How to Turn an Emotional Transition Into a Beautiful Celebration | Tembi Locke

0:00So how can we simultaneously celebrate a major life transition while allowing space to grieve and also honor and support those at the center of it all beyond just you and including you. This question sparked an extraordinary conversation about motherhood, loss, love, and the power of place to shape who we become. When New York Times bestselling author Tembi Locke realized her only daughter was heading off to college, she crafted what she calls a college moon, a sacred journey through Sicily that would become so much more than a final summer trip. And it became this beautiful exploration of how we navigate major life transitions while building new family bonds in the wake of loss.

0:41And I wanted to know all the details. Temi's 2019 memoir, From Scratch, it became an instant bestseller. It was adapted into a hit Netflix series and her new memoir, Someday Now, a memoir of family, reclaiming possibility, and one Sicilian summer. It takes us on this intimate journey through the streets and traditions of Sicily as she navigates sending her daughter to college while also nurturing delicate bonds of a newly blended family. And what emerged from our conversation was this profound understanding of how places shape us, how we carry them with us, how the ancient story and wisdom of Sicily, where there isn't even a future tense in language, can teach us about being present during life's biggest transitions.

1:22We explore a whole bunch of practical wisdom about blending families, processing grief while celebrating joy, and finding ways to stay grounded even when everything around us feels like it's shifting. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

1:43Jonathan, I know I'm in great hands. I have looked forward to this from the moment the email came through, and I thought, oh, how lovely that unfolding will be, whatever that looks like. Now I'm looking forward to it as well. We're having this conversation. You have an audio book, an audio experience, an immersive audio experience out someday now. And I want to drop into a whole lot of the ideas and some of the stories from it because I think they're really relevant to so many of us. But I'm also curious about the format of what you did. I think you have been in the world of acting for a long time.

2:19People have probably seen you, heard your voice in so many different areas and so many different places for a lot of years. You wrote this incredible memoir that then becomes a Netflix series. And then you decide there's another story to tell here. And you make a really interesting choice about how you want to tell it. Some people would say, well, write a memoir or do. And you decide that immersive audio is the way that you want to do this. And I'm just really curious about what went into that exploration and that decision. First of all, I love this question. And thank you for this question. because I think the top line answer, before we drill deeper, is that I was very curious about it.

3:00One, I am a listener of audiobooks. And I also, I think, intuitively have been, was, am in a season of my life of deep listening. And as the story was emerging, the idea of an end, because the location of the story primarily is a familiar place. It's set in Sicily. So it's a similar location, and in some cases, the exact same locations that I write about in my memoir, my first book. But to return to those spaces as a storyteller and bring the listener along with me to experience a place just through sound, both the sound of my voice telling the story that I wrote, but also the sound of the place.

3:57And, you know, it kind of formed very organically. I can't say I woke up one day saying, I want to create this whole new format of, you know, it's a memoir, but it's an audio memoir, but it's also like a little bit of a documentarian work. It wasn't that formal. I really led with my intuition and I thought, well, let me write a story and to write a second memoir is also its own challenge, right? So I knew I was going to write another story that in some way was tethered to my first book. I wanted it to feel of a piece, but its own thing, its own story. And this format lends itself to it being a different way to drop into a life and into a story that listeners who maybe listened to the first book, or readers, or even viewers of the adaptation of my first book, coming to Someday now is a different experience and it's very intimate.

4:59And I think that intimacy, I've been craving it in my life and in a very noisy world. And I wanted to challenge myself to listen, both internally and externally. And I thought, what if I bring listeners along with me? Yeah. Intimacy is such an interesting thing. So Good Life Project actually exists because is a million years ago before we were doing this, I got interested in public radio. And a friend of mine connected me with somebody who was one of the founders of one of the big longstanding public radio franchises. And I was walking around, this was back in New York. She also happened to be a docent at the Met, like this gorgeous museum.

5:41I'm walking around the museum with her one day and I'm kind of telling her about my interest. And she kind of looks at me and she asked me, she's like, well, like, why are you so interested? And I was like, well, you know, as an author, I'm doing this and that, like the reach is just astonishing. and she kind of cocks her head to the side like I'm missing something here. I'm like, what am I missing? And she says, the thing about audio, the thing about radio, public radio in particular, is there is no more intimate medium than you can possibly have. And it was like a light bulb moment for me. I'm like, oh, right.

