Waitress at Night

My favorite book as a child was called The Carrot Seed. The story is about a little boy who planted a carrot seed. He tended it for days and days, but no carrot came up and and his whole family said over and over, “it won’t come up, it won’t come up”. But despite his detractors, the little boy continued to weed the dirt and sprinkle the ground with water. When suddenly, one day, a giant carrot came up “just as the little boy had known it would.”

I feel that there was some inkling in my small, child soul that I would need to impress the moral of this story onto my heart for the journey of my life ahead.

This simple little book from 1945 is an allegory for the path of any artist.

It is an eternal act of faith to show up each day and tend to the plot of soil that is our mind hoping that something nourishing for the self and others will eventually grow from it. This is creation for the sake of creating. Gardening because we love the feel of Earth on our hands and sun on our backs. The blossom or the berry is simply a byproduct of the joy of daily communion with nature. The song is the jewel rewarded to the one who enjoys daily mining of the psyche and the soul. We do it because we love to or else are driven by some other maddening force beyond our control.

But how do we feed ourselves as we wait for the carrot to grow? How do we live in a system that values the carrot only and not so much the hours, days, months spent tending and toiling and hoping and waiting?

We get jobs.

I’ve had many jobs over the years in order to maintain a trickling stream of income. These include: docent at a gallery in the Presidio in San Francisco in which hours would go by where it was just me and the security guard and I took breaks to stand in the mist shrouded parking lot and smoke 1/4 of a clove cigarette; hostess at an upscale SF restaurant - I took the bus 50 minutes each way and cried the whole way home for the first week because of the harsh hazing of the other servers; I worked at a juice bar, a Berlin-themed currywurst restaurant, a boutique/ cafe where people came in to buy a $300 dress to go with their oat latte. The only job I had that didn’t feel like a job was working for a family as household assistant and nanny. They became my family and the “work” felt much more like life & was deeply gratifying and enriching.

All the while, I kept tending the seeds of song and the even quieter, deeper seed of hope that one day I will wake up to find I have grown a whole garden that will sustain me emotionally, spiritually and, yes, materially.

I haven’t had to get a job since 2020 when I was laid off from the bougie cafe & decided to move back to my family’s farm in Virginia. In that same month I signed a record deal with Sub Pop. That was a true carrot seed moment. It felt both miraculous and natural. It didn’t change what I do or how I do it, it simply reinforced both of those things and gave me a new momentum and optimism to continue on the way I was going.

For 4 years I have lived off the fruits of my artistic garden, but my return to Los Angeles has created a stronger demand for capital.

In reference to making music, Quincy Jones famously said, “God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.” And this is the crux of the issue of being an artist for a living. Of course we don’t want to create for the sake of sales, but at the same time we have to have money to live in this world.

And so tomorrow and the next day I will be assisting my wardrobe stylist friend on an E-commerce photo shoot. This will be the first time that I’ve done a “real” job since March of 2020. I am nervous and humbled and a little down about it to be honest. But at the same time, I can see the way an occasional gig for extra cash can have the effect of protecting and preserving the sanctity of my garden.

Emerson says, “Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from necessity of sale - who always writes to the unknown friend.”

I completely believe that we can be fully and abundantly sustained by the efforts of our true soul’s path. I have faith in the nature of the carrot seed, with proper tending, to become the carrot.

So tomorrow when I’m steaming blouses and numbering garments, I will try to think of it as my contribution to someone else’s garden & all the while keep dreaming of my own.