Remembering how to be human

Midsummer and mortality in Freedom, Maine.

“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”

– Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Our barn in Freedom, Maine. (Photo by Erin Little)

Happy Summer Solstice! We’ve just passed the longest day of the year and the peak of the solar calendar. In Sweden, the country of my ancestry, it’s also midsummer, which is celebrated just a few days after the solstice.

Here in midcoast Maine, life is in full bloom. On our little farm in the town of Freedom (population 711), the peonies are popping, the fuzzy yellow baby geese who live in our pond are now little grey birds, the sunflowers are shooting up, and the raspberry bushes will soon be full of fruit to pick for our morning smoothies.

Life here is simple, slow and full. My two-year-old son spends hours chasing frogs, throwing rocks and sticks in the pond, and “petting” the flowers. He’s not interested in getting anywhere or accomplishing anything. He’s just being a little human, exploring his world.

Max in the kitchen garden, helping plant seedlings.

The first peony to pop in our flower garden.

In Nordic countries, where the sun never seems to set, the Solstice carries a special significance, and midsummer is seen as a time when magic is at its peak. (I’ll never forget being in the Swedish countryside with my mother, visiting the villages our family came from, and waking up at 1:30am to bright sunlight streaming in through the windows.)

Midsummer’s nights of endless light were traditionally a time to honor the sun’s many blessings: food, flowers, light, energy, warmth, fertility, and the ability to go out and enjoy life. This was done knowing that darker days would come again soon. In fact, that’s what makes the moment so vital and alive.

If you’ve been reading Hello, Mortal, you know that we’ve explored each of the major seasonal turning points of the year—the Fall Equinox, the Winter Solstice, the Spring Equinox, and now, the Summer Solstice—as opportunities for death contemplation.

There’s been something grounding and quietly powerful in this seasonal practice. A reconnection to the rhythms of nature and the way they’re mirrored in our own lives. Beyond the obvious symbolism that becomes social media platitudes (“Fall is a time for letting go,” “Spring brings new new growth”), what I’ve discovered is that these moments—the origins of our oldest holidays—are about stopping to honor life and death. They remind us of what our ancestors knew and lived by: the natural cycles of birth, growth, decline, death and renewal that are embedded in all things.

There’s a strange comfort and anchoring in that.

Though it might seem incongruous with the warmth and light, Summer is just as important a time to contemplate death as Winter. When life is at its peak, can we hold both sides of the coin—enjoying the juicy, full moments, knowing that loss is always still present?

For me, that reflection has led to living more seasonally: working more in the colder months, and slowing down in the Summer so I have the time and space to actually enjoy it.

A place called Freedom

Here in Freedom, I avoid (as much as possible) work that requires me to sit in front of a screen. Instead, I garden, cook, get outside, and buy raw milk and sausages and cheese from the farm stand 10 minutes down the road. I read books, sit on the grass while my son chases the geese, and enjoy time with family and friends.

There’s a way of life here that reminds me what it is to be human. It’s not a curated or commodified version of rural life (although I do love a good antique breadboard)—it’s a real, working web of communities full of creative, hard-working people and small local businesses rooted in food, land, community, and design. It’s life lived closer to the ground, in relationship with the seasons, in connection with others.

Local eggs.

We bought our little farmhouse in 2021, in the midst of the pandemic and a personal time of loss that I’ve written about before. We’ve spent the past four years gradually restoring the house and barn (a process we generously like to call a “spiritual journey”), planting trees, going antiquing, and driving to the coast to walk on the beach and pick up oysters.

And as I’ve gotten to know the community here, I’ve been blown away by the creativity and way of life of the people I’ve met here. Mainers live creatively, communally, and in alignment with nature and the seasons.

We have neighbors who dehydrate their own sea salt from Maine seawater and tap their birch trees for syrup. Our other neighbors keep bees and sell their wildflower honey by the side of the road (payment via honor system in a little lockbox). My friend Sarah, who grew up here, compares it to Sonoma in the ‘70s—a place where a food and farming movement, and a new way of being, is taking root.

