2025 Wish-List.

A garden of one’s own

“By eleven-thirty, Sadie was in her pajamas, teeth brushed and flossed, ready to go to bed. She wondered if this was what other twenty-three-year-olds' Friday nights were like. When she was forty, would she lament that she hadn't had sex with more people and partied more? But then, she didn't enjoy many people, and she had never gone to a party that she wasn't eager to leave. She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work. She felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things. A perfectly efficient section of code. A closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationary, over priced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this. Dov often said she was bourgeois. He meant it as an insult, but she knew that she probably was. Her parents were bourgeois, and she adored them, so, of course, she had turned out bourgeois, too. She wished she could get a dog, but Dov’s building didn’t allow them. ”

― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Inner magasin, arise!

There is a Goop Princess hiding inside me. She secretly wishes to build her own Goop empire where she can recommend lovely luxury products and make a living. She has *some money to spend and doesn’t believe in restriction. She lives on the intersection of Want Street and Desire Street. It is a very busy street and her attention is spoken for.

Green Chord Pants and sturdy shirting pass by. She grabs then and adds to her cart.

A basic navy t-shirt that is luxurious. Merino waist coat. Check !

She imagines putting miles on these Desert boots.

Or walking in the forest in these garden shoes. She regrets not buying them in Japan for cheap, but she is a goop princess who quickly shrugs off the price difference.

Moss green and deep reds are the color of the year. Will these red jeans abate her mid life crisis ? She has declared these colors a personal trend for herself, by herself, to herself. Goop princesses are powerful and can resist mass market forces.

A brown belt and a black belt with a gold toned buckle. A brass cuff. Not Goop enough in price ? Maybe Philo can fill the gap ?

There is always a list and lot of yearning to go around. Spending time scrolling blogs helps grow the list. Whats the point of it all ?

Deep deep down, all I really want is him, my puppy and a home for us. We want to sleep in our bed and wake up feeling safe. I have this today. LA fires have reminded me yet again : I am closer to being a climate refugee than a wealthy older person who who can outrun climate impacts in their lifetime …… and says “drill, baby, drill” or “Shop, baby, shop” ! Every personal story I read from LA, could be me - this year, next year or by the end of the decade. I want to tell the big earthquake due anytime now, to snooze another year till we have a tad more savings to survive the risk. I wish to not know the pain of having everything I own burn down after years of editing wishlists and painstakingly budgeting for them. New questions to ask before I buy something :

Will I wear it out over my lifetime ?

Can it move with me, with my nomadic lifestyle ?

Can I afford it ?

Will I buy it full priced or am I attracted to the sale price more than the garment ?

Seeing a garment you really wanted 5 years ago on the second hand market for cheaper, is my big short circuit-er. Am I buying into the nostalgia ? Everything, I mean everything, will appear on RealReal given enough time. Most of us don’t wear our clothes into the ground.

Will this garment serve me well ? ( Sturdy wearable clothes, please. No car-door-2-building-door shoes please. )

Will I regret this money spent and wish I had a tad more savings instead ? Can I really afford to pay for it two times over ?

My answer : Nothing makes the cut. Having a wish list and yearning for it, is part of healthy life and growth cycle. Smaller and more thoughtful wishlists that meet a higher standard, is the way. Wishlists snoozed over months, is the way. Small shopping fasts, is the way. One item a month for small doses of dopamine spread out over time, is the way.

I wish for a safe home.

I wish for us all to think deeply about the costs of climate mitigation and climate adaptation.

I wish for a government to take care of our basic security needs so that we may build our lives on top of it.

The desire for a house with a garden started during the pandemic. Apriori, I thought it was a bougie trap. We, like most downtown apartment dwellers, fled to the suburbs across the country for private outdoor space. I furnished it with all the resources I could spend, given that I felt at home, settled in and rooted in place. We dug and toiled till the land became a habitat for wild life and humans.