6:11It's like literally, especially these days when people are walking around often with earbuds in their ears, it's like whatever they listen to is inside of their head. It's like a direct line to their brain. And it took me a while to really understand that. I really thank you for that reflection. And I understand it, I think, intimately, both as a listener of audio and radio. But I also know that much like music, we form so many associations with the places we first heard something. For example, I know people who have had just an early listen to the book and they've said, wow, even my experience of listening to the story changes if I'm listening to it at home in my kitchen or if I'm in my car or if I'm taking a walk.

6:59And this portability of the experience of listening and being told a story as you're moving through your life is deeply, deeply intimate. And, um, I don't know. I just, I find it, I find sound so elusive. First of all, I find sound to be a privilege. It's a privilege to hear. I have friends who have, or have challenges with their hearing, right? So to hear, just to hear is a privilege. and then to listen as we all know is something even deeper right and so i think that this experience of creating this audiobook has been a really powerful reminder to me of slowing down the gift to hear what's around us and then how that can help us tune in and listen within.

8:00Yeah. And to give a little more texture, part of what you hear is not just your voice through this, but what you did is you recorded a whole bunch of video in Sicily in different parts. So you're hearing the native sounds from what's around you mixed in with the experience. So rather than sort of like a manufactured soundtrack in the background or just nothing, it's almost like you're trying to bring somebody into this environment, which is really interesting because somebody's probably potentially listening in their car, and that's all of a sudden, wait a minute. I'm almost smelling the sound of the street in Sicily or something like that because I hear the sounds of it.

8:37You know, it's so funny when I initially, when I was talking to my editor about sort of like what the arc of the story itself might be, and I knew I was going to record these sounds, but I hadn't yet recorded all of them. And so the process of being in Sicily and journaling, writing, capturing the things I need for the story I'm seeking to tell. And then I walked around the streets and through the rural areas around the house where I was staying with this handheld recorder. And I listened to the wind. I don't know that I'd ever done that in my entire life, other than when I was a teenager, like, oh, that's the wind.

9:28It's messing my hair up. But now I'm listening to the wind. And what that did for me as a storyteller, just as a human, the way it opened my heart to know that that wind is blowing from the south. So that same wind is the wind that came across the sea from North Africa into Sicily and will continue north of it. It suddenly made everything seem so beautifully and intimately woven together that I think it helped me to tell the story I think that was on my heart to tell. I love that. It's interesting as you're describing that, what popped into my head also is this experience of so many of us have a listening device and a camera and a video camera in our pockets right now.

10:19And oftentimes we malign the fact that we have it there and our head is always down looking at our palm and not paying attention to the world. And if you don't do anything to sort of pull out of that. Yeah, that is the reality for so many of us. But when you sort of try and be conscious about it and realize that you have a device that can capture moments, I don't know about you, but I have found that it sometimes makes me pay more attention to my surroundings because especially when I'm traveling, I'm sort of constantly looking around and listening for and looking for these moments to capture.

10:57But there's this fine line, right? Because there's a line between being there for the purpose of wanting to capture something cool or interesting to bring back and just being there. Exactly. And threading that needle and the balance between sort of the conscious awareness that I want to capture this because I'm writing something and I want to document it. And, oh, I'm noting this, I'm noting that. And then it's a little bit like in theater with a show and rehearsing. You rehearse, you rehearse, you put all the consciousness on it. We're rehearsing it. We're figuring out the steps where what's the choreography, what's the blocking.

11:35But when it's showtime, you let all of that go and you just are in the performance. And so to some degree, I think all the recording, there was that moment where I'd start the recorder and I'd sit down and I'd make sure it was positioned correctly. And then it was just let it go. And now let me listen also. And I did not know the gift that would come from something as simple as listening. Yeah. And then I would imagine on random days, if you play back just random sounds, it's like you time travel. Audio has this amazing ability to let you time travel, whether it's sounds, whether it's music, like you said earlier in our conversation.

12:20I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was feeling when I hear the first three notes of a particular song. It just ports us to a different place in time. You know what? It's so interesting that you just reminded me of, as we've been talking, I was thinking of in my early, in my childhood, pre-digital, pre-everything. My father was a big, you know, he loved taking family photos and whatnot. And then at every family reunion, which my family had numerous, he would orchestrate this incredible slideshow. And he would do the slideshow and he would spend weeks prior to the family reunion doing the slideshow and he would set every slide to music in the way that like now we can all do on our iPhone in a single device, but he was using, you know, multimedia.

