A Well Kept Secret

An ode to staying small and slow in the face of expectations of endless growth

I’ve been remembering a past life of mine recently, realizing how deeply it has shaped my current life.

In 2003 I was 22 and in my last year of my fashion design undergraduate program in Philadelphia. I made some lifelong friends and I felt inspired and capable. It was a deeply creative chapter of my life. In this final year we were invited to dream into what we wanted for our future careers. Which designers did we aspire to be? What kind of success were we hoping for? As classmates all imagined being the next Marc Jacobs or Lanvin or YSL— my answer was “I want to be a well kept secret. I want to be myself and if you know, you know.”

Now, part of that was informed by my still deeply traumatized and wounded self, my low self-worth after an abusive childhood and young adulthood but much of it was shaped by the knowledge that chasing endless growth, celebrity, and late/ end stage capitalistic demands was not how I wanted to engage in my creative work and was definitely not how I wanted to live my life.

Hello from me at 22 who really was not looking forward to a life in a cubicle. Yes of course I made that necklace with spray-painted supplies from the hardware store and junk store.

In my undergraduate program, most of my classes were art-focused or fashion design focused. I was drawing and painting and sewing and draping. My favorite class was one where we were given a weekly theme and a cap of $5 to spend making a head to toe design. One of the weeks we had to pick a song and create an outfit inspired by it costing no more than those 5 single dollars. We were on the cusp of entering the workforce in the field of fashion design and I felt the suffocation of being expected to get an office job with entry level pay. I was in my hardcore and post-hardcore era so of course the song I chose was Thursday’s “For the Workforce, Drowning”. (I’ve always been a dramatic bitch. Sorry not sorry.)

Cue the lyrics:

"And we're up to our necks
Drowning in the seconds
Ingesting the morning commute
Lost in a dead subway sleep
We lie wide awake in our parents' beds
Tossing and turning, tomorrow we'll get up
Drive to work, single file
With every day, it's like the last
Waiting for the life to start
Is it always just ahead of the curve?...
Just keep making copies of copies of copies
When will it end?"

The outfit I designed and draped. An office worker, a puppet with compromised view. No chill did I have. So literal I was (Am.).

Months later, living in NYC in an apartment with cum stains on the wall from a previous tenant (yes really), I found myself on the subway, day after day, weeping at how my life had turned into exactly what I tried to avoid. You won’t be surprised to know that I walked out of my first entry level design and fit model job about 1.5 months into employment. Left for lunch and never came back.

I was naive, I couldn’t believe how extractive the fashion world was— stealing designs from other designers, traveling the globe to buy cheap garments to copy, exploiting folks across the globe and right in NYC through sweatshop labor, the environmental impact of so many synthetic fabrics and production excess, demands to stay late into the evening to prove I was committed, and as their fit model— controlling comments about my body and what I should be eating and doing— all for $24,000 a year. No thank you. Bank account balance was probably at a cool $50 balance when I left and until I found a fine dining server job that was problematic and abusive in its own ways. (I had to hide my nose rings, tattoos, and rat tail mullet to get the job. Even though it came with a higher income— the most I ever made in NYC $60,000 a year— and a union, it was so wildly abusive and I was so deeply struggling in my early 20s as I had yet to address my trauma history and alcohol misuse. One day, two years later, I walked out of this one, too. )

From there I was determined to have meaning in my work and my life. But at 26, it was quite some time before that became possible or true.

Our American fast-paced, growth at all costs, sit in the office and shut up culture does not value those of us who refuse so as you can imagine, it has been a uphill battle finding ways to work and live that feel aligned and enlivening, for me.

When I announced and started editing the anthology “Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement” in 2010, a little glimmer lit up in me.