When we moved in.

On the day we moved out, 2 and 1/2 years later. Judge me by the gardens I create. I wanted the kids in my neighborhood to enjoy walking and playing on the streets. I wanted cozy streets that make cars slow down making it safer for us all. I wanted beauty and growth. I wanted cleaner air for us all. I wanted less rain water run off into the ocean. I wanted bird song and delicate shadows dancing in my windows when I wake up in the morning. I wanted low maintenance drought tolerant garden that is a certified California Native Habitat.

To be a custodian of a piece of land is an immense responsibility and privilege. As immigrants who haven’t found our house, should we have built a garden ? Why waste the effort and money ? Kim Ludy, of SlowPoet Studio, has had an outsized impact in my garden investment strategy. She is a long term renter and has allowed herself to become a native to the land. What a lovely sentiment. Every decision in our personal lives needn’t be a maximization of wealth pathway. To buy stones and plants, is something I allowed myself. When the HOA slapped us with a notice that the driveway was cracked, we took to the hammer and banged at the concrete for 3 months. A permeable gravel pathway was put in to capture more groundwater and reduce run off into our street—>sewage—>bay—>ocean.

All he wanted was a cherry blossom tree. It is a Japanese tree that needs water unlike what our native trees can give back, given that water consumption. A garden needs to be culturally sustainable too, to ensure that the next person doesn’t undo everything created in the past. Pretty trees offset the more shrubby ones planted for wild life.

We are an all-lawn neighborhood. The delight it gives to our neighbors when in bloom is absolutely worth it. The birdsong makes children pause and look. The number of bare yards that put in this exact street tree, inspired by these blossoms makes the water we guzzled worth it. Check out the tree score index for your neighborhood. 30% canopy cover is essential to mitigate the urban heat island effect in our cities.

They blasted some hills in Oakland to create a new town home community in a chaparral fire zone. ( NIMBYs will not up-zone the flats fast enough to allow more housing in the fire-safe zones. This blame is on the “environmentalists” who don’t allow housing. ) I carried out some stones into my yard. They will grow up to gather moss someday. This single family house will grow into a town home/duplex someday.

Shopping therapy is a sink hole that doesn’t solve anything. These boulders are an exception. After a life’s traumatic event, I drove down to a stone yard and bought 3 of them out of self pity. Rationality went out of the door. My peak impulse buy till date are stones - not diamonds or sapphires, but moss rocks.

How else will you know that I have been kissed by Japan ? The light and shadows cast by these delicate leaves, is what I would design all my windows around. These maples get the water from washing rice grains, every single day. It’s an Indian tradition to give the water to the holy basil sacred plant. Water was scarce all through my life. As I read the book Dune, the way the Fremen are ever aware of water at every step of the day, is how I grew up. Water intense lifestyles in Arizona and Dubai, pretending to not be a part of the desert ecosystem, will always baffle me. A t-shirt takes 700 gallons of water to come into existence. How can it ever be a free t-shirt or “just clothes” ?

The backyard. My puppy never once chased the birds. The land birds got comfortable enough around her to walk on the ground to hunt. Seen in the background are my cobble stone collection. SF streets were once lined with cobble stones. As we moved to a more car-centric walker-hostile model of city transit design, they were ripped out in favor of wider asphalt roads. The residents rescued some stones and periodically sell on craigslist. I picked up 300 of the 700 needed to build a terrace fountain.

Had we lived here for longer, a food forest would have taken shape.

Not all tech bros vote against the environment.

Berries and veggies for human consumption, wild sages for fragrant summers, grape vines for creating a green wall, purple needle grasses for being our state grass, granite slabs rescued from a old building demolition in SF.

Dogs, make my home. The Indian cot is from craigslist picked up from the wealthy enclave of Alamo. Restoration hardware made it in 2012.