13:08He was pulling it all together. And I remembered in one of the times he was creating one of these, he was going through photos and he found in the box of photos, a cassette tape. Effectively, he had recorded the sound of my voice sending an audio message to my grandparents when I was like three years old. And I remember being a teenager and hearing my three-year-old voice, right? And I remember being like, suddenly the memory or my sense of the memory of being there, like it was like I was back, I was time traveling, as you said, back to that moment when I was three. And I remember the phone being brought close to me and being able to sort of like say hello to grandma and grandpa.

13:58And you're right. Audio has this way to transport us and it's powerful. Yeah. So agree with that. Let's drop a little bit into the story that you do end up telling. So this is really, it's a story about a fairly short season that unfolds between the time that your daughter graduates high school, and then moves on to college. And so many of us had been through that season, all the feels, all the time, all the questions, all the head spins. And you kind of take us right into the middle of it. And you had a different approach than anyone else I've ever heard. You decide that you want to create something called a college moon.

14:44So take me into this. So yes, my daughter, well, let me also say, is an only child. So my only child is preparing essentially to leave the nest and go off to college. And you're right, I was in all the feelings for many reasons, which are in the book and we can talk about here certainly. But there was a sense, I think emotionally, I was very predisposed to this idea of losing her, quite frankly, like in some sense of loss and grief that came with this very dynamic and beautiful moment. It's both dynamic and beautiful and exciting. And I'm over the moon for her of all the things that are going to happen.

15:28And at the exact same time, I'm feeling this quiet ache that I don't know how to name. Do I have permission to name it? Who do I talk to about it? And within that, I wanted to freeze and hold time. I was very much aware that I was passing through the last, if you will, summer of her childhood or her childhood in the way I had been used to it, where we'd organize family trips. I knew that once she went up to college, she'd have her own plans that she wanted to do for summer. And it might not include me or submitting any time with me whatsoever. So I wanted to seize this moment. And I thought, you know, quite frankly, the idea of a college moon, I cannot take credit for it.

16:16I was really in my desperation, googling like, what are like some things to do with your child before they leave to go off to college? And I came across this, you know, on the internet. And I thought, well, what's that? And then I loved an aspect of the idea, which is essentially carving out a bit of time with your child one on one time to just be. And it's a way to like a honeymoon set a couple is celebrating their nuptials and their wedding and having, you know, gone through the wedding. And now we get to go rest and be together. She'd just gone through graduation, the joys of all of that. And I thought, what would, what would it look like if we had this trip?

16:52And so I thought it would be lovely to spend some one-on-one time with her. And so I said, well, let's go. I picked sort of the space, but I said, you pick the various itinerary points, but we're going to end the trip in Sicily. Because Sicily was a familiar place to us. We have personal and family history there. Her father, my late husband is from Sicily. And we had not had since the pandemic time there alone. And I felt that we needed that. I thought it would be good for us. and that is really the jumping off point for the book for the audiobook is this idea of we're going to take this trip we're going to end in sicily oh and here is the additional element which is that once we're in sicily and we're settled i want to invite robert who is my new husband we are a blended family, and at that point in the events of the book, are relatively newly blended family, let's all spend some time there together before this family changes.

18:08Because a child leaving home is a change in the family unit. And so that's really the starting point for the book. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because so many of us have experienced our version of how do we handle this moment of transition? Because it's not just for the kid, it's for us. And if we're in a relationship, it's for us and who we're in relationship with is that relationship is going to change the quality of the home. It's going to change like all these things. And yet so often we're just kind of like rushing through that time. And I, and I realized also a lot of kids that graduate high school, they're like last summer with my friends.

18:42See you mom. See you dad. It's like, we want nothing to do with you. We're just going to run off. And until like literally the last moment they can possibly be with their friends. Okay. Now you get to like drive me to school or drop me off on the plane or something like that. Like that's the extent of it. And you were much more intentional, but you bring in this other, other aspect, which I want to tease out a little bit, which is there's a complicated history here also. And, but there's a complicated history for so many people. Like yours is unique to you and your family situation and your history, but there are so many blended families.

19:17There are so many families where, you know, you've got kids from different parents who've come together into a new family. And then when you move through a moment like this, which is a huge one, how do you do this dance where you honor what you need, where you honor what your kid needs, where you honor what your partner needs? And if it's a scenario, what their kids need in a way that doesn't destroy the sacredness of the experience for anybody. And that's something that you write and talk about that I thought was really thoughtful. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Well, thank you.