Last weekend, I went to dinner in a tiny restaurant at a homestead down a dirt road, run by a couple who used to own a cider bar in town. From the outside, it looked like just a modest shingled house and barn tucked away in the woods. But the minimalist, modern candlelit interior of the barn took my breath away. THe space was as thoughtfully designed as any Michelin-star restaurant I’ve ever been to, and the dinner was one of the best testing menus I’ve ever had—made with all local, seasonal ingredients. (This is why my good friend from the city calls Maine “hidden fancy.”) The experience was thoughtful, deeply intentional, and clearly the product of a labor of love.

The June 7 tasting menu at Circumstance in Swanville, Maine.

Next weekend, we’re going to another pop-up farm dinner, and then to a seaweed festival (I’m pretty excited).

Right now, this way of living feels almost radical.

With AI making its way into more and more aspects of our lives, I already sense something essential to our humanity beginning to slip away. Not just in how we work, but in how we are, and our sense of who we are. As profit-driven algorithms homogenize and flatten our tastes, as we outsource our thinking, creativity, and communications to ChatGPT, as we consume more and more content generated by AI rather than written by humans—it feels like we’re sliding into a version of reality that most us don’t actually want to live in.

And it’s happening fast. AI accelerates everything to an almost absurd degree—information gathering, communication, problem-solving, content creation—in the name of efficiency. But to to get where, exactly? The tech world is racing us all to a life we never wanted or asked for: one of ultimate convenience, efficiency, and artificiality. The vision being sold to us feels to me increasingly at odds with the cyclical, relational, inefficient nature of real human life.

I’ve been observing lately such a widespread sense of inevitability and resignation around the takeover of AI. But being here, reconnecting with something that feels human in the most basic sense, I’m reminded that we don’t have to blindly adopt this new normal. We actually have the power to choose how (and whether) we adopt these technologies—and to determine how they fit into our own values and priorities. I think it’s important to remember that we have the freedom to find, and create, a different way of being if that’s what we want.

Growing flowers, cooking and eating food that’s grown nearby, reading books and spending time with family. Being present with my lived, embodied experience, including all the tension, friction, upsets and disappointments that inevitably arise, that always arises. Whenever I’m here, I remember: Isn’t this… kinda the whole point?

Strawberries from a farm stand in Washington, Maine.

There’s a certain kinship between Mainers and the French, who seem to know that life is meant to be lived, not optimized. Enjoying a life full of simple, beautiful pleasures isn’t a luxury reserved for the privileged few, or a scheduled interruption from a life otherwise built around hustle and brand-building. It’s just what a good life is.

Pamela Clapp, an American living in Paris, describes this in a great piece about why the French don’t obsess over purpose and career the way we Americans do: “What if your purpose is simply to build a good life? To raise kind children… To read a few excellent books. To notice the seasons. To build meaningful relationships. To help others. To give time—and money if you can—to causes you care about. Isn’t that what people will remember anyway?”

Contemplating mortality helps us decide what a good life looks like to us. We say this all the time, but it bears repeating: contemplating mortality isn’t just about remembering that we’ll be dead one day. More importantly, it’s about remembering that we’re alive right now. What do we want to do with this one life we’re given? What does real freedom feel like for us? How do we want to live? Is the way we’re spending our days, weeks and months a reflection of what matters most to us? And in this Summer season when life is at its peak, can we let ourselves enjoy the ride a little bit more?

As an undergrad, I learned about Epicureanism, a philosophy that takes the enjoyment of life seriously as an end in itself, in one of my ancient Greek philosophy classes. The philosopher Epicurus, who held his school in a beautiful garden, says: “Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” Epicurus also wrote that the art of living well and dying well are one and the same—remembering death means also remembering to enjoy life while we can.

Maybe (if you’ll forgive the cheesy reflection), this is what real freedom is: the ability to fully experience and enjoy life, knowing that there is pain and loss too, that the darker days are on their way.

But for now, we go to farm dinners with our friends and pick peonies and eat wild strawberries.

Happy Midsummer from Freedom. I hope you enjoy a season of slowing down, enjoying good food and good conversation, and the freedom to live in a way that brings you meaning and joy.

If you’re feeling the pull to Freedom—and you’re working on a writing project—we hope you’ll join us for a retreat this Summer! I’m co-hosting a weekend of non-fiction book development for women writers Aug. 8-10 with investigative journalist and author Alden Wicker. More info here.