To Market, To Market

Letting magic take the wheel. *Chapter 87*

It’s become our weekly routine to visit the Saturday morning farmers market. Alan and I are both fairly habitual people. Although I find myself needing slight tweaks every now and again, I function best within the structure of a schedule I can depend on and look forward to.

To Market To Market, by Bonnie Lynn Felton, lynnfelton.com

The farmers market is special to me in many ways. During the 2020 lockdown when I’d just moved home and found myself unexpectedly grounded at my parents’ house, I spent a lot of time deepening my meditation practice. My visions often drifted to farmland. A strong desire to live on multiple acres, grow food and get to know my community. I even started an Instagram called BrittSeeksFarm where I followed every Georgia farmer I could find and posted pictures of vegetables, flowers and my brand new obsession, sourdough.

In 2021, the world began to branch out again and I begrudgingly sought a restaurant job. A potent sting to my ego as I’d left LA on the promise to myself that I’d, “never wait tables again.”

“How will you ever meet anyone if you don’t?” My wise and much younger cohort, Emilie, asked me over a coffee. I’d met Emilie waiting tables in Los Angeles and on this day we were at a museum in Brooklyn, a happenstance reunion trip in which the two of us plus two other fellow servers turned best friends found ourselves in the city at the same time.

I’ve met most of my best friends in restaurants and so when I returned to Atlanta, I immediately spread my resume around town. Within a week, I was hired and, sure enough, would meet my Atlanta community, my boyfriend and even see my 2020 visions come to life in that kind of way in which you have to clap your hands in front of your own face to realize.

After a few months serving, I volunteered to help the restaurant set up its sister coffee shop’s booth at the farmers market. Waking up at 4:30am every Saturday (after a Friday night shift and before a Saturday night one) I’d load up the car with bagels and pastries and breads, drive to the Carter Center and set up our display. It didn’t take long for its popularity to catch on and soon a line full of weekly regulars began to snake through the parking lot.

Alan and I had just started dating. He was a chef at a different restaurant in town and would come to the market to pick up produce for the weekend’s service. AND he would always stop by our booth to bring me flowers he’d bought from a farmer a few stalls down. All the surrounding vendors would swoon. I would blush. It. Was. A. Dream. A full blown gag-inducing romcom.

Soon, I’d met all the farmers I’d followed from BrittSeeksFarm. I had regulars who became friends, like one of my dearest Jacin, who I write about frequently and who embroidered me this sweatshirt.

my first merch lol

But because I didn’t want to be waiting tables, I felt ornery about my early morning wake ups for the market. Even though I was hanging out with the people who’d visited me in visions from meditations years prior, I was complaining because it was all panning out in ways I didn’t expect and so assumed were wrong. The magic was completely lost on me.

Surrender, I’ve been thinking and talking about it a lot lately. Practicing ease and leaning into the mystery. Allowing life to unfold without feeling so strung out about how it should. I’ve needlessly stressed over so many moments that now make perfect sense in the puzzle of it all. This post from

Haley Nahman

so perfectly illustrates everything I’m talking about.

Learning to move in concert with the unknown is a skill worth cultivating, and in my experience, it’s one of the best ways to stumble into the right kind of luck.

-Haley Nahman

I’ve been taking walks this week without my headphones in and allowing my mind to swirl like it used to when I was a teenager, laying on the carpet, staring at the ceiling fan, dreaming of my future. I had this thought. What if our memories are composed of the moments when our future and past selves connect? What if our glimmers, those moments of serenity and peace are a visit from our future selves, a friendly hand on the shoulder to say, it’s going to be okay? And back in the present, could my memories be current me reaching back to past me? Am I experiencing, in real time, some quantum moment of self comfort and connection? Recollections coming up as my old self calls across time and space in need of reminding from its future, you’re exactly where you need to be.

This past Saturday I marveled at the bounty of produce and flowers now abundant at the market during Springtime. I recalled a moment from December when we visited the stalls, cold and bleak, dotted only with root vegetables and kale. Purposefully, I made a memory. “Come Spring, remember this moment and reflect on where you are now.”

Presently, I’m sitting in a coffee shop across from my boyfriend, writing to you. I now visit the farmers market instead of working it. I no longer wait tables but benefit every moment from having done so. The best choices I’ve made are the promises I’ve broken to myself. Surrender has lead me exactly to where I didn’t even know I wanted to be and there’s so much peace in recognizing that. Maybe my future self is walking around her farm, remembering this exact moment, a time when I learned let go and to trust a little more in the magic.

WATCHING

The Studio on Apple Tv. Um. I’m having a blast and I think it’s because it appears everyone involved with this show is too. It’s fun.

READING

This gorgeous post from one of my oldest and dearest friends,

Kerry Whigham

of The Aspiring Flâneur, total heart bursting joy in his words about his recent position in Paris.

Please read the post from Maybe, Baby that I linked and quoted above.

I also absolutely loved this post, Late Bloomers and Co., from A Tiny Apartment. It may be only for Paid Subs, not sure, but worth the read! Love this quote:

…so many other firsts and starts were conjured after I turned 40, in a few cases, long after. Things that showed up decades after the initial desire for them first burned inside me, long after I had naively written them down in a list or in a journal or simply hoped/prayed they would someday transition from desire to reality.

DOING

Not every single walk but most, I’ve taken without headphones and what a difference. I think I may now understand what everyone’s talking about when they say their walks clear their heads.

Last week was weird and full of invitations to practice the surrender I’ve just written to you about. As Scraps, our crazy terrier, gets older and his health declines, I found myself on a rollercoaster of panic over whether I’d see him again or not. He lives with my parents who he adopted after our move home in 2020 and I head out to see them every few weeks. My mom says he is acting totally himself just slower and I’m slowly coming to terms with the facts of life and love and eventual loss. He could stick around for another five years or another five months, we just don’t know and that’s okay.

Speaking of tweaking routines, I keep trying to write my articles from bed on Sunday mornings and quickly find myself still half dressed, hunched over my computer and surrounded by pillows at 1pm. This sends me into anxious disgust, heavy writer’s block and frantic frustration over not being able to finish a post. And so, next week I plan to forgo the romantic fallacy that is writing from bed, dressing myself and sitting at a table. Will report back on my findings.

I hope you have a lovely and magical week full of flowers and the strawberries that are now in season. I’ll talk to you again soon. Thank you for reading.