19:53And that is really kind of where I found myself. And I think to talk about why for my specific blended family, it was very charged. Well, let me back up and say this. I am the child of several blended families. Okay. So, and in my adult life, I tried to blend families prior to even the blended family that I'm in now. So I realized in the writing of this, I'm sort of predisposed. I have a kind of imprint of like really wanting this all to work out. You know, even the inner child in me is like, I want it all to work out. And I want to honor everyone's, my own process and needs, but also that of my daughters and that of my husband's.

20:39And so particularly for us as a blended family, you know, I knew that when my daughter left home, because we are blended, we are a blended family because of loss through death, that I knew that there was an underlying, there's always a hum of grief that is a part of our origin story, right? It just is. And although we had worked very hard to become very close, and I thought we were, in some ways, there was a little voice in me that was worried, like, well, what if she just goes off and she's like, oh, that's them and these newly married people, and I'm not a part of that. Or, you know, she and my husband, her stepfather really didn't gel and get along.

21:32And, you know, Now, for many blended parents, there's always one parent who's in the center kind of holding the two parts, all the parts of the blended together, and that was me. And so I was very much like, I want this work that we've done, this tapestry that we've woven together, I don't want it to fray.

21:54And so I felt a part of this trip was an opportunity for us to create new memories together. to sort of honor that closeness that we had, you know, formed. And I think, you know, it's something I was really, really struggling with. And I didn't know who to talk to about that part of it. Like, I didn't expect that that was going to come up with my child leaving home, this sort of larger issue of the family unit and closeness. And I know you cannot create intimacy between two people, That is their path and their relation to have. However, I did feel we could set up circumstances or opportunities for closeness, and then you see what happens.

22:44And this trip was like, let's put us all in the same space, same time. Oh, and by the way, have gelato and pasta and play a frolic in the sea. But really, the heartfelt intention of the trip was a kind of a closeness and a time together that I felt, let's see what happens. Because being a blended family is not, it is not easy. And you're right, you know, that season of graduation was a particular flashpoint, wherein I could feel everyone's different reactions and feelings around it, right? You have me who's celebrating and happy, my daughter who is also happy, but there's an awareness of the person who's missing, her late father.

23:30And then there's my new husband, her stepfather, who wants to plug in but also doesn't want to overstep, but wants to leave space for the times when she and I might just need to fold into each other and he's not a part of that. So there are many things happening. And I felt like this must be happening for lots of families, like lots of families. And what would writing about that and sharing just our little family story do to kind of create space to start conversations around it? yeah and i think it is it is such a relevant story for so many people again they'll have their version of it you have your facts your version your history but everyone's going to have something there especially blended families there's always going to be an interesting and complex dynamic and you're trying to do right by everyone all the time which of course is an impossible thing to ever even like try to do like all you can do is the best you can at any moment in time Hello for being a mom.

24:29Right, exactly. But it also brings up this notion of this dance that we do between time and presence. And this is something that is a part of this, you know, from the opening move, you know, where you start out by saying, I'm going to get the language wrong, but there's no future tense in the Sicilian language. And you use that as a really interesting way to tee up this notion of, well, the bigger thing that's happening here is we are really playing with time and like dropping into the moment. Yes. That quote that I opened the audio book with is something my mother-in-law said to me. And I had been in Sicily and around Sicilians for more than a decade.

25:07And although I speak Italian and can understand Sicilian, I had never slowed down to actually listen to the fact that there actually isn't a future tense. It's not used in Sicilian, particularly with my mother-in-law's generation. and so this idea that the future is not ours to have, so what we have is right now. It's another way of being in the moment, right? And Sicilians are also, interestingly enough, very focused on the past. Now, they have many different conjugation forms of the past. There's like the immediate past, the remote past, the like ultra, ultra remote past. You can hang out in the past for forever, and then there's the present, but the future is very elusive, and so I begin the book at that place because I think I was really asking, what is the future for all of us?

26:02And I couldn't, I didn't have a correlate, clearly, how could one know? But what I did have was this trip, this one now, this one summer, this one time that we'd carved out together. And I think that in some way, the book is born of that longing to really drop into the moment. I mean, I think Many of us can relate to the fast-paced, sped-up nature of life in general for American families, for the way life is now. And I also was seeking to put a pause on all of that, just pause it and just be. And so, yes, that's the beginning of the book. I am driving, I'm alone, and I'm remembering something that my mother-in-law said to me many years ago as I am driving toward something that I'm not sure what I will find.

