The Sunday Sip #2

meditations on birthdays, the natural world, and abundance

Hi again. I have written about ten introductions for this newsletter and delete each one, because it feels trite to write about things I enjoyed or observed in a week when the world seems to be tunneling into an inferno at light speed. But that is also why I began this project (yes, only a week ago), because I was becoming increasingly cynical about my own future, and subsequently, the world’s, which was a dangerous place to find myself in. I want to be useful, and I think most of my usefulness comes from attention. So here it is, the ten things I payed attention to this week. If you stay with me until the end, it might all make sense.

1. Happy birthday Mom!!! My mom is the best person I know and is constantly raising the bar for life’s potential. She knows how to make things a celebration. I think she should start a Substack.

   

   & a homemade carrot cake to celebrate

2. I have been watching The Crown and Great British Baking Show every night with my parents, and I really think the Brits do TV better. AND the new Downton Abbey movie just came out, so I really need to go to the theatre (fancy spelling) and make my 6th grade heart happy.

3. Speaking of middle school nostalgia, my friend Izzy and I went to the mall this week and became reacquainted with Lush. I bought their Super Milk glitter body spray which smells like lemony-buttery-vanilla. Some may say that won’t change your life, but I beg to differ.

4. As I am writing this, rain comes down in sheets outside my window. Oregon really offered the best of fall weather (in my opinion) this week: rainstorms, hazy late summer evenings, and a full moon.

   

   Corn moon on September 7, 2025

5. Yesterday, we went to a sheepdog trial at a nearby vineyard. My aunt is a top dog handler in this sport (if you’re reading this, happy birthday Maggi!) and it was so cool to spend an afternoon immersed in this world, governed by a language of whistles, commands and trust.

   

6. We are gearing up for harvest, so I helped my dad in the winery this week. I spun over barrels and drained out the lees (the leftover sediment from the wine), which resulted in many spills, but I eventually got the hang of it. It felt nice to light up a different part of my brain, whatever part is more concerned with doing than it is with thinking, and it felt good to use my hands for something. They were stained purple by the end of the day. They were also glittery, from the aforementioned Lush body spray.

   

   Don’t cry over spilled wine…

7. I will always look back at this summer as the summer I spent with my family. I’m so grateful for them and am looking forward to one more week at home before I move back to Eugene.

8. I went out to lunch with my nan this week. Our friendship has been the longest friendship of my life, since it started as soon as I could talk. We used to play games and pretend we lived in elaborate, make-believe worlds, but now we just talk. At lunch, she told me a story about her wedding. As Nan and my grandpa were driving from their reception in Seattle back to San Jose, my grandpa turned to her and asked, “Carol, will you still love me this much when we are 60 years old?” She responded with this: “Don, of course not. I’m going to love you more.” What a way to live a life. To be in the midst of your honeymoon phase, but to believe this is only the tip of love’s iceberg.

   

9. I have been thinking of abundance all summer, mostly because I often default to the Fear of Things Running Out. I tend to bottle up my happiness in case I need to pour myself a big glass of it on a hard day down the road. Or I fear I will someday run out of poems, or money, so I take a magnifying glass to my life and see what I can ration. My mom tells me to go outside, to observe the way nature grows and does not hold back. At the thousands of grapes turning purple in the backyard, or the sequoia with its million pine needles. At the apple tree so full of ripeness, it has to drop some apples to the ground, which then feeds the birds or coyotes or the ground beneath them. To look at all this, and then to fear love’s or joy’s or poetry’s running out, would be a waste.

10. As if she read my mind (because she can also do that), my mom gave me Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. It is a gorgeous book, filled with illustrations as well as the common thread in all of Kimmerer’s work, that “all flourishing is mutual.” On page 22, she writes:

“To name the world as gift is to feel your membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even thought the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed.”

We are not owed anything, and yet the world continues to pile gifts high on plates and serve them to us for breakfast. How could our lives be different, if we extended the favor? If we took a little more care of each other?

What else could change, if we began to see everything as a gift?

See you next Sunday,

Maya