Imagine a home burning down after years of being built up. It’s tragic that we zone fire-prone lands to low density housing developments. To have metal roofs, cement siding, air-tight joints, windows that aren’t vinyl, fire-proof vegetation in parts of California built in the 1920, is a very expensive endeavor. We do not up-zone the safer-to-build lands like this lot. This house should have been a duplex. We would have been twice as happy with half the yard and a more vibrant neighborhood. Single family housing only culture - being sold as the only kind of housing that is an acceptable American dream - leads to sprawl and NIMBY-ism. Every time we bring up town homes and family sized apartments, we get accused of being communists who want to box people up and force them to take trains. The same people will go to Europe, walk around and brag about it. I want more friends and businesses in walking distance. I want to live in walkable vibrant neighborhoods buzzing with human energy. A yard does not fill the hole in the heart created by lack of serendipitous human interaction.

What is a house, without the neighbors ?

This seemingly innocent book has had an outsized impact on my life. The pied piper’s notes lead me to reading this interview on Orion magazine.

If you could live anywhere, where would it be?

A place where I could garden, walk to a decent spot for coffee and food and some groceries, where there are trees, very good friends within easy walking distance, a bookstore and/or library walkable or bikeable at least, where there are beautiful places for gathering, plazas or parks that work (see Christopher Alexander et al), some basketball courts, a place where not everything is oriented around cars, i.e. pedestrian friendly, lots of trees, lots of forageable stuff (mulberries, serviceberries, black raspberries, etc.), probably a significant waterway nearby, a place where I’d know and have occasion to hang out with some of the people who grow my food, a culture of gardening actually, and a potluck culture, and good movies nearby, etc.

That is it. With these words, I fell out of the hypnosis of the home furnishing/reno daze that the pandemic induced. The home I was building was the exact opposite of this. No lamp or chair or native shrub could help. A boring car centric suburb where we drew a circle around our house, and said “this is what matters” wasn’t sufficient anymore. “Very good friends within easy walking distance” stood out in particular. This passage was mailed out to my girl friend who responded with “how will living within walking distance ever be possible ?”

My reply : < Deep sigh>

A few months later, when we realized that a house next to our friends was currently empty, I asked for the contact email. My friend, the excessively pragmatic realist, thought it was too “out there” to happen. A few months of back and forth negotiations started with the home owner. When the landlady finally said yes, we were in Australia exploring neighborhoods of Sydney. Newtown was our favorite. We liked the college town vibe, the wabi-sabi of an old changing neighborhood, seeing folks of all ages walking around, the unpretentiousness of service we got when sampling food, the movies we watched in an old theater with a red carpet, the bus rides, the vintage shopping, bookshops, the coffee, …. Why cant we do this for ourselves when we are home ? Why is this sort of exploration of place something that only happens far far away from home ? Why do we go to European cities to take romantic “cultural” strolls and come home to sitting on freeways ? Why were we living in a car dependent suburb where there is no human energy on the streets ? Were we obsessed with the garden because the neighborhood was boring and unwalkable ? Are we locking ourselves up in our yard and not experiencing the world enough ? We found a neighborhood like Newtown in East Bay. House prices are 2million$ for 1920s 1500sft bungalows on liquefaction soil that wont survive the big one. We live in the flats but the houses in the hills are in a wild fire zone making insurance iffy. Newly built townhomes are 1.4 million and apartments start at 800k with insurance issues persisting because rest of the housing stock is not resilient. We rent. We said yes to the landlady. I moved to live next door to my friend. We both get our 8,000 steps every single day.

Our current home. Our wall of maps from/for our walks. The tea pot that is my constant companion. This dining table that has moved 7 houses over the decade+ with us.

Do you know we have an extinct volcano in Oakland ? You get to walk through its belly and marvel at 165 million years of life that made us this land. Sibley regional is our outdoor geology museum.

At the intersection of a redwood forest and an oak woodland.

My cheetah in action.

You are a native after you have fallen in love with the poison oak and/or become political locally.

