, I knew that every emotion I felt came from within me and not from somewhere else. In an essay I began at the time, I wrote: “Clarity feels like both a lens and a weight. Ordinary within my own life, I have pledged, though I didn’t know I was pledging, to feel everything.”

It’s felt like an eon since I’ve written here, but it’s only been two weeks.

In the last three weeks, more than 8,000 Palestinian people have been killed; over 3,000 of them were children. Phone and internet service in Gaza has been cut; fuel has run out; it is nearly impossible for aid to enter, and there are no safe routes for evacuation. The IDF has continued a near-constant onslaught of bombing, including the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas, which causes fourth and fifth degree burns, poisons and devastates the land, and is a direct violation of international humanitarian law. Palestinian journalists have been threatened and killed; their families have been targeted and killed. It is completely asymmetric warfare. It is genocide.

In the states, there have been waves of protests against the violence, calling for a ceasefire. I have heard my friends and communities express rage and sorrow, anguish and grief. The violence against the people of Gaza has been so intense, and so immediate, that there has barely been any time to mourn the lives lost in the Hamas attack. Activists packed Grand Central on Friday night in an action organized by Jewish Voice for Peace; 300 peaceful protesters, many of them Jewish, were arrested. On Saturday, Within Our Lifetime, a Palestinian-led community organization, gathered over 100,000 people in a march that shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. In photographs, the crowd stretches as far as the eye can see, waving Palestinian flags, holding up signs. When I joined the protest for a moment at the Brooklyn Museum, all I saw was people of all ages—young and elders, families with children—moving as one body, moving with purpose, moving with a hope and dream for liberation.

Though one of the things I love about writing this letter series is its closeness and specificity, the luxury to look tightly at one plant, one flower, the truth is that when I become aware of the natural world, it is impossible to ignore how interconnected and dependent we are upon each other. I want to see a free Palestine; I dream of a world in which settler colonialism and genocidal violence do not exist; I grieve for all suffering in Gaza, and for those who are living with pain and fear. I have appreciated the organizing and statements from Jewish Voice for Peace, and if you are able to donate funds, consider the Palestinian American Medical Association’s relief campaign for Gaza hospitals, as well as Doctors Without Borders, which is responding to urgent medical need in Gaza. 

I often write about my emotional life in terms of doors and rooms. To face a choice is to look down a hallway, or series of hallways; doors are open or shut. 

Sometimes what I need is in another room. 

For centuries, before opening to Western trade and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, Japan used a lunisolar calendar, adopted from China. The four seasons of winter, spring, summer, and autumn were traditionally divided into twenty-four seasons, which were further divided into seventy-two micro-seasons, known as kō, each lasting just five days. I don’t remember where I first encountered the 72 kō calendar, but I’ve been thinking of it lately, especially now that I live so close to nature, where in the quiet of each day I find myself noticing the minute changes in the world around me. Which trees are turning, which trees’ leaves have fallen, the way the liquid chirping of songbirds in the morning has turned to the beckoning caw of crows.

The 72 kō calendar begins in February, after the start of the lunar year, with 立春, or Risshun, the beginning of spring. Each five-day season is described with a poetic line: February 4-8 corresponds to 東風解凍, or “East wind melts the ice.” The micro-seasons all deal with the natural world, some in lines more specific than others. In Rikka, the beginning of summer, from May 5-9, “Frogs start singing.” From June 11-15, “Rotten grass becomes fireflies.”1 The calendar takes note of sprouts, blooms, and witherings, of the movements of animals and of the harvest, that intersection of the tamed and untamed worlds.

Many of the plants mentioned in the traditional Japanese calendar are familiar to most—cherry blossoms and peach blossoms, peonies and chrysanthemums, rice seedlings and bamboo shoots, perhaps even the mulberry leaves upon which the silkworms feast, from May 21 to 25. But one humble plant appears twice in the calendar: the common self-heal, Prunella vulgaris, which is said to sprout in December and wither in June.

True to my word, I’ve been noticing the green things lately. The plants that don’t flower showily the way we think flowers do. I have learned the difference between the heart-shaped leaves of common blue violet and pennywort; I have plucked leaves of broadleaf plantain—ovate, long-petioled, parallel-veined—while walking, tearing them into a poultice to rub on insect stings. I have spotted here and there the serrated leaves of wild roses, the blooms of which have died back and are turning now to rosehips.

I live, for now, in a house at the edge of a field at the edge of the woods. When I walk through the field, there are parts that feel like meadow and parts that feel like marsh, and where the grasses meet forest and tree there are stands, bright green, searingly green, the greenest neon green you’ll ever see, of stinging nettle. When I first met nettle, I thought I recognized it; though I took its picture, I was afraid to touch it. I was afraid of being stung.

Urtica dioica is named for its sting; urtica derives from the Latin urere, which means to burn or scorch. The leaves and stem of a nettle plant are covered in fine hairs, some of which are hollow and act like hypodermic needles, breaking off when brushed against and injecting chemicals that cause a painful sting. Up close, a nettle stem looks positively spiny, the fine needles glinting like wet weaponry. A nettle’s sting creates a wave of red, raised welts which can last for days. 

Yet nettle’s uses are both edible and medicinal. Indigenous Americans harvested young nettle leaves in spring because they grew before other food plants were available; in Europe, where nettle is also a native species, there are recipes for soups and stews using the leaves. Cooked or blanched, the leaves taste similar to spinach, and are nutrient dense, which makes them good for foraging. And though the plant stings the skin when touched, it’s been used as a pain reliever for arthritis and lower back pain. Some research has even indicated that nettle’s sting is, paradoxically, anti-inflammatory. 