26:59Yeah. And it's all in the context of this, a couple of months where there's such a strong impulse to be so future-focused. What's coming? What's not coming? all the plans we have to make, all the things we have to do. Like, and like, you're literally watching the days sort of like tick by and say like, there, there's an expiration date on this moment for all of us, you know, and we got to do all the things we got to plan. We got to make sure like what's coming happens, right. And we're setting things up the best possible. And yet, like the more you do that, the more you forsake like that, that moment that you're in.

27:30So it's like, it's so interesting that you then choose to say, let's go to Sicily, a time that effectively doesn't acknowledge the future as a way to opt out of this, at least for part of that, and just drop in. We have to physically take ourselves out of the environment we're in and go to this place where the ethos is so different that it almost forces us to just be here now. Jonathan, that particular summer I write about, well, I live in Los Angeles, So I live in a large city. We were in all the planning mode for college and sheets need to be extra long, twin sheets, all the things, right? And I knew intuitively I was craving silence and quiet and stillness.

28:20And I knew Sicily could offer that. I knew firsthand because I'd experienced it there. It was a place that I came to after Sato, my late husband, passed away. I'd spent summers there with my daughter, really kind of trying to reform or form some new self, some new life for myself, some understanding of life after loss. And so to return to Sicily, which is a place where they don't talk about the future, a place that is ancient, where the cobblestones are old, where literally, you know, churches are built on top of mosques, you know, on top of temples. I mean, it just, the sense of ancientness is there.

29:09And the sense of everything being temporal is also there because you are confronting who you are in relation to the not only history of mankind on this particular place on the planet, but also there's a volcano on the island. So you're also looking at the history of the planet Earth itself, which is coughing up magma, you know, like every three hours at Mount Etna. And so you're very much aware, like, this is a fleeting moment. This time that I am living on the planet Earth is really small. And what do I want to make of it? How do I want to be in it? How do I want to be in relation with others and ultimately in relationship with myself?

29:51And I also didn't know when I went on this trip that it would also be a kind of the word that's coming to my mind. And it's, I don't mean it in a negative sense, but a kind of interrogating. And I mean it in the most capacious sense, interrogating my own history, right? As a mother, as a wife, you know, there was a lot of, I had my own personal history to reflect on. And so Sicily became this canvas, this container upon which we could slow down time, just be, and at the very least, be in ancient waters and relax. and i guess the curiosity here is when you do this when you drop into that space and you have certain expectations how can you not right we're all human like as much as we want to surrender like oh look look we're planning this whole thing we're packing up the family we're staging who's coming when like with the things we want to do things we got to see people we got to talk to, you show up with expectations when you get there.

31:01And this happens with so many of us when we're planning on some sort of adventure or experience. It's like, we got it all set, right? And then you hit the ground and you're like, oh yeah, that's not going to happen. Not. Universe has other plans, like not. And that, you know, that dance between preparing and then letting go of your plans, a lot of that is kind of like a mini metaphor for like what I was doing in general in that stage of life, which is like, you prepare, you plan, and you know, you hold on to your plan, and then you realize, okay, I got to let that go. And it's the holding on and the letting go, the holding on and letting go that what I like to also think of as that expansion and contraction that is constantly happening in life, right?

31:47And to like, be with the rhythm of that, like I've planned it, I've here, but if nothing else, Sicily will forever thwart your best plans. It is like grade A level. Like, you know, it wins all the awards for like, you know, pulling the rug out from under you just at the sense of, you know, at the, at the infrastructural level, at the, like, you get to the restaurant and you plan the eight o 'clock dinner, but they're like, ah, well, really we'll see you at nine. I mean, and then every turn you surrender. You know, it invites a kind of surrender to the moment. And, you know, we certainly found that, you know, on the trip as well.

32:30So we planned certain things and then we left space open. Yeah. I mean, you're also doing this dance where you and your daughter do have history in this place. And memory is tied to that history and deeply personal memory is tied to that history. You and your current husband, different story. So how do you land in this space and allow your daughter individually to experience it the way she needs to, you to experience it the way that you need to, you together to experience it, and then invite somebody new into a space that has deep personal history and is in many ways sacred and find a way not to bastardize or dishonor that experience, but create new sacred moments.