When I started Corpus Ritual herbal remedies in February 2013, this glimmer started to turn into a flame, a future vision (a hope, really) of being able to sustain myself through meaningful work finally started to take root. But it did not come to fruition quickly. For the last 13 years I’ve been on the slow growth trajectory refusing much of the standard ways of growing a business which seem to require investors, paying influencers for talking about my remedies on their social media, creating products without a care for the quality or the ingredients, of farming out, literally, anything I don’t feel like doing to unpaid interns or assistants. Or like, AI now. I’ve watched some small herbalists follow this script only to literally sell their business to a manufacturing facility while still trying to sell us the claim they are just a backyard-grown, back to the land kinda herbalist. Woof capitalism and its lies.

I refused and I refuse. A well kept secret I and my work continue to be.

And yet I’m happy in my work, I feel fulfilled and am grateful every day that I get to do work (and play) that is both meaningful to me and others and does as little harm as possible in this violent world.

All of this was coming back to me as I was in the slow process of weeding my raised beds watered by drip irrigation in this time of deep droughts in the high desert where I have grown as many herbs as I can for the last 6 seasons. My fingernails dirty, my unwashed hair, sweat beading down my back because it’s been in the mid-90s for 2 months now. As I harvested the Blue Vervain I grew from seed and cut and placed it in a jar to brew into a strong tincture to support our nervous systems especially those of us with tight shoulders and perfectionist tendencies, a kind of ecstasy came over me, a deep gratitude for staying the course even when it left me broke for so many (so many) years. Even though I still have yet to break 6 figures, my work is accessible and thriving and I’m happy enough in my work and in my world. (And I always welcome new clients and customers of course!! I would like it to keep growing!)

My “office” is a garden somedays as I weed and water and harvest to make fresh tinctures, other days it is sitting at a screen in a private chapel connecting with brilliant and big feeling and big hearted clients, and still other days it is blending teas and bottling tinctures to ship to folks all over the country and other days it is sitting down to write.

My work requires I stay flexible and curious, listen, pay attention, eyes and ears and all senses wide open.

Just today I was going to harvest and make the final round of Sagebrush hydrosol for the summer and sadly the Sagebrush said no. A big part of my work with plants involves deep listening, consent, and communication. We are in an incredibly dry year here in the high desert-- there was very little snow last winter and coupled with a very dry monsoon season so far this year, plants and humans alike are struggling.

I had been watching the Sagebrush for the last month or so and worried they might not be into another harvest and yes, that was what I heard today. Too dry, not enough growth to harvest ethically, and their perfume was even waning. As an herbalist and caretaker, I have to listen when the “no” is clear so sadly, I will not have a restock available until next summer. There is, of course, a financial “hit” for listening to the “no” and staying aligned in my values in my business.

In contrast, after having to restart my garden THREE times in the last six seasons due to situations beyond my control, my first-year medicinal garden has been abundant this year due to my drip irrigation and growing lots of my favorite friends from seed so there’s lots of beautiful, abundant medicine made and available. These days are challenging for us all and require adaptability and patience as things wax and wane. I know this intimately as a person trying to run an ethical, sustainable small business.

Datura pods to dry for this fall's Datura balm return, so much tulsi for tinctures and teas, calendula for oils and balms, and fresh plant tinctures galore.

The herbal practice part of my work requires me to stay within the parameters of what I can do with my own two hands. (And yeah, sometimes Rose Blakelock offers her two hands, too, when I really need them.) It requires me to stay tuned in and in conversation with the generous and simultaneously struggling earth body, the plant life that springs forth from a little seed into abundant growth. It requires me to stay attuned to climate crisis and the way it is shaping so much so quickly. In order for my remedies to be healing, I have to be willing to listen, go slow, stay adaptable. Big business would never, ever work for the quality I try to bring through.

I don’t know what’s ahead, as we go deeper into this terrifying age of AI and rapid climate crisis and gas crisis leaving shipping costs increasing and so many folks out of work or underemployed and so many towns around me plunging deep into a water crisis but I do know I would have never made it in the “workforce”. Drowning, I certainly would have.

So I’ll stay out here on the edges, in the cracks, where abundance isn’t a buzz word, it’s a way of practicing gratitude for what I have and what I get to share.