When I was younger than I am now I was convinced that I could not be happy and write. Writing was mysterious to me, a deep alchemy that took place in the wake of strong feeling and held me fast until it departed. I could not depend on its regular or fated arrival, only the knowledge that it had come before and would come again. The only throughline seemed to be first, novelty, then, extremity—of emotion and of experience. And I began to live my life with an analytical, historicizing eye, an eye that became an I that lived for the story, that kept the camera rolling in the hopes that that mysterious alchemy would come again. 

I don’t feel like that any more, not now, but I still start essays and stories this way—from a flash of something magic, some deep feeling that turns literate, solidifying until it has formed a new sentence in my head. The quickening of that first sentence is something I still treasure; I write toward its aliveness for the rest of the piece. 

I’ve been writing this letter series for about two months now, going on three. Since starting Yield Guide, I’ve been looking around and catching myself with that analytical eye again, as I notice what’s in season and what’s in bloom. I began this series in part because I wanted to share the joy I felt in close looking—in identifying plants and learning their histories, bringing texture to the flora of ordinary life. But in the last two weeks, especially as the deadline for this letter approached, I felt myself turning opportunistic as I gazed, wondering where the story was. What the angle was. What was beautiful, and showy, and had a built-in metaphor. Instead of looking for the pure pleasure of looking, I was looking for something to write about.

A little over a year ago I first encountered a poem by Marie Howe, “Annunciation.”

Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it
I know it is—and that if once it hailed me
it ever does—

And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as toward a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where 
it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so 
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

Before blooming, when the flowers are just beginning to bud, young sunflowers track the movement of the sun. The plant heads—sap-green, spiky, lion-maned— tilt toward the sun at dawn, following its path across the sky, reorienting eastward at night to prepare for the sun’s arrival the next day. As the sunflower gradually opens, revealing its tightly furled petals, the flower head continues to track across the sky, receiving the light and warmth of the sun, until it has completely bloomed, displaying that familiar fanfare of yellow petals. Fully opened sunflowers do not move but face east, positioned to receive the first hours of morning sunlight, which also helps to attract pollinators, like hummingbirds and native bees. 

The sunflower, Helianthus spp., turns not with its whole body but with its stem, growth hormones increasing on either side of the flower head in response to sun exposure. This means that as the plant grows taller it is the growth itself that makes it change direction. Like eyes scanning a page, it moves back and forth, its shaggy head following the sun, which it knows without knowing to follow.

I have never been good with change. When I have been very happy—and I have been very happy many times—I have always thought: I wish it could always be like this.

But if it had always stayed like that, as it was then, then I could not have this. 

And if I did not know this—

If I could never know this—

Things do not have to be beautiful to be useful. Nor do things have to be of use to be good. 

Nor does a thing have to be good, though I am familiar with the impulse.

While walking through Prospect Park the other day, I stopped to identify a plant with white flowers, one I noticed when it was in bloom last summer. I’d pinched off a sprig to put in a bud vase, but discarded it when it dried and turned brown. At first I had thought the plant was a relative of Queen Anne’s lace, the tall, waving wild carrot flowers that I grew up seeing, sprouting from cracks in the sidewalk. The identification my app provided said something else: Achillea millefolium, also known as the common yarrow.

The first part of its name, Achillea, comes from Achilles, who carried it to treat war-wounds; millefolium describes its feathery, fern-like leaves. Yarrow grows tall and brushy; its stems, dark green, sometimes grayish, can reach three feet tall. Atop each plant is a branched cluster of creamy white flowers, each disc-shaped head itself a collection of tiny white florescences. There’s a prairie feeling to yarrow, the way it leans and takes up space; it looks properly wild, a weed, an honest herb, covered in tiny native pollinators. I saw it growing in a scrubby patch near the roller rink, the clusters of flowers forcing their way past the corded wire fencing. It didn’t seem to care where it was planted; it was not ornamental. Yarrow is an old herb. It has had many uses: analgesic, wound-healer, fever-breaker. Dried yarrow stems are used in I Ching divination. In British folklore, a yarrow leaf could be used to determine if one’s romantic feelings were requited. The leaf was placed in the nose and a verse recited: Green ’arrow, green ’arrow, you bears a white blow, / If my love love me, my nose will bleed now.

Welcome to Yield Guide, a project inspired by field guides, plant identification, art history, close reading, and deep listening. In each letter, I’ll be sharing one meandering observation on a single subject. The first observation of the month will always be free; a second will be available to paid subscribers. It’s my hope that this project will be an exercise in slow and deliberate looking, and also in returning to writing as a site of community, experimentation, and pleasure. Thank you for reading, and for supporting this practice.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in meadows lately.

There’s the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, which years ago I learned was man-designed to mimic nature’s rolling hills and valleys, with hexagonal-stoned pathways set below the eye line, so that figures walking through the park appear as if they’re gliding. And up in Bennington, Vermont, where I have spent the last two Junes, the small college campus—clusters of barns and colonials and low, sixties-style concrete construction—suddenly yields to a vast, open meadow. The meadow is huge, with its own vanishing point. In the middle distance, trees; in the far distance, the green mountains. Farther still the soft white bodies of clouds, buttery streaks that seem to dissolve into a blue sky. Groundskeepers have cut a path through the meadow, and on either side the tall grass reaches mid-thigh.