33:16And it's complicated. It was complicated, Jonathan. It was so complicated. And, you know, I began with sort of what I call like small bit planning. Like I could envision certain pieces. Okay. I could envision us, she and I getting there. And because the other new, the new part for she and I was the fact that when we went to Sicily together, we always stayed with my mother-in-law. That was where we stayed. Well, in the years between COVID and the summer that I write about in the book, my mother-in-law passed away. So this was the first time that my daughter and I would be staying in a place that wasn't our home, effectively, right?

33:55And so that was already new enough. That was like, whoa, okay, that's its own sort of... So I involved her in helping pick the place so that she had buy-in on where we were staying, you know, folding in the fact that we didn't want to be too far from where her childhood summer friends, you know, could come and they can meet. We wanted enough familiarity and closeness, but we also needed, you know, something new. So we carved out also the first part of the trip was just the two of us so that she and I could do our own, the rituals we needed to do as mother and daughter, as the daughter-in-law and granddaughter of my mother-in-law who was no longer with us.

34:39We wanted to visit her gravesite. We wanted time to trace our fingers along the texture of our lived experience and our history. And I needed space to do that first before Robert ever got there. And I told my daughter that I said, this is what feels right. How does this feel to you? And she felt that that was, that felt good. And she was clear about where she needed boundaries. And I listened to that. I had to, right. Because I had no interest in the trip, you know, as I write about the book, kind of blowing up in anybody's face, the whole point of this was to go gentle and go slow. so when we kind of nest settled into that then I had to turn to Robert and say okay well I've negotiated all that with her now here's what's happening and you know he had his reluctance you know and and I write about this and and um you know he was like I don't want to tread in a space that is yours.

35:45And I also said, but we also are a family now. And for you to be boxed out, if you will, of a whole part of our history and lives and a place also doesn't feel honoring. And so eventually, you know, he agrees. And then there became when we got on the trip, like, okay, well, what are the things that we all do together? And what is that? How does that? How does everybody? And so I kind of was like, you know, as the project manager of this grand experiment, I said, you know, everybody gets to kind of like pick a day where we're like, we just follow that person's plan for the day. And, you know, we did the best we could with it.

36:24It was imperfect, but it felt authentic to us. And if we had made a plan and then we didn't like it, we simply pulled out of it because the goal was really togetherness, not checking off the boxes of an itinerary, even if we had planned for them. Right. And so I tried to be very flexible. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. in this context you also you introduced the myth of persephone which is tied to the island but also is really relevant to like this conversation so i'll ask you to share a little bit about what the myth is also and i'm curious like how does the myth of persephone how did it help you metabolize what you're experiencing oh oh you have really gone to the heart of the matter haven't you jonathan Okay, well, Sicily is known as Persephone's Island.

37:20So in Greek mythology, Persephone was on the island of Sicily, where Hades pulls her into the underworld. She is the daughter of Demeter, and her mother, Demeter, in the grief and the loss of her daughter, who can't find her, roams the island of Sicily in grief and blights the landscape, quite frankly, which is through, you know, drought, winter, all of that. And then it's only when she makes a pact with Hades that her daughter in the mythology gets to come rise up for six months out of the year. And that is when the island of Sicily is the most verdant. It's spring and summer. And she is at peace as a mother.

38:04She is alive again. She is able to see her daughter. She feels safe with her. And so I've always, my entire time going back and forth to Sicily, because my late husband loved mythology. And when Zoella was little, they read all these mythology books. And there's a great book called Persephone's Island. And I'm drawing a blank on the author as we speak, because that happens this age. And so I knew of the myth because it was read as a bedtime story. And I knew of the myth historically related to the island of Sicily. But being there at the eve of my daughter leaving home and going away and not knowing, I mean, I knew physically where she would be in college, but I wouldn't have eyes on, right?

38:55That she was stepping into a life that would be largely invisible to me. And I didn't know who she would meet along the way and what influence they might or might not have on her. It's a letting go. And so now I am seeing this Demeter Persephone myth through new eyes. you know um i'm the mom in the story and you know uh although you know i don't think that you know a dark force from the underworld is going to take her away from me in the way that the myth that is in the myth i did feel that primal sense of longing for your child and i could relate to that idea of the grief that a mother has in that way, and then the joy that a mother can have in reconnecting with their child.

