Ask Otea
Life advice from realms real and imagined.
Click on the stars below to submit a question to the wise Otea!
The Otea Oracle Deck
The Otea Oracle Deck
COMING SOON
Dear Otea:
My teen is coming out and wants their room to reflect their identity. They love bold patterns and bright colors—but I’m overwhelmed. How do we design something supportive and expressive?
Cara Mia:
I acknowledge your overwhelm. This being who came from your body is beginning to head out on their very own way, in so many ways.
Start by remembering that whatever they’re craving—color and pattern collisions that might test your sensibility—are actually the party streamers celebrating their love that has chosen to let you in. Yes, you were once the whole of their shelter. But now, you are becoming an honored guest in this heart of a house that must be big and bold enough to house you both.
Begin by bringing a few pieces into their bedroom that are deeply shared. A soft toy won together at a carnival when your child was still in your arms and against your chest. An artifact given by an ancestor who’s now in the beyond, beyond you both. Anchor your teen’s space in a few of these shared relics. Hold them close and tell their story to one another, in your own tones.
Give them the parameters of a budget for their space. Perhaps some guidance on basic furniture pieces. Let them earn some of the elements in their own way—saving to make more of their room more of theirs. And then, my dear, you’ll need to give up the control of curation and let them show you how they need to live.
Let the designs that emerge shock and surprise and maybe even offend you. Ask your changing child what they see when they look upon these treasures. Let this time and their touch on your shared home be a revelation. Like the witness to any great work of art, widen the walls with your willingness to find beauty in any place they are trusting enough to show it to you.
You don’t have to let them re-design the entirety of the house beyond their bedroom. But I encourage you to see how you could give certain elements in the common areas a double touch together, layering your beauty with their beauty like a thick collage. An animal-print frame they choose on a landscape painting you’ve selected. A shade in the same family you originally envisioned that trends a few tones deeper in their chest.
They will be gone from this space of yours very soon. Remember the impassioned marks of your own teenaging self—pressed into notebooks and carved into trees. The stakes are as high, if not higher, as they were when you were where they are now.
This world will meet them with all too many moments of washed-out and watered-down and sometimes worse. So, let them get a running start.
And let them pave that runway in every last shocking color of the rainbow. Because in the darker nights that may come, the brightness of those glorious streamers will be the living light by which you’ll both follow.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
Dear Otea:
I’m surrounded by people who equate productivity with worth. How do I make space for joy in a culture that treats it like a waste of time?
Cara Mia:
Come closer to a non-human being. A purring pet on a lounger. A wildflower climbing up through the cracks in your sidewalk. Consider the sources from which this world already grows and the way these things already go.
A plant or a pet isn’t concerned with the output of its essence. How much or how well or how long. Instead, they exude. In sun. In shade. All the days of their lives spent spilling their goodness without measure.
Each of us has a cologne that comes off of our skin. A scent that changes the chemistry of each room that we enter. And that changes the course of this world by inviting the air into the sweetness of our wake. Our heat turns heads and it turns the tides.
Your time here is a gift from all entities. The grass blades. The holy spirits. The dearly departeds. All of the ones whose bodies built this place for you to lie down.
Will you refuse this gift by believing the lie that you must pay rent for your right to exist?
Each time you fight to “make” something, you turn away from what’s already been given. You push every living thing farther from you, when all it really wants is to perfume you. Every thing that’s alive already makes more of this life without having to make a damn thing.
You will have to be bold and be brave to take back the time that is trying to be taken from you. To double and triple-dip your hands into the deep well of delight that’s been waiting all its life for your arrival. This is not languishing. This is lingering in the love that is your right and your duty for the rest of your days.
Make no mistake. You have only one thing to do here on earth: to give this world the pleasure of giving off its goodness by giving yourself over to the pleasure of all of it.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
Dear Otea:
My family talks a lot about where we’re from, but never about what we survived. How do I open a conversation about our deeper stories without reopening wounds?