What is a lichen ? you ask. And suddenly, you are thrust into the richness of plant kingdom and kinships that go beyond the human realm.

I don’t miss Japan. The next Miyazaki will probably walk in Oakland and train in its Pixar offices ?

Oakland teaches you to love forests that don’t look like your child’s drawings - tall straight trees and round canopy. I have been told that only a botanist can love this picture. I disagree.

Every rock here was born miles away in the pacific oceanic plate and immigrated here. Deep time is visible here.

WALKING LIFE in THE URBAN BAY

All I wanted was to kill the fluorescent green looking lawn. The side effect of this project is me becoming a certified naturalist, an outdoor educator and a site leader on a forest restoration crew. I thought my place would be the small piece of land in my yard. Instead, it’s the forests of East Bay Regional Parks that have my stewardship. California is a truly magical place and my idea of heaven. Oakland is the most geologically intricate city on the planet with incredibly diverse forests. Start in a rainforest among the redwoods. Walk a few miles to end up in an Oak Savana. Walk along the ridges of chaparral scrub. Walk into the shaded oak woodlands along the creases of the mountains. Then walk downhill along the ancient creek beds. You will find a downtown built on top of the ancient sand dunes and might forgive the recurring potholes on the roads. Keep walking towards the shore to end up at the wetlands. Amidst this, you will see the legacy of every settler colony that has arrived in the last few hundred years - the conquistadors, the miners, the squatters, the Spanish aristocrats and their children, the crooks who became politicians, the night raiders, the farmers, the ranchers, the asian immigrants, the dock workers, the arrivals on transcontinental rail from the great migration, the army vets post ww2, the bohemians from SF, the small tech folk, the climate workers, the artists, ... The city wears it’s history and battle scars with great dignity.

This is the beauty of East Bay. One doesn’t need to take flights into several places far away to travel. One only needs to walk out of the door and keep walking. We camped out in the Amazon rainforest for a week recently, only to terribly miss my local forest all the while. Every time the guide from the indigenous tribe we stayed with pointed at a special useful plant, I told them we have an equivalent growing in Oakland. If you visit me, I will show you our mountains, streams and plants used by Ohlone peoples who live here, I told him. According to our local legendary artist John Muir Laws of Oakland, love is attention and devotion over a prolonged period of time. Here, one can build intimacy with the land by learning your neighboring forests and it rewards you for it. A lifetime of walking is not enough.

During a visit to Alaska, our local guide made a pitch : “move to Alaska for nature. You get a 1000$ check from the oil pipeline every month. Once the new gas pipeline gets built after Trump abolishes EPA, you will get an additional check. Oakland is crime and stupid liberals and taxes”. I said “no thank you”. The following silence was thick and uncomfortable. His reply: “You city girls like shopping too much to enjoy nature”. I walked away fuming.

Recreation in nature is to love, what visiting a brothel is to feminism. Love of nature isn’t reserved only for those who recreate in a forest on top of a ATV. Its for all of us who don’t vote to repeal Inflation Reduction Act and aren’t waiting for the next fossil pipeline to be built.

This right to enjoy nature, isnt reserved for folks who can buy up the last remaining forests and take the modern mechanized ways of life into the last remaining intact habitats. It is also for us folks who live in dense urban areas who have learnt to see a wild flower growing in a sidewalk crack as a triumph of nature.

We can walk, short drive or take a bus into the forest that we protect. It is for those of us without yards but get a sense of delight from the street trees en-route to the BART station. Its for those of us who spot the scrub jay on our street and are thankful for the efforts of Urban Forestry. Lawn to habitat conversions absolutely make a difference. Just look at all the birds in Berkeley. The hippies had planted gardens and the wild life appeared at our front doors.

This entire city is my yard. I love you East Bay. Maybe all the good choices I made in my life lead me to live here for this brief moment in my timeline.

My wish : to keep walking here.