39:47And so I wrestled with that mythology and with that story and with the fact that at one point I had been Persephone. I was the one who'd gone on the adventure and left home. And I didn't talk to my parents for who knows how long, back in the days before email and cell phones and all of that. My life was largely invisible to them. And so I bring that up in the book because it is something that I'm wrestling with. And I thought, well, what better way to think about the seasons of life as a mother, the seasons in general, than here in Sicily? because that is, Sicilians tell the story as a story of the seasons, the natural, maternal, earthly seasons of their island.

40:41It's a way they explain summer and fall and winter, spring, through the eyes of Persephone and Demeter. That was a surprise to me. And so I had to, because it kept coming up, I thought, well, I've got to, as I do as a writer, write to that and explore what that means. Yeah. And I think we're all doing that dance of navigating seasons. And especially as a parent, when you have a kid of a certain age who these days often is out of the house and then they're back and then they're out of the house and then they're back. You experience that sort of like rotation, like in and out and in and out. And certainly like, if you look at the data these days, a lot of us are going to have some level of that rotation, probably until our kids are in their late 20s or even 30.

41:28The world is changing. And they've been doing that in Europe and Italy for forever. I mean, people didn't leave home until 28, 29 until they married. I mean, that was just normative there. The economics and the culture dictated that. And now we're experiencing that a lot here as well. Yeah. We've been talking about Sicily largely as a place, but it really is a character in this story. And I think, again, for you at Sicily, for so many of us, we have that thing. And we're like, oh, it's over there. It's that place. It's that city. It's that town. But there's a bigger presence, bigger role that it plays in our stories that I think we often discount.

42:09Because I feel like place is so connected to identity in certain ways, and also to just our sense of who we are, and how and where we belong and don't belong. And it's funny, as I'm saying this, is my wife, part of my wife's family is actually Sicilian. And, you know, like for years, we would on Christmas and Easter, you know, like you're at the house and at some point the phone is going to ring. Oh, it's definitely going to ring. It's the old dial-up phone with the long like crinkled cord, which then gets passed around the table to whoever's old enough to still speak Italian, like here and like in New York, gets passed around.

42:50You can hear the Sicilian very loud volume coming from the other side of the phone, just this deep, deep, deep tradition that was carried through many generations and across an ocean. But there was always this sense of, this wasn't just a place that you go to visit. This is a living, breathing place where you are shaped or changed. And I wonder if when you have that sense of identity with a place, that the feeling that you get when you're somewhere like that is a feeling that you need to keep going back to that place to feel or whether you can bring it home with you. That question has been a question that has dangled in my soul for years, if not decades.

43:40So there are two places for me on the planet, where when I find myself, and I mentioned this briefly in one of the chapters in the book, that my orientation, my understanding of who I am come into a new focus. and one place is East Texas, which is where my family's from, all my ancestors. And that is where I have so much deep, deep, deep cellular ancestral memory, living history. so it always sort of felt strange to me that I would feel a version of a similar kind of feeling state on land that I have no biological connection to right there's I have no ancestors in Sicily so I always felt like what is it about this place that is evoking this for me this is so strange.

44:48And I challenged it and I questioned it. And did I have a right to even feel as though I belong to a place where I don't have history in a sort of ancestral sense? Where I've evolved over many years is an awareness that what happens for me in Sicily is one, a part of my literal shared history. I've spent so much time there and my connection to my late husband and my connection to family and so many memories there. But there's also something about Sicily in particular, which I think is more at a cellular, at the level of the geography, the planetary, that space, what it does for me at a cellular level, sun, wind, sea.

45:35It relaxes my nervous system. my set point reaches a space that is so beautiful that I can kind of connect vertically to spirit. And, you know, that's a beautiful thing. And so when I experience that, when I'm there, I'm often asking myself, how do I bring that back to LA, which is where I live and where I work and where I really spend, you know, a lot of my time. And that question has always been, you know, know, kind of at the forefront of my mind when I'm leaving there, because I'm always like, I'm going to miss this place so much. You know, there's this saying in Sicily, Sicily makes you cry two times.

46:16You cry when you arrive and you cry when you leave. And if you understand this joke, you'll understand what this means. It's like, you cry, you're like, oh my God, I'm back in this place again where like the road is closed. And like, I, you know, I need to get this done and I can't get it done because infrastructure will drive you insane. And then, but gosh, it seeps into you and then you cry when you leave. So for me, that answer has been about how do I bring a place with me wherever I go? Because I don't, we may not always have the privilege. I have not always had the privilege of being able to go and be there.

46:54I mean, the pandemic certainly gave us that moment where I thought, I don't know if I'm never getting back there. One of the things that I have done for myself, and we were chatting about this a little bit before we formally started having our conversations, I carry stones with me. I bring a physical piece of that place with me as a literal reminder, a vibrational talisman, if you will, that when I hold it, I can feel vibrationally that connection to that place. So I do that. I also have a home garden that has Sicilian foods in it and Italian oregano and rosemary and the things that also allow me to consume, if you will, bits of a place.

47:41and then I do that thing that you just talked about which is like I call the relatives and I talk to them and that makes me feel close but I've come now to really deeply understand that after many years of going back and forth and back and forth that when you have a deep connection to a place it imprints you so deeply that I actually can times when I'm particularly stressed or there's a lot going on. I can visualize a particular locale in that place that is so endowed with beauty and memory and peace and ease and love and grace. And I can bring it to my mind's eye and I'm there. And I can get that same nervous system reset that I get when I'm actually physically there.

48:36But it took me a long time to get there. And what I hope is that one of the things people might take away from listening to the book is that we can have that with the places that matter to us, wherever that place is. I have a friend who loves a particular area of Central Park. That's very far from Sicily, but it's her spot. And no matter what's going on, it gives her that. I had my own spot in Central Park that was like that. Did you? I think any long time New Yorker probably did. It was like you have to have your survival spots in a city like that. Yeah, you really do. And also I learned recently through somatic, some therapeutic somatic work that I've been doing, that there's something called, and you may know of this, listeners may know of this, but a place that is charged with a lot of negative ions actually literally changes your nervous system and resets your nervous system.

49:37And a lot of trees and greenery, you will experience a lot of negative ions. And so therefore it makes sense that Central Park in New York City would be the place that you would gravitate toward and feel that. Yeah. I love the notion, though, of becoming so deeply familiar with a place and the way that it makes you feel and the senses of that place that you, over time, cultivate the ability to step back into that space through intention no matter where you are, or at least not fully, but at least get enough of it so that you can kind of bring it along with you and affect you on a nervous system level.

50:15I think so many of us aspire to be able to do that, especially in the world we're living in right now, where we feel. Oh, absolutely. A lot of it is untethered and outside of our control. And it's like, what is your version of that, I think, is the inquiry there. And maybe you have to go back in time to find it. You know, what's interesting, I thank you for bringing it up because the thing that I observed when I was in Sicily, and this is mentioned briefly, the symbol of Sicily, one of the symbols is the pine. The pine tree, but it's really the cone. You'll see it in ceramics all over the island and whatnot.

50:49And if we know anything about the natural world, we know that trees across the planet are all interconnected. at the root system level, right? That is something that people can go and research, but there's science that bears this to be true. And I asked myself, well, if the pine trees here in Sicily are connected in some way to the pine trees of East Texas, then it's all connected. And it's all connected in me. And that felt very comforting. Hmm.

51:30You end with a simple Italian phrase about letting the day find you. Dolce farniente, the sweetness of doing nothing.

51:46That phrase is always a phrase, even just saying it. Literally it's like, oh yeah, that's an option. That's a choice. Like, oh, there's also that in the world. But, you know, it's used in Italy as, you know, people call upon it. It is a part of the culture of, like, there's value and there's sweetness in doing nothing. Just being. And I wanted to end the book there, even as a reminder to myself. because I have to be reminded of that, right? This highly productive do, go, all that stuff. But in the sweetness of doing nothing, I think is where I have found my connection

52:41to the love that is ever present always, to others, to nature, to time and space, all of it. And if we slow down and we lean into the sweetness of doing nothing. And it's hard sometimes to do nothing. It's really hard. You know, but even if you do it for five minutes, three minutes, there's a kind of power there. And I wanted to end the book there because in the arc of the relations that I write about in the book, the arc of my motherhood up until the events of the book, I wanted to have an invitation to myself that it's okay going forward in this future that is not spoken of to just be, just be.

53:34And that actually feels like a great place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? um to me to live a good life is to live in close intimate and authentic relation with the people that you closest to you that you choose to love chosen family friends to me that is such it's where all the sweetness is for me is that being able to be fully seen, heard, felt, and authentic in those spaces. And also, I would add, if you can do that with yourself and your deepest dreams and desires to be in a kind of ongoing conversation with your own inherent joys and desires.

54:30That's to me is like where all the goodness is. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. I've so enjoyed this conversation. It's really been a gift.

55:05done. So please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a second favor, share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too, but just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.