A story about foraged flowers.

The only sound is the snickering of candles we’ve arranged on the edge of the sink and the closed toilet seat, their flames flickering gold on our forehead sweat. Is the occasional swoosh of the shallow water that we swirl with our bath-puckered hands, just to sense movement. Is the steady tide of lungs, inhaling and exhaling the thick steam and incense smoke. It’s as if we’re cocooned in this small apartment bathroom and in the smooth edges of its bathtub, smaller still. I start thinking about how four square walls can be a jail cell or can be a cozy nest, depending on context.

In October, just a week and a half after I first met Lauren, I started a Masters program in Urban Sustainability — a discipline that marries environmental concerns with those of social justice — at a university on the west side of Los Angeles. It’s a low-residency program, meaning that most of it takes place online during the evening hours. But at the beginning and middle of every semester, all of the student cohorts assemble for a full-time, in-person residency on campus — a jam-packed week of class discussions, interactive workshops, group projects, lectures, and panels, with lunch and snack breaks squished paper-thin between the learning blocks.

We spend a lot of time talking about…heavy shit. About all the ways that capitalism conspires against collective good and the good of the earth, how it eats us from the inside like illness. About the imbalances of power and privilege that spread perniciously as virus through our infrastructure and our economy. About the systemic nature of just about every societal problem, plus every true solution. (Everything is connected. This is beautiful and also hard.)

When you look, you can’t stop looking. You start to see the sickness everywhere, including within yourself and your own behaviors. You, too, purchase mass-made socks off the internet, even though you’ve just done a whole presentation about the hidden costs of fast fashion and you recognize the traumas to both human and earth that were integral to each pair’s sourcing, production, and transport. You sometimes do your grocery shopping at Whole Foods because you like their rosemary-flavored almond flour crackers and their sugar snap peas, even though you know that the company and its parent company are capital-B Bad. You’re addicted to consumption…