We'll see you next time.
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.
I wanted to know all the details.
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.
We 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.
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Good Life Project is sponsored by Whole Foods Market.
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Jonathan, 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.
Thank you so much.
You have been in the world of acting for a long time.
People 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 it.
And you decide that immersive audio.
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.
One, 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 places, 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.
And, 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's a little...
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 if 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.
And 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 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.
I'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 in it?
And I was like well, you know, as an author and 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, wow.
Right.
It's like literally, especially these days when people are walking around often with earbuds in their ears, like 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, yeah.
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.
And this portability of the experience of listening and being told a story as you're moving through your life is deeply, deeply intimate.
And 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 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 audio book 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.
Yeah.
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.
Potentially listening in the car and that's all of a sudden, wait a minute.
Like I'm almost smelling the sound of the street in Sicily or something like that, because I hear the sounds of it.
You 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 this.
The story I'm seeking to tell is 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.
It's messing my hair up.
But now I'm listening to 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.
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.
And oftentimes we malign the fact that we have it there.
And we're just.
You know, 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.
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.
But there's this fine line, right.
Because there's a line between like, 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 I, 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, what's the choreography, what's the blocking.
But 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 to Yeah.
And then I would imagine, on random days, if you play back just random sounds, it's like you time travel.
Yes, yes.
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, I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was feeling when I hear the first three notes of a particular song.
Yes, 100%.
It just ports us to a different place in time.
Yeah.
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.
He 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.
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.
And you're right.
Audio has this way to transport us.
And it's powerful.
Yeah, so agree with that.
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.
So 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 could happen.
And 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 spending 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.
I 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.
And to just be.
And it's a way to like a honeymoon.
A couple is celebrating their nuptials and their wedding and, having 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 it look like if we had this trip?
And 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 audio book, 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 Let's all spend some time there together before this family changes.
Because 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'll, And I realize also a lot of kids that graduate high school.
They're like last summer with my friends.
See 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're much more intentional.
But you bring in this other aspect which I want to tease out a little bit, which is there's a complicated history here also.
Yeah.
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.
There are so many families where 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.
Good Life Project is in partnership with Airbnb.
So when my daughter came to me with the idea of walking the Nakasendo Trail in Japan together, my heart just lit up.
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Well, thank you.
And 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 husbands.
And 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.
There are 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.
And you know, 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 to to this work that we've done, this tapestry that we've woven together.
I don't want it to fray.
And 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 it's something I was really, really struggling with.
And I didn't know who to talk to about that part of it.
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, right?
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.
And this trip was like, let's put us all in, you know, the same space, same time.
Oh and, by the way, have gelato and you know, you know pasta and you know, 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 know, 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 right.
And 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 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 try to do.
All you can do is the best you can at any moment in time.
Hello for being a mom.
Right, 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 audiobook with is something my mother-in-law said to me.
And I'd been in Sicily and around Sicilians for more than a decade.
And I, 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 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?
And I couldn't – I didn't have a – 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 pace, 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.
Yeah, 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.
You're literally watching the days tick by and say there's an expiration date on this moment for all of us.
And we've got to do all the things.
We've got to plan.
We've got to make sure what's coming happens right.
And we're setting things up the best possible.
And yet, the more you do that, the more you forsake that moment that you're in.
So 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 like 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 you know for college and you know sheets need to be extra long, twin sheets, all the things right.
And I knew...
Intuitively, I was craving silence and quiet and stillness.
And I knew Sicily could offer that.
I knew firsthand because I'd experienced it there.
It was a place that I came to after Sado, my late husband, passed away.
I'd spent summers there with my daughter, really kind of trying to reform or form some new place 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, churches are built on top of mosques.
I
You know, on top of temples.
I mean, it just the sense of ancientness is there.
And 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?
And 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 that 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.
Hmm.
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, 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.
And 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.
You're like, oh, yeah, that's not going to happen.
Not universe has other plans like not.
And that, you know, that 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 OK, 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 thing.
That is constantly happening in life, right?
And to, like, be with the rhythm of that.
Like, I've planned it, I'm 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 to eat a quick dinner but they're like Oh well really, we'll see you at night.
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.
So 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 like, 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.
And 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.
And 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.
Folding in the fact that we didn't want to be too far from where her childhood summer friends could come and they could meet.
We wanted enough familiarity and closeness, but we also needed 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 is no longer with us, we 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 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 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 in 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 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.
That is, and I also said, but we also are a family now.
And for you to be boxed out if you will have a whole part of our history and lives and a place also doesn't feel honoring.
Um, 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 does 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.
Or we're like, we just follow that person's plan for the day.
And, you know, we did the best we could with it.
It 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 try to be very flexible.
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In this context, you also you introduced the myth of Persephone, which is tied to the island but also is really relevant to this conversation.
So I'll ask you to share a little bit about what the myth is also.
And I'm curious how does the myth of Persephone, how did it help you metabolize what you're experiencing?
Oh, you have really gone to the heart of the matter, haven't you, Jonathan?
Okay, well...
Sicily is known as Persephone's island.
So 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 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.
She 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 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 that 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.
I'm the mom in the story.
And although I don't think that 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.
And 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.
It's a way they explain summer and fall and winter and 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 rotation, in and out, in and out.
And certainly 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 30s.
For sure.
The world is changing.
Yeah.
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 of...
But it really is a character in this story.
And I think, again, for you, it's 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.
Because 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.
It's funny, as I'm saying this, 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.
Just like 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.
So 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 knowledge 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.
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.
And 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 is 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.
It 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, kind of at the, 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.
You 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 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.
I mean, the pandemic certainly gave us that moment where I thought I don't know if I'm ever 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 reminder, 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 a Sicilian foods in it and Italian oregano and rosemary and the things that sort of like.
Also allow me to consume, if you will, bits of a place.
And 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 at 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.
I can get that same nervous system reset that I get when I'm actually physically there.
But 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?
Did you?
I think any longtime New Yorker probably did.
Yeah, you have to.
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 is 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.
And 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.
I think so many of us.
I aspire to be able to do that, especially in the world we're living in right now, where we feel 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.
It's like, and maybe you have to go back in time to find it.
It'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.
And if we know anything about 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, right.
And it's all connected in me.
And that felt very comforting.
You end with a simple Italian phrase about letting the day find you.
Dolce far niente.
The sweetness of doing nothing.
Um, that phrase is always a phrase.
Even just saying it literally is 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 in there.
It is a part of the culture of like.
There's a value in and there's sweetness in 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 to, to the love that is ever-present always, to others, to nature, to time and space, all of it.
It's really hard.
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.
And 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?
To me, to live a good life is to live in close, intimate and authentic relationships, 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.
That'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.
Hey, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Suleikha Jawad about turning illness and upheaval into creating meaning and wonder.
You can find a link to that episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields.
Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young.
Christopher Carter crafted our theme music.
And, of course, if you haven't already done 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.
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