Cara Mia:
The story of all that they’ve survived is alive in the land that's been lost. There is no separation between that place and their pain. Even, and especially, in their silence. The refusal to name it is the evidence of what has endured.
Let that land that’s been lost speak in its own language. Ask them what died and what thrived in the place where they started. How they brought it to their lips and into their hips even as their hearts broke. What tides turned there? What winds whipped and wizened them beyond belief? What muscles flexed in their legs and their guts in the face of whatever that weather was?
Ask them to tell the stories of the plants that were pulled up by their roots and brought into the soup and seeped their sweetness that sustained. Then, grow something together, here and now, from what the earth gives you both in this place you’ve reached. Plunge your hands into the dirt beside them and tunnel together, all the way down to the wound and the wonder of that other world that once was.
Remember, my dear, that we are all surviving something. The wound is already well open. It lives in the way your family talks and in the way that they walk and in whatever they keep from you. Let them keep it. They deserve this.
And keep your eyes on how they clutch what they love. The way that they hold it close is the truest story of their survival. To have loved through struggle. To have loved through loss. To have loved upright without a sound and with no one but the soil, all around.
You are that love. You are their deepest story and their open wound and all the want that remains in that wide open. Your presence is required. Your survival is inevitable.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
Dear Otea:
Every room in my house is perfectly styled, but somehow it still doesn’t feel like a home. What emotional ingredients am I missing in my design choices?
Cara Mia:
I know this might feel a bit macabre at first, but I need you to begin by beholding your own flesh. Step closer to the mirror in the full-length light of day. And look for the you that exists only in this time and this space. The one who is here and then gone, gone, gone.
This is the you whose lipstick is smeared after a feast drenched in olive oil. The you whose buttons are undone after an afternoon delight. The you who is askew and led astray. To the place where there are no perfect coiffures or curated color palettes, but only the wind and the rain and the sun caught in your hair that cannot stop growing.
Undo it, my love. The arrangement on the mantle that sits frozen like a cluster of crematory vessels at the morgue. The plumped pillows in their tidy row who are living in fear of the crush of life’s heavy caress. The level line that keeps the frame from falling with the grace of god-given gravity.
Welcome the cut flowers that compost before your eyes. The brass platter that tarnishes with each scraped serving of sweetness. The fabric that fades from all this light that you’re living in.
Your home is the place that welcomes the you who is changing and aging and yes, even decaying. And the you who is flying in the very face of your own dying.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
Dear Otea:
Spring has arrived. What can you share with us about renewal?
Cara Mia:
There is the rhythm of the seasons. And there is the rhythm of your seasons. Sometimes these duet and sometimes, like any good lover, nature releases the clasp on your hand and lets you go your own way.
Before you begin to strongarm any sense of spring renewal, find the center of your own season. It could be hailing outside and we’ll be longing to enter the icy fray, unbridled and unbundled. Or, in the fullest fatness of high summer, when it seems like everything and everyone is exposed, we’ll want nothing more than to hide ourselves from all this heat.
We are made from sun and shade. From the fiercest wind and the slightest breeze. Tiny weather systems live within us and we carry these climates out into the elements under the vault of a shared sky. The wonder of any cycle is born from both bowing to our own weather and the weather of the world without sacrificing the inevitability of either season.
So if the world’s springtime is your time for song, belt it in all its boldness and hold nothing back. And if you’re not yet ripe enough to arise, know that the birds and the bees and the petals will do it for you. They will carry your torch and unfurl into light until you’re ready to turn your light on.
The way of you is the way of all of life. You cannot help but come back to it, on your own sweet time.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
Dear Otea:
What's a combination of flavors on your table as wild and surprising as the combination of patterns you've shared with us?
Cara Mia:
You can stack all the careful cookbooks and lookbooks to high heaven on top of your table. And beside them, there will always be the craving creature who is you!
The perfect combinations exist at the cocktail hour where your body and the world’s body of work can clink coupes in a glorious “cin cin.” Balance is never a notion on a pedestal: It never rests, so long as your own beauty still breathes. Whether color or pattern or flavor, the secret is to let it remain touchable against your fingers and imbibeable against your tongue.
