Poetic Entanglement — Dispatches & Essays

Meet the Yaks

2026-08-27T15:56:49Z

People notice the yaks first.

It is difficult not to. They look as though they wandered out of an older, wilder story and decided our pasture would do. They are shaggy, substantial, watchful, and completely unconcerned by the fact that I may have plans for the day.

Tashi, Sweet Momma, or Bad Baby… Each has a distinct way of moving through the world. One is bold and tests everything, another cautious, another convinced that every bucket contains something personally intended for them, and one that wants nothing to do with you unless we are playing “Which side of the fence am I supposed to be on?” Spend enough time around animals and the idea that they are interchangeable becomes ridiculous.

Yaks are not decorations. They require feed, fencing, observation, patience, and the willingness to learn what they are telling you before the message becomes expensive. They are also part of the larger question behind this farm: What happens when we make room for animals and knowledge that do not fit neatly into industrial systems?

There is a romance to seeing a yak outlined against a North Country sky. There is less romance in frozen water, damaged fencing, mud season, or discovering that a creature with horns and strong opinions has developed an interest in the exact place you need to stand, or that the pasture you like for them isn’t up to their standards that day. Both versions are true. Romance and reality.

Most of the time, yak are amicable, but they aren’t just another cow. They are bovine.

That is what I want to share here: not animals as scenery, but animals as living history, daily responsibility, and individual characters. They shape the farm, interrupt the schedule, and make ordinary mornings feel briefly prehistoric.

The last thing you want is to find yourself on the wrong side of an animal that outweighs you many times over—especially one carrying a three-foot span of horns.

Tashi is one of the gentlest giants I have ever worked with. But even the gentlest animal can have an off day—or simply forget, for one careless moment, how small and breakable the human standing beside him is.

When we first moved to New York, every one of our yaks broke out.

Every yak except Tashi.

While we spent three exhausting months chasing nineteen yaks through the Adirondacks and down to Lake Champlain, Tashi stayed home. He waited for his herd.

Each night, I would go out and talk to him. The pasture must have felt terribly empty, but there he remained—steady, patient, and exactly where he belonged.

Eventually, one by one, we brought them all home.

Tashi had been waiting for them the entire time. I just love this big guy.

Tell me: Have you ever met a yak in person? And what would you like to know about living with them?

I Am Not a Difficult Patient. You Were Unprepared.

2026-08-21T19:02:42Z

Today, I went to see a pain-management doctor for the first time. He told me I wasn’t willing to tell him my story. I asked whether he had read my chart. He said he has 250 patients. “Sometimes people don’t show up.” He stated that he cannot read every chart before every appointment. Besides, he said, mine “didn’t have much” in it.

I have a complex chronic illness. My medical history does not fit neatly into a few sentences delivered on command. My chart reads like a philosophy textbook: long, layered, occasionally contradictory, and filled with years of symptoms, diagnoses, medications, injuries, adaptations, and attempts to keep living inside a body that does not always cooperate. That is precisely why I expected him to read it.

Not memorize it. Not solve everything before walking into the room. Read it.

When I questioned his lack of preparation, he became defensive. When my husband tried to smooth the conversation over, the doctor cut him off. The appointment had become less about my pain than about the fact that I had made a professional uncomfortable by expecting professionalism. And I realized, this is what invisibility looks like.

It is not always being ignored completely. Sometimes it is being seen only as the easiest possible version of yourself. A cooperative patient, the pleasant older woman. A short appointment, or a simple story. A person who will answer the same questions again, overlook the lack of preparation, absorb the rushed manner, and leave grateful that someone agreed to see her at all.

But I am not simple. Neither is my illness. And I will not apologize for requiring someone to pay attention. I understand that physicians are overworked. I worked for a doctor as his medical assistant for years. I understand that healthcare systems overload providers, shorten appointments, multiply administrative demands, and leave too little time for the human being sitting in the examination room.

That is a serious systemic failure. But the patient cannot be expected to absorb that failure quietly. Your caseload is not something I created. Your schedule is not something I control. Your employer’s staffing decisions are not my responsibility.

I arrived having done my part. I came to the appointment. I brought my history, my questions, my body, and the pain I live with every day. I was not asking him to perform a miracle. (He actually said, “There is no miracle cure.”) I was asking him to begin the appointment informed.

There is a difference between demanding perfection and expecting competence. Women are taught to blur that distinction. We are taught to soften the question. To manage the other person’s reaction. To reassure the professional that we understand how terribly busy they are.

To say, “I’m sorry, but…” To bring our husbands so someone might believe us, then remain agreeable when those husbands are dismissed too.

To accept five hurried minutes as expertise and call dismissiveness “bedside manner.” And when we refuse? We become difficult. Older women are especially easy to dismiss because the world often assumes we should become quieter as we age.

Less demanding. Less visible. More grateful. We are expected to have spent decades learning how to make everyone else comfortable, and to continue doing it even when we are frightened, hurting, or asking for help.

But something happens when a woman reaches the point where she is no longer willing to perform that role. She stops cushioning every truth. She stops confusing credentials with character. She stops treating basic competence as a favor.

She says: I am paying YOU to help ME care for myself.

That sentence matters.

A patient is not a passive object being processed through a system. Care is a professional relationship. I bring knowledge of my body and the experience of living inside it. The physician brings medical training, clinical judgment, and a responsibility to prepare. Neither person knows everything. Both should be willing to listen. But only one of us was being paid to arrive ready.

I am tired of mediocrity being accepted as standard operating procedure. Not only in medicine. We see it everywhere: overloaded systems, unprepared professionals, poor communication, and defensive reactions when someone notices. Instead of correcting the failure, institutions teach the customer, employee, patient, or citizen to expect less. They teach to employee to blame the recurring problems or the “them” in charge…or encourage the practice of shifting blame to the patient or consumer…but the problem is never addressed.

Eventually, “We’re overwhelmed” becomes an answer to everything. It may be an explanation. It is not a standard. Reading the available information is part of the job. Listening without becoming defensive is part of the job. Acknowledging complexity instead of punishing someone for it is part of the job. Treating the person in front of you as a human being (not an inconvenience in an overbooked day) is part of the job.

I am not asking for special treatment. I am asking for care. I should not have to simplify my illness to protect someone from the effort of understanding it. I should not have to manage a professional’s ego while trying to manage my own pain. And I should not have to disappear in order to be considered cooperative.

If expecting preparation, curiosity, competence, and respect makes me difficult, then perhaps difficult is exactly what women need to become. Not cruel, or unreasonable. Not unwilling to understand the pressures other people face…simply unwilling to accept those pressures as permission to stop doing the work.

I am here.

My history matters.

My pain matters.

And I will not make myself smaller so that someone else can remain comfortable doing less.

Do your job.

Do better.

Things Worth Keeping in a World Moving Too Fast

2026-08-18T15:18:43Z

There are yaks in the pasture, heritage pigs in the barn, chickens and ducks underfoot, seeds waiting to become something and at least one fence that needs my attention. There is also a laptop open on a surface somewhere, probably about to topple over onto my coffee cup.

That feels like the right place to begin. I’m Mema…a Gen X writer, farmer, grandmother, creator and keeper of things worth keeping. I live with rare animals, believe in real food, I am flush with unfinished projects, beautiful ideas, and the stubborn belief that we can still build lives with meaning. I also live in the same strange digital world you do…some days feel magical, or like sci-fi…

Artificial intelligence can write a grocery list. Our phones know where we’ve been. (Not creepy at all!) Appliances want passwords. Every company has an app, every app needs an update, and somewhere along the way we apparently agreed that refrigerators should send us notifications. I’m not sure who asked for all this. But I’m curious. I think that is how we got here.

We rebuilt differently

In 2020, our family lost nearly everything in a house fire.

Loss has a way of editing your life without asking permission. It strips away the unnecessary and leaves you staring at what remains—along with the difficult question of what you want to rebuild. We rebuilt with the idea that we could create a legacy.

What began with animals and a tiny piece of land in NH became Mema’s Inclination: maybe it was part farm, part experiment, part act of preservation (for us and the animals), and part refusal to let meaningful ways of living quietly disappear. We are raising heritage livestock because genetic diversity matters. We grow food because knowing where it comes from matters. We care for the soil because we cannot keep taking from the ground without giving something back. We support local food because communities are stronger when they can feed themselves. And we keep learning because old knowledge survives only when someone practices it, questions it, improves it, and passes it along. None of this is especially tidy. In fact, I am not an organizer, I’m a pile it up and find it like it is organized girl. But I’m trying.

Animals do not care about my organization techniques. Seeds fail. Equipment breaks. Feed bills arrive with impressive reliability. Some days feel deeply meaningful. Other days involve chasing another escaped animal while reconsidering every decision that brought me to that exact moment. This is not a picture-perfect farm. It is a real one.

What deserves to come with us?

The world is moving quickly. Technology is changing our world. It would be easy to stand in a barn full of heritage animals and decide that my job is to resist all of it. But I don’t believe preserving the past means hiding from the future. I think the more interesting question is:

What deserves to come with us?

Can technology help small farms survive?

Can it connect more people with local food?

Can it help teach a new generation about endangered livestock, seeds, soil, and self-reliance?

Can it help a woman in muddy boots turn a lifetime of ideas, mistakes, experience, and hard-won wisdom into something that reaches beyond her fence line?

I don’t know all the answers. That is part of why I’m here. I’m wandering through this new world one curious click at a time. I’ll try things. I’ll misunderstand things. I’ll occasionally threaten (or throw) a device that insists my password is incorrect when I know perfectly well that it is not. Then I’ll learn something and try again. That may be the most Gen X approach possible: skepticism, curiosity, and the firm conviction that we can probably figure it out ourselves.

What you’ll find here

Mema’s Inclination is where old-fashioned know-how meets restless modern curiosity.

We’ll talk about:

Heritage animals and the people trying to save them
Real food, gardens, and useful skills
Home, farm, and beautifully practical projects
Rural reinvention and community
Books, creativity, business, and original thought
Technology—and whether it can help us preserve what progress too often leaves behind

There will be successes, failures, experiments, expenses, opinions, and absurdities. I’ll share useful ideas, lessons learned the expensive way, things I’m still trying to understand, and honest glimpses of life behind the farm gate. Because some things are worth keeping: Rare breeds. Good soil. Real food. Useful hands. Original thought. Hard-earned knowledge. A well-set table. A neighbor who shows up. The courage to rebuild. The freedom to remain curious. And the ability to laugh when the beautiful plan collapses before breakfast, at lunch, and again after dinner.

Pull up a chair

You don’t need a farm to belong here. You don’t need livestock, acreage, spotless taste, or clean boots. You only need some curiosity about how we might live more thoughtfully in a world that hasn’t ever slowed down long enough to ask where it is going.

Consider this your chair at the farm table. Come for the animals and practical ideas. Stay for the sharp observations, unexpected experiments, and the ongoing adventure of keeping what matters while remaining open to what comes next.

Welcome to Mema’s Inclination. The boots are muddy, the Wi-Fi is temperamental, and something is always growing, hatching, simmering, breaking, being repaired, or we are working on another way we might be able to make that one “impossible” something that could become something possible.

If this sounds like your kind of place, subscribe and join me. Then leave a comment and tell me: What do you believe is worth keeping?

On the Architecture of Attention

2024-01-15T12:00:00Z

Poetry is not decoration. It is a way of paying attention.

When we look closely at how language functions inside organizations, brands, and creative ventures, we frequently discover a profound deficit not of words, but of listening. The modern market floods every channel with accelerated noise, automated mimicry, and synthetic enthusiasm.

What is scarce—and therefore invaluable—is tonal precision.

The Granular Work of Voice

To establish an authentic voice requires slowing down enough to understand what you actually believe. It requires extracting the underlying cadence of your thinking rather than adopting a borrowed vocabulary.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” — Simone Weil

Whether we are shaping the narrative architecture of a founder-led company, designing the literary atmosphere of a destination retreat, or assembling a sequence of poems, the standard remains identical: does every sentence earn its place?

Welcome to Poetic Entanglement.