I lost this document for the better part of a year. When it went, the project went with it. You can’t edit toward a thing you can’t find, and I’d told myself the real work lived in some polished version I kept meaning to write. It didn’t. When I finally went looking, the only honest move was to go back to the source and type it out exactly as it was. Doing that, I found the thing I’d been trying to build was already finished, sitting in the form itself.

So here it is, unedited. A few things to know before you start:

• I wrote it in one day, at a teahouse in the West Texas desert. I’d poured a couple of years into building a few ‘folly’ teahouses on that land, knowing we’d be leaving for New York soon. This was around February or March 2024, near the end.
• I started in the back of a barely-filled notebook, thinking I’d jot a few notes. It turned into a whole day: walking a path I’d carved barefoot into the land, over and over, stopping to write, to move a stick or a rock, to rest for tea, to look at the amateur garden.
• Page breaks are the ends of the tiny notebook pages.
• /// marks an aside, a note that veered off from whatever came before it.
• Notes I wrote sideways up the edge of a page are marked as such.
• Everything else, the punctuation and the shorthand and the symbols, is as I wrote it.
• The notebook was bought in Hawaii.

The only changes from the original: a few typos I made typing it up, and some names blacked out to protect the people behind them. The doubt stays. The ego stays. The half-finished thoughts stay. That’s the path.