When I’m feasting, I invite my head, my heart, and my stomach to all come along. The fantasy of a candied violet that opens my mind to crystalized prettiness. The bitter chicory that brings my heart back to the rise and fall of my home’s hills. The pink prosciutto sheets that satisfy and satisfy, giving their life to give me more of it. What a delirious gift to bundle this triplet together in a sweet-bitter-silky bouquet!
Play freely with your proportions. If you’re so stuffed with life’s sugared puff pastry that you’ve lost your edges, try a drop of astringent orange aperitivo. Let its brightness create space for you to admire all that exists apart from you. If you’ve gone so deep into the salt of the earth with vine and root, mix your beets with the uncunctuousness of pignoli or aioli. Let the oil and wax relax you into a richness that cushions and coats.
The true art of fritto misto is found when you let the flavors of this world become you—fitting the feast to the skin of your desire, while still getting good and served by nature’s cornucopia of destiny.
Trust that what graces your table has always been invited. Whether by the strange bounty of nature or the strange bounty of your own nature. Reach for all of it with more of you.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
Dear Otea:
What is the most beautiful color?
Cara Mia:
The most beautiful color is the one that receives all of your rainbow. It is the pigment that is strong enough to envelope every last liquid drop of your love and your loss. Wrapped in the tent of its tint, the arcobaleno of your body bows towards more of all this sky.
For me, it is caramello and camel. The crema that coats the bottom of the cup. The silvered spuma that ices the crest of the wave. My bare feet meeting every microcosm of sabbia, in the buff. The honey and aranciata set of sun on the edge of the field where I let all my colors run.
Your most beautiful color always becomes you. Against it, you will become you in every light.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
Dear Otea:
I don't know how I'm feeling about the end of the year and beginning of the new! Anxiety, hope, fear, love. I know we don't know or can't know what will come, but it all feels so scary—almost chaotic—right now. What's a peaceful path forward through the raging unknowns?
Cara Mia:
Your peace through the raging unknown begins and ends with the only person you’ve always known: you, and you, alone. That you already awaits this you all the way on the other side of this scary, hopeful, chaotic year ahead. Conjure this self from spirit into solid, twelve whole months and so many lifetimes from right now, patiently awaiting your own arrival at their timeworn table. Their steady hands on the cloth that covers it, freckled from 365 more sunrises. The curve of their spine where they’ve borne whatever the weight. The lift of their chin where they’ve caught every light. A new map of lines carved in their still familiar face where they’ve laughed and cried with abandon over moments they’ve already made that you’ve not yet met. When you look this person in the eye, you will turn the fear of your fate into the inheritance of your fortune.
You will always be known to yourself. You will always prevail. Your love moves forward and forever onwards, onwards, onwards. There is no other way. So start on your way towards the you that is already rising to meet you.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
Dear Otea:
I have recently become very interested in my family history, but am realizing that there are so many questions I won't ever know the answers to! This pains me a little … how can I honor my ancestry and sit comfortably in the unknown?
Cara Mia:
The conversation has already begun! So live in the question and let it unfold. From the side of life, I know it can sometimes seem linear. A call and a response. An ask and an answer that leads you from here to there. And yes, certainly, your history has backbone. It has the people in their places and you, trying to trace their steps and track their scent. But from the other side, from all sides—where I sit—your history also has breath. It arrives through transmission. Through the moments when you’re caught in a movement that seems like more than just yours. A gesture that feels unconscious. An inexplicable craving. A choice without clear pros or cons. This is the conversation. In these moments of mystery, your family reaches for you. They are as present in the space that surrounds the photograph as they are bound within its frame. Scour the archive. Delight in the stories told and the letters written. But know that their lives, and yours, are made as much from what you allow to come undone as they are from what was said and done. You must let their lives live through your own longing. Otherwise, your ancestors have no way to reach for you and nowhere to go. And when you let them come out of nowhere, and be with you everywhere, you’ll both come